The first gathering of an elite to be held in Britain in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 was the Royal Television Society conference, held in Cambridge from 13-15 September. The event is TV’s most important gathering. Unlike the Edinburgh TV festival, which is a “fun thing” for the blithe (and in general younger) spirits who make the content, this is serious and aims at the older, more male, TV people who make (or at the moment lose) the money.
Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation was supposed to be there, but didn’t show because he felt, being American, that he shouldn’t get mired in the controversy his speeches usually generate at a time when a display of mourning was called for.
The rest, being British, decided to get on with it. They were appropriately solemn at the opening. Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, took the opportunity to remind the audience of the “extraordinary powers and responsibilities which lie in the hands of the media”. Will Wyatt, the former chief executive of BBC Broadcast and the society’s president, talked of television being the one force that could unite the nation.
Peter Bazalgette of Endemol UK – the makers of Big Brother – who gave the keynote Huw Wheldon Lecture, was the most explicit on this theme. “[Television] unifies us more than it divides us,” he said. “[It] must be a broad church.”
But the industry people went on to show that they are unable to unify any longer, in two ways: first, by their response to a particular programme; and second, by their general desire to shape the media for disunity.
On the Friday morning, the BBC public relations people circulated an embarrassed little statement on the previous night’s Question Time. The programme had prompted hundreds of angry telephone calls because of the “anti-American” feeling expressed on it. “We, too, were surprised by the strength of feeling,” said the note chirpily – but reasonably, given that here was a show with audience participation, and the way people participate sometimes, one would hope, surprises even jaded palates.
To view the programme later was to be surprised at the surprise. A number of people said that America should grasp how much it is resented, disliked and hated in large parts of the world. More insisted that the response to the US atrocities had to be commensurate and, if possible, within a legal framework. At one point, Philip Lader, the just-retired US ambassador, said he found the comment that America was hated “hurtful”.
Still, the note said it was “an appropriate programme to make”. That was not allowed to stand. On Saturday, Greg Dyke, the BBC director general, said he thought that “on balance . . . it was an inappropriate programme to broadcast live . . . there were times when the tone was not appropriate”.
It was a betrayal of office. It was the statement of one who thinks of broadcasting as a matter of orchestrating a performance, from which false or “inappropriate” notes should be excluded. It contradicted the celebratory tone of the previous evening: for if television in general, and the BBC in particular, is to “unify” a democratic people, it does so by providing a medium for their diverse views. If it seeks to evince from them an appropriate response, it divides them in the name of political correctness.
TV at present celebrates its irreverence, its diversity, its youth, its femininity, its multi-ethnicity. Dyke makes known his displeasure at the whiteness of his organisation. But push comes to shove – and then he becomes a white man who knows that the voice of the people must be controlled.
The real business of the conference was, in fact, disunity. Once he had paid tribute to the hideous, Bazalgette’s theme was how a new TV generation was surfing the World Wide Web and the global choice of “anarchic, multifaceted and broadly ungovernable” media; and how regulation was ceasing to be something the state could apply, but was devolving to the individual.
The TV industry’s leaders are facing, and for the most part seeking, the end of regulation; the weakening of the great terrestrial broadcasters; the advent of multichannel “anarchy”. Everything on TV will be a bit more extreme (as long as it’s not serious!) – as with the “reality” shows – and, above all, everything will be niched. Niches are turning the voice and window of the nation into a shattered glass, with hundreds of images on each shard. Sports niches, nature niches, history niches, sex niches, arts niches: some of the stuff in these niches will be classy, but, above all, it will be not Our TV but My TV.
We have not much of a Voice of the Nation, and will have none quite soon – unless it is on a niche channel called Britannia (or Jerusalem?). When, in fantasy, the BBC leadership tries to act like one, in an appropriate way, it betrays the frivolity of the modern medium, which no longer even knows the central, modest task we pay it to perform – to be a channel for a diverse demos.
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