For television, 1968 was a traumatic year. Not only in the minor national sense of a petty shake-up of the commercial companies; but in the larger international sense of a medium that for the first time found itself being taken really seriously.

It was the year in which the concept of TV as a harmless toy finally died. It was the year in which complacency about what TV was doing to society was replaced by concern. It was the year in which people who had never thought about TV before had to start thinking about it.

It was the year in which almost every major social convulsion – the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, student riots, the French revolt, the Chicago Democratic Convention – was followed by an anxious look at TV to discover what contribution it had made to these events.

Mode of thought

It was the year in which every mode of thought – participation, trivialisation, alienation and drop-outs, the generation gap, rejection of authority, disillusionment with politics – could be traced back to the influence in some greater or lesser measure of the TV factor.

It was the year in which some responsible people began to ask themselves whether so powerful and all-pervasive a social force could safely be left in the hands of those who used it primarily to entertain or sell goods. Should society, through TV, be left to the mercies of the hucksters and the show-biz purveyors?

On the other hand, were there not equal, or even more, dangers in making TV part of the state apparatus – as in France and Russia – and having it run by politicians? Was there no middle path for TV? Was there only the dictatorship of bureaucracy or the dictatorship of frivolity?

It was the year, also, in which in Britain and America the one group who seemed blissfully unaware of the growing importance of the medium were the hierarchy actually running it.

Obsessed by ratings

They were more obsessed by ratings than social impact; they were more concerned with balance-sheets than sociological repercussions; they were more flattered by quantity of viewers than quality of programmes.

Nothing that was being done by the two major channels in Britain – BBC-1 and the ITV – showed any awareness that the role of TV in a modern democracy had changed, and that they should do something about it.

Thus, on the issue of violence, for example, there appears to be an ostrich-like refusal on the part of TV executives to believe that the unrelenting transmission of programmes – Westerns, gangster, spy and detective series – showing that virtue almost always resides in the man who can shoot faster and hit harder must enshrine in many young minds the belief that violence is an acceptable, even admirable, aspect of human behaviour.

President Johnson’s Commission on Violence, which is now conducting hearings in Washington, has been indicating considerable impatience with the broadcasters’ contention that there is no casual relation between TV violence and social violence.

Some of the Commission’s members have already complained that the American networks have not done enough research on this issue and have been hiding behind a fog of ignorance to justify their programming. The same criticism could be levelled against British broadcasters.

Even politicians – notoriously indifference to every aspect of TV except when it concerns them or their party – have in 1968 stirred themselves from their comatose complacency about the medium.

Mr. Richard Crossman’s [Leader of the House of Commons until October, Secretary of State for the new Department of Health and Social Security from November – Ed] complaint that politics had been trivialised by the small screen carried with it imputations that other serious aspects of live – religion, education, the law, trade unions, the armed forces – were also being subjected to the same diminishing process through their appearance and presentation in a basically-trivial medium.

Mr. Anthony Wedgewood Benn [Minister of Technology], also concerned about the degenerating aspects of TV, tried to awaken, without much success, a disinterested public to the dangers of a medium that was so dedicated to providing entertainment that its resources were denied to those serious groups in society who felt they should be able to use it to put across their particular points of view.

Doctors concerned about mental health, scientists frustrated with working conditions, farmers anxious about prices, teachers worrying about standards, trade unions concerned about their image are granted a minuscule amount of TV time because there are too many pop singers, yowling groups, actors in mediocre serials and bad comics who are considered to have first, and dominant, call on the medium.

Thus a medium which could provide an opportunity for participation in the affairs of the nation, and a chance for discontent and criticism to be voiced, is constantly being denied to most interests, and their spokesmen, in society.

The ultimate effect is a build-up of resentment and frustration which has already demonstrated how dangerous it can be through the student riots and demonstrations that have been the startling international phenomenon of 1968.

Could it be that there is more than a coincidence in the fact that these students are the first ones to have been weaned on TV from infancy – and that they are the ones most distrustful of authority and the ones most demanding in their claims for participation?

Just as 1968 has shown what the consequences of TV frivolity can be, so has it demonstrated the futility of trying to control the medium for bureaucratic state purposes alone.

De Gaulle, in France, and the Central Committee in Russia still assume that they can control and subdue the forces of discontent and protest by denying them access to the broadcasting media.

They are only just beginning to learn that it is not so easy. The very presence of TV stokes up an irresistible pressure to be heard. The explosion, when it comes, will be all the more intense because of the efforts to use broadcasting to bottle it up.

These then are only some of the considerations that must be recognised when any State from now on contemplates the future of TV.

The post The year TV showed it is not just a toy appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

For a moment, at least, there is an uneasy hush about the question of politicians and TV.

Having been hit by the verbal blunderbusses of two Cabinet Ministers – Richard Crossman and Anthony Wedgwood Benn – charging them with trivialising the political scene, the TV executives are brooding about the accusation and, as yet, doing nothing about it.

Now, in his Granada lecture Richard Crossman asked why the minority of people interested in politics should be given less TV time than minority groups interested in sport, music, drama or religion.

He estimated that the minority really keen on politics would be “far more numerous than all the opera-goers and the balletomanes put together, and at least as numerous as the active Christians.”

“Sixty minutes a week of straight outside broadcasting would seem a lot to us,” he said, pointing out that this was the time allotted to all-in wrestling.

Privileged

But what Mr Crossman failed to ask himself, and what few politicians are prepared to face, is whether or not any serious or concerned aspect of man’s activities can hope to benefit by increased support or respect if it becomes a recognised and accepted ingredient of a medium which is itself fundamentally trivial.

Tie one sector of our communal life that TV has continually given a privileged position in terms of hours has been the Christian churches.

Although the Postmaster-General does not have much say in the programme content of either the ITA or the BBC. he does insist that the hours between 6.15 p.m. and 7.25 p.m. on Sundays should be confined to a limited category of broadcasts (religious, charitable, Welsh language, those for the deaf) and which, in practice, has meant a quarantined zone largely occupied by religious TV. In addition to this hour and 10 minutes of privileged time, the ITV usually provides about 35 minutes a week of religious chat in what used to be the Epilogue slot and the BBC has a half-hour repeat of one of its Sunday religious programmes late the same night.

Definition

In other words, over three hours every week are granted, almost as a right, to Christian churches to put over their message and philosophy on TV. No other serious institution — Parliament, the Monarchy, the City, the Press, the Universities, the Law, the medical profession — is granted a fraction of this time to say what they would like to say to the public.

The definition of what is a religious broadcast is almost exclusively decided by the Central Religious Advisory Committee which advises the ITA and the BBC on these matters

On this Advisory Committee, which was established by Lord Reith – the BBC’s first Director-General — there are no minority religious groups or non-Christians. It represents exclusively the “mainstream of Christian tradition.”

The Chief Rabbi, in a recent letter to the Times, pointed out that the Jewish community receives but a fraction of its proportional share in religious broadcasting time based on the ratio of Jewish citizens.

And a number of MPs have also written to Lord Hill at the BBC complaining about the fact that the humanist position does not get its fair share of representation on the box.

Declining

But a more fundamental question than this volume of time each faith or interest gets on TV is whether or not there is any evidence that the constant exposure of Christianity on TV in its present context brings about a heightened awareness of Christianity and a rise in the number of its adherents and followers.

Judging by a Gallup Poll taken last year, there has been a serious increase in the number of people who believe that religion is losing its influence.

Compared to 1957 — which is a date that roughly corresponds to the advent of commercial TV on a popular scale and the consequent change in serious TV standards — there was an increase of some 17 per cent. in the number of people who thought religion was on the decline.

In 1957 52 per cent. of the people thought religion was losing its influence, in 1967, this had jumped to 67 per cent. In 1957, 17 per cent. thought religion was increasing its influence; in 1967 only 9 per cent. felt its significance was greater.

It is interesting, too, that it was members of the Church of England — the faith that gets the biggest slice of the TV religious cake — who provided the largest number of those who felt religion was losing its influence.

On the other hand, if we examine the records of the Jews and Humanists — groups who are concerned about their lack of access to the box — we will find no such precipitate decline in the over-all adherence to the importance of their beliefs.

The number of recognised Jews in Britain has remained relatively static — around the 450,000 mark — in the post-war years. The Humanists, on the other hand, are galloping ahead with membership in the Humanist Association – although tiny — increasing by some 20 per cent. per year.

No one would try to deduct from these figures a generalisation that TV is chiefly responsible for a fall in churchgoing or a decline in Christianity. Other factors — materialism, science, permissiveness, scepticism have made their impact. But why, for example, have these factors left the Jews relatively untouched?

TV, being the mysterious, unknown quantity that it still is, could be having its effect.

Commercial?

Isn’t there an element of the concealed commercial about many religious unobtrusive priest trying to make some sort of subliminal impact in a discussion on pop music or sex — which puts viewers in mind of TV advertising films and therefore stimulates their most intense defensive and cynical responses?

Judging by the surreptitious disguises now being used to flavour religious programmes with a secular masquerade, it appears that there is a growing doubt about the value of straight forward Christian programmes attempting to reason or proselytise or argue directly from the small screen.

Series such as Malcolm Muggeridge’s The Question Why and the current series on London Weekend, Round House, which is a sort of Speaker’s Corner on current affairs, are only peripherally religious and almost make nonsense of the Postmaster-General’s edict that these Sunday night slots should be devoted to religious programmes.

The post Is TV doing God any good? appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

WHEN Labour came to power in October, 1964, British TV faced a number of outstanding problems. Ever an optimist, I envisaged a TV millennium.

“The appointment of young and vigorous Anthony Wedgwood-Benn as the new Postmaster-General should presage some bold and exciting developments in British TV,” I wrote at the time.

Having outlined some of the issues I confidently expected Mr. Benn to tackle, I ended my article, addressed to him, with the following euphoric peroration: “The time has come for a positive lead from the Postmaster-General for more diversified, more significant and more adventurous TV. Will you give it?”

At the time, the future development and expansion of TV was harassed and beclouded by a host of unanswered questions. They hung over the medium like life in one of those TV commercials a minute before taking an aspirin.

Problem

The most pressing problems included the raising of the TV licence fee, the introduction of colour, the possibility of a fourth channel, the structure of commercial TV, the University of the Air, Pay TV.

Supplementary issues which might have been influenced by a dynamic and concerned Postmaster-General were the extension of broadcasting hours, a determination to prevent excessive profits being made out of a monopoly situation, an insistence that money made out of TV should be ploughed back into the medium, and the encouragement of the production of TV programmes for export.

Well, three and a half years have come and gone.

Wedgwood Benn has come and gone. Mr. Edward Short, his success as Postmaster-General, has come and gone. Mr. Roy Mason, the third Labour custodian of our TV destiny is now in charge.

What has been accomplished? After almost four years of Labour Government only two significant changes have taken place. We have colour and three new programme companies will soon be performing on Channel 9.

On the other hand, the litany of “no changes” sounds like a particularly depressing long moan. The BBC has not received an increased licence fee. There is no possibility of a fourth channel during the life of this Government.

There will be no University of the Air. Nothing has been done about pay TV except to allow an experiment to go ahead that had already been decided upon by the Tories.

There has been no increase in broadcasting hours. Nothing has been done to prevent exorbitant profits being made by those lucky enough to get commercial TV contracts. Nothing has been done to stimulate the production of TV programmes tor export. No steps have been taken to see that money made in TV stays in it.

With this desert of negative achievements to inspire him, it is perhaps not surprising that Mr. Roy Mason, our latest Postmaster-General, should early on indicate that he, too, intends to adopt the administrative philosophy that in broadcasting the less done the better.

Although he has only had the job tor a fortnight or so, his performance last week in answering questions in the Commons about broadcasting shows that the obscurantist mantle of his predecessors sits very naturally on his shoulders.

Abrupt

He was asked nine questions and to each one of them he managed to say no; he couldn’t promise; he couldn’t comment; or he didn’t intend to do anything.

Now if these questions had been asked for purely party provocative or petty purposes, one might have understood and forgiven Mr. Mason’s stonewalling demonstration.

But some of them seemed to me to raise important issues that deserved more than a dismissive reply.

He was asked by Mr. Hugh Jenkins if he would introduce legislation that could enable him to require the ITA to withdraw the licence of any programme company whose control was materially changed by acquisition or merger.

When Mr. Jenkins received an abrupt “no” to his question, he pressed on with a supplementary suggestion that since these contracts were in many cases licences to print money wasn’t it desirable that the nature of the company to which it was given should remain the same?

In other words, if Thames TV or London Weekend or Yorkshire TV received their contracts because of the nature of the men who were going to run it and back it, shouldn’t Parliament be concerned if another group of individuals bought themselves into controlling positions after the contracts had been allotted?

A perfectly reasonable question, you would think, demanding a considered reply. There is, for example, the case of EMI, which, when it was part of a consortium trying to get the Yorkshire contract was rejected, turning up again as a possible large shareholder in Thames TV because it has bought itself into ABC Pictures, which has a major stake in Thames TV.

If it was right for EMI to be turned down by Lord Hill in Yorkshire, is it right for EMI to be accepted by Lord Bowden in London? Surely a subject that should concern the Postmaster General?

But no. Mr. Mason shrugged off the question with the cryptic remark that Mr. Jenkins was concerned about “this developing into a monopoly situation” and thought it should be referred to the President of the Board of Trade.

The post Latest in the long line of No-men! appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.