3 - ‘Expressing Their Own Point of View’
Television Audience Research on ‘Race’ at the BBC, 1950–1968
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2026
Summary
Chapter 3 moves into the post-war period and the Audience Research Department in the BBC archive, examining two of its ‘special audience research reports’, on a 1952 documentary series about race relations in Africa, and a 1968 study of audience responses to the BBC’s first fictional television series focusing on a Black family, Rainbow City (1967). In doing so, the chapter examines both the department’s conception of racially innocent British audiences and its loose definition of ‘race’ on screen within its own methodologies, and its uncomfortable encounter with the existence of measurable racial prejudice among ordinary Britons in 1968.
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- Race on ScreenAudience Racism in Twentieth-Century Britain, pp. 95 - 127Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
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