The origins and development of the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture and the Edinburgh International Television Festival (EITF) are typically, and in some ways appropriately, regarded as inextricably connected, but the MacTaggart Lecture can claim rights of prima geniture. The first lecture, delivered in Edinburgh by radical playwright and director John McGrath on 25 August 1976, formed part of a retrospective celebrating the work of the recently deceased, Scottish television producer and director, James MacTaggart. The retrospective had been organised by the BBC in association with Granada Television and the highly successful and prestigious Edinburgh International Film Festival, which had begun some thirty years earlier. It was in the following year, that an Advisory Committee, chaired by Gus Macdonald with William Brown (then Managing Director of Scottish Television) and Alastair Hetherington (Controller, BBC Scotland) as joint Presidents, organised the first Edinburgh International Television Festival at which distinguished documentary maker Marcel Ophuls discussed ‘Naturalism and Television’ as his theme for the second MacTaggart Lecture. But the mutual success and continued close association of these two events has blurred recognition of their staggered birth.

Across the subsequent three decades, MacTaggart lecturers have been drawn from the ranks of the most celebrated and distinguished programme-makers (Verity Lambert and Norman Lear), producers (Janet Street-Porter, Christine Ockrent, Marks and Gran), playwrights (John McGrath, Troy Kennedy Martin, Dennis Potter), journalists (John Humphrys, Peter Jay) and authors (John Mortimer), as well as senior media executives from both the public (Michael Grade, Greg Dyke and Mark Thompson) and private/independent (David Liddiment, Richard Eyre, Jeremy Isaacs, Denis Forman and David Elstein) sectors of broadcasting, alongside significant owners of media corporations such as Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner.