Page 173 - Culture Society and the Media

NEGOTIATION OF CONTROL IN THE MEDIA 163
questions concerning, for example, the nature of ‘creativity’, perceived needs and
goals of individual producers, distinctions between ‘art’ and ‘craft’, and so on.
The views of a producer from the original production team responsible for
Tonight’, one of the most successful of Britain’s early ‘formula’ shows, indicate
a different set of priorities from that imagined by Coser:

It was on ‘Tonight’ that I learned the creative logic of a production
team…. Although an idea can only originate in one person’s mind, it often
emerges in a halfformed state: it can be greatly improved if six or seven
people question it and add to it and elaborate it and refine it. In the same
way, after the programme was over, six or seven people were much better
than one at evaluating it, drawing conclusions, seeing new possibilities to
exploit or errors to be corrected…. It makes a production team the best
place for any novice to learn the craft…. It also offers him a variety of
different roles—writer, film director, researcher, studio director,
interviewer, producer—with a correspondingly better chance of finding a
suitable niche than he would have if apprenticed to a single producer. (Jay,
1972, pp. 24–5)

‘Formula’ styles do not necessarily mean standardized trivia, any more than they
apparently mean standardized roles: while the range of styles may be dictated by
the organization and technology of the medium, the quality of the finished
product may have more to do with the ability of those performing the major
creative functions and with the general socioeconomic and socio-cultural milieus.
Nevertheless, the power of general economic and commercial factors in
determining the creative freedom of individuals in the production process should
not be underestimated. In times of financial stringency, particularly,
experimentation and originality tend to be subordinated to predominantly market
considerations.

Whereas, in the early sixties, a schedule of ten to twelve weeks was
considered acceptable for a half-hour documentary, nowadays a standard
series (such as ‘Horizon’) will think itself lucky to get more than five
weeks for an hour. But, as a fellow-editor remarked to me recently: ‘In
those days we were developing the conventions. Now we merely apply
them’. It is the technician’s pride in his workmanship which leads him to
tolerate and hence to perpetuate, this condition…. He will show that he can
do a good job regardless of the difficulties (for if he does not, someone else
will)…. Haste necessitates the adoption of rules-of-thumb for calculating
the viewer’s response, and this in turn requires the adoption of methods to
which such calculation is appropriate…. It is really not good enough for
me to say that we employ the commercial and authoritarian models of
communication only as a shorthand, since shorthand is all we have time
for. What has happened is that we have adopted towards our own work a