Page 104 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 92
regularity and slickness of presentation, as well as audience participation devices such as
musical request programmes, quizzes and amateur performances. This process of
‘Americanization’ was intensified by the arrival of US troops in Britain. The BBC tried
to cater for them by including more American material, such as baseball commentaries
and American popular music (Cardiff and Scannell 1981). By the end of the war then the
BBC found itself heavily involved in emulating the very style of programming which was
so detested before the war. As Cardiff and Scannell (ibid.: 76) conclude, ‘in a very
general sense the war showed the BBC that serving the public could no longer mean
leading and guiding the audience but must involve a more pragmatic effort to cater for its
differing needs and requirements’.
This process was fundamentally mediated through the availability of empirical
information supplied by the Listener Research Department. After the war, the importance
and legitimacy of in-house empirical research into the audience was no longer contested,
and the Audience Reseach Department rapidly grew in size and centrality. It was during
the war that Robert Silvey, the first head of the department, initiated the setting up of the
Continuous Survey of Listening, aimed at measuring the number of listeners for each
programme, and it was this research machinery which later became the BBC’s ratings
service for both radio and television (Silvey 1974). As a matter of fact, from the very
beginning the BBC’s television planners were more readily prepared to use research in
their search for policy criteria then their radio colleagues, such as an investigation into
the usefulness of programme scheduling and sequencing for viewers (Chaney 1986).
However, these developments should not be interpreted as a wholesale capitulation to
the principles of commercialism, nor as a complete waning of normative discourse within
the BBC. If Reith’s philosophy was put under severe pressure after the war, it certainly
did not completely lose its hold on the BBC’s way of knowing how it should relate to the
audience. According to Scannell and Cardiff (1982:187) after the war ‘the BBC no longer
sought to lead and reform public taste; it now tried to match or to anticipate it’. But this
could misleadingly suggest that the BBC had unreservedly succumbed to the commercial
dictum of ‘giving the audience what it wants’. This was not the case, either at the level of
policy discourse or at the level of programming practice. The set of values and attitudes
established during the Reithean era remained influential as a figure of conscience, as a
general reminder of the normative role the BBC had to play as a public service
institution. In other words, these values and attitudes remained a constitutive element in
the BBC’s sense of corporate identity, if only as a faint echo of a glorious past or, to put
it more positively, as a key marker of the corporation’s unique tradition, of what Burns
(1977:43) has called the ‘platonic idea of the BBC’.
Still, enormous changes were brought about during the postwar period. The
popularization of wartime radio programming implied a recognition that the British
public could no longer be addressed as a unified and homogeneous whole, but, in the
words of William Haley, Reith’s successor after the war, as ‘a cultural pyramid slowly
aspiring upwards’ (quoted in Kumar 1977:246). This recognition was formalized with the
introduction of a tripartite service system of sound broadcasting: the Light, Home, and
Third Programmes. According to Haley, the pre-war single service system ‘plunged [the
listener] straight from popular to unpopular material, from highbrow to lowbrow and vice
versa’, which resulted in the BBC’s reputation for being didactic, ‘something of a
governess’. On the other hand, the new system would ‘lead the listener on to more