Wit & Attitude Quote by Pete Waterman

A producer insisting "The public are not stupid" is less a compliment than a corrective: a jab at the industry reflex to blame audiences when a product flops. Pete Waterman came up in the era when pop was openly engineered for mass appeal, and his name is tied to that very machinery. So the line carries a quiet defensiveness. It reframes the charge often leveled at hitmakers - that they pander to an undiscriminating crowd - into an accusation aimed upward. If people buy it, stream it, sing it back at you, maybe the problem isn't taste. Maybe the problem is condescension.

The phrasing is doing work. "The public" sounds like a monolith, but Waterman treats it like a jury: collectively attentive, capable of detecting cynicism, and quick to punish boredom. The grammar - "are not" - lands like a firm rebuttal to some off-camera sneer. He's not romanticizing fans as enlightened critics; he's asserting a pragmatic intelligence: the public can tell when something is half-made, when a chorus doesn't lift, when a persona doesn't fit. They may not use the language of tastemakers, but they know what moves them.

In context, it's also a defense of pop itself. Waterman stakes out a democratic idea of culture: popularity isn't proof of stupidity, it's evidence of connection. The subtext is pointed: the real foolishness belongs to the gatekeepers who keep mistaking their own status for insight.