BBC and ITV after Three Years

Richard Hoggart
AFTER only three years, commercial television in Britain is enjoying enormous success. The initial doubts about the venture, whether those of its opponents or the different doubts of its supporters, have melted like morning mists. Financially, it has proved more successful than its most optimistic operators could have hoped: it can, in general, claim larger audiences than the BBC wherever the two channels can be obtained1 ; even more interesting, its prestige is now high with some of those very organs of intellectual opinion which were its strongest early critics. The Observer has handsomely made amends for its former suspicions in a birthday salute, and The Manchester Guardian is following a similar course. All this enthusiasm seems to me, first, excessive if one consistently watches commercial television programmes ; second, wrongly conceived in that it is a reaction from what must have been a mistaken view of the way comUniversities & Left Review 5 Autumn 1958

Mass Communications
mercial television would influence British life ; and third, dangerous in that it will help to create a climate in which, being kindly accepted, commercial broadcasting can develop its inherent qualities more freely. This is a time for stocktaking, and the stocktaking should be thorough, for after this the major trends will be established. I do not think a Labour government will be able to unscramble commercial television ; but controlling it properly will be much harder if the present congratulations-without-examination continue. More specifically, a third television channel seems likely to be made available soon and the commercial companies want to be sure that they, not the BBC, run it. The Daily Mirror's tendentious pamphlet The Future of Television, which brashly propounds all the ad hominem arguments in favour of commercial control for this third channel, is presumably only one public instance of pressures which are being

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applied increasingly in a great many areas (as they were when the introduction of commercial television was being discussed). Last, the BBC'S charter comes up for renewal in 1962, and we may assume that the public success of commercial television will then reinforce a demand for commercial sound broadcasting. Why has commercial television been so much more generously received than the BBC? A man and his wife who sometimes sit-in for us represent a general underlying attitude. They do not have television and like to watch when here ; they always watch commercial television. One day, the set being on the BBC channel, they left it there, and when we came back said, with a rising surprised inflection: ' We've been watching BBC all night and it was very good.' Over the years the BBC has built up a strong persona in the public mind, and this persona is now trammelling them.2 Great numbers of people simply assume that the BBC is ' Them.'

Commercial Television
By contrast, commercial television is or seems to be more nearly ' Us.' Commercial television, then, began with a considerable free credit of goodwill and this, not the superior quality of their programmes (whether ' light' or ' serious'), is the prime foundation of their success a foundation of which they have made good use. They are preferred partly because their motives are so clear ; they do not seem like the powers-that-be, or like those who are ' out to do you good.' Most people will prefer the unabashed barker to the man who sells them good tea in plain packets. There is a story about a foreman who refused to attend a course of ' Human relations for Supervisory Staffs ': ' The men know I'm a bastard,' he said. ' I don't want them to think I'm a hypocrite as well.' The same argument partly applies to some intellectual organs. Fleet Street naturally tends to be suspicious of the ' official line' and ready to give a lot of rope to a maverick. To some extent this is true of the more serious papers as of the populars. And there is little doubt that over the years many good journalists have had cause to chafe at the velvet smothering hand of BBC policy; there are plenty of stories about how this interview was removed or this man quietly dropped. So, again, there was a fairly strong subterranean readiness to cast commercial television as the channel for the outspoken, the unofficial and unstuffy.3 But the chief reason for the change of front among intellectual organs lies deeper, and indicates a typical misunderstanding of the process by which commercial massmedia may affect a society. The approval now given to commercial television has a relieved quality, as though the writers are surprised because the programmes are not as terrible as they had expected and are even at times ' educational.' But what did they expect? a sort of televised Radio Luxembourg? The style and material of American television at its most blatant, all the time? This is mistaken, not only because the safeguards painfully put into the Independent Television Act were designed to prevent such a phenomenon, but because it misunderstands the nature and tendencies of commercial massmedia. These media have two crucial qualities. First, they start from the given tone and texture of their own society. Our commercial television operators are unlikely to commit the folly of importing American styles wholesale, though they will go as far as they can in this direction. And this is not primarily because American styles are so

much worse than our own (it would be more difficult than we usually assume to prove that they are), but simply because they are not British. So it was only to be expected that commercial television would roughly mirror much of the varied nature of British life. That is where it must begin. But, second, commercial mass media, by the largely unarticulated force of their nature, establish a process whereby both the strengths and the weaknesses of a society's common attitudes are gradually altered so as to encourage the adoption of a pattern of attitudes more directly conducive to these organisations' purposes. Seen from this point of view, commercial television's achievement comes into a different perspective. As to what I have called its given foundation, one may admit easily that it takes care of some fairly varied interests, both ' serious ' and ' light,' and takes a rather self-conscious care of educational, political and religious aspects. We can gather as much simply from commercial television's prestige-advertisements in the quality press.4 The picture already begins to look different, though, if we simply consider the distribution of the different material between peak-hours and off peak-hours (and the distribution of advertisements between those hours). But really to see the developing tendencies we need a closer knowledge, based on actual viewing over a period. We must try to assess, much more than we have done so far, the whole tone and trend of the material, whatever its official designation; for this is quite intractable to justification-bystatistics.5

The 'Serious' Programmes

We find, then, that most6 of the apparently ' serious' programmes are so nervously conscious of audience-ratings that they have become gimmicks, with their distracted and distracting entertainment value submerging any real approach to sustained thought (e.g. Under Fire ; The Sunday Break) : or that some programmes roughly claiming to be educational or documentary are only advanced forms of the current vogue for realism-with-melodrama (e.g. most medical programmes or those series ' straight from the files of . . .'). So we move along to typical peakperiod programmes, the quizzes and games. A great deal has been said about these, usually in the intellectual's habitual tone of amused dismissal. But the fact is that these things are really not funny ; they should leave us feeling very grim indeed. One sign of our lack of proportion in this whole discussion is that parents and other interested bodies worry a great deal about violence on television7 and its effect on children, whereas they should be worrying even more about the dangers of exposure to the appalling phoniness of these occasions. I do not mean this flippantly. I am concerned about violence, too ; but I should be less worried about the effect of most television violence on my own children than about the possible pointers to human relations they would obtain from a typical commercial television quiz-master. So it is not very relevant for Sir Robert Fraser to claim, either that commercial television already does a great deal of ' serious ' work or that it does as much of such work as ' the public ' will stand at this stage in this democracy's development. (I would in any case argue that the assumption contained here about' the public ' is a thin one.) What exactly is included in ' serious' work, we have to ask, and what is the trend there and, more, elsewhere in commercial television programmes? And is this trend likely to help the emergence of the more responsible democracy on which Sir Robert attends ? For the commercial

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providers are constantly testing the strength of the bars, getting up to the margins of their laid-down requirements, seeking new formulations to get past them at this or this point; in short, extending their work in the direction their situation drives them to extend it, whether in the giveaways, the new season's quizzes, the family serials, the magazines of ' real life,' the melodramatic documentaries or the medical serials. One final example: the advertisements alone would probably yield the most direct information on this question the fever of alternation between crude ' spots,' ' hard ' and ' soft' sells, jingles, insistent echo-chamber repetitions, halting infant's voices (a particularly nasty form) ; or the hectic experimentation with the ' neutral' Advertising Magazines (in which the suggestion is that friendly folk are recommending products they have found useful). Many of these are feeble if unpleasant things now because the programme companies have one hand tied behind their backs by the Act. But the hand is likely to work progressively looser. This whole process, difficult to appreciate but the really significant one, will continue the more easily because of the public euphoria created by the recent birthday celebrations. The final small irony in the relative popularity of the BBC and commercial television is that so much of the success of the latter is based on BBC virtues. Take their news and political coverage, for example. In its essentials ITN continues the tradition very well established by the BBC (the BBC's virtues here have been generally conceded, even by those who otherwise do not favour the Corporation) accuracy, objectivity, well-nourished background, and so on. After all, ITN is administratively independent of the programme companies and has been in part staffed by people trained in the BBC. But the main reason for ITN's greater public success rests on the fact that it has made one simple but pervasive tonal change from the BBC. I am ignoring aspects of ITN's treatment which are less favourable its greater emphasis on the rather trivially personal, and its tendency to confuse directness with a brash palliness. If we assume, though, that ITN's approach is on the whole better than that of BBC News, then this is chiefly a matter of tone. ITN's directors have been sensible enough to see that they must avoid the stuffy and plushy and aim at the direct and demotic. It is really only a different packet, but here the packet matters a great deal.

watched from all sides, rather as the Lord's Day Observance Society watches the occupations of Royalty, for any deviations from a pure and representative public norm. And from a not altogether disinterested section of the Press it attracts the same sort of habitually hostile attention as the British Council. Meanwhile commercial television breathes hard at its side, and its purposes are rather more single-minded. The BBC is a two-horsed equipage and the horses tend to pull away from each other: the socially well-intentioned world from the entertainment industry ; the Civil Service upper-ranks from the artists producing on-the-floor. The BBC has shown already that it wishes to some extent to meet the challenge of commercial television directly, that it realises its own dual situation could well cause it to be driven into a corner from which there would be no escape, only a slow decline followed by a sudden death as Parliament ratified the growing public feeling that this body was not worth the license money. On the other hand, 1 do not get the impression that the BBC seeks merely to follow where commercial television leads. I believe the public-service nature of its charter the requirement to provide a ' balanced ' service and so on is taken much more than formally by the Corporation. The planners do not yet see very clearly how to fulfil this representative function, but they wish to do so. There were two extreme ways in which the BBC could have reacted to the appearance of commercial television. Both were recommended to it; and fortunately the Corporation has adopted neither. One was to seek all-out competition with its rival. It is true that some recent BBC moves may make one wonder whether this is precisely what they are trying to do. They have bought some people and some programmes, presum-

B.B.C. Television
What of the BBC? It seems plain, from the outside,8 that the BBC is shaken and muddled, that it understandably finds great difficulty in assessing its own position and prospects. Programme changes indicate as much, and one gains the same impression with remarkable unanimity from listening to Corporation workers at various levels. But the BBC's situation is difficult. It is often thought of, with some justice, as the entrenched Establishment; yet in some respects, as we have seen, the BBC operates under much less favourable initial circumstances than commercial television. Both organisations have their advisory bodies, but the tightness of the BBC's charter and the nature of the public expectations it has traditionally attracted as in some sense the ' voice of Britain ' put it under special pressure. I can say from experience that it takes its advisory bodies very seriously. But the views of members of these bodies naturally tend to be more idealistic than practicable, not to be greatly touched by considerations of today's strongly competitive situation. Again, the BBC is readily attacked for being ' stodgy ' ; it is also constantly 34

ably at exceptionally high cost, to counter commercial television ; and no doubt they have had to swallow hard and make a number of separate contracts at special rates to retain staff. Sometimes they have imitated commercial television's congenital brightness (e.g. the latest discussion programme THE LION'S DEN !)9 ; in some ways they have usefully relaxed their manner. But a survey of the nature and the balance of BBC programmes, especially at peak television hours, makes it clear that they are not aiming to follow commercial television all the way. Partly, no doubt, because they could not do so. In the end, and sooner rather than later as we now know, commercial television will be able to outbid them financially in almost all areas. The BBC will only be able to make play with marginal victories, bought by taking money from another part of their fixed budget. But I hope the BBC have decided that, even if they had the money, this would not be their purpose ; that it would interfere with their best functions. Second, it was argued that on the arrival of commercial television the BBC should withdraw behind its ' serious ' defences and seek only to represent' the best that has been thought and said . . .' This is in many ways a sympathetic argument; but I think it is a mistaken one. Mistaken not because it might mean the eventual death of the BBC as because the BBC would again, though this may seem at first glance paradoxical, be removing itself from the really worthwhile challenge presented to it in this situation. For the sort of minority work which is usually implied when this second argument is advanced would not represent a balanced or varied or wide picture of the best in British life, both now and potentially ; it would be a form of established middle-class literary, artistic and intellectual ' culture.' The BBC should quite properly concern itself with many things which the proponents of this case tend to ignore or to assume are fit only to be left to commercial television sport, comedy, variety, popular music. These are all part of British life and not simply to be written off as lowbrow. If these things are represented well then they can be integrated with matters we more readily recognise as ' cultured.'

As for the BBC, I do not know how far the sheer pressure of competition, rather than a genuine reassessment, has led them to make the useful changes I have mentioned. One gains the impression, rather, that they are ' playing it by ear.' Or if the higher echelons do appreciate the positive aspects of the challenge now before them, they do not seem to have communicated it to the rest of the fifteen thousand below them. One commonly hears BBC workers on the floor (producers, writers, editors) speak about the higher officials in a way which recalls the Other Ranks of the Armed Forces discussing the upper ranks. And there is often a wide difference in background. The upper echelons, we hear, are the Corporation's ' career administrators ' what can they know of the imaginative side of script-writing and production, or of the high-pressure competition in sports or variety programmes? ' Good Morning. Good Morning. The General said,' is the tone one. hears echoed. Or one is told that the ' Oxford/Cambridge axis' is too powerful. With all this one hears that, to avoid Establishment repercussions, the BBC will not take enough chances ; that ' when in doubt, cut it out' is the axiom. This is especially a pity since the BBC has its share of men with a strong sense of what good things the Corporation might do and they find themselves too often thrown back. Somebody up there doesn't like it.

The Strengths of British Life

Something of the same kind of feeling comes across to the listener and viewer. At its best and I do not, of course, mean only in its ' highbrow' programmes the BBC puts out some excellent programmes. Whatever their weaknesses I do not think there can be any question but that, overall, BBC programmes are better than those of commercial television. But the main weakness remains: that they do not have a sufficiently wide sense, or one sufficiently sensitive outside recognised intellectual or ' cultured ' areas, of the strengths of British life. One is repeatedly struck by their lack of closeness to the 'thisness' of people's lives, the communications missed through a narrowness of tone. And so, when they seek to amend, they often move towards precisely the sort of stereotypes which afflict commercial television or the popular press, the stereotypes of the commercial entertainment world. Or they unbend from being rather loftily middle-brow so far as to become uneasily lower-middle-brow, as in so many of the general knowledge and brains-trust types of programme. ' Opinionation ' can be a moving approach to knowledge; or it can remain a thinner state than that which it preceded. The BBC's case for THE BRAINS TRUST usually includes the argument that, though nothing is deeply gone into, it is surely civilising for great numbers of people to observe that it is possible to discuss amicably, not to become excited or abusive. One sees the point; reasonable argument is a good thing (though one is just as likely on THE BRAINS TRUST to see a form of cultured verbal ball-play or of polished acrimony). Yet some of the assumptions behind this justification are worrying. They seem to imply that those outside, the mass of others, are slightly barbaric because they become excited when they argue, or because they are not provided with the emollient or lubricating phrases which feature notably in certain. British social groups. There seems to be an unspoken assumption that the particular forms of the British cultured middle-class are a norm (but do intellectuals in, say, France or Russia conduct their discussions in just this way?), and that the larger part of the ' civilising' of British society lies in the spreading of these forms throughout it.10

Middle Class Standards

The appearance of commercial television made it plain that the BBC had been living a sheltered and presumptive life. Its charter incorporated many admirable intentions ; it was run largely by middle-class people ; it had no competitors and no commercial pressures. It produced some magnificent results. But it had a narrow view of the best that is thought, said and done in British life. The ' Reith Sunday' is only the best known public instance of this character. It avoided gross palliness but tended towards cultural patronage. It tended to assume too much, and so did not think enough about how to speak to people not of the ' informed' class. At the same time, it often assumed too little and so under-estimated what such people would appreciate, if it were properly presented to them. Just here is the clue to the BBC's opportunity now. Much may be given to commercial television, but in its nature it cannot represent fully the variety and complexity of interests in this society. There are some intelligent and serious people in commercial television, but their work is likely to remain limited; they can reflect much of our existing virtues ; they cannot take much risk in moving ahead along the line of potential developments.

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Whatever the difficulties, the BBC has, at this moment in British life, an exceptional opportunity as a chartered non-commercial and (if it wills) non-Establishment body. It has to lay its old ghosts, slough off its old persona, seek to present a spectrum of the best in all areas of British life, to reach the common heart without being commonplace or without implying an anti-intellectualism. More, it has the opportunity to reach out and reinforce the most promising changes in British life. We are moving physically and in class ; we seem even to be moving emotionally ; education is setting up new patterns in life and so are the increasing changes in industry. Many of these changes could push us towards the managerially paternal or the friendly materialistic. Towards the creation of these attitudes commercial television has a natural contribution to make. But the BBC could be a sensitive index to the best of these changes, to the way old strengths may be adapted to them and new strengths developed. Even if it does this the BBC may have to be prepared for the commercial channels to have larger viewing figures much of the time, at least for as long as we can now foresee. But it will have stuck to its own central good purpose, it will be working along the line of growth and, since we are a much more intelligently varied people than commercial television dare consistently assume, the BBC will not be in a fuddy-duddy's corner ; it will command solid support from many of us much of the time. Its tones will not be middle-class nor working-class ; they will resist definitions of this kind. They will represent the better tones of the newly-emerging Britain. Meanwhile, the two questions I mentioned at the beginning attend: who is to have the third television channel, and will commercial sound-radio be successfully advocated by 1962? We can assume that, in the tiny but powerful back-bench-and-big-business area which did so much first to introduce commercial television, the answers to these questions are clear, and action already being taken. I hope that, whatever the changes of face by some informed people, no socialist is in any real doubt about the beginnings of his answers: that commercial sound broadcasting should not be introduced and that the third channel should not go to the commercial companies. Properly read, the record of commercial television points directly to these conclusions. But whether the BBC can rise to its opportunity I do not know.

Notes
It is true that the first months of 1958 showed a slight movement back to BBC TV among viewers. But this does not significantly alter the argument which follows and could, in fact, be inferred from within it. 2 Even today the tone of the BBC's treatment of great public events, its pomposity and prefectorial patriotism, often reinforce this feeling. 3 And the fact that BBC fees, in comparison with those on commercial television, look inadequateand that their expense allowances have a typical Civil Service irrelevance to the actual cost of subsidence todayhelps to increase the irritation. 4 e.g. the recent full-page spreads about commercial television's cultural, educational and religious achievements. I believe off-prints of this were also sent to selected individuals, such as clergymen. 5 We need some individual essays examining typical television programmes (types of serial, recurrent forms and their modifications) using very much the methods of detailed literary criticism, especially that kind of literary criticism which takes into account social resonances (tone, public weight of language, popular myths or archetypes.) We need also much more examination of the problems of good communication before a huge and undifferentiated audience, in so direct and intimate a medium (unconscious pressures, limitations on language, available degrees of emotional directness and subtlety in short, the difficulties of a properly imaginative use of the medium as distinct from its proven effectiveness in communicating either imaginative stereotypes or simple and literal teaching). 6 But not all: e.g. Dr. Bronowski's NEW HORIZON series. 7 And ITV, true to form, produces a report Parents, Children and Television, which shows that they take the problem seriously. It is on the whole a very reassuring document ' but based on questions which are irritatingly irrelevant to the real problems behind the situation it concerns. 8 I am a member of the BBC's North Regional Advisory Council, but would like to make it plain that the information I use in this essay has been gleaned outside that body. 9 And they bought the MISS WORLD programme, which proved to be tasteless ballyhoo of a kind viewers scoffed at. It is just this sort of misjudgment of its audience which the BBC should not make. 10 The same sort of assumptions are often found in academic circles. Recently I heard a provincial professor complaining warmly about the ' uncouthness ' of working-class scholarship boys. They didn't know, and often seemed indisposed to learn, how to offer sherry to a visiting speaker. But they, and their mothers, would know how to make a visitor ' feel at home' if he called on them in their known environment, and their forms would not be uncouth. Perhaps learning the drill with sherry is a necessary part of a social lingua franca for people moving between classes. But I suspect that the refusal, by some, to adopt this drill was an unconscious rejection of the assumption that it was ' civilised ' and their native forms ' uncivilised '.
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