British television science fiction began when the broadcast medium was in its infancy. Despite an occasionally chequered history, popular programmes in the genre have been produced by both the BBC and the largest commercial channel, ITV. Doctor Who is listed in the Guinness World Records as the longest-running science fiction television show in the world and as the "most successful" science fiction series of all time.
Read more about British Television Science Fiction: Early Years, Creation of Doctor Who and ITV, Television Science Fiction in The '70s, 1980s, Doctor Who Revival and Other Developments
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“Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.”
—Rupert Murdoch (b. 1931)
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—Jane Clark, British millionaire politician’s wife. As quoted in Newsweek magazine, p. 15 (June 13, 1994)
“The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.”
—Frederic Raphael (b. 1931)
“The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today—but the core of science fiction, its essence ... has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.”
—Isaac Asimov (1920–1992)