It may have happened fifteen years later than it needed to, but at the annual MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, BBC Director General Mark Thompson – and, presumably, his colleagues in the corporation have finally woken up to the real threat that the corporation faces: the downward pressure that is being placed upon the producers of TV content.
Click for pic credit
That BSkyB have been allowed a free pass to make a fortune without giving anything back apart from cash for their allocation of spectrum (like so many other corporations, they’ve been allowed to get away with being socially useless) – and in doing so, they’ve created in impossible ecology for content-producing broadcasters to compete in. It’s a race to the bottom. Understand this and you’re halfway there to understanding how Sky’s marketing budget is bigger than ITV’s production funds.
Thompson is onto a winning argument here: The argument that we need to continue to produce locally-oriented content in the UK – and that there’s an overwhelming democratic case for doing so.
It’s been an issue that was addressed at EU level in the mid-1990s, and British regulators and media commentators appeared to spend the intervening decade-and-a-half either pretending that the regulations didn’t exist or that they weren’t needed (with honourable exceptions such as the former MEP Carole Tongue)*.
The concern here is, primarily, a democratic one. In his ‘Undeclared War’, David Puttnam quoted Francois Mitterrand expressing this argument succinctly:
“What is at stake is the cultural identity of all our nations…. it is the freedom to create and choose our own images. A society which abandons the means of depicting itself would soon be an enslaved society.”
At the time, multi-channel TV was an unknown quantity, there were legitimate worries that new broadcasters (a euphemism, usually, for BSkyB) were claiming that regulation would be impossible in a multi-channel broadcasting environment – and that, consequently, it should no longer be attempted. Sky particularly had in mind the rules that say that 51% of broadcast content should originate within the EU**.
Words like ‘dumping’ were wheeled out all the time. And, of course, this debate provided the perfect cockpit in which to rehearse the opposition between Froggy cultural fragility and their apparent nemesis, our crass Anglo-Saxon values. Not only did it encompass cultural interventionism (something that the French have never pretended to undervalue) – it also touched on the deregulatory agenda.
It was certainly hard to make the case for regulation in British circles at the time. Yet, though this debate was often portrayed in this way (with the UK, as ever, held up as a Yankee Trojan horse), there was a minor problem with this:
The UK is, in fact, not only the most heavily regulated broadcasting market in the world, but it also shows signs of benefiting enormously from this state of affairs.
In terms of home-grown content on TV, we produce more for our own marketplace than anywhere else in the world apart from the US. At the same time, we don’t have the clumsy regulations that used to apply to French radio and that still apply to French Cinema (I say clumsy, but their cinema regulations seem to have the desired effect). In short, we have out-froggied the Frogs without even having to make ourselves look like them.
As long as viewers in the UK can have a wide choice of new original content (particularly drama) from a diverse range of sources, we can be reasonably confident that our own stories are getting an airing. But I’m not sure how far either the ‘public service broadcasting’ intervention that we have in the UK or the other EU models can be applied in the future.
** Footnote: I should declare an interest here – I was once Carole’s researcher – this is a subject that I know inside out – and it’s a huge relief to find the chattering classes finally waking up to it. Carole assembed a huge weight of evidence in support of this argument – evidence that was largely ignored at the time.
**This is a crude rendition of the rules, but I think you get the picture.
