From The Tablet, August 2001
Many who work in television speak sentimentally of a golden age when creativity was the watchword and the medium was in the vanguard of new cultural movements. They recall how ITV screened John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger only months after its first stage performance in 1956, and got a 62 per cent share of the audience. In the 1960s on BBC1, classical music documentaries frequently pulled in audiences of seven million viewers. Such numbers for pure arts programmes are unimaginable today. Viewers’ tastes are increasingly diverse, and the arrival of satellite and cable television has fractured the audience. In the face of this changed situation, television executives have been accused of losing their nerve.
When ITV’s director of channels, David Liddiment, spoke recently at the Edinburgh Television Festival, he argued that the very soul of British television was at risk. Television, he contended, was finding it increasingly difficult to value creativity for its own sake, and had become fixated on audience size. In Liddiment’s words, “Numbers now seem to be the only universal measure for excellence we have: how many, how much, how often”.
He laid heavy blame on the BBC, accusing it of failing to give creative leadership to the rest of the broadcasting industry. His case was that the licence fee allowed the BBC elbow room that its commercial competitors lacked. But instead of using this opportunity, he said, the Corporation was now so aggressively commercial that other channels had fewer chances to take very many risks of their own. Liddiment accused the BBC of limiting ITV’s margin for innovation by scheduling programmes against it in an aggressively commercial way. As a result, he declared, all television channels were replicating each other’s ideas and squeezing the available space for originality. It is a fair charge, and one with which many programme-makers agree.
Nearly every recent speech about broadcasting has invoked the virtuous rhetoric of “creativity and innovation”. The issue fascinates business school academics. Their research shows that creativity can only flourish if workers feel they are trusted, if managers are pastorally sensitive to their subordinates, and if organisations disavow cultures of blame - creativity needs licence to fail. The most important finding is that creativity is born out of intrinsic motivation. This implies that the best programmes happen when producers believe in their ideas and their craft. A former controller of BBC2 once said that good programmes should be “hand-made and not manufactured”. his successors would doubtless nod agreement. but the truth is that today’s television executives have imbibed the rhetoric of creativity and innovation while failing to grasp the underlying implications.
The BBC can take risks more easily than its commercial competitors. Each year it has a guaranteed income of almost £2.5 billion from the licence fee, which will increase by 1.5 per cent above the rate of inflation every year until 2006. By contrast, the ITV network has no financial hammock, and as the British economy slows down, faces its most serious drop in revenue for a decade. This breeds caution. ITV must pause before spending heavily on projects such as its forthcoming drama documentary on the events of the Bloody Sunday shootings in Northern Ireland.
The issue at stake is not merely the BBC’s preparedness to take risks, but also its capacity for distinctive imagination. It is not just the BBC that makes public service programmes. So do the ITV companies and Channel 4. All are creative organisations in their own right, says David Liddiment, and have a duty “to keep television alive as a creative force at the centre of our cultural life – to feed its soul”. But with specialist channels such as Artsworld or The History Channel now showing programmes of a kind once found only on the BBC, the case for public service broadcasting is not as self-evident as once it was. David Liddiment argues that the BBC deserves the licence fee only if it “has soul” and embodies a distinctive creative vision.
Much of the argument revolves around the identity of BBC1. When John Birt was director-general, he diverted funding to news and current affairs, much of it at the expense of drama and light entertainment on BBC1. As a consequence, the BBC came to be accused of “super-serving” the middle classes. Greg Dyke, Birt’s successor, was determined to change this perception and to make BBC1, in his words, “the gold standard for television in the digital age”. He decreed that the channel should become more overtly entertaining. While factual programmes would continue to be shown on BBC1, they would be more in keeping with the channel’s more populist identity. Some producers chafe at this definition: last week one of them complained to me that the channel’s commissioners were now mainly interested in “soft-edged” programmes.
Meanwhile, there has been a parallel evolution of BBC2 into a general channel, with its more challenging output about to be diverted to an “unashamedly intellectual” digital BBC4, a television equivalent of Radio 3 and Radio 4 based around arts, music and ideas. The Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, is expected to give the plan the go-ahead next week. BBC4’s annual budget, initially £26 million, is miniscule in television terms, and its programmes will initially be available only to a small audience. There are fears that many of the BBC’s more adventurous programmes will be exiled to the margins of what some critics describe as a “digital dustbin”.
Mark Thompson, BBC’s Director of Television, is adamant that the hours devoted to arts, religion and current affairs on BBC1 and 2 will remain steady, but the reality is that there has been a sharp fall in BBC2’s arts coverage. Music and dance once found on BBC2 is being diverted to the BBC’s digital channels. In the case of religious programmes, only the worship strands are scheduled routinely on BBC1, while BBC2 has been less than receptive to religious subjects, which in time could also disappear to a little-watched BBC4.
Many of the BBC’s decisions about television are driven by its failure to connect sufficiently with viewers under 35, a large number of whom are indifferent to the value of public service television. To attract them, the BBC intends to spend £95 million a year on BBC3, a digital channel for the young – a budget more than three times larger than is proposed for BBC4.
The BBC has a real dilemma. Audience research shows that more than 40 per cent of viewers who have cable or satellite television prefer themed entertainment and sports channels to generalist channels such as BBC1 and BBC2. But if the BBC were to embrace themed channels too early, it would disenfranchise a very large audience, for two thirds of the population of Britain has access only to the five terrestrial channels. Moreover,an important part of this audience from the BBC’s perspective is the middle class, which has until now been stubbornly resistant to cable and satellite. The BBC derives much of its legitimacy from the support of the middle classes, yet its new programme strategy risks driving to the margins some of the programmes most valued by this audience. If the BBC is prepared to take risks only on its less-watched channels, but not where it counts, on BBC1, it will properly be accused of losing its creative nerve and retreating from its public service mission. Which is exactly what David Liddiment did.
Although the BBC is a leader among the creative industries, it has given relatively little thought to the circumstances in which creativity can flourish. One BBC manager who visited the American paper manufacturer 3M was astonished to find there a significantly greater attention to the fostering of creativity and innovation than the Corporation could claim. A particular obstacle is the cumbersome way in which the BBC commissions programmes. Creative blocks will continue until the best producers are free to make some programmes on the basis of intuition without having to jump through endless bureaucratic hoops first.
It is hard to justify public service broadcasting that merely replicates what the private sector does. But the BBC faces an almost impossible tension between its commitment to groundbreaking programmes and at the same time the need to attract enough viewers to justify the licence fee. Controllers might feel freer to encourage untrammelled creativity if the Culture Secretary were to decree in firm language that audience ratings were not to be the decisive measure of the BBC’s success.
The licence allows public broadcasters a freedom not available to their commercial counterparts. The implied bargain is that they use their space ambitiously, failing magnificently if needs be. The charge against the BBC is that it is failing to keep its side of the bargain.
The BBC is conservative. It learnt fear during the Thatcher years and will unlearn it with difficulty. So long as the achievement of a constant share of the audience remains to be a condition of the licence fee, the Corporation’s creative blocks and, by extension, those of broadcasters in general, will remain in place. As David Liddiment argued at Edinburgh, “It is not enough if you call yourself ‘public service’. There has to be a margin for the unexpected, serendipity, a margin for programmes that the public has no idea it wants until it sees them, a margin for backing your own judgement and taking a punt on talent”. The duty facing public service broadcasters is to lead audiences and not merely to follow them.
Many who work in television speak sentimentally of a golden age when creativity was the watchword and the medium was in the vanguard of new cultural movements. They recall how ITV screened John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger only months after its first stage performance in 1956, and got a 62 per cent share of the audience. In the 1960s on BBC1, classical music documentaries frequently pulled in audiences of seven million viewers. Such numbers for pure arts programmes are unimaginable today. Viewers’ tastes are increasingly diverse, and the arrival of satellite and cable television has fractured the audience. In the face of this changed situation, television executives have been accused of losing their nerve.
When ITV’s director of channels, David Liddiment, spoke recently at the Edinburgh Television Festival, he argued that the very soul of British television was at risk. Television, he contended, was finding it increasingly difficult to value creativity for its own sake, and had become fixated on audience size. In Liddiment’s words, “Numbers now seem to be the only universal measure for excellence we have: how many, how much, how often”.
He laid heavy blame on the BBC, accusing it of failing to give creative leadership to the rest of the broadcasting industry. His case was that the licence fee allowed the BBC elbow room that its commercial competitors lacked. But instead of using this opportunity, he said, the Corporation was now so aggressively commercial that other channels had fewer chances to take very many risks of their own. Liddiment accused the BBC of limiting ITV’s margin for innovation by scheduling programmes against it in an aggressively commercial way. As a result, he declared, all television channels were replicating each other’s ideas and squeezing the available space for originality. It is a fair charge, and one with which many programme-makers agree.
Nearly every recent speech about broadcasting has invoked the virtuous rhetoric of “creativity and innovation”. The issue fascinates business school academics. Their research shows that creativity can only flourish if workers feel they are trusted, if managers are pastorally sensitive to their subordinates, and if organisations disavow cultures of blame - creativity needs licence to fail. The most important finding is that creativity is born out of intrinsic motivation. This implies that the best programmes happen when producers believe in their ideas and their craft. A former controller of BBC2 once said that good programmes should be “hand-made and not manufactured”. his successors would doubtless nod agreement. but the truth is that today’s television executives have imbibed the rhetoric of creativity and innovation while failing to grasp the underlying implications.
The BBC can take risks more easily than its commercial competitors. Each year it has a guaranteed income of almost £2.5 billion from the licence fee, which will increase by 1.5 per cent above the rate of inflation every year until 2006. By contrast, the ITV network has no financial hammock, and as the British economy slows down, faces its most serious drop in revenue for a decade. This breeds caution. ITV must pause before spending heavily on projects such as its forthcoming drama documentary on the events of the Bloody Sunday shootings in Northern Ireland.
The issue at stake is not merely the BBC’s preparedness to take risks, but also its capacity for distinctive imagination. It is not just the BBC that makes public service programmes. So do the ITV companies and Channel 4. All are creative organisations in their own right, says David Liddiment, and have a duty “to keep television alive as a creative force at the centre of our cultural life – to feed its soul”. But with specialist channels such as Artsworld or The History Channel now showing programmes of a kind once found only on the BBC, the case for public service broadcasting is not as self-evident as once it was. David Liddiment argues that the BBC deserves the licence fee only if it “has soul” and embodies a distinctive creative vision.
Much of the argument revolves around the identity of BBC1. When John Birt was director-general, he diverted funding to news and current affairs, much of it at the expense of drama and light entertainment on BBC1. As a consequence, the BBC came to be accused of “super-serving” the middle classes. Greg Dyke, Birt’s successor, was determined to change this perception and to make BBC1, in his words, “the gold standard for television in the digital age”. He decreed that the channel should become more overtly entertaining. While factual programmes would continue to be shown on BBC1, they would be more in keeping with the channel’s more populist identity. Some producers chafe at this definition: last week one of them complained to me that the channel’s commissioners were now mainly interested in “soft-edged” programmes.
Meanwhile, there has been a parallel evolution of BBC2 into a general channel, with its more challenging output about to be diverted to an “unashamedly intellectual” digital BBC4, a television equivalent of Radio 3 and Radio 4 based around arts, music and ideas. The Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, is expected to give the plan the go-ahead next week. BBC4’s annual budget, initially £26 million, is miniscule in television terms, and its programmes will initially be available only to a small audience. There are fears that many of the BBC’s more adventurous programmes will be exiled to the margins of what some critics describe as a “digital dustbin”.
Mark Thompson, BBC’s Director of Television, is adamant that the hours devoted to arts, religion and current affairs on BBC1 and 2 will remain steady, but the reality is that there has been a sharp fall in BBC2’s arts coverage. Music and dance once found on BBC2 is being diverted to the BBC’s digital channels. In the case of religious programmes, only the worship strands are scheduled routinely on BBC1, while BBC2 has been less than receptive to religious subjects, which in time could also disappear to a little-watched BBC4.
Many of the BBC’s decisions about television are driven by its failure to connect sufficiently with viewers under 35, a large number of whom are indifferent to the value of public service television. To attract them, the BBC intends to spend £95 million a year on BBC3, a digital channel for the young – a budget more than three times larger than is proposed for BBC4.
The BBC has a real dilemma. Audience research shows that more than 40 per cent of viewers who have cable or satellite television prefer themed entertainment and sports channels to generalist channels such as BBC1 and BBC2. But if the BBC were to embrace themed channels too early, it would disenfranchise a very large audience, for two thirds of the population of Britain has access only to the five terrestrial channels. Moreover,an important part of this audience from the BBC’s perspective is the middle class, which has until now been stubbornly resistant to cable and satellite. The BBC derives much of its legitimacy from the support of the middle classes, yet its new programme strategy risks driving to the margins some of the programmes most valued by this audience. If the BBC is prepared to take risks only on its less-watched channels, but not where it counts, on BBC1, it will properly be accused of losing its creative nerve and retreating from its public service mission. Which is exactly what David Liddiment did.
Although the BBC is a leader among the creative industries, it has given relatively little thought to the circumstances in which creativity can flourish. One BBC manager who visited the American paper manufacturer 3M was astonished to find there a significantly greater attention to the fostering of creativity and innovation than the Corporation could claim. A particular obstacle is the cumbersome way in which the BBC commissions programmes. Creative blocks will continue until the best producers are free to make some programmes on the basis of intuition without having to jump through endless bureaucratic hoops first.
It is hard to justify public service broadcasting that merely replicates what the private sector does. But the BBC faces an almost impossible tension between its commitment to groundbreaking programmes and at the same time the need to attract enough viewers to justify the licence fee. Controllers might feel freer to encourage untrammelled creativity if the Culture Secretary were to decree in firm language that audience ratings were not to be the decisive measure of the BBC’s success.
The licence allows public broadcasters a freedom not available to their commercial counterparts. The implied bargain is that they use their space ambitiously, failing magnificently if needs be. The charge against the BBC is that it is failing to keep its side of the bargain.
The BBC is conservative. It learnt fear during the Thatcher years and will unlearn it with difficulty. So long as the achievement of a constant share of the audience remains to be a condition of the licence fee, the Corporation’s creative blocks and, by extension, those of broadcasters in general, will remain in place. As David Liddiment argued at Edinburgh, “It is not enough if you call yourself ‘public service’. There has to be a margin for the unexpected, serendipity, a margin for programmes that the public has no idea it wants until it sees them, a margin for backing your own judgement and taking a punt on talent”. The duty facing public service broadcasters is to lead audiences and not merely to follow them.
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