Cod on Ice 
Andy Beckett
- Panorama: Fifty Years of Pride And Paranoia by Richard Lindley
- The Harder Path: The Autobiography by John Birt
For those inclined to ponder the state of the BBC, and of British television in general, the performance of Panorama has long been a favoured indicator. In January 1955, not much more than a year after the current affairs programme began broadcasting, the Sunday Times declared: ‘Panorama is a perfect illustration of what is wrong with television.’ Yet within five years, the Daily Mail was praising the programme for establishing investigative television as a British broadcasting genre:
Panorama has become an unbreakable Monday night fixture for between six and eight million people . . . The current muster has Robin Day, tenacious as a badger; Ludovic Kennedy, whose line is artistic, faintly raffish melancholy; James Mossman, the ardent Galahad who will never take for granted that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor . . .
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Andy Beckett’s Pinochet in Piccadilly is out in paperback. He is writing a book about Britain in the 1970s.
Other articles by this contributor:
Another Tribe · PiL, Wire et al
Political Gothic · David Peace does the miners’ strike
When Capitalism Calls · The Protest Ethic by John Lloyd
Bringing Down Chunks of the Ceiling · Manchester, England: The Story of the Pop Cult City by Dave Haslam
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