The history of BBC2

I have a piece on the history of BBC2, which is 50 years old next month, in the latest issue of BBC History Magazine. It's not available online but here is a brief snippet:

The BBC's Director of Television Kenneth Adam announced that the new channel called on the viewer ‘occasionally to stretch himself a little further’ and ‘to push back the horizon a little’. But according to a poll conducted in June 1964, viewers were not keen on having their horizons pushed back. Nearly half of those who had seen BBC2 thought its programmes worse than those on ITV and BBC1. Among BBC2’s regular viewers there were twice as many men as women - probably, said the polling company, ‘due only to male intellectual curiosity’.