From our archives...

BROADCAST CONCERNS
A report on Broadcasting Standards Council complainants, based on a study of complaints received over an 18 month period

This is a study I was commissioned to produce for the Broadcasting Standards Council (which later became the Broadcasting Standards Commission, and then part of Ofcom), in the UK in 1994-95.

Basically they wanted to know what kind of people were sending them complaints about TV programmes. They wondered if it was only mad people. The happy finding was that it wasn't *only* mad people.

I have found an ancient electronic copy of it (on one of the wax cylinders that we were using back in the mid-1990s) and so it is presented here for if anyone's still interested.

You can download it as an Adobe Acrobat document.

(Not got the Acrobat reader? Go here).

My personal favourite is perhaps the persistent letter writer whose bittersweet relationship with the BSC leads him to begin a letter from October 1993 with "It's a waste of time and stamps but I'm a persistent character."

He ends by saying: "I await your usual nonsensical answer".