Between 1975 and 1982, The Open University broadcast a series of televised courses on the genealogy of the modern movement: A305, History of Architecture and Design 1890–1939. Through twenty-four programs aired on BBC 2, the course team aimed to offer students and viewers a critical understanding of the intentions and views of the world that fuelled the modern movement, and to present some of the alternative traditions that flourished alongside it. The course nevertheless avoided the more dismissive positions of its contemporaries, while engaging political issues of its day such postwar urban planning and the housing question.