Page 106 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 94
than down (ibid.). It was only in the late 1950s and early 1960s that the range of
entertainment programmes was expanded and more ‘popular’ styles of news and current
affairs programmes were introduced. According to Burns (1977:54), ‘by 1960, most
people within the BBC had been made aware that, whatever else it did, it had to deliver
programmes which were entertaining’.
And this leads us to the changed cultural relationship between the BBC and its
audience. Commercial television’s most significant impact was the breaking of the
BBC’s cultural monopoly in defining what broadcasting should be about. Commercial
television challenged the BBC’s status as a unifying national force, it led to ‘the intrusion
of other renderings of Britishness and of rightmindedness, and the consequent shrinking
of BBC values to something sectional and questionable’ (ibid.: 43). Its hegemony
undermined, it was no longer possible for the BBC to revel in its mission of cultural
enlightment as the ‘natural’, taken-for-granted purpose of public service broadcasting. It
became too clear that what the BBC represented and promoted was a very partisan
version of British citizenship, which excluded the social realities of large sections of the
general public. The BBC therefore needed a different self-concept to keep up its
legitimacy as the national public service broadcasting institution par excellence. This
shift in self-conception was accomplished during the 1960s when the hierarchical idea of
society as a cultural pyramid gave way to a more liberal vision of cultural pluralism.
Hugh Greene, the BBC’s Director General from 1960 to 1969, introduced a new
metaphor to conceive of the BBC’s altered social role: not that of a ship, as Reith would
have it, but that of a mirror. The BBC must, in his view, mirror a changing society and
culture: ‘I don’t care whether what is reflected in the mirror is bigotry, injustice and
intolerance or accomplishment and inspiring achievement. I only want the mirror to be
honest, without any curves, and held with as steady a hand as may be’ (in Briggs
1985:331).
This change of metaphor implies a dramatic shift of the place assigned to the audience
vis-á-vis broadcasting in public service philosophy. Abandoned was the explicit desire to
take the audience on board, as it were, and lead it in a previously determined direction—
as implied in Reith’s model of public service. Instead a far more neutral task was
formulated: that of representing and ‘registering’ society’s many different voices and
faces. The BBC came to embrace a new conception of ‘serving the public’ by taking up,
in the words of Krishan Kumar (1977), the role of ‘honest broker’, of manager and
impressario, of middleman of all possible sectional positions and interests in an
increasingly pluralist and conflict-ridden society.
It is this version of public service philosophy that has come to predominate to this day.
Thus, a recent summary of the guiding principles of public service broadcasting
formulates its importance in terms of its provision of ‘a forum in which all citizens can
find an expression of national concerns and communal interests. In its universality of
appeal and geographic and social reach broadcasting can help create a shared sense of
national identity’ (Broadcasting Research Unit 1986). In this context, diversity has
become the most prominent substantive principle in programming policy: diversity of
interests represented and of tastes catered for, even if it concerns minority interests and
tastes. In practice, this leads to a will to provide something for everyone, by appealing to
every conceivable minority or majority group. As Janet Morgan, a consultant for the
BBC, has observed: