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  Mr Justice McCOMBE English High Court judge
In the ordinary course, none of the participants here would have been in the slightest offended by foul language in the workplace, even in the context of a disagreement between colleagues. It was the language in which they all dealt. It seemed to be language reminiscent of the quickfire exchanges in American office scenes familiar from the cinema, using language that, years ago, would have been wholly unacceptable but which now is, perhaps regrettably, commonplace in many places of work as the machismo image of Hollywood is imported into real life. • Written judgment in a case of wrongful dismissal brought against brokers Cantor Fitzgerald, 29 July 2002
  JOHN McDONAGH Film Company of Ireland
In those dangerous and exciting times [1919] no cinema owner would dare risk exhibiting the Republican loan films so it was planned for a few volunteers in fast cars to visit certain cinemas, rush the operator’s box, and, at gun-point, force the operator to take off the film he was showing a put on the Loan Film. • Source unknown
Dwight MacDonald DWIGHT MacDONALD 1906-1982; American journalist and academic
Like nineteenth-century capitalism, Mass Culture is a dynamic, revolutionary force, breaking down the old barriers of class, traditions, taste, and dissolving all cultural distinction. It mixes and scrambles everything together, producing what might be called homogenized culture. ... It thus destroys all values, since value judgments imply distinctions. Mass Culture is very, very democratic: it refuses to discriminate against, or between, anything or anybody. • ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’ in Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (eds): Mass Culture: The popular arts in America, 1957
Gus MacDonald Lord GUS MacDONALD 1940- ; Scottish television executive, government minister
The British film industry is not dead—it’s alive and well and it’s called television. • Edinburgh Television Festival guide, 1977
CECIL McGIVERN 1907-1963; Controller of BBC Television Service 1956-1962
Good television with screens as they are today means close-up. Television of the future, I sincerely hope, will not need to accept this limiting factor. ... If the television producer knew he was producing for 20-inch screens, his work would be easier. ... And when that happens, there will be no more nonsense about good television being close-up. ... Television today is not television but small-screen television, a very different matter. [0047] • 'The Big Problem' in BBC Quarterly, Autumn 1950.
The most common television screen size at the time was nine-inch, with 15-inch sets beginning to take over a share of the market.
Iam McKellen Sir IAN McKELLEN CH 1939- ; British actor
While I was reading the book I believed it entirely. Clever Dan Brown twisted my mind convincingly. But when I put it down I thought, What a load of ... [eloquent pause] potential claptrap. • About The Da Vinci Code, in which he stars, quoted in The Guardian 18 May 2006.
Compton Mackenzie Sir COMPTON MACKENZIE 1883-1972; novelist, founder editor of ‘The Gramophone’ in 1923
I ask readers if they want to feel that their collections of records are obsolete, if they really want to spend money on buying discs that will save them the trouble of getting up to change them, and if they really want to wait years for a repertory as good as what is now available to them? ... The substitution of a long playing disc is not a sufficiently valuable improvement to justify the complete abandonment of present methods of reproduction. • editorial in The Gramophone, 1949
Marshall McLuhan MARSHALL McLUHAN Herbert Marshall McLuhan
1911-1980; Canadian academic
1 If a technology is not understood either from within or from without a culture, and if it gives new stress or ascendency to one or another of our senses, the ratio among all our senses is altered. ... The result is a break in the ratio among the senses, a kind of loss of identity. The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962
2 In many ways advertising agencies have become the most effective educational institution in our society. • 1968
3 The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb. • 1969
4 Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America—not on the battlefields of Vietnam. • quoted in the Montreal Gazette, 16 May 1975
Harold Macmillan Sir HAROLD MACMILLAN 1894-1989; British prime minister
It’s not that we can’t afford a [television] set; my employers won’t give me any time off to watch. • BBC Television’s 25th anniversary dinner, 1961
LouisMacNeice LOUIS MacNEICE Frederick Louis MacNeice
1907-1963; British-Irish poet and dramatist, BBC radio producer 1941-1963
. . . To found
A castle on the air requires a mint
Of golden intonations and a mound

Of typescript in the trays. What was in print
Must take on breath and what was thought be said.
In the end there was the Word, at first a glint,

Then an illumination overhead
Where high towers are lit.
Autumn Sequel, Canto IV, 1954
  JOHN MACY Jr John Williams Macy Jr
1917-1986; President, Public Broadcasting Corporation 1969-1972, former Civil Service Commissioner
In the average [American] home television is watched for five hours and fifty minutes a day ... the equivalent of 12 full weeks out of the year in front of that one-eyed monster. ... The only activity that occupies more time in the home is sleeping—and some would observe that the two pastimes are synonymous. To Irrigate a Wasteland, 1974
  Sir PHILIP MAGNUS 1906-? ; British historian
Mrs [Margot] Asquith remarked indiscreetly [in 1914] that if Kitchener was not a great man, he was, at least, a great poster. • quoted in Kitchener: Portrait of an Imperialist, 1958
  KENNETH MAIDMENT President, British Film (and Television) Production Association
In the UK, at any rate, producers, distributors and financiers should reflect on whether there is any worthwhile revenue to be gained by exploiting [video]cassettes at all. • BFPA Annual Report 1979/80
See also  Go to Robert Camplin Robert Camplin
Norman Mailer NORMAN MAILER 1923- ; American writer
Film, at its most compelling, lives in our mind somewhere between our memories and our dreams. One of the most advanced art forms of the twentieth century is, therefore, one of the most primitive as well, or at least, such a claim can be invoked when we are dealing with the sinister edge of serious film on a large screen in a dark theater. • ‘Footfalls in the crypt’ in Vanity Fair, February 1992
David Mamet DAVID MAMET 1947- ; American playwright
A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue. • quoted in The Independent, 11 November 1988
William Mann WILLIAM MANN 1924-1989; Music critic, The Times
The outstanding English composers of 1963 must seem to have been John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the talented young musicians from Liverpool whose songs have been sweeping the country since last Christmas, whether performed by their own group, the Beatles, or by the numerous other teams of English troubadours that they also supply with songs. ...
        The slow, sad song about That Boy, which figures prominently in Beatle programmes, is expressively unusual for its lugubrious music, but harmonically it is one of their most intriguing, with its chains of pandiatonic clusters. ... But harmonic interest is typical of their quicker songs too, and one gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches, so natural is the Aeolian cadence at the end of Not a Second Time (the chord progression which ends Mahler's Song of the Earth).
• ‘What songs the Beatles sang . . .’ in The Times, 27 December 1963
Roger Manvell ROGER MANVELL 1909-1987; British film historian
The Odessa-steps sequence in Potemkin, which is the classic sequence of silent cinema and possibly the most influential six minutes in cinema history. Film, 1944
Sophie Marceau SOPHIE MARCEAU 1966- ; French film actress
Husband sleeps with Jeanne because Bernadette cheated on him by sleeping with Christophe. In the end they all go off to a restaurant. • Description of a standard French film, at Cannes Film Festival, 10 May 2000
Guglielmo Marconi Senatore/Count GUGLIELMO MARCONI 1874-1937; pioneer of wireless propagation, Nobel Prize for Physics 1909
1 I do not feel any useful purpose would be served by discussing [television] at the present time. • 1928; source unknown
2 I consider that the most fertile fields of radio for the amateur experimenter and young engineer just out of college are short waves, directive transmission, and television. I believe television is finally emerging from the laboratory. It will be seen in homes throughout the land, but I do not know how soon. • quoted in Television, April 1928
Andrew Marr ANDREW MARR 1959- ; BBC Television political editor
One of the real differences between print and broadcast journalism is that the former is much improved by strong liquor, while the latter is not. • Quoted in The Sunday Times, 28 October 2001
Sir EDWARD MARSH Sir Edward Howard Marsh
1972-1953 ; Winston Churchill's private secretary
How I dislike ‘Technicolor’, which suffuses everything with stale mustard. Ambrosia and Small Beer, 1964
Groucho Marx GROUCHO MARX 1895-1977; American film and broadcast comedian
1 There are more things on television than stale jokes and weatherbeaten movies. If you take this monster in moderate doses you can learn how to remove hair from your legs without a razor, how to tenderise meat without a concrete mixer, how to be alluring to your girl friend without an aphrodisiac. ... As a sedative it has no equal. The Groucho Letters
2 Until TV nobody knew the calibre of the clowns governing the country. The Groucho Letters
3 I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book. • source unknown
4 I have a hunch that his attempt to prevent us from using the title is the brainchild of some ferret-faced shyster, serving a brief apprenticeship in your legal department. I know the type well—hot out of law school, hungry for success, and too ambitious to follow the natural laws of promotion. This bar sinister probably needled your attorneys, most of whom are fine fellows with curly black hair, double-breasted suits, etc, into attempting to enjoin us. Well, he won’t get away with it! • Letter to Warner Bros in reply to the studio's letter threatening legal action over use of the title A Night in Casablanca, 1946
David Mellor DAVID MELLOR British politician, one-time Secretary of State at the National Heritage Department
1 With hindsight, an unfortunate development for Britain. • at Edinburgh Television Festival 1994, of the government’s decision to allow Sky Television to take over British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB); quoted in Broadcast, 2 September 1994
BSB and government
    responsibility BSB and the government's responsibility.
2 One of the great self-inflicted wounds of Britain in the 1980s was to allow so many of its newspapers to fall into the hands of foreign companies. • at Edinburgh Television Festival 1994, quoted in Broadcast, 2 September 1994
Félix Mesguich FELIX MESGUICH 1871-1949; cameraman for Lumière
As I see it, the Lumière Brothers have established the true domain of the cinema in the right manner. The novel, the theatre, suffice for the study of the human heart. The cinema is the dynamism of life, of nature and its manifestations, of the crowd and its eddies. All that asserts itself through movement depends on it. Its lens opens on the world. • cit. Georges Sadoul: L’invention du cinéma 1832-1897
Jonathan Miller Dr JONATHAN MILLER 1934- ; British actor, producer, television presenter, etc
Television is simply a hole through which you push various communications. • 1970
Mitch Miller MITCH MILLER Mitchell William Miller
1911- ; American band leader, head of A&R at Columbia Records
The eight to 14 year olds, the pre-shave crowd that makes up 12 per cent of the population and zero per cent of its buying power, once you eliminate the ponytail ribbons, popsicles and peanut brittle. • Characterisation of the audience being targeted by music radio stations, music and radio industry conference, Kansas City, Missouri, March 1958
  ANDREW MILLER JONES 1910-1994; BBC television producer, co-founder of Panorama (responsible for commissioning the mask that became the BAFTA award)
1 A comparatively large number of (television) viewers can be expected for programmes of limited appeal and this audience can be increased by beguiling the casual viewer into looking at an item which he might not ordinarily have gone out of this way to see. In this way, the general standard of taste can be raised. • ‘Film and Television’ in Penguin Film Review 6, 1948
2 Except in broadcasts of actualities, it is illogical to make a distinction between a first-time broadcast and a recorded repeat, and yet every ITMA fan knows that the Thursday broadcast and its repeat at the weekend are not the same thing. The difference is psychological, but none the less real for all that, and the sense of being fobbed off with something second-hand is even more acute when a programme is broadcast for the first time in recorded form. • ‘Film and Television’ in Penguin Film Review 6, 1948
Carl Milliken CARL MILLIKEN Carl Earl Milliken
1877-1961; President, Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association; Governor of Maine 1916-1921
The very name Hollywood has colored the thought of this age. It has given to the world a new synonym for happiness because of all its products happiness is the one in which Hollywood—the motion-picture Hollywood—chiefly interests itself. • speech, April 1928
Alasdair Milne ALASDAIR MILNE 1930- ; British television producer, BBC Director-General 1982-1987
Our country takes the BBC's dedication to truth-telling wholly for granted. You only have to look at the highly organised lying in the service of an ideology or a creed or a state which afflicts entire continents, to see how rare truth-telling is in broadcasting or, for that matter, what extraordinary efforts are being made by totalitarian régimes to prevent undoctored broadcasts from reaching their own citizens. • Speech in Glasgow, January 1982; quoted in Alasdair Milne: DG: Memoirs of a British broadcaster, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1988
Newton Minow NEWTON MINOW 1926- ; lawyer; Chairman, Federal Communications Commission 1961-1963; Annenberg Professor of Communications Law and Policy, Northwestern University 1987-
I have confidence in your health, but not in your product. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air, and stay there. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland. • Address to National Association of Broadcasters, 9 May 1961
Read Minow's speech in full
  PAT MITCHELL Executive vice-president, TBS Productions
The worry that multimedia and online services will cannibalise TV is the old argument that film would kill radio, then TV would kill film, then home video would kill network TV and so on. None of this has happened. • 1995
Ivor Montagu IVOR MONTAGU Hon Ivor Goldsmid Montagu
1904-1984; British film-maker and critic, a founder of the Film Society, founder president of the International Table Tennis Federation 1926-1967
Is it conceivable that if cinema had been invented even as late as broadcasting—cinema with its infinite possibilities for national education, national expression, international get-together and get-to-know-each-other—it would ever have been allowed to get into the largely foreign and exclusively profit-interested stranglehold that grips it now? • ‘Improving Britain’s film business’ in Documentary News Letter, August-September 1947
ROBERT MOOG Dr Robert Arthur Moog 1934-2005; American electronic music pioneer
There has been a very long trend away from music as a social activity. Before the radio and electric phonograph, people made their own music, for themselves and each other. What I see now is that, more and more, we're all in our own little boxes, using the fruits of technology to make or listen to music in isolation. Something basic and low-tech is missing. • interview in the New York Times, 1999
ARNOLD MORLEY 1849-1916; British Liberal member of parliament; Postmaster-General 1892-1895
There is a great distinction between telephone companies and gas and water companies. Gas and water are requisites for every inhabitant in a district, but the telephone cannot, and never will be, an advantage which can be enjoyed by large masses of the working classes. • as Postmaster-General with responsibility for telecommunications, House of Commons, 1895
Herb Morrison HERB MORRISON Herbert Morrison
US radio commentator
It's crashing. It's crashing. Terrible. Oh my, get out of the way, please. It's bursting into flames. And it's falling on the mooring mast. All the folks agree this is terrible, one of the worst catastrophies on the world. Oh, the flames, four or five hundred feet in the sky, it's a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. The smoke and the flames now and the frame is crashing to the ground, not quite to the mooring mast. Oh, the humanity and all the passengers. • 6 May 1937, commentating on the arrival and explosion of the airship Hindenburg at Lakehurst, New Jersey, while experimenting with field recording equipment—which is why a recording of an apparently random news report exists; the recording was later broadcast nationwide by NBC
Go to Chronomedia 1937
Samuel Morse SAMUEL MORSE Samuel Finley Breese Morse
1791-1872; American inventor
What hath God wrought? • first electric telegraph message, 24 May 1844, quoting Numbers 23:23
cf Jack Gould Jack Gould
John Mortimer JOHN MORTIMER Sir John Clifford Mortimer
1923-2009; English barrister, dramatist and writer
The main aim of education should be to send children out into the world with a reasonably sized anthology in their heads so that, while seated on the lavatory, waiting in doctors' surgeries, on stationary strains or watching interviews with politicians, they may have something interesting to think about. • quoted in The Times, 30 December 2000
Malcolm Muggeridge MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE 1903-1990; British journalist
1 Some politicians, I really believe, would walk barefoot from John O’Groats to Shepherd’s Bush if they were assured of a peak-viewing time appearance on arrival there. • letter to The Times, 9 April 1966; BBC Television is based at Shepherd’s Bush
2 It is very nearly impossible to tell the truth in television Christ and the Media, 1976
Frank Muir FRANK MUIR 1920-1998; British comedy writer
Two technical innovations this century, because of the limitations they imposed, sent comedy off in two entirely new directions: silent films and radio. ... It is one of the tinier sorrows in this century of weeping, wailing and the nationalisation of teeth, that television was invented so soon after radio. • 1966
cf Go to W E Williams W E Williams
Rupert Murdoch RUPERT MURDOCH Keith Rupert Murdoch
1931- ; Australian-born international media tycoon
1 I can’t concede this difference between quality papers and mass circulation popular papers. • 1969, quoted in Campaign
See also Go to Chris Smith Chris Smith
2 Nothing ventured, nothing gained. ... After all, we are in the entertainment business. ... Circulation went up and it stayed up. We didn’t lose money or anything like that. • reported comments on the fact that the Hitler diaries published in his UK ‘quality’ newspaper The Sunday Times were (blindingly obvious) forgeries; quoted in Robert Harris: Selling Hitler, 1986
3 For 50 years British television has operated on the assumption that the people could not be trusted to watch what they wanted to watch, so that it had to be controlled by like-minded people who knew what was good for us. Much of what passes for quality on British television is really no more than a reflection of the values of the narrow élite which controls it. I urge you to stop harking after a better yesteryear and to appreciate what tomorrow has to offer. • MacTaggart Lecture, Edinburgh Television Festival, September 1989
See also Go to Margaret Thatcher Margaret Thatcher
4 Advances in the technology of communications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes: fax machines enable dissidents to bypass state-controlled print media; direct-dial telephone makes it difficult for a state to control interpersonal voice communication; and satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television channels. ... [T]he extraordinary living standards produced by free-enterprise capitalism cannot be kept secret. • Speech to UK advertising executives, London, 1 September 1993, reportedly written by Irwin Stelzer.
This led to Chinese authorities banning privately-owened satellite dishes, setting back seriously Murdoch's aspirations to exploit the Chinese market.
Ed Murrow EDWARD R MURROW Edward Roscoe Murrow
1908-1965; American broadcaster and news commentator
1 Television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us. • Article in TV Guide, December 1958
2 This instrument can teach, it can illuminate, yes, it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it is merely lights and wires in a box. • Source unknown
Benito Mussolini BENITO MUSSOLINI 1883-1945; Italian fascist dictator
L'arma più forte.
[Cinema is] the most powerful weapon.
• 1922
See also Go to LeninVladimir Illich Lenin
Mussolini opens CinecittaMussolini opens Cinecittà studios in Rome.
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Page updated 1 March 2011
Compilation and notes © David Fisher