I was astonished that your article (From Attenborough’s gorilla mayhem to TV’s first gay kiss: the 100 biggest moments from a century of television, 23 January) omitted the wonderful, moving moment on That’s Life! when Sir Nicholas Winton’s achievement in saving 669 children from the Holocaust was revealed, to him, to them and to viewers. It has been watched more than 40m times since it first aired and Piers Morgan has called it the best moment ever on television. Sir Nicholas’s example should never be forgotten.
I was lucky enough to be there at the time (as I was as a researcher in the gallery) during one of the moments you do mention, when the F-word was first said on television, and I remember vividly how producer Ned Sherrin reacted.
Esther Rantzen
Bramshaw, Hampshire
• Stuart Heritage gives us the 100 biggest TV moments of the last 100 years. Strikingly odd that 3% of them concern MasterChef, yet there is no place for any mention of Twin Peaks. Widely acknowledged as a turning point in the way that television was made, particularly in relation to casting, it seems to be a glaring omission. I understand that this list seems to concentrate on British content, yet Dallas, Friends and Squid Game get a mention, while this highly culturally significant work does not.
Duncan Wain
Lowestoft, Suffolk
• Your article claims that, in 1985, “Live Aid, a 16-hour transatlantic charity concert, [was] watched by 1.5 billion worldwide”. I was in charge of global audience measurement for the BBC from 1982 to 1998. I am an expert in this field. I have written many books and articles on the topic and have taught many people how to measure audiences on all media. There are correct ways of doing it. And there are ways, too many of them, when people just make up absurd and impossible numbers.
The claim that Live Aid was watched by 1.5 billion worldwide remains one the most often repeated and reported untruths about global TV audiences. Nobody has ever produced any evidence that that audience was ever measured. And we know for certain that it couldn’t have been 1.5 billion.
Please put some automatic algorithms in your systems whereby nonsense about global TV audiences gets an immediate health warning: “This is almost certainly untrue!” Or just think about it. One in three people in the world watched Live Aid? It is not true, but what is weird is that people and journalists believe it.
Graham Mytton
Coldharbour, Surrey
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