Page 102 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 90
There was no way to answer this question in any systematic way, but it was a hauntingly
disquieting one and it stimulated calls among programme makers to search for empirical
knowledge about listening habits. Here then we have the origins of interest in audience
research within the BBC: it was led by a concern about the effectivity of its attempts to
fulfil its self-imposed cultural task. Thus, as early as 1930 Val Gielgud, then Head of the
Drama Department and active proponent for the setting up of some form of ‘listener
research’, stated in a memorandum:

I cannot help feeling more and more strongly that we are fundamentally
ignorant as to how our various programmes are received, and what is their
relative popularity. It must be a source of considerable disquiet to many
people besides myself that it is quite possible that a very great deal of our
money and time and effort may be expended on broadcasting into a void.
(Quoted in Briggs 1965:259)

He went on to complain that ‘nothing handicaps me more than the non-possession of
anything in the nature of a thermometer which would correspond in the theatre to the
acid-test of box office returns’ (quoted in Chaney 1986:269). Despite the commercially-
sounding overtones of this last remark, however, early debates within the BBC about the
uses of empirical surveys among the audience were not predicated upon the wish to
singlemindedly determine the size of the audience. Rather, what many felt was needed
was finding out more about ‘types and tastes among the various classes of society and in
the various parts of England’, as stated in a 1930 memorandum by Director of Talks
Charles Siepman (quoted in Briggs 1965:260). The interest, in short, was substantially
sociological rather than merely statistical. Furthermore, Siepman stated very clearly that
empirical information should not dictate programming policy: ‘However complete and
effective any survey we launch might be, I should still be convinced that our policy and
programme building should be based first and last upon our own conviction as to what
should and should not be broadcast’(ibid.).
Underlying these early concerns was an increasing awareness within the BBC that the
listening public was not an abstract entity, an ideal-typical national community
characterized by ‘unity in diversity’, as Reith’s philosophy assumed, but a fundamentally
stratified category, both socially and culturally, with sectional interests and differentiated
preferences and habits. In particular, the predominance of ‘serious listeners’ was
gradually being called into question and more and more attention was being paid to
attracting ‘the man in the street’. As a result, programming policy began to be based upon
the acceptance of a separation between the ‘serious’ and the ‘popular’, for instance in
style of presentation of talks programmes. ‘Serious’ talks were presented in a
dispassionate and ‘neutral’ manner, whereas in ‘popular’ talks programmes attempts were
made to represent the opinions and experiences of ‘ordinary people’ and to use lighter
styles of presentation such as the round-table discussion, interviews and the magazine
format. Undergirding this differentiation was the assumption that the audience could be
divided into the ‘intelligent and the well-informed’, the ‘intelligent and not so well-
informed’, and the ‘not-so-intelligent and mostly uninformed’. The second group, not the
third (which was considered too ‘vulgar’ to be reachable) was seen to be the most
important target for the popular talks programmes (Cardiff 1980).