Page 105 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Britain: the BBC and the loss of the disciplined audience 93
serious things’ by ‘curiosity, liking and growth of understanding’. He or she would be
encouraged to switch from one programme to another and gradually ‘move up the
cultural scale’ (in Briggs 1985:244). There is no doubt then that the paternal, educational
attitude was still alive and well in these years: the audience was still considered to be a
disciplined audience, at least in potential. Haley firmly believed that, ‘while satisfying the
legitimate demand for recreation and entertainment, the BBC must never lose sight of its
cultural mission’ (ibid.: 245).
It must come as no surprise, however, that the Light Programme soon proved to attract
the vast majority of the listeners, most of them of working class background (as the
Audience Research Department found), while the audience for the Third Programme, the
service for high culture, did not widen, thereby disaffirming Haley’s idealist philosophy.
The limitations of the paternalistic, normative model of public service broadcasting
became ever starker, although still cherished.
But the most important changes were triggered by the emergence of television. BBC
Television was initiated as early as 1936; it was discontinued during the war and
reopened in 1946. In the beginning, many reservations against the new medium were
expressed, especially at the top of the BBC hierarchy, typically born out of the concern
that it would dominate the home, encourage passivity and lead to an excess of
entertainment. An often-quoted remark were Orson Welles’ words: ‘If the home is to
become a non-stop movie-house, God help the home.’ (ibid., 276) In other words,
television, due to the assuaging experiences with radio, was no longer surrounded with
too high hopes about its reforming potential. The difficulty of disciplining, the audience
had implicitly become an accepted fact, although sounds of caution continued to be
heard. In 1952, Haley told his staff: ‘Fight against too many hours. Fight against lowering
of standards…. Television must not become a film industry. Television must remain
civilized and adult. You are fighting great issues.’ (ibid.)
The installation of a second, commercial television channel in 1955 destabilized even
3
further the situation in which the BBC operated. Commercial television, not incidentally
named Independent Television (ITV), actively and shrewdly exploited the BBC’s
patronizing reputation in its claim of presenting an alternative, ‘people’s television’
(Sendall 1982). In practice, this meant the introduction on British television of many
obviously popular genres such as spectacular quiz shows and imported American drama
series. But the most important result of these events is not the so-called ‘trivialization’ of
television programming as a whole. More fundamental is the fact that the BBC was now
confronted with the need, not only to attract the audience (which could be seen as the
main drive behind the earlier popularization of radio), but to fight for it in a competitive
environment. And so, the ratings game—and ratings discourse—was introduced in
British television. Thus, the BBC Handbook of 1957 stated that it was ‘of obvious
importance to the BBC to know how those of the television public who have a choice of
programmes divide their viewing time’ (Briggs 1985:300). The apparent ‘obviousness’ of
‘the battle of the figures’ was reflected, for instance, in the development of more
competitively-organized television schedules and the setting of minimum average shares
4
of audience which the BBC should seek to establish, although in terms of overall
programming policy the BBC first refused to compete with ITV on the same terms. It
continued to insist on maintaining the standards of ‘responsibility’ and ‘quality’. In the
first years of competition, then, the BBC’s output of ‘serious’ programmes went up rather