Dennis Lawrence

For the civil servant concerned with the administration of the government’s interest in broadcasting, the question of authority starts from the need to manage the allocation and use of radio frequencies. By Act of Parliament and by international treaty, this is a matter for the government; and the need for that management is indisputable. To use Lord Reith’s evocative and time-touched phrase, someone must be ‘the policeman of the aether’; and it cannot be anyone else. Authority here is uncomplicated: government, through an executive Department of State, licenses the use of frequencies. Broadly, its concern will be to make the most intensive possible use of the frequencies available under international agreement to the United Kingdom. As the licenser, it will seek to ensure that its licensees observe conditions prescribed to prevent, or to reduce to generally acceptable levels, interference by one transmission with any other. It is concerned essentially with the means, and not the ends; with the signal and not the message it contains. But when the signal is broadcast for general reception, when the licence authorises the licensee to address mass audiences in this country and in others, when in short the messages become television and radio programmes, then the consequences of the act of licensing become different in kind. They become social.