As newly discovered television ‘stars’ blaze into incandescence, or at least into headlines, and as one parlour game succeeds another, radio programmes begin to sound a defensive note. The strong emotions which are revealed when the House of Commons debates the future of television colour most discussions by the professionally engaged of the claims of sound broadcasting in a world which is rapidly switching from loud-speaker to screen. In the Autumn 1953 number of the B.B.C. Quarterly Louis MacNeice made ‘A Plea for Sound’. The word ‘plea’, with its overtones of advocacy and partisanship, suggests some of the passion which this controversy can provoke. And one of the unfortunate results is that the opposing sides in this pointless warfare have resorted to that most tedious of stratagems which forbids the praise of X without the condemnation of Y. Not that I think Mr MacNeice guilty of this. ‘Television, obviously’, he says, ‘is an exciting and fertile medium in which many fine things can be done that sound could never attempt. The point is that sound can do many fine things that will never be possible in television. We should all therefore hope both that television may develop to the utmost and that sound broadcasting may survive.’ In which future directions are these fine things likely to be found?

Imagine a future in which sound and television are equally available to most people, in which several alternative television programmes are transmitted for the greater part of the day, and in which the present technical limitations of television have been to a considerable extent overcome.