Commercial Television Quotes

When I came to England at the very beginning of commercial television it was easy for me because I was only doing one or two shows a week at most. It was really a holiday.

There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.

Consumers can choose from hundreds of channels today, including dozens for kids. At a time of dwindling resources, we don't need to be subsidizing PBS. It's time for Big Bird the mooch to compete with 'Dora the Explorer' and 'Bob the Builder.'

In day-to-day commerce, television is not so much interested in the business of communications as in the business of delivering audiences to advertisers. People are the merchandise, not the shows. The shows are merely the bait.

I think the challenge in hour television or half-hour television is that the more it's around, certainly on commercial television, the less time you have to tell stories these days, because the more commercials they're putting in.

Broadcast television is designed to reach as many people as possible, right? There's an obligation that we as creators have to advertisers, and it is an advertising medium.

I've chosen not to go to Sky or ITV because the programmes I've made at the BBC, I want to carry on making.

It is extremely difficult to do anything constructive, let alone deep, on daily commercial television, especially on a talk show.

The one thing about program television that's absolutely incompatible with any concept of art is that all decisions have to be made by program directors, whereas art is autonomous. It may be dependent, but it knows no superiors.

The 1990 'Goodwill Games' can be another indication that the television world is not divided between commercial and cable. If the viewer thinks highly of our efforts... they will have a higher opinion of cable television and TBS.