The Nationwide Television Studies

Charlotte Brunsdon, David Morley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134751624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

This book brings together for the first time David Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon's classic texts, Everyday Television: Nationwide and The Nationwide Audience. Originally published in 1978 and 1980 these two research projects combine innovative textual readings and audience analysis of the BBC's current affairs programme Nationwide. In a specially written introduction the authors trace the history of the original Nationwide project and clarify the origins of the two books.

Part I
EVERYDAY TELEVISION: NATIONWIDE

Charlotte Brunsdon
David Morley
produced by

The British Film Institute Educational Advisory Service

This study of the BBC’s Nationwide attempts to produce a ‘reading’ of the programme which reveals the ways in which it constructs an image of its audience. Specifically, the study details the methods through which the programme addresses itself both to a national audience, united in the diversity of its regions, and an audience of ordinary individuals, grouped in families: everyday television for everyday people.

The authors

Charlotte Brunsdon is a research student and David Morley a research associate at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We should like to thank Nadine Gartner for taking the photographs and the BBC for permission to use them. We are also grateful to the BBC and Michael Barratt for permission to publish the transcript in Chapter 3.

PREFACE

The work on which this monograph is based was originally carried out collectively by the Media Group at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, in the period 1975–6. Its members were: Roz Brody, Charlotte Brunsdon, Ian Connell, Stuart Hall, Bob Lumley, Richard Nice, Roy Peters. This work was discussed by the group and individuals wrote up contributions on different aspects of the programme. Since then, we have worked from this material to produce the present monograph, incorporating some of the writing produced at the first stage, although sometimes in relation to different problems from those originally addressed. The Media Group have all read and commented on this work at different stages, and in this context we are particularly grateful to Stuart Hall. We would also like to thank Ed Buscombe for his help.

Our analysis focuses on the ideological themes articulated in the programme, only partially relating these to their material bases in the formal properties of the discourse, and we have not integrated the visual level of the analysis into the central argument—this is one of the most obvious limitations of the work. We have also found ourselves, at times, wanting to make arguments for which we do not have sufficient data because of the different ways in which problems were originally posed. This has happened, for example, in relation to questions concerning women and the family, which were not focused originally as major concerns, but which have come to occupy a more explicit space in the analysis. It has frequently been a case of recognising only at a later stage what questions should have been asked of the material in order to produce satisfactory data.

The Nationwide programme examined in some detail in Chapter 3 of this monograph has subsequently been used within a research project, funded by the British Film Institute, on ‘the encoding and decoding moments in television discourse and programming’: this has been under way at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies since September 1976. This work constitutes an attempt to explore the range of differential decodings of the programme arrived at by individuals and groups in different socio-cultural locations. Within the context of the larger study, then, the programme analysis presented here constitutes the base line against which differential readings may be posed, and our reading of the programme will be open to modification in the light of the audience work.

C.B.
D.M.

1
GOING NATIONWIDE

(i) Nation and Regions: the historical development of the programme

Nationwide was started in 1966 as part of a strategy adopted by the BBC to meet three different needs. First, there was the necessity to build on the ‘spot’ established by Tonight, and to produce a programme which would carry through the solid audiences for the early regional news into BBC1’s major evening output beginning at 7 p.m. On the other hand, there was the need to meet the criticism that the BBC output was too much dominated by the metropolis and thus failed to express/deal adequately with the needs of ‘the regions’. The regionalism of Nationwide was seen as a necessary basis for any sense of national unity in the conditions of the late 60s and 70s or, as the BBC evidence to Annan put it:

local and regional services are an essential part of a truly national broadcasting system.

(BBC Handbook, 1978)

Finally, there were the recommendations made by the McKinsey Report and developed in the BBC policy document, Broadcasting in the 70s, that fuller use should be made of the company’s regional studios, allowing for regional specialisation and a ‘rationalisation’ of resources (and cost-effectiveness).

The regional element has always been crucial to Nationwide—the idea:

is to impress on the viewer that this is a programme which is not dominated by London and which embraces every main centre in the UK.
(William Hardcastle reviewing current affairs schedules; quoted in Connell, 1975)

So much so that when Nationwide ‘looked at London’ in the film ‘Our Secret Capital’ (Nationwide 16/8/76) Julian Pettifer, the presenter, consciously acknowledged the programme’s brief by saying:

On Nationwide we try desperately not to be a metropolitan programme.
Tonight is an exception. For the next 25 minutes we’re looking at life in London: but we offer no excuse, because after all, wherever you live in the UK, London is your capital…

Similarly Stuart Wilkinson (deputy editor of Nationwide) claimed that:

Nationwide would not be a nationwide programme without this facility to involve our colleagues in the regions. The crosstalk between the regions is the very essence of the programme.

(Quoted in Brody, 1976:20)

The programme attempts to construct a close and ‘homely’ relationship with its regionally differentiated audiences: this can be seen clearly in the programme’s self-presentation, or billing, in the Radio Times:

Reporting England: Look North, South Today, Look East, Midlands Today, Points West, Spotlight South West.

(Radio Times 29/3/77)

Today’s news and views in your corner of England presented by the BBC’s regional newsrooms. Then…take a look at the scene Nationwide.

(Radio Times 13/1/76)

…present news and views in your region tonight. Then at 6.22… present some of the more interesting stories of life in today’s Britain…

(Radio Times 14/1/76)

News and views in your region tonight. Then the national scene presented by…

(Radio Times 15/1/76)

…present the British scene to the people of Britain…

(Radio Times 16/1/76)

Nationwide is positively involved in the search for regional variety: of customs and ways of life. Indeed ‘Let’s go Nationwide…and see what the regions think…’ becomes the characteristic Nationwide form of presentation. Thus the programme is able to stress regional differences (different dishes, superstitions, competitions), to present a Nation composed of variety and diversity, but also to unify the regions in the face of National Crises: ‘How is Leeds coping with the drought? What about the South-West?’ (17/8/76).

We see variations in regional responses to issues given by the centre: classically, regional variations in the celebration of the Jubilee. But the regional is still contained within the national: regionalism is the life-blood of Nationwide, but full-blooded separatist or nationalist movements—such as the Irish Republican Movement—transgress the limits of the Nationwide discourse, breaking as they do the assumed frame of the ‘United Kingdom’.

Similarly, within the programme, the links over to regions are usually from London, and are used to ‘fill out’ regional aspects of something of national import; the regions do not usually initiate stories. The regions follow, and are linked to the national news—they pick up stories signalled in the national news and flesh out their significance for the region. The input of ‘regional stories’ — material drawn from the ‘life of the region’ —is subordinate to this ‘national with regional effects’ input; the regional variations are orchestrated from the central London studio base. London is the ‘absent’ region, the invisible bearer of national unity. It is both technologically and ideologically the heart of the programme.

(ii)
The world of Nationwide: the Mandala

During the period in which we viewed the programme, Nationwide regularly opened with the use of a specially designed graphic device—a lengthy sequence in which the basic concentric patterns altered through the superimposition of different images, ending in an abstract which culminated in the programme title. This device was based on the Mandala, an oriental mystical symbol of the universe. In its original form, various aspects of the life of samsara (the cycle of birth and death) or religious representations of the deity were depicted. Mandala is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘magic circle’ and its basic pattern is a set of concentrically arranged figures with radial or spherical emblems arranged around a central point. It was the term which Frank Bough used to describe the opening sequence of the programme. (See figs. 1-3.)

Deprived of its celestial resonance, the Mandala which heads Nationwide does seem to have a similar function to the Buddhist version. It suggests that ‘all human life is there’ —tied together at the central point (‘the still point of the turning world’) which is, of course, Nationwide itself. The device does symbolise something which is essential to the programme—unity in diversity. The form of the device— both the way the images work and the accompanying music— represent something of how the programme sees itself: the whole introduction can be read as a meta-discourse about the programme itself. The wheel suggests constant movement around the country surveying everything of interest. The points of the compass index its outward, regional viewpoint—each wheel being representative of the various Nationwide regions. But the device—like the programme itself—is centred—everything flowing out of and returning to a single source.

The basic pattern of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Nationwide Project: Long Ago and Far Away…
• Part I: Everyday Television: Nationwide
• Part II: The Nationwide Audience: Structure and Decoding
• Part III: Responses