BRITISH TELEVISION: A DIM VIEW

This article marks the culmination of several years of off-and-on work. I originally marshalled the material into a proposal for a one-off television programme. For many months, I tried to fire up first one, then another old chum in the programme-making business to run with the proposal and take it to a commissioning editor, preferably the appropriate one at Channel 4. There were long discussions about the likelihood of any television channel being ready to screen a programme that tore into the modes and manners of broadcasting, including its own. I maintained that, if a channel perceived any likelihood of getting a decent audience for such a subject, any scruple about sensitivities would melt away.

However, more (in the end) for personal than any other reason, these programme-makers bailed out. I then sent the proposal to most of the best-established companies making factual programming for UK channels. Just one of them responded, declining but in a friendly manner. I wrote to the others again, reiterating that I am an old pro in the same business as they are. After all, these independents are the first to grumble when commissioning editors leave them swinging in the breeze. A small handful responded, gratifyingly shamefaced but not otherwise up for business.

Another programme-maker whom I contacted later (whom I also required to prompt for a reply) suggested that I instead knock out the material as a newspaper feature which, if it caused the sort of stir I hoped, might lead on naturally to the possibility of a programme.

So I wrote the piece you find below. I submitted it to The Guardian, The Independent and The Times, all newspapers for which I have written in the past. Trying to make it in some spurious manner “topical”, I framed it as a letter to Chris, Lord Patton, upon his taking up office (tomorrow) as chairman of the BBC Trust. Not a word of acknowledgment came back from any of the newspapers. When prompted, The Guardian did send an apologetic but otherwise impersonal rejection. The other two remained silent under further enquiry.

Lord Patton o'the BBC

I cannot be very disheartened at these companies and journals not wanting my stuff. But their lack of the most elementary courtesy is utterly dismaying. It is a discourtesy shared with cinema, theatre, book publishing and doubtless every other enterprise. How shaming.

An INTRODUCTION for the NEW BBC CHAIRMAN

Dear Lord Patten,

Upon your appointment as chairman of the BBC Trust, you were widely quoted to the effect that “I hardly ever watch television”, something you say was a misquotation. However, I hope you will permit me to assume that the evenings that you pass slumped in front of the box are relatively few and far between. People in public life never did do much viewing. The earliest purchasers of television sets typically bought them “for the servants”. The box replaced religion as the opium of the masses, not of the movers and shakers.

BBC Directors-General hardly get to watch any programmes, which was probably why PD James was able to make mincemeat of Mark Thompson in a memorable radio encounter a couple of years ago. DGs may hear a few broadcasts on radio while being whisked by car from one important meeting to another. But when Lord Birt was DG, I doubt that he ever saw a programme unless a government minister complained about it. He was too busy tearing out the septic tank, the central heating and the roof insulation actually to notice what the house looked like or how its inhabitants felt. On his watch, morale at the Corporation fell to an unprecedented low.

That television managers do not watch stuff – anyway, certainly not on transmission – is confirmed by what has happened to the way that programmes are presented. Each channel treats its output merely as a means of winning, holding and keeping viewers: “stay with us”, as newsreaders and linkpersons plaintively beg. Marshall McLuhan saw what was happening as long ago as 1967: “the medium is the message”. We can now say that, within the general dictum, each channel is its own message.

Television programmes still have the power to inspire adherence. Think of the devotees drawn by Mad Men, Glee, True Blood, Breaking Bad and Desperate Housewives. These dramas are of course American imports (this year’s panic, The Killing, is Danish) and you may well feel that, in citing them, I am loading my argument. I will concede odd shafts of local light, all as it happens from Channel 4 – Misfits (or at any rate its first astonishing series); The Promise (old-fashioned and over-extended but a proper, sustained story); the remarkable durability of Shameless – but those other dramas that have brought a measure of éclat to current British television are, almost without exception, genre pieces of various kinds, not least the relatively new (or anyway newly dominant) format of dramatised versions of the lives of celebrities, usually dead ones with whom liberties may be taken. Christopher and His Kind was flagged on BBC4 as ”original drama” but of course Kevin Elyot had dramatised Isherwood’s memoir. Those American shows that I listed above were all born of an individual writer’s scratch notion, something that is far too nerve-wracking for most British commissioning editors most of the time.

C4's startling contemporary drama serial, Misfits

How did British television get so compromised, so nerveless, so apt to keep glancing over its own shoulder, while paradoxically being so self-important and so ruthlessly competitive? From the end of the 1960s to the early 1990s, I alternated between working in and writing about television. It seemed to me then that this was the most exciting and important field in which to toil and to be interested, and British programming was at its cutting edge. My father was one of the million householders who bought a set in the twelve months after the Queen’s Coronation, which we had – as it was termed in those days – “viewed” enrapt at a neighbour’s house. I discovered the medium’s rich range on its two, then three channels through the 1960s and into the ’70s, a period now enshrined in cliché – but clichés are founded in truth – as The Golden Age.

Here was quality in variety: Doctor Who; World in Action; Steptoe and Son; The Prisoner; Armchair Theatre; The Stanley Baxter Show; Ready, Steady, Go!; All Our Yesterdays; The Rag Trade; Diary of a Young Man; Survival; Morning in the Streets; Tonight; The Avengers; Culloden; On Safari; Coronation Street; Your Life in Their Hands; The Plane Makers; Ways of Seeing; Face to Face; I, Claudius; Not Only – But Also; Isadora; Hancock’s Half Hour; Man Alive; Talking to a Stranger; The Army Game; University Challenge; Late Night Line-Up; The Roads to Freedom; The Sky at Night; Compact; Till Death Us Do Part; Disappearing World; The Search for the Nile; That Was the Week That Was; Monitor; The Strange World of Gurney Slade; The Likely Lads; The Magic Roundabout; The Forsyte Saga; Horizon; Spycatcher; It’s a Square World; Quatermass and the Pit; Dad’s Army; The Great War; Z Cars; The Old Grey Whistle Test; Tomorrow’s World; On the Margin; Aquarius; The Wednesday Play.

Judi Dench in John Hopkins' four-part, multi-viewpoint drama of 1967, Talking to a Stranger

Look across the schedules of the myriad channels now available and ponder whether there might be some degree of falling off: All New TV’s Naughtiest Blunders; 100 Men Own My Breasts; Outrageous Vacation Videos; Hotter Than My Daughter; Aircrash Confidential; Uncut! Sex on the Job; Most Haunted Unseen; F*** Off, I’m Ginger; Even My Pet’s a Porker; World’s Wildest Police Videos; The Spa of Embarrassing Illnesses; Most Shocking Criminal Behaviour; 50 Greatest Plastic Surgery Shockers; The Most Annoying TV Moments We Hate to Love; A Hundred Orgasms a Day; Celebrity Fear Factor UK; Celebrity Rehab; Web Lives Exposed ... Even if some of these things are more innocuous than they appear – I do not propose to research the matter – the pitch that their titles make is clear. So many programmes now trumpet terms that used to be confined to sensationalist top-shelf magazines and commercial down-market videos: “extreme”, “addicted”, “bizarre”, “wild”, “crash”.

Each of my lists is highly selective, of course. But just as all of the contemporary productions would have been unthinkable thirty years ago, so it must be doubted if equivalents of the vintage ventures, all so innovative in their time, would leap the barriers to originality erected over recent years. There are many reasons why risk died in broadcasting. The evidence of this death is everywhere.

For some twenty years now, television has been widely described as “dumbing down” to meet a demotic audience perceived as requiring constant stimulus. The danger that this would happen to television was long foreseen. In a submission to the Pilkington Committee that reported on broadcasting for the government in 1960, the poet TS Eliot warned that “those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it”. I suspect that Eliot would consider the full debauch to have arrived some years past. By 2004, 54 percent of those surveyed agreed that the BBC had “dumbed down” and/or ”lowered quality”.

Uplifting television: 100 Men Own My Breasts

There were angry refutations. In an article, one-time LWT executive David Doherty snarled that “dumbing down … was always an ugly phrase: elitist without being elegant, alliterative rather than analytical. It represented knee-jerk criticism of emerging freedoms, the last rallying cry of an elite who thought that culture … was too precious to leave to the masses, down to whose level the media were supposedly dumbing”. Docherty’s phrasemaking, it strikes me, was assonant but asinine. “Emerging freedoms” was an astonishing spin on the trend that led inexorably to I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here. And if ever there was a “knee-jerk criticism”, it was calling those who argue for thoughtful work “elitist”.

Part of the dumbing down is that, stealthily, television has abandoned all pretence to any concern for its own output. The programmes – the stuff that, for most people, are the medium’s raison d’être – barely make the top fifty in the list of executives’ own priorities. These mandarins are more interested in policy, structures, demographics, sales charts, models of future configurations of transmission ecosystems, that kind of big boys’ toy.

The BBC is enjoined by charter to carry no advertising yet it generates more ads than any of its rivals. The promotion of future programmes has several times passed what seemed at the time like saturation point. And, increasingly, BBC news bulletins are deemed proper vehicles for promoting up-coming current affairs and feature programmes that touch on public events, just as weather forecasts specify those few sports engagements still within the Corporation’s portfolio.

You can trace the BBC’s commitment to self-promotion back to 1967 when, though fiercely resisted at the time, the wireless stations were revamped and “wonderful Radio One” was born. Thereafter, outlandish claims for the BBC’s own entertainment value became the norm: “we’ve got an absolutely fantastic show for you today”, that level of reticence.

The unsinkable Katie Price in I'm a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here

Back in television, even though the viewer’s whereabouts are readily verified by myriad means, most channels affix a logo permanently to the corner of the screen – that is, permanently during the programmes, not during the precious advertisements and promotions. Would that it stopped there. Further information is deemed essential, such as the declaration that the programme is “brand new” (which is to say not broadcast in Britain before but several months after it was brand new in the States) or part of some supposed “season” of related programmes or even that some different series will be starting in a day or two.

I once settled down to watch a holiday season movie on the Disney Channel. It turned out that the silhouette of Mickey Mouse’s head permanently resident in the bottom corner of the screen on that channel had been redesigned for the occasion. Every three minutes, it juddered and dropped out of sight, then reappeared bearing the legend ‘Happy Easter’, then juddered again, popped out of sight and resumed its usual empty state. Disney lost at least one viewer before ten minutes of the movie had elapsed. And to what purpose?

People will get used to anything, of course. The competition to distract the viewer has to hot up. In addition to standing channel IDs, “urgent” information has to be intruded suddenly by a strap-line. Just as you are being gripped by a programme’s climax, a caption appears telling you about the next programme. No concession is made either to the viewer’s sensibility or to the attention that the programme-makers must have assumed that they would be granted by the broadcaster.

Channel 4 once had an afternoon screening of the movie Auntie Mame. In the last shot, Rosalind Russell as the eponym determinedly ascends a grand staircase, her latest protégé in tow, towards a golden future at the top of the stairs beyond the upper right-hand corner of the screen. In C4’s screening, her transported gaze was fixed on a sign that read “Next: Countdown”. Of such bathos is British television daily made.

Radio 1's first logo, 1967

Just in case these rude interjections fail to frighten you into dropping the remote, a linkperson will then speak over the end credits, repeating the intelligence about the next programme and perhaps something later in the week. And for those whose memory is terminally short-term, the end credits will also be collapsed into a vignette while other screen furniture confirms the linkperson’s message and the strapline of a few seconds earlier. The viewer who had hoped to glean some information from the credits has no choice in the matter and is not considered. Nor are those whose names appear in those credits. And it confounds me that any composer should still wish to supply theme music that will be comprehensively trampled on transmission.

Are higher management at all aware of transmission modes? Do they know how cavalierly both the audience and the programmes are treated? Have they registered how routinely the switching on of the mic in the presentation suite affects the soundtrack, music and all, of the end of the programme, so that, if the linkperson leaves the mic on, the programme ends in a cacophony of distortion? Reviewers, whose viewing is also largely conducted ahead of transmission, are spared these abuses too.

This hectoring of viewers and the hustling off of programmes that are reaching their end creates a sense of the channel as sausage-factory production line, all the products the same and a liability unless packed away immediately. Programme-makers are obliged to join the packaging/promoting culture that they cannot beat. Dramas routinely have to intrude “previously” summaries and “in the next episode” trails into the unity of story. (HBO in the States splendidly resists this). So moments are highlighted out of context and imminent revelations are imposed on you, often at the direct expense of the end-credits. Documentaries are now apt to trail clips of the upcoming segment before the ad break and then restate the programme’s premise after the break, as though we are all too stupid to hold anything in our heads.

This infantilizing and spoonfeeding of the audience inevitably infects programme policy too. News reports are constantly decorated with pointless, banal illustration (feet on city streets, children playing in soft focus, the bereaved leafing through photograph albums), overblown graphics and even moments of “reconstruction” (i.e. dramatisation). Passers-by are canvassed for random vox pops that only confirm that the public is ill-informed: last year, a bloke on his doorstep told the BBC that he disagreed with striking BA staff because “we could all do with a bit more money”, but the strike was over work conditions, travel concessions and safety regulations, not pay. Didn’t the news editor know that?

AJ 'Freddie' Ayer

A BBC news apparatchik once wrote to a newspaper, quoting (in order to refute) an earlier correspondent’s comment: “I make no apology for having been ‘obsessed with making the news interesting’ … what should we do – make [it] boring?” I don’t think news editors need to make the news anything. They ought to believe that it is intrinsically interesting, that it requires no hard sell. Otherwise they are in the wrong job.

As well as their reliance on genre, commissioning editors generally will not commit to a new drama unless at least one from a small repertory company of actors presumed to be audience-pleasers is willing to play the lead. These actors – you know who they are – may be identified by their safe dullness, a quality endlessly extended by the predictability of their casting. To compound the offence, recognisable actors are now required to front documentaries. Television executives evidently believe that, for instance, BP’s disaster in the Gulf of Mexico cannot deliver an audience unless sold as Stephen Fry and the Great American Oil Spill. While Fry may be adept at giving what his beloved Wodehouse called “the old oil”, I entertain some doubt that he is among the world’s leading authorities on environmental disasters or multinational corporations.

So why was it him presenting? Fry is routinely accounted “the cleverest man on television”, which nicely encapsulates the degree to which the medium has declined. Such bygone regulars as AJ Ayer, Jacob Bronowski, Stuart Hall, Susan Sontag, John Berger, Marghanita Laski, Raymond Williams, George Steiner, Bryan Magee and even Malcolm Muggeridge would have eaten a Fry-up for breakfast. Why not go the whole hog with the Deepwater Horizon programme and have Paris Hilton shrieking because her heels got splattered or Charlie Sheen blaming a Jewish conspiracy? Or could we instead have a proper programme that doesn’t pander to celebrity culture?

Television has run hard with celebrity. Experts, seasoned journalists and professional interviewers are no longer in demand. No traditional, uncompromising reporter like James Cameron could now replicate his glorious broadcasting career. However ignorant or inane or irrelevant, the observations of someone who appears in the tabloids are far more welcome to programme-makers than anything smacking of knowledge, authority or experience. And because television influences so many other fields, this absurd distortion of public discourse infects marketing calculations everywhere. So the random taste in fiction of people off the telly dictates publishers’ lists, which are already dominated by ghosted celebrity memoirs and novels and children’s books by comedians and actors. Because television imagines it can only filter any information or education through the mouth of a graduate of soap opera or Big Brother, the rest of the culture follows suit. It can only be a matter of time before no job vacancy in the land is filled without an X Factor or Dragon’s Den-style audition of the applicants.

One of the authors of this televisual disaster is, I submit (and you may well be shocked to entertain the notion), Jeremy Isaacs. Sir Jeremy would seem to be the type of proper, honourable and creative television executive of the past. (At least he wasn’t dressed by Asda, like the unlamented Andy Duncan). But it was he more than anyone who dismantled the old studio system by setting up Channel 4 as a “publishing” rather than a producing house. In theory, letting a hundred independents bloom looked like an enlightened act. But what some of us warned at the time has come to pass.

Sir Jeremy Isaacs, father of Channel 4

The pattern of the industry has reproduced the collapse of the big studios in Hollywood in the 1950s. Because the independents were obliged to compete for the favours of commissioning editors, the pitch and the deal became their primary creative acts. That safety should become the prevailing tenor of the pitches was as predictable as the gradual hoovering up of small production houses by larger ones. The distinctive house-style of the broadcasting producers – Granada’s innovative thoughtfulness, ATV’s showbiz pizzazz, the BBC’s historic mission to “inform, educate and entertain” – metamorphosed into the buyer’s market exemplified by Sky, which has only recently begun to generate original British programming of its own.

In his time as BBC D-G, John Birt underscored the dismantling of the studio system by outsourcing craft services, thereby destroying long BBC traditions of training and methodology to the whole industry’s detriment. At a more subtle level, the collegiality of the big studios was snuffed out too. And middle management grew. When I was an in-house BBC producer in the 1970s, I was answerable to one immediate boss who supported my decisions as a matter of course. Now, nothing is given a green light until it has been neutered by an army of executive producers, marketing consultants and sales advisors.

Given this unpropitious climate, is it any wonder that the idiosyncrasy of talent has left the field to time-servers, profit-counters and systems nerds? Please be a restorative, creative and critical chair of the BBC Trust.

Yours sincerely,

W Stephen Gilbert