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.

MANY OF our politicians are so dedicated to the Parliamentary institutions in which they function and are so involved in their workings that they are oblivious to the waves of change and thought that are already eroding and undermining these institutions.

Anyone who watched Mr. Quintin Hogg on Panorama last week would have seen how fiercely and how pugnaciously a responsible politician reacts to any threats to conventional political attitudes.

Mr. Hogg lost his temper with Mr. Perry Anderson, a research fellow at Reading University and editor of the New Left Review.

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Mr. Anderson, speaking in the low-keyed, rational tones of this kind of TV discussion (which was on the problems of Parliamentary democracy), was saying that talk of referenda or administrative devolution “is so much irrelevancy, it means nothing to the major part of the population in this country.”

A harmless enough comment. you might think. Not one to set pulses racing or fists pounding. But it sent Mr. Hogg into a lather of agitation which, by comparison, made most Frenchmen I had seen on telly seem like models of calm imperturbability.

“What right have you to speak for the major part of the population?” shouted Mr. Hogg. “You represent nobody. Nobody would v ote for you if you stood for Parliament. You ignorant man, why do you claim to speak for the major part of the population of this country?”

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Now you will notice that what roused Mr. Hogg’s abuse was that Mr. Anderson, who is not an MP, should claim to speak for “the major part” of this country.

Presumably if he had been an MP, Mr. Hogg would have granted him this privilege. Or if he had been head of the TUC, like Mr. George Woodcock, he would have had the right to speak for a major or minor part of this country. Mr. Hogg clearly has no doubts that he has the right to speak for “the major part” of this country.

Now it seemed not to have occurred to Mr. Hogg that the reason he was in the Panorama studio discussing the possibility of bloodshed in Britain was because a young student named Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who “represented nobody,” took a handful of students to the barricades to protest against educational and social conditions.

It is this conflict between those who believe that an ordered society can only function through elected representatives of the people and those who feel that the Parliamentary machine is too remote, too inflexible, too cumbersome, too self-infatuated, too indifferent to minority protests that is at the heart of the present malaise in all democratic societies.

The word that has dominated the speeches and the conversation of those involved in the current turmoil in France has been “participation.”

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It was this frustration at not being allowed to actively participate in the direction of their own affairs, at being well-looked-after pawns in a benevolent autocracy, that united French students, workers and intellectuals. Economics, it should be noted, was only a secondary aspect of the revolt.

Now what guarantees are there that this feeling of non-participation, which can fortuitously be ignited into violent resentment, does not exist among the British people?

The truth is that our Parliamentary system has evolved to a point where we elect, for all practical purposes, an administrative dictatorship for a maximum of five years.

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The Labour Party showed how it was possible to remain in power with a tiny majority of three. We have seen how little influence the protests of backbenchers, the Opposition or the House of Lords can have on a Government determined to push through any sort of legislation it desires.

The most effective pressures on Government action do not come from within the Parliamentary system, but from outside it. From the Press, television and public demonstrations.

Now it is interesting that in de Gaulle’s France the most obvious repression was exercised over TV. “They (the opposition) have the Press,” said de Gaulle. “I have the RTF and I intend to keep it.”

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But the mere act of using TV as an instrument of Government policy, of denying it the right to act as a channel for protest and opposition, is, in my opinion, one of the major causes of France’s present turmoil.

In highly industrialised societies like France and Britain, viewers are sensitive enough to realise when the total picture of their life, as shown on TV, is a lying or evasive one.

When Mr. Edward Short, as Postmaster-General, a few months back, said: “We do not want TV to degenerate into the state in which the British Press finds itself to-day,” was he not saying something similar to de Gaulle’s dictum: “They have the Press. I have the RTF, and I intend to keep it.”

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No one suggests that Mr. Wilson’s Government is exercising a de Gaullist censorship over TV. Bid there are subtler and less obvious ways of making sure that TV does not function as vigorously or effectively as it should as a channel of protest and public participation.

The appointment of two politicians as heads of the BBC and ITV makes sure that Parliamentary sensitivities and sensibilities will always be recognised and appreciated in the highest quarters.

If minorities cannot acquire a reasonable access to the TV medium; if governments cannot encourage the use of TV as a safety-valve for dissipating and cooling the heated discontents of our time; then do not be surprised if frustrated Britons also take to the streets and the barricades.

The post A look at this business of a man’s right to speak on the box appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.