Page 178 - Culture Society and the Media

168 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
American tastes and leisure patterns. Paralleled by a boom in the export of
British television programmes to the United States, the move was interpreted as a
triumph for ‘quality programming’: ‘What has happened is that U.S. TV
audiences have grown up. They will not take a steady diet of junk, and Britain
produces quality material’ (Mason, 1976, p. 40). The British imports receiving
most acclaim in the United States were the big, long-running glossies: ‘The
Forsyte Saga’, The Six Wives of Henry VIII’, ‘America’, ‘Elizabeth R’. Some
British imports inspired American imitations, such as ‘All in the Family’ (from
‘Till Death Us Do Part’ and also shown in Britain), ‘Sanford and Son’ (‘Steptoe
and Son’), and a costly failure ‘Beacon Hill’ (‘Upstairs, Downstairs’).
To what extent might this actually reflect the emergence of a deep-seated
audience need for a certain type of programming? (This would imply a
personalized, communicator image of the audience.) Or how much could it be
due to the expansion of big-business interests with capital to invest in long-term
promotion (implying an institutionalized, organizational need)? For one thing,
the selling of British programming was not an easy matter. Richard Price
Associates, a company formed to market abroad the programmes of several
commercial companies, took eighteen months and twelve major sales
presentations to sell ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ to the United States. For another, the
foreign film arm of Sir Lew Grade’s ATV, Independent Television Corporation
(ITC), was at that time developing one of the largest production schedules in
Europe, being involved not only in co-productions with Radiotelevision Italiana
(RAI), but also in a major export drive to the United States. ITC-RAI co-
productions of the late 1970s, such as ‘The Life and Times of William
Shakespeare’, and ‘The Life of Jesus’ starred some of Hollywood’s and Britain’s
biggest names.
In this context, it is difficult to see the purely ‘quality’ explanation as holding
water (moreover, the falling pound in the late 1970s meant that British
programmes were a cheap buy). An alternative explanation is that this is an
example of the external ‘survival’ needs of the organization being fed into the
communicators as intellectual attitudes, ideals and values which, although
organizational in origin, may be expressed, interpreted, or even experienced as
occupational or professional tenets.

THE LIMITS OF CONTROL
Consideration of the external and internal contexts of media organizations and
occupations, it has been argued, is fundamental to an understanding of the
sources, nature and directions of control in the media, particularly in relation to
the shaping of output. The complex of constraints which has been outlined, and
within which communication organizations and professionals operate, makes it
difficult to sustain a view of the media and media practitioners as autonomous
‘watch-dogs’. On the other hand, to the extent that the media can be observed to
negotiate the parameters of constraint—exercising, at least at times, a policy of