Chapter 1 examines the ‘discovery’ of the audience in twentieth-century Britain and sketches out the anxieties about the audience’s impressionability which were voiced in government and non-governmental committees on films and television throughout the century. The concept of a highly impressionable British audience subsequently took hold, paving the way for new, self-proclaimed experts on audience wants and needs that emerged, including Stephen Tallents and Robert Silvey, as head of a new department of ‘Audience Research” at the BBC. This chapter unpicks the racialised assumptions that informed the creation of this field and the audience it presumed to measure.

Throughout the 1970s, audience research conducted at both the BBC and ITV affiliates consistently overlooked audiences of colour, even as these institutions began to hesitantly acknowledge and consider institutional mis-steps in their approach to Britain’s own ‘race problem’. Several extended audience research reports were conducted on shows about ‘race’ in the period, including Till Death Us Do Part in 1973, which began to produce a coherent picture of persistent racial prejudice among white viewers. Alongside this, audiences of colour were finally brought into audience research but in quite exceptional ways, including a 1975 study for ITV, when 21 West Indian television viewers offered their thoughts on Love Thy Neighbour and the broader television landscape, and in 1979 at the BBC for a potential programme on “multiracial Britain.” The chapter examines the shape of this belated inclusion within these institutions and considers the highly circumscribed ways in which Black and south Asian audiences were allowed to speak about screen content and racism.

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.

This chapter reflects on Awo Mana Asiedu’s approaches to researching audiences in Ghana, a predominantly oral context. It takes as its starting point her motivations for doing this kind of research and then outlines her work to date in this area, particularly with the audiences of Roverman Productions, a major performance group in Accra. It foregrounds the importance of the perspectives of the audiences themselves and how they perceive the impact that performances audiences watch have upon them.