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.

Panic is clearly in the air. After only three months of operation the new look in commercial TV is being relentlessly driven back to the old look.

Harassed by newspaper reports, falling ratings, impatient advertising agencies, bewildered manufacturers, the independent companies have the frightened glazed look of a fox being surrounded by ravenous hounds.

Having assumed for so many years that they had the magic formula for popular appeal, that they alone could unerringly supply what the public wanted, they are now faced with the fact that Auntie BBC has acquired a mini-skirt and a come-on leer, and can dish out friviality, [sic] vulgarity and triviality as expertly as their show biz rivals.

Catastrophic situation

The statistics for October viewing make very depressing reading for executives on Channel 9. According to JICTAR, which has replaced TAM as the source of TV ratings, the BBC acquired 53% of the total audience last month against the ITV’s 47%.

The BBC’s own statistics, which have always marginally differed from those of TAM and JICTAR, claim that in October the BBC had 60% of the viewers against ITV’s 40%.

Accompanying this decline has been the words of woe tumbling out of the mouth of advertising agency executive – “A catastrophic situation,” said one. “The present state of things cannot continue beyond two or three months,” said another.

If these signs of discontent are designed to get the programme companies to change their schedules, put out different programmes, revise the quality of their product, then one must ask in which direction they want the companies to go and ought they to have the power to force the companies to comply.

Already it is quite clear that no one has interpreted the dissatisfaction of the advertisers as a call for better quality programmes, more serious drama, more committed or involved or responsible programmes

Such news as has been forthcoming about the company reactions to their falling ratings indicates that a return to worse, less demanding, more familiar and more orthodox entertainment programmes is now being planned for the New Year.

Classic examples

We are promised a return of variety along the lines of the Palladium Show. Back in the London area Thames TV will bring back Crossroads and Peyton Place – both classic examples of what TV can do worst.

Crossroads, the epitome of serial drivel and a perfect example of chewing-gum for the eyes, is coming back, we are told, partly because of heavy viewer demand.

The actual number of letters received by Thames TV when Crossroads went off the air inquiring or requesting its return were 480 in August, 75 in September and only 34 in October.

Whatever these figures show, they hardly indicate that some millions of viewers should be condemned to this kind of TV junk for months, and perhaps years, because of the demands of a few hundred viewers.

Judging by the decline in letters received, it seems even these viewers have now settled down to the loss of one of their favourite shows without any undue repercussions on their emotional well-being.

More comedy

Even London Weekend, which was one of the few companies making slight genuflections towards the goal of more mature viewing, has assured us that more new comedy shows are on the way to cheer up their audiences and, presumably, their advertisers.

But when we speak of Channel 9 returning to more popular shows, we have to ask ourselves what are they really returning from? Why only popular shows!

The truth is that hardly anything much has changed, in terms of peak-time viewing, over the whole ITV network since the new companies have taken over.

The basic reliance on serials like Coronation Street, variety shows like Opportunity Knocks, comedy shows like George and the Dragon and hours of old films has barely been questioned.

Can anyone have watched London Weekend’s fare on Saturday and Sunday and truly say they were in anyway affronted by anything remotely highbrow or unpopular or adult during its peak-time hours?

Yet, in spite of all that is being done to provide more and more popular programmes, the BBC still seems to be clobbering ITV mercilessly in every region but Lancashire.

In the London area the BBC shows that have reached the top spots — seven out of 10 — have nearly all done so against opposition that was once considered impregnably popular.

Marked change

What, then could possibly have happened? If the ITV is producing much the same diet before against the BBC’s very similar menu, why has the taste of the public shown such a marked change in a matter of a few weeks?

Could it possibly have something to do with the manner in which the taste of viewers is measured? Is there any likelihood that some of the mystery may reside in the way in which ratings are now acquired compared to what had taken place previously?

The fact is that when the new companies came on the air so did a fresh audience measurement system. TAM, the previous company gave way to AGB and JICTAR.

Although the methods of gathering the ratings are much the same – electronic meters attached to a sample of sets which record the programmes switched on – the actual people having the sets have been changed. In other words, there are now in the London area 350 different homes equipped with these special sets: 350 other homes had them when TAM was in business.

Although the method of selection of these homes, designed to represent a cross-section of the London audience is the same, could it be that with such a small sample changes of three or four per cent in the sample taste could account for the statistical switch of hundreds of thousands of viewers?

Accurate reflection

Could it be that the fresh group of viewers now being asked for their preferences is a more accurate reflection of the nation’s taste than the old sample that had been used by TAM?

Is it possible that commercial TV never had the long lead over BBC that they had claimed over the past number of years, and that nothing has really changed with the advent of the new companies but a different standard of measurement?

And on such uncertain statistical evidence is it right that the standard of TV programmes should be pushed even lower than they now are?

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