Open Door is a programme produced by the BBC's Community Programme Unit. It was first broadcast on 2 April 1973 and ran for a decade until September 1983. The programme gave people brief control of transmission and was a platform for the public to talk about its own issues and give their own views without editorial input from the BBC.

The Community Programme Unit was initiated by David Attenborough, the BBC Director of Programmes from 1969 to 1973, in collaboration with television producer Rowan Ayers. The two were interested in promoting public television as a space for participatory democracy. Ayers was appointed to run the Community Programme Unit (CPU).

The CPU had a base, deliberately distanced from the BBC Television Centre, in a terraced house owned by the BBC on Hammersmith Grove. William Fowler and Matthew Harle write that this was to ensure the Unit was visible to the community and that it was a less intimidating space for people to enter without having to go through security checks, for instance.

The CPU broadcast programmes both live with a studio audience and with pre-recorded elements. Programmes were styled on the format of popular talks shows and news reports of the day, but with a focus on social activism because community groups would be given editorial control over content. In a research article discussing the creation and legacy of the CPU, Jo Henderson argues:

The CPU's importance is threefold. Firstly, it created the broadcaster-as-publisher model in the UK, subsequently adopted by Channel 4, and now by streaming sites such as YouTube and post-mediated social media platforms such as Twitter. Secondly, it created innovative content that extended the topics and subjects on British television. Finally, it used the new technology of video to develop and refine techniques that have now become familiar elements in the television grammar of reality television and in first-person documentary

— Jo Henderson, Let the people speak – The Community Programmes Unit 1972–2002, Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies (2022)

Open Door, the first programme for the CPU, was initially brought to the attention of Robin Scott, who had been controller of the Light Programme and then BBC2, after reading about the idea from Frank Gillard, former director of BBC Radio, who had written about an American "people's radio show" in Boston. Attenborough appointed Scott and Ayers to create a BBC television version. In a Board of Management Meeting on 7 December 1972, Attenborough presented Community Programmes, a five-page report that proposed an experimental series, overseen by the CPU, to start in April 1973 (this would become known as Open Door). Attenborough argued that the network could benefit from community programmes by bringing "unheard voices to a mainstream audience" and by also challenging traditional ways of creating content. Thereby "new editorial attitudes that do not derive from the assumptions of the university-educated elite who are commonly believed to dominate television production." However, Attenborough also addressed the possible concerns of broadcasting such programmes, and he outlined these as including: (1) the potential to disrupt BBC impartiality, (2) the risk of programmes leaning too heavily in one political or social direction, (3) content may be boring and bring in low viewership, (4) programmes may be deliberately controversial, and (5) the potential for the BBC to be liable in libel proceedings or contempt of court. To counter this, Attenborough argued that the CPU should investigate applications "and make formal recommendations supported with a summary of their research and reasons for commendation to a Selection Committee".

Mike Phillips, interviewed by David Hendy for the University of Sussex - BBC Centenary Collection recalls that, at the time, there was a problem within and outside the Corporation for self-representation. Phillips describes his colleagues as being "all nice people" but criticises the lack of black and working-class representation not just on screen but behind it as producers and broadcasters, saying "the sense of who was entitled to speak and who was not entitled to speak was stifling."