'This collection of essays was inspired by a desire to bring together some of the arguments that have, in recent years and all over Europe, shaped the debate about the future of television. It is undeniable that the commotion came from a certain anxiety and sense of crisis, although in some quarters (not represented in the pages that follow), the crisis was perceived and seized as an opportunity: to dismantle regulations and state controls, to discredit television's civic accountability, and above all, to make lots of money. Those, however, who felt that public service television - in its old, government-monopoly form and in its advertising-funded, commercial manifestations - was something worth defending also seized the crisis as an opportunity. It made it possible to reflect on what television had come to mean for audiences and television makers, for our sense of democracy, of community, and of the contemporary nation-state: the last in Europe paradoxically at one and the same time on the verge of disappearing into a Federal Europe, and of reasserting itself in the confused search for nationalism, regional autonomy and ethnic identity.
At this juncture, it seemed imperative to limit the topic somewhat and start by studying the fault-lines along a more traditional fissure: the high-culture/ popular culture opposition, for example, or more precisely, the divide which is supposed to separate writers - men and women of letters - from such a stridently populist, easily demagogic and inherently ephemeral medium such as television. Under the title of 'Writing and Filming', an international weekend conference was organized by the Institute of Film and Television Studies at the University of Amsterdam and held at the Nederlands Filmmuseum on May 15th-17th, 1992. The event was itself something of a follow-up to a seminar organized under the title 'Television: Questions of Quality' by the Centre for Creative and Performing Arts at the University of East Anglia in Norwich two years earlier. The presence of speakers who attended both conferences (Cook, Bradbury, Hachmeister, Elsaesser) gave the discussions some continuity, understated by the fact that only the revised version of one paper - Jon Cook and Thomas Elsaesser's closing report from the Norwich meeting - is included here.
The essays that follow are diverse in the arguments they advance and the moral stances they take, but also in their diagnostics and the history of television they implicitly or explicitly draw on. On the whole, they try to avoid too rigid a definition, either of television or of quality television. Nor do they address the economic and policy arguments for and against deregulation, which are comprehensively rehearsed elsewhere. 3 Instead, an attempt is made to explore a terrain where 'quality' is not a category separating sheep from goats or a label designating a value we are all supposed to recognize, but where intrinsic criteria apply and a rather complex set of judgements operates about responsibilities and traditions, professional practices and professional ethics, which suggests that the view from outside and the view from inside - the historian's and the partisan view, so to speak - may eventually complement each other. While the authors all agree that such a dual perspective is desirable, they nonetheless approach the quality debate differently and focus it in a number of ways which it might be useful to sketch and briefly comment on.'
