Williams, Raymond. Television.

Technology
and Cultural Form. London/New York:
Routledge, 1990.
86 programming: distribution and flow

evident assumptions of entertainment and distraction, but these

involve definitions of interest which are sometimes more closely
centred on individually presented persons and on a kind of par-
ticipation (these elements are particularly evident in some of the
serials and in some of the relationship games). It is then only on
the assumption of a particular cultural ‘set’ – itself related to the
character of education and daily life, and containing within it
quite evident class characteristics – that one can assume that, for
example, a documentary on international aviation is more serious
than a serial or a game involving the presentation of a relation-
ship between husbands and wives or parents and children. The
mode of attention in each case has a specific character, and if the
latter is trivialised or vitiated by a manner of presentation, so
may the former be abstracted and in its own way trivialised by
its more conventionally ‘serious’ abstract examination. That is
why, though the distribution shown and the broad distinction
between types are necessary elements of analysis, they are only
one kind of analysis of real content, either generally or in terms
of the particular television experience. It is then to another mode
of analysis that we must now turn.

B. PROGRAMMING AS SEQUENCE OR FLOW

Analysis of a distribution of interest or categories in a broadcast-
ing programme, while in its own terms significant, is necessarily
abstract and static. In all developed broadcasting systems the
characteristic organisation, and therefore the characteristic
experience, is one of sequence or flow. This phenomenon, of
planned flow, is then perhaps the defining characteristic of
broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural
form.
In all communications systems before broadcasting the essen-
tial items were discrete. A book or a pamphlet was taken and
read as a specific item. A meeting occurred at a particular date
 programming: distribution and flow 87
and place. A play was performed in a particular theatre at a set
hour. The difference in broadcasting is not only that these events,
or events resembling them, are available inside the home, by the
operation of a switch. It is that the real programme that is offered
is a sequence or set of alternative sequences of these and other
similar events, which are then available in a single dimension
and in a single operation.
Yet we have become so used to this that in a way we do not see
it. Most of our habitual vocabulary of response and description
has been shaped by the experience of discrete events. We have
developed ways of responding to a particular book or a particu-
lar play, drawing on our experience of other books and plays.
When we go out to a meeting or a concert or a game we take
other experience with us and we return to other experience, but
the specific event is ordinarily an occasion, setting up its own
internal conditions and responses. Our most general modes of
comprehension and judgement are then closely linked to these
kinds of specific and isolated, temporary, forms of attention.
Some earlier kinds of communication contained, it is true,
internal variation and at times miscellaneity. Dramatic perform-
ances included musical interludes, or the main play was pre-
ceded by a curtain-raiser. In print there are such characteristic
forms as the almanac and the chapbook, which include items
relating to very different kinds of interest and involving quite
different kinds of response. The magazine, invented as a specific
form in the early eighteenth century, was designed as a miscel-
lany, mainly for a new and expanding and culturally inexperi-
enced middle-class audience. The modern newspaper, from the
eighteenth century but very much more markedly from the
nineteenth century, became a miscellany, not only of news items
that were often essentially unrelated, but of features, anecdotes,
drawings, photographs and advertisements. From the late nine-
teenth century this came to be reflected in formal layout,
culminating in the characteristic jigsaw effect of the modern
88 programming: distribution and flow

newspaper page. Meanwhile, sporting events, especially football

matches, as they became increasingly important public occa-
sions, included entertainment such as music or marching in
their intervals.
This general trend, towards an increasing variability and mis-
cellaneity of public communications, is evidently part of a whole
social experience. It has profound connections with the growth
and development of greater physical and social mobility, in con-
ditions both of cultural expansion and of consumer rather than
community cultural organisation. Yet until the coming of broad-
casting the normal expectation was still of a discrete event or of a
succession of discrete events. People took a book or a pamphlet
or a newspaper, went out to a play or a concert or a meeting or a
match, with a single predominant expectation and attitude. The
social relationships set up in these various cultural events were
specific and in some degree temporary.
Broadcasting, in its earliest stages, inherited this tradition and
worked mainly within it. Broadcasters discovered the kinds of
thing they could do or, as some of them would still normally
say, transmit. The musical concert could be broadcast or
arranged for broadcasting. The public address – the lecture or the
sermon, the speech at a meeting – could be broadcast as a talk.
The sports match could be described and shown. The play could
be performed, in this new theatre of the air. Then as the service
extended, these items, still considered as discrete units, were
assembled into programmes. The word ‘programme’ is charac-
teristic, with its traditional bases in theatre and music-hall. With
increasing organisation, as the service extended, this ‘pro-
gramme’ became a series of timed units. Each unit could be
thought of discretely, and the work of programming was a serial
assembly of these units. Problems of mix and proportion became
predominant in broadcasting policy. Characteristically, as most
clearly in the development of British sound broadcasting, there
was a steady evolution from a general service, with its internal
 programming: distribution and flow 89
criteria of mix and proportion and what was called ‘balance’, to
contrasting types of service, alternative programmes. ‘Home’,
‘Light’ and ‘Third’, in British radio, were the eventual names for
what were privately described and indeed generally understood
as ‘general’, ‘popular’ and ‘educated’ broadcasting. Problems of
mix and proportion, formerly considered within a single ser-
vice, were then basically transferred to a range of alternative
programmes, corresponding to assumed social and educational
levels. This tendency was taken further in later forms of reorgan-
isation, as in the present specialised British radio services One to
Four. In an American radio programme listing, which is before
me as I write, there is a further specialisation: the predominantly
musical programmes are briefly characterised, by wavelength, as
‘rock’, ‘country’, ‘classical’, ‘nostalgic’ and so on.1 In one sense
this can be traced as a development of programming: extensions
of the service have brought further degrees of rationalisation and
specialisation.
But the development can also be seen, and in my view needs
to be seen, in quite other ways. There has been a significant shift
from the concept of sequence as programming to the concept of
sequence as flow. Yet this is difficult to see because the older
concept of programming – the temporal sequence within which
mix and proportion and balance operate – is still active and still
to some extent real.
What is it then that has been decisively altered? A broadcast-
ing programme, on sound or television, is still formally a series
of timed units. What is published as information about the
broadcasting services is still of this kind: we can look up the time
of a particular ‘show’ or ‘programme’; we can turn on for that
item; we can select and respond to it discretely.
Yet for all the familiarity of this model, the normal experience
of broadcasting, when we really consider it, is different. And
indeed this is recognised in the ways we speak of ‘watching
television’, ‘listening to the radio’, picking on the general rather
90 programming: distribution and flow

than the specific experience. This has been true of all broadcast-
ing, but some significant internal developments have greatly
reinforced it. These developments can be indicated in one simple
way. In earlier phases of the broadcasting service, both in sound
and television, there were intervals between programme units:
true intervals, usually marked by some conventional sound or
picture to show that the general service was still active. There
was the sound of bells or the sight of waves breaking, and these
marked the intervals between discrete programme units. There is
still a residual example of this type in the turning globe which
functions as an interval signal in BBC television.
But in most television services, as they are currently operated,
the concept of the interval – though still, for certain purposes,
retained as a concept – has been fundamentally revalued. This
change came about in two ways, which are still unevenly repre-
sented in different services. The decisive innovation was in ser-
vices financed by commercial advertising. The intervals between
programme units were obvious places for the advertising to be
included. In British commercial television there was a specific
and formal undertaking that ‘programmes’ should not be inter-
rupted by advertising; this could take place only in ‘natural
breaks’: between the movements of a symphony, or between the
acts in Hamlet, as the Government spokesman said in the House of
Lords! In practice, of course, this was never complied with, nor
was it ever intended that it should be. A ‘natural break’ became
any moment of convenient insertion. News programmes, plays,
even films that had been shown in cinemas as specific whole
performances, began to be interrupted for commercials. On
American television this development was different; the spon-
sored programmes incorporated the advertising from the outset,
from the initial conception, as part of the whole package. But
it is now obvious, in both British and American commercial
television, that the notion of ‘interruption’, while it has still
some residual force from an older model, has become
 programming: distribution and flow 91
inadequate. What is being offered is not, in older terms, a pro-
gramme of discrete units with particular insertions, but a
planned flow, in which the true series is not the published
sequence of programme items but this sequence transformed by
the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these
sequences together compose the real flow, the real ‘broadcast-
ing’. Increasingly, in both commercial and public-service tele-
vision, a further sequence was added: trailers of programmes to
be shown at some later time or on some later day, or more
itemised programme news. This was intensified in conditions of
competition, when it became important to broadcasting plan-
ners to retain viewers – or as they put it, to ‘capture’ them – for a
whole evening’s sequence. And with the eventual unification of
these two or three sequences, a new kind of communication
phenomenon has to be recognised.
Of course many people who watch television still register
some of these items as ‘interruptions’. I remember first noticing
the problem while watching films on British commercial tele-
vision. For even in an institution as wholeheartedly commercial
in production and distribution as the cinema, it had been pos-
sible, and indeed remains normal, to watch a film as a whole, in
an undisturbed sequence. All films were originally made and
distributed in this way, though the inclusion of supporting ‘B’
films and short features in a package, with appropriate intervals
for advertising and for the planned selling of refreshments,
began to develop the cinema towards the new kind of planned
flow. Watching the same films on commercial television made
the new situation quite evident. We are normally given some
twenty or twenty-five minutes of the film, to get us interested in
it; then four minutes of commercials, then about fifteen more
minutes of the film; some commercials again; and so on to stead-
ily decreasing lengths of the film, with commercials between
them, or them between the commercials, since by this time it is
assumed that we are interested and will watch the film to the
92 programming: distribution and flow

end. Yet even this had not prepared me for the characteristic
American sequence. One night in Miami, still dazed from a week
on an Atlantic liner, I began watching a film and at first had some
difficulty in adjusting to a much greater frequency of com-
mercial ‘breaks’. Yet this was a minor problem compared to
what eventually happened. Two other films, which were due to
be shown on the same channel on other nights, began to be
inserted as trailers. A crime in San Francisco (the subject of the
original film) began to operate in an extraordinary counterpoint
not only with the deodorant and cereal commercials but with a
romance in Paris and the eruption of a prehistoric monster who
laid waste New York. Moreover, this was sequence in a new
sense. Even in commercial British television there is a visual
signal – the residual sign of an interval – before and after the
commercial sequences, and ‘programme’ trailers only occur
between ‘programmes’. Here there was something quite differ-
ent, since the transitions from film to commercial and from film
A to films B and C were in effect unmarked. There is in any case
enough similarity between certain kinds of films, and between
several kinds of film and the ‘situation’ commercials which often
consciously imitate them, to make a sequence of this kind a very
difficult experience to interpret. I can still not be sure what I
took from that whole flow. I believe I registered some incidents
as happening in the wrong film, and some characters in the
commercials as involved in the film episodes, in what came to
seem – for all the occasional bizarre disparities – a single
irresponsible flow of images and feelings.
Of course the films were not made to be ‘interrupted’ in this
way. But this flow is planned: not only in itself, but at an early
stage in all original television production for commercial sys-
tems. Indeed most commercial television ‘programmes’ are
made, from the planning stage, with this real sequence in mind.
In quite short plays there is a rationalised division into ‘acts’. In
features there is a similar rationalised division into ‘parts’. But
 programming: distribution and flow 93
the effect goes deeper. There is a characteristic kind of opening
sequence, meant to excite interest, which is in effect a kind of
trailer for itself. In American television, after two or three min-
utes, this is succeeded by commercials. The technique has an
early precedent in the dumbshows which preceded plays or
scenes in early Elizabethan theatre. But there what followed the
dumbshow was the play or the scene. Here what follows is
apparently quite unconnected material. It is then not surprising
that so many of these opening moments are violent or bizarre:
the interest aroused must be strong enough to initiate the
expectation of (interrupted but sustainable) sequence. Thus a
quality of the external sequence becomes a mode of definition
of an internal method.
At whatever stage of development this process has reached –
and it is still highly variable between different broadcasting
systems – it can still be residually seen as ‘interruption’ of a
‘programme’. Indeed it is often important to see it as this, both
for one’s own true sense of place and event, and as a matter of
reasonable concern in broadcasting policy. Yet it may be even
more important to see the true process as flow: the replacement
of a programme series of timed sequential units by a flow series
of differently related units in which the timing, though real, is
undeclared, and in which the real internal organisation is
something other than the declared organisation.
For the ‘interruptions’ are in one way only the most visible
characteristic of a process which at some levels has come to
define the television experience. Even when, as on the BBC, there
are no interruptions of specific ‘programme units’, there is a
quality of flow which our received vocabulary of discrete
response and description cannot easily acknowledge. It is evi-
dent that what is now called ‘an evening’s viewing’ is in some
ways planned, by providers and then by viewers, as a whole; that it
is in any event planned in discernible sequences which in this
sense override particular programme units. Whenever there is
94 programming: distribution and flow

competition between television channels, this becomes a matter

of conscious concern: to get viewers in at the beginning of a
flow. Thus in Britain there is intense competition between BBC
and IBA in the early evening programmes, in the belief – which
some statistics support – that viewers will stay with whatever
channel they begin watching. There are of course many cases in
which this does not happen: people can consciously select
another channel or another programme, or switch off altogether.
But the flow effect is sufficiently widespread to be a major elem-
ent in programming policy. And this is the immediate reason for
the increasing frequency of programming trailers: to sustain that
evening’s flow. In conditions of more intense competition, as
between the American channels, there is even more frequent
trailing, and the process is specifically referred to as ‘moving
along’, to sustain what is thought of as a kind of brand-loyalty to
the channel being watched. Some part of the flow offered is then
directly traceable to conditions of controlled competition, just
as some of its specific original elements are traceable to the
financing of television by commercial advertising.
Yet this is clearly not the whole explanation. The flow offered
can also, and perhaps more fundamentally, be related to the
television experience itself. Two common observations bear on
this. As has already been noted, most of us say, in describing the
experience, that we have been ‘watching television’, rather than
that we have watched ‘the news’ or ‘a play’ or ‘the football’ ‘on
television’. Certainly we sometimes say both, but the fact that we
say the former at all is already significant. Then again it is a
widely if often ruefully admitted experience that many of us find
television very difficult to switch off; that again and again, even
when we have switched on for a particular ‘programme’, we
find ourselves watching the one after it and the one after that.
The way in which the flow is now organised, without definite
intervals, in any case encourages this. We can be ‘into’ some-
thing else before we have summoned the energy to get out of the
 programming: distribution and flow 95
chair, and many programmes are made with this situation in
mind: the grabbing of attention in the early moments; the reiter-
ated promise of exciting things to come, if we stay.
But the impulse to go on watching seems more widespread
than this kind of organisation would alone explain. It is signifi-
cant that there has been steady pressure, not only from the
television providers but from many viewers, for an extension of
viewing hours. In Britain, until recently, television was basically
an evening experience, with some brief offerings in the middle
of the day, and with morning and afternoon hours, except at
weekends, used for schools and similar broadcasting. There is
now a rapid development of morning and afternoon ‘pro-
grammes’ of a general kind.2 In the United States it is already
possible to begin watching at six o’clock in the morning, see
one’s first movie at eight-thirty, and so on in a continuous flow,
with the screen never blank, until the late movie begins at one
o’clock the following morning. It is scarcely possible that many
people watch a flow of that length, over more than twenty hours
of the day. But the flow is always accessible, in several alternative
sequences, at the flick of a switch. Thus, both internally, in its
immediate organisation, and as a generally available experience,
this characteristic of flow seems central.
Yet it is a characteristic for which hardly any of our received
modes of observation and description prepare us. The reviewing
of television programmes is of course of uneven quality, but in
most even of the best reviews there is a conventional persistence
from earlier models. Reviewers pick out this play or that feature,
this discussion programme or that documentary. I reviewed tele-
vision once a month over four years, and I know how much
more settling, more straightforward, it is to do that. For most of
the items there are some received procedures, and the method,
the vocabulary, for a specific kind of description and response
exists or can be adapted. Yet while that kind of reviewing can be
useful, it is always at some distance from what seems to me the
96 programming: distribution and flow

central television experience: the fact of flow. It is not only that

many particular items – given our ordinary organisation of
response, memory and persistence of attitude and mood – are
affected by those preceding and those following them, unless we
watch in an artificially timed way which seems to be quite rare
(though it exists in the special viewings put on for regular
Reviewers). It is also that though useful things may be said about
all the separable items (though often with conscious exclusion
of the commercials which ‘interrupt’ at least half of them)
hardly anything is ever said about the characteristic experience
of the flow sequence itself. It is indeed very difficult to say any-
thing about this. It would be like trying to describe having read
two plays, three newspapers, three or four magazines, on the
same day that one has been to a variety show and a lecture and a
football match. And yet in another way it is not like that at all, for
though the items may be various the television experience has in
some important ways unified them. To break this experience
back into units, and to write about the units for which there are
readily available procedures, is understandable but often mis-
leading, even when we defend it by the gesture that we are
discriminating and experienced viewers and don’t just sit there
hour after hour goggling at the box.
For the fact is that many of us do sit there, and much of the
critical significance of television must be related to this fact. I
know that whenever I tried, in reviewing, to describe the experi-
ence of flow, on a particular evening or more generally, what I
could say was unfinished and tentative, yet I learned from cor-
respondence that I was engaging with an experience which
many viewers were aware of and were trying to understand.
There can be ‘classical’ kinds of response, at many different
levels, to some though not all of the discrete units. But we are
only just beginning to recognise, let alone solve, the problems of
description and response to the facts of flow.