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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and this week I'm very pleased to be joined from the States by the writer Peter Biscind,

who is probably best known here as the author of the classic study of 70s cinema,

Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, and his new book turns to another golden or sort of golden age,

but one of television.

His new publication is Pandora's Box, the greed, lust, and lies that

broke television. Now, welcome, Peter. I mean, you talk about television being broken, but in some

ways, this is a study of a period when television got good. I mean, before the 1980s, or early

1980s, as you describe it, television, particularly

in the States, was a kind of wasteland, wasn't it? Why was that? Well, because the business

model that networks used was advertising sponsors. And sponsors did not want their, you know,

their ads, their car ads, their whatever

they were drug ads, aspirin. They didn't want them adjacent to scenes of sex and violence

or controversy for that matter. So therefore, advertisers exerted pressure on the networks

to avoid that kind of programming. Consequently, each network

set up a division called standards and practices, which enforced a kind of puritanical

morality on network programming, such that even married couples were not shown sleeping in the same

beds, but rather twin beds next to each other.

So it was kind of a crazy, the programming was called low LCD, lowest common denominator programming,

you know, with the goal of reaching as many people as possible.

And to reach as many people as possible, you didn't want to offend anyone.

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