Understanding Television

Andrew Goodwin, Garry Whannel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134979547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

Understanding Television offers an introduction to some of the issues of television broadcasting and its main genres. It examines a number of programme categories, such as news, drama-documentary, sit-com, soap opera, sport and quizzes, and discusses aspects of the history of the organisation of television, its audiences and its future; it also looks at some key conceptual debates about hegemony in contemporary television

1

PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING: THE HISTORY OF A CONCEPT

Paddy Scannell

It is well known that broadcasting in Britain is based on the principle of public service, though what exactly that means, on close inspection, can prove elusive. The last parliamentary committee to report on broadcasting —the 1986 Peacock Committee—noted that it had experienced some difficulty in obtaining a definition of the principle from the broadcasters themselves. A quarter of a century earlier, the members of the Pilkington Committee on broadcasting were told by the chairman of the BBC’s Board of Governors that it was no use trying to define good broadcasting —one recognized it. Maybe. Yet for the sake of reasonable discussion of the relevance or otherwise of public service broadcasting today it is worth trying to pin down the characteristics that define the British system. A useful starting point is to distinguish between public service as a responsibility delegated to broadcasting authorities by the state, and the manner in which the broadcasting authorities have interpreted that responsibility and tried to discharge it.

Government intervention to regulate broadcasting has been, in many cases, the outcome of wavelength scarcity and problems of financing. The portion of the electromagnetic spectrum suitable for broadcasting is limited and governments have had to assume responsibility for negotiating international agreements about wavelength allocations to particular countries as well as deciding how to parcel out the wavelengths available in their own country amongst the competing claims of broadcasting and those of the armed forces, merchant shipping, emergency services, telecommunications, and so on. The problem of financing arises because it is not immediately obvious how people are to be made to pay for a broadcast service. Most forms of culture and entertainment are funded by the box-office mechanism—people pay to enter a special place to enjoy a play, concert, film, or whatever. But radio and television are enjoyed in people’s homes and appear as natural resources available, at the turn of a switch, like gas, water, or electricity. The two means of financing broadcasting in universal use, until recently, have been either a form of annual taxation on the owners of receiving sets (the licence fee), or advertising.

The British solution, back in the early 1920s, was the creation of a single company, the British Broadcasting Company, licensed to broadcast by the Post Office and financed by an annual licence fee charged on all households with a wireless. How the concept of public service came to be grafted onto what were originally a set of ad hoc, practical arrangements and the shifting terms of debate about what it has meant, can best be traced through the various committees on broadcasting set up by successive governments from the beginning through to the present. These committees, usually known by the name of their chairmen, have been given the task of reporting to Parliament on the conduct of the broadcasters, the general nature of the service provided, and its possible future development. They have been the means whereby Parliament has kept an eye on the activities of those to whom it has delegated responsibility for providing broadcast services in this country.

The very first broadcasting committee, set up by the Post Office in 1923 under the chairmanship of Major-General Sir Frederick Sykes, was asked to consider broadcasting in all its aspects and the future uses to which it might be put. In the minuted proceedings of this committee and its report we find the earliest attempts to formulate what the general purposes of broadcasting should be. A crucial move was the definition of broadcasting as ‘a public utility’ whose future should be discussed as such.

The wavebands available in any country must be regarded as a valuable form of public property; and the right to use them for any purpose should be given after full and careful consideration. Those which are assigned to any particular interest should be subject to the safeguards necessary to protect the public interest in the future. (Sykes 1923:11)

Bearing in mind the cheapness and convenience of radio, and its social and political possibilities (‘as great as any technical attainment of our generation’), the committee judged that ‘the control of such a potential power over public opinion and the life of the nation ought to remain with the state’ (Sykes 1923:15). The operation of so important a national service ought not to be allowed to become an unrestricted commercial monopoly.

The report rejected direct government control of broadcasting. Instead, it argued, indirect control should be operated through the licence which by law must be obtained from the Post Office for the establishment of any broadcasting station. The terms of the licence would specify the general responsibilities of the broadcasters and hold them answerable for the conduct of the service to that state department.

Thus the definition of broadcasting as a public utility, and the mandate to develop it as a national service in the public interest, came from the state. The interpretation of that definition, the effort to realize its meaning in the development of a broadcasting service guided by considerations of a national service and the public interest, came from the broadcasters and above all from John Reith, the managing director of the British Broadcasting Company from 1923 to 1926, and the first Director-General of the British Broadcasting Corporation from 1927 to 1938. The Sykes Committee had made only short-term recommendations about the development of a broadcasting service and the BBC had been granted a licence to broadcast for only two more years. The Crawford Committee was set up in 1925 to establish guidelines for the future of broadcasting on a more long-term basis. Reith was invited by the committee to present it with a statement of his views about the scope and conduct of broadcasting and he did so in a memorandum which he wrote as an impartial statement, presented in the interests of broadcasting not the British Broadcasting Company, and intended to show the desirability of the conduct of broadcasting as a public service.

In Reith’s brief and trenchant manifesto for a public service broadcasting system there was an overriding concern for the maintenance of high standards and a unified policy towards the whole of the service supplied. The service must not be used for entertainment purposes alone. Broadcasting had a responsibility to bring into the greatest possible number of homes in the fullest degree all that was best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour, and achievement. The preservation of a high moral tone—the avoidance of the vulgar and the hurtful—was of paramount importance. Broadcasting should give a lead to public taste rather than pander to it: ‘He who prides himself on giving what he thinks the public wants is often creating a fictitious demand for lower standards which he himself will then satisfy’ (Reith 1925:3). Broadcasting had an educative role and the broadcasters had developed contacts with the great educational movements and institutions of the day in order to develop the use of the medium of radio to foster the spread of knowledge.

Here we find a cogent advocacy of public service as a cultural, moral, and educative force for the improvement of knowledge, taste, and manners, and this has become one of the main ways in which the concept is understood. But radio, as Reith was well aware, had a social and political function too. As a national service, broadcasting might bring together all classes of the population. It could prove to be a powerful means of promoting social unity particularly through the live relay of those national ceremonies and functions—Reith cited the speech by George V when opening the British Empire Exhibition: the first time the king had been heard on radio—which had the effect, as he put it, of ‘making the nation as one man’ (Reith 1925:4). By providing a common access for all to a wide range of public events and ceremonies—a royal wedding, the FA Cup Final, the last night of the Proms, for example— broadcasting would act as a kind of social cement binding people together in the shared idioms of a public, corporate, national life.

But, more than this, broadcasting had an immense potential for helping in the creation of an informed and enlightened democracy. It enabled men and women to take an interest in many things from which they had previously been excluded. On any great public issue of the day radio could provide both the facts of the matter and the arguments for and against. Reith had a vision of the emergence of ‘a new and mighty weight of public opinion’ with people now enabled by radio to make up their own minds where previously they had to accept ‘the dictated and partial versions of others’ (Reith 1925:4). The restrictive attitude of the Post Office which, at the time, had forbidden the BBC to deal with any matters of public controversy, was severely restricting the development of this side of broadcasting, and Reith bitterly denounced the shackles imposed on radio’s treatment of news and politics. Only when freed from such chains would broadcasting be able to realize one of its chief functions. The concept of public service, in Reith’s mind, had, as a core element, an ideal of broadcasting’s role in the formation of an informed and reasoned public opinion as an essential part of the political process in a mass democratic society.

Finally, Reith argued strongly for continued ‘unity of control’ in broadcasting—that is, for the maintenance of the BBC’s monopoly of broadcasting in the United Kingdom. The monopoly granted to the BBC in 1922 was merely for the administrative convenience of the Post Office— it found it easier to deal with one licensed broadcasting service than several. At first there had been a considerable outcry (particularly from the popular press) against this ‘trade monopoly’ as a restrictive practice which inhibited the development of a range of competing programme services for listeners to choose from. But Reith defended what he later called the ‘brute force of monopoly’ as the essential means of guaranteeing the BBC’s ability to develop as a public service in the national interest. The monopoly was, Reith argued, the best means of sorting out a technically efficient and economical system of broadcasting for the whole population—and universal availability was the cornerstone of the creation of a truly national service in the public interest. Second, unity of control was essential ethically in order that ‘one general policy may be maintained throughout the country and definite standards promulgated’ (Reith 1925: 10).

Reith favoured changing the status of the BBC from a company in the private sector, set up originally in the interests of the British radio industry, to a corporation in the public sector under the authority of the state, because he believed it would give broadcasting a greater degree of freedom and independence in the pursuit of the ideals of public service. On the one hand it was necessary to be freed from commercial pressures. If radio continued to be part of a profit-oriented industry then the programme service would be influenced by commercial considerations and the need to appeal to popular demand. Entertainment, a legitimate aim of broadcasting, would become a paramount consideration to the detriment of other kinds of programming with a more educative or culturally improving aim. On the other hand, broadcasting needed to be free of interference and pressure from the state in order to develop its political role as a public service.

Reith’s advocacy of a public service role for broadcasting in 1925 had the support of Post Office officials. Public opinion too had come round in favour of continuing broadcasting as a monopoly in the custody of the BBC, and there was no opposition to its transformation into a corporation at the end of the following year. Thereafter, for nearly thirty years, secure in its monopoly, the BBC was uniquely empowered to develop a service along the lines envisaged by its first Director-General.

There were two crucial decisions made by Reith and a handful of senior BBC staff about how to organize and deliver the programme service. The mandate of national service was interpreted most basically as meaning that anyone living anywhere in the United Kingdom was entitled to good quality reception of the BBC’s programmes. They should be universally available to all. To achieve this a small number of twin transmitters were set up in strategically chosen locations to deliver two programmes to listeners: a regional programme produced from a handful of provincial centres, and a national programme produced from London. Wherever they lived listeners had the choice either of the national or their own regional programme. Second, the policy of mixed programming offered listeners on either channel a wide and varied range of programmes over the course of each day and week. Typically it included news, drama, sport, religion, music (light to classical), variety, and light entertainment. Not only did this mix cater for different needs (education, information, entertainment), but for different sectional interests within the listening public (children, women, farmers, businessmen, and so on).

These decisions had farreaching consequences. In the first place they brought into being a radically new kind of public—one commensurate with the whole of society. On behalf of this public the broadcasters asserted a right of access to a wide range of political, cultural, sporting, religious, ceremonial, and entertainment resources which, perforce, had hitherto been accessible only to small, self-selecting, and more or less privileged publics. Particular publics were replaced by the general public constituted in and by the general nature of the mixed programme service and its general, unrestricted availability. The fundamentally democratic thrust of broadcasting—of which Reith was well aware—lay in the new kind of access to virtually the whole spectrum of public life that radio made available to everyone. It equalized public life through the common access it established for all members of society—and it is worth noting that initially in nearly every case the broadcasters had a hard fight to assert that right on behalf of their audiences. In one particular case—the access of TV cameras to the House of Commons—the principle has only just been won.

In the long run these structural arrangements for the distribution of the service and the range of programmes on offer were far more important than the actual style and content of particular programmes at the time. The BBC soon succeeded in winning a reputation for itself as a purveyor of moral and cultural ‘uplift’ in the well established tradition of improvement for the masses. It was far less successful in establishing its news and political programmes. The monopoly, a source of strength in some areas of programming such as music, was a source of weakness in relation to parties, governments, and state departments. Throughout the era of its monopoly the BBC’s independence of government was frail and it was widely regarded (especially overseas) as government’s semi-official mouthpiece.

In the decade after the Second World War the monopoly came under increasing pressure, and the first postwar committee of inquiry into broadcasting—the 1950 Beveridge Committee—made the question of the monopoly its central concern. The BBC produced a classic defence of its position in its written submission to the committee. To introduce competition for audiences into broadcasting by establishing other programme services would inevitably lead to a lowering of programme standards. By that the BBC meant ‘the purpose, taste, cultural aims, range and general sense of responsibility of the broadcasting service as a whole’.

Under any system of competitive broadcasting all these things would be at the mercy of Gresham’s Law. For, at the present stage of the nation’s educational progress, it operates as remorselessly in broadcasting as ever it did in currency. The good, in the long run, will inevitably be driven out by the bad. It is inevitable that any national educational pyramid shall have a base immeasurably broader than its upper levels. The truth of this can be seen by comparing those national newspapers which have circulations of over four millions with those whose circulations are counted in hundred-thousands. And because competition in broadcasting must in the long run descend to a fight for the greatest number of listeners, it would be the lower forms of mass appetite which would more and more be catered for in programmes. (Beveridge 1950: para. 163)

In the event, the Beveridge Committee endorsed the BBC’s monopoly, but its days were numbered. Within a couple of years a general election returned a Conservative government that rejected the recommendations of Beveridge and opted to establish commercial television, funded by advertising, in competition with the BBC’s television service.

The British system is sometimes presented as a mixture of public service and commercial broadcasting as represented respectively by the BBC and ITV, but this is misleading. The terms under which commercial broadcasting was established by government made it part of the public service system from the beginning. A public corporation, the Independent Television Authority, was created by Act of Parliament with general responsibilities to establish a commercial television service that would inform, educate, and entertain. This service, known as Independent Television (ITV), was subject to state regulation and control by an authority charged with maintaining high standards of programme quality. It was an extension of public service broadcasting, not an alternative.

Even so, when the next committee on broadcasting, chaired by Sir Harry Pilkington, set about examining the impact of commercial television in I960 and comparing its programme service with that of the BBC it found much to complain of in the doings of ITV. If the main concern of Beveridge had been with the monopoly, Pilkington was concerned with programme standards and the ominous threat of ‘triviality’. Pilkington defined the concept of public service broadcasting as always to provide ‘a service comprehensive in character; the duty of the public corporations has been, and remains, to bring to public awareness the whole range of worthwhile, significant activity and experience’ (Pilkington 1960:9). Against this criterion the committee noted the widespread public anxiety about television which had, in the last few years, taken over from radio as the dominant broadcasting medium. The commonest objection was that television programmes were too often designed to get the largest possible audience, and that to achieve this they appealed to a low level of public taste (Gresham’s Law again). There was a lack of variety and originality, an adherence to what was safe, and an unwillingness to try challenging, demanding, and, still more, uncomfortable subj...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• General editor’s preface
• Introduction
• 1 Public service broadcasting: the history of a concept
• 2 A suitable schedule for the family
• 3 TV news: striking the right balance?
• 4 Points of view
• 5 F For Fake? Friction over faction
• 6 Box pop: popular television and hegemony
• 7 Winner takes all: competition
• 8 Gendered fictions
• 9 Only when I laugh
• 10 Television and black Britons
• 11 Are you receiving me?
• 12 Today’s television, tomorrow’s world
• Index