It's not all Brideshead Revisted - British television broadcasting

National Review, Oct 13, 1989 by Anthony Lejeune

It's Not All Brideshead Revisited

LONDON--To see a good argument muffed is always frustrating. In a highly publicized lecture, Rupert Murdoch, who a few months ago launched Britain's first satellite television service, argued that it was a snobbish fallacy to regard British television as being, in general, superior to American television. He's right: but he was distractingly wrong in thinking that the trouble with British television is epitomized by "upmarket costume soap operas, played out in a rigid class-conscious setting." If Upstairs, Downstairs were typical of British television, there would be no cause for complaint.

Anyway, lightnings of disapproval immediately rained on Mr. Murdoch's head, the latest barrage in a great howl of rage and fear which has gone up from Britain's cultural establishment ever since Mrs. Thatcher's government revealed its plan to liberate, more or less, the television airwaves.

Such intense fury becomes explicable only when one looks more closely at the origins of this clamor. It comes from people who don't really like television, from politicians who don't watch television, from professional busybodies, who always think they know what's best for other people, and from the present makers and controllers of British television, threatened with the loss of their fifty-year-old monopoly.

One regional station took a full page in the national press for what must surely rank among the most counter productive advertisements ever devised. It showed an extremely pretty girl in a state of undress. The accompanying text claimed that she was an Italian housewife doing a striptease on Rome's deregulated television, and asked British viewers if they really wanted that sort of thing on their screens. Before the cries of "Yes! Yes!" had died down, investigative journalists revealed that the girl was not an Italian housewife at all but an English photographic model, and that the station was itself planning a late-night sex show dressed up as sociology.

FROM THE BEGINNING, every move to increase Britain's meager ration of television has been opposed. When the BBC launched the world's first television service in 1936, the innovation was widely deprecated, not least by the BBC's own management, as a frivolous whim. When, long after the war, transmission hours were gradually increased, abolishing the so-called "toddlers' truce" in early evening (when mothers were loftily presumed to be reading to their children or tucking them into bed), fresh lamentations arose. Any programs shown after about 10:30 at night were, and still are, dismissed as being "for insomniacs." A second BBC channel was eventually launched on the specific understanding that it would be more "serious" and "cultural."

The biggest row was provoked in the early 1950s by a campaign for the introduction of a commercial channel, financed by advertising. Lord Reith, the former Director General of the BBC, thundered in the House of Lords: "Somebody introduced small-pox, bubonic plague, and the Black Death into Britain. Somebody is minded now to introduce sponsored broadcasting." The campaign, however, was very skillfully organized; and so commercial television was born, under the censorious eye of an Independent Broadcasting Authority, charged with keeping the anticipated flood of immorality in check. Channel 3 immediately proved so popular that no subsequent government dared touch it.

MANY MORE YEARS passed before a second commercial channel, Channel 4, was allowed, and even then only on condition that it should concentrate on specialist and minority interests; a brief gladly taken by its left-inclined management to mean that it should include programs appealing to homosexual, feminist, and immigrant groups. And that's the lot, still.

Rapid technical advance would soon have forced a change even had Mrs. Thatcher's government not acted; preventing satellite transmissions from abroad would be virtually impossible. The government's main proposals are that there should be a fifth, and if possible a sixth, "terrestrial" channel, two new multi-program satellite channels, and numerous local services through cable and microwave, and that the money should come from advertising or subscription. There will be a Broadcasting Standards Council to "protect" the viewer (poor trembling viewer) from indecent and violent programs.

Americans may wonder what all the fuss is about: but fuss there surely has been. The Chairman of the Independent Broadcasting Authority said the government had "gone overboard"; the proposals might result in "a period of near-anarchy" and could drive the BBC "into a sort of cultural ghetto." Some IBA officials said they wanted to "go into a corner and sob." The arts lobby waxed quite hysterical. "The best we can hope for," wrote the playwright and novelist John Mortimer, "are re-runs of American serials, old movies, mindless game shows, and a little news done on the cheap." He maintained that, although the British public wanted "good drama and intelligent and well-filmed news programs," they would be fobbed off with "second-hand, second-rate rubbish."