Page 103 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Britain: the BBC and the loss of the disciplined audience 91
All in all, BBC programming in the last few years before the Second World War
exhibited an unmistakable drift towards popularization. This development did not so
much represent the abandon of a commitment to reform the audience (although Reith,
who departed in 1938, was very embittered by the tendency), but can be seen as a first
recognition of the difficulty of realizing that goal as a result of an awareness about
‘resistances’ among actual audiences to take up the role of the disciplined audience that
was so well-intentionedly assigned to them. Letters from listeners and all sorts of
‘opinion polls’—early versions of ratings research—carried out by newspapers in the
1930s showed a clear ‘preference for entertainment’ among the people (Briggs 1965;
1985). Furthermore, there was evidence that large sections of the audience were attracted
to the transmissions of commercial radio stations based on the European continent, such
as Radio Normandie and Radio Luxembourg. In other words, the BBC needed to begin to
deal with competition. As a result, programming policy discourse became preoccupied
with a fundamental contradiction between the wish to edify the audience on the one hand,
and the need to attract the audience on the other.
The process of popularization was greatly accelerated by the war, when the BBC was
assigned the task of maintaining the morale of both the workforce at home and the troops
in France. Here, especially, the accumulation of empirical knowledge became a crucial
factor in the development of new patterns of programming. Thus, the BBC’s Listener
Research Department, set up in 1936, acquired unprecedented importance during the war
as it provided systematic information about the population in a period of great
uncertainty. And the troops in France were treated to the visit of a high BBC official,
A.P.Ryan, who was appointed to investigate their listening habits. In his influential report
he came to some extremely sobering conclusions:

It is idle to hope for serious listening, if that be defined as putting on
programmes which will only appeal to people that broadcasting may give
them something of the satisfaction as is to be got from, say, reading
Shakespeare or listening to Bach…. This obvious fact cannot be too
emphatically stated. The troops won’t mind if a proportion of good
serious stuff is included in their programme out of deference to policy
views as to what constitutes good balance. They won’t mind—and they
won’t listen. They will simply accept good serious stuff as one of the facts
of life, like blackouts, and absence of hot water and being away from
home. If they were ordered to listen they would do so with resignation,
and even perhaps with growing interest, but they will not be ordered to
listen, and so they will switch off or turn to Haw Haw or some other
obviously entertaining alternative.
(Ryan 1940, quoted in Cardiff and Scannell 1981:62; italics in original)

This piece of evidence led the BBC to grudgingly accept the need to increase the amount
of light entertainment. As a result the Forces Programme—which was set up as a service
for the troops but was soon to be widely listened to at home as well—became filled with
a flurry of cheerful music, variety, and popular talks programmes. In this, the BBC
recognized the success of the programming strategies of the commercial radio stations.
American formulae, styles and formats were gradually adopted, such as continuity,