164 | Mass Media and Historical Change
to utilise global television to spread their values, especially to developing
countries, but this was frequently criticised as ‘cultural imperialism’ during the
post-colonial 1970s.
Not only did ‘world television’ famously fail, but also the attempt to suc-
cessfully establish a common European broadcasting system with complete
programming. This shows once again that the audience rather than media tech-
nology determines media structuring in the long term. Hence the European
media public remained event-oriented. The United States certainly had more
success broadcasting globally, first in countries with commercialised television,
such as South America and Japan. In Western Europe, on the other hand,
success was limited by anti-American feelings up to the 1960s (cf. Hilmes,
in Nowell-Smith 1996: 468). The increase in the number of American tele-
vision series aired in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s had consequences
that were ambivalent: on the one hand, series like Dallas fostered anti-Amer-
ican prejudices; on the other, youth programmes and family series probably
increased the public’s fascination with the ‘American Way of Life’. Further-
more, these American series stimulated the creation of adaptations in their
own countries. Controversial new formats like Sesame Street were first aired
in translation and then as remakes in several countries. West German televi-
sion reacted to internationally successful U.S. series like Holocaust (1978) by
producing similar programmes of their own like Die Geschwister Oppermann
(1983) and Heimat (1984), which also dealt with the fates of families during
the Nazi era, but avoided showing concentration camps (Bösch 2007). These
limitations on American influence were evident even in Latin America, where
most notably Brazil and Mexico sold television series of their own (telenove-
las) to neighbouring countries. This demonstrates the principle of ‘cultural
proximity’, according to which media consumers prefer things that seem to
be most similar to their own culture (Sinclair 1999: 18). Even today, global
television formats are most successful when national stations can link them
with elements of their own culture (like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire or Big
Brother), which again shows the limits of the oft-postulated Americanisation
of television. Comparing the national content of such formats as well as the
manner of their reception would be an excellent approach to a transnational
cultural history.
The global circulation of television formats has been facilitated by the
worldwide expansion of commercial channels since the 1980s. Other than in
North and South America, commercial channels existed only in a few industri-
alised countries during the first decades of television. There was a dual system
in Japan and Great Britain, where a regionally structured private channel was
launched in 1955 (ITV, ‘Independent Television’). ITV quickly proved finan-
cially successful and was so independent in its programming that it forced
the BBC to make some reforms. For this reason businessmen and publishers