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Peter Bazalgette is chairman of independent production company EndemolUK, and a director of Channel4.
This is an abridged version of the Foundation Lecture delivered at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
Taken from the Sunday Observer page 7 Today; No link.
Far from dumping down standards, multi – channel television offers viewers what they want, argues Peter Bazaglette.
The television shows Dog Eat Dog and the Weakest Link ‘ display and encourage mindless, cruel competitiveness and a disguised or perhaps unconscious contempt…for those at whom they are directed. They aim very effectively at an inadequately educated part of the population.’ So wrote the distinguished professor, Richard Hoggart, recently.
‘This sort of horror at the taste of the public has beset British broadcasting since its outset. But whereas a cultural elite could dictate the contents of the airwaves when there was extremely limited spectrum, now digital technology is shifting power dramatically to viewers. Judging by the amount of squealing by the enemies of entertainment at the moment. It’s gradually dawning on them that there’s a popular uprising going on.
A number of assumptions lie behind H oggart’s views. One is a sort of misplaced utopianism: that all programmes should be morally improving and none should be merely diverting – and certainly not in the sense that the Weakest Link amusingly revels human nature. Another is that to enjoy programmes whose sole purpose is entertainment you must be stupid, depraved or educationally deficient.
‘The equally eminent Richard Eyre, former head of the national Theatre, has joined the attack ‘The BBC exists to serve its audience: indeed it has a duty to serve it, and the public is best served by making the best programmes; Which is why it lapses – Fame Acadamy, SAS Survival Secrets, the viral growth of lifestyle programmes- so try the patience of its supporters.’ OK, I would bristle at that – my company makes many of the programmes Eyre condemns. But who says which are the ‘best’ programmes? Eyre was only recently a BBC governor, but he seems to think Lord Reith is still in charge. This is what Reith wrote in 1924: ‘It is …represented to us that we are ..setting out to give the public what we think they need, and not what they want. But few know what they want, and very few what they need,’ Was that true then? It certainly isn’t now.
‘This miserable, puritan streak in Eyre and Hoggart has a lineage. Here’s Wordsworth on popular books in the early nineteenth century: ‘A multitude of causes are acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.’ And in the last century FR Leavis managed to condemn thus: ‘{It} is the very reverse of recreation in that it tends not to strengthen and refresh the addict for living, but to increase his unfitness by habituating him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality at all.’
It is only 50 years since we were allowed more then one television channel. ‘The Beverage Report in 1949 had turned down the idea of a commercial channel with the words ‘Like the work of the universities, broadcasting should be regarded as a public service for a social purpose and not as the sale of a popular commodity.’
But now all this Swiftian detestation is just so much bleating. Multi – channel television offers people what they want , not merely what others think they need. It’s becoming a truly diverse and mature medium that increasingly resembles a bookshop or magazine rack. Highbrow, lowbrow and no-brow rub along quite happily.
The shift of power to the viewer is both profound and inevitable. It’s driven by technology. There are teenagers in my house who, faced with a range of digital channels, hardly ever watch the terrestrial ones. Their favourite fare may be Buffy The Vampire Slayer, The Simpsons, and MTV.
But beyond that, the digital channels offer a truly extraordinary range of programmes that I suspect Hoggart and the dumbing- down brigade are unaware of. I sometimes take a snapshot of a single timeslot just to prove this. The last time I did it was 10 days ago. On a Thursday at 9pm Channel4 and BBC2 had documentaries about the Ancient Egyptians and the Bible. On digital channels there were at least nine more docos to choose from: the Kennedys, the National Trust, Rommel, the IRA, Mallory and Irvine, neuropyschology,poisons, a study of flies and even one about Montaigne. There was also Ashkenazy playing Mozart, a film about contemporary dance and movies by Scorese and Fellini. All this in one time slot. Television is now for all manner of puritans and Catholics under one roof. Can’t the puritans learn a little tolerance, or is that an oxymoron.?
My children also have a device called a Personal Video Recorder. Sky Plus uses this technology. It contains 40 hours of recording capacity and will be a standard facility before long. With this they do their own scheduling and timeshift about half an hours viewing. They now watch programmes when they choose to. And while they don’t ignore the ads, they always fast forward through them. Watching them do this you can detect a fault line developing in the business model of commercial TV. They’re endangering what was always, in any case, the rather blunt instrument of the 30 second advertisement. What will probable happen in the future is that ads will be targeted at our households individually, or at our postcodes. It’s possible that subscribers to a digital package such as BSKyB’s will be offered a discount in return for accepting these ads. In those circumstances is it not the boot on the other foot completely? Instead of the viewer buying a television package, is not the viewer selling their attention to the broadcaster for a price of the discount? A further fundamental shift of power is on the horizon.
But still the ancient regime does not get it. The latest to rear his head is Roger Mosey, head of BBC Television News. Two weeks ago he made a speech in which he attacked ‘middle-class producers and commissioners who use less educated and less sophisticated ‘real people’ to make bad television programmes in the hope of getting ratings,’
We can all trade specific shows of questionable taste, But, television programmes have always been mediated by their producers (the great documentary maker, John Grierson, used to tell people what to say.) And it’s also true that viewers themselves are featuring more and more in so-called reality formats. I think It’s a healthy, empowering phenomenon. Wife Swap on Channel4 is an excellent example.
When I first went into television some 25 years ago, it was indeed the preserve of the middle class. Working-class people tended to feature either as grinning ciphers in game shows or wee al too often portrayed as mere victims of their social circumstances. That’s certainly how we made Man Alive, which I worked on. By contrast, shows like Wife Swap and BB explore the real lives and attitudes of Britons. The premise may be entirely false, but what flows from it is authentic, otherwise people wouldn’t watch it.
Television may still be regulated more heavily then other media because it is more invasive. There are still tough rules on taste and decency, nine o’clock water-sheds and so on. There remain persuasive reasons for intervening with public service broadcasters such as the BBC and Channel 4 to ensure a range of interests are catered for. But technology is now putting power in the hands of viewers-they cannot and will not be dictated to ever again. Death to cultural totalitarianism. Let a thousand programme bloom.
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