The idea of a prison abolitionist group getting a Friday night slot on the BBC seems totally implausible now. But this was 1977, when BBC outlier the Community Programme Unit (CPU) were producing DIY TV. Founded in 1972 the CPU’s Open Door series invited community and activist groups with otherwise ‘unheard or neglected’ stories to submit a proposal to create their own programmes to be broadcast on BBC 2. If successful (and only three in ten were), these groups were then provided with a modest budget and a production team to help them realise their vision. With almost total editorial autonomy, what emerged from the CPU could be watched regularly on the BBC between 1972 and 1983, in the form of Open Doors, and then continuing in different configurations until 2004 – a total of 243 programmes produced during its existence.

After their initial broadcast these programmes largely disappeared from public view, let alone memory, the idea of community access television an anathema in our contemporary broadcasting landscape. That was until Spring of 2023 when Raven Row, a gallery housed in an eighteenth-century house in Spitalfields, filled its three floors with outdated television sets streaming over 100 programmes from the CPU’s history as part of its exhibition People Make Television. ‘Radical Alternatives to Prison’ could be watched alongside shows with titles including: ‘The Wages for Housework Campaign’, ‘The Transexual Liberation Group’, the ‘Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’ but also ‘The Campaign for the Feminine Woman’, ‘The Naval and Military Club’ and ‘The Woodland Trust’. Most of the material on display as part of People Make Television is from Open Door, although material from other aspects of the CPU and smaller short-lived community cable channels in Bristol, Sheffield, Swindon, and Milton Keynes’ are also on display.

On the ground floor, twelve CRT monitors play Open Door programmes on loop; audio is cleverly connected to whichever episode is playing allowing you to move through the space and the programmes on screen simultaneously. An informal médiathèque at the very top of the house allows visitors an index of all the videos on display on the floors below. The experience of watching the material here feels very different, a more conventional archive-experience that points to deliberately light-handed curation. The show is an excavation of a social archive and we are left to draw our own connections and conclusions.

I spend most of my time at People Make Television upstairs where the domestic space has been leant into by the curators. The design mimics a living room: grey comfortable sofas and armchairs are angled towards clunky looking television sets with remotes sat on side tables waiting to be flicked through. I visited the show across multiple days in its final week, and as a result, the living rooms are always fully occupied, strangers sat shoulder to shoulder on the sofas, on the floor, and leant against walls – faces glued to the screen. The scene reminds me of images I’ve seen of families sitting around their brand-new television sets in the 1960s – collective experiences of uninterrupted television watching that have largely faded from our homes today. It feels distinctly domestic in People Make Television, and when I find out later that the CPU itself was housed in an old-terraced house, a separate building from the rest of the BBC, it makes sense. It feeds into a sense of nostalgia which becomes one of the dominant affects that circulates through Raven Row when I visit. Nostalgia for what’s presented on screen, in familiar shots of London and familiar struggles, and in the way we watch as an audience– the viewing experience collectivised via the passing round of the remote control, the sofas and the occasional ‘I remember that’ from a person watching (twice when I visit there is someone sat next to me whose own community group made a show under the CPU).

In my time at Raven Row, I watch shows on farm workers, women with cystitis, teachers, cleaners, anarchists, Science Fiction enthusiasts, nursery workers, clarion singers for peace and Latin American refugees. The majority of these programmes are political, which ruffled feathers during the CPU’s tenure at the BBC (it was nicknamed the ‘Communist Programme Unit’ by internal critics). Today we don’t need the BBC to platform DIY TV, we can find it on YouTube, TikTok and Twitch. That being said, there is something about the making and pacing of the CPU shows on display at People Make Television that lack an obvious equivalent in the reaction economy that is YouTube. All of the programmes I watch are made by groups or collectives coming together around a common cause, supported materially and without time pressure to make that cause visible in the public sphere, whether that be to draw attention to racism in primary education, legalise cannabis or stop the building of a motorway. In one of the closing scenes of RAP’s programme on prison abolition, a young woman describes her experience at the ‘Newham Alternative Project’ - ‘it’s not just you’ she says, surrounded by other members of the project taking part in the broadcast, ‘there are other participants and you can talk about your problems together, you’ve got ideas and help coming from other people which I think you can learn a lot from’. Despite being told we’re in the ‘golden age’ of DIY media (and reality TV), it’s hard to imagine that kind of opportunity existing today: serious programmes on public television made by a broad swathe of people not just broadcasting professionals, where those people are supported to say what they want how they want in a model of truly participatory television.