Page 132 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 120
into the larger social impact of their programmes. To be sure, apart from measuring
audience size and appreciation, the public service audience research departments in
Britain and the Netherlands do regularly carry out what are called ad hoc investigations,
intended to gather more specific information about audience responses to concrete
programmes or types of programme. But not only do these special studies take up a
relatively small amount of the total budget and energy available for the research
endeavour (Home Office 1977); they also generally address questions that do not go
beyond the direct, institutionally defined interests formulated by the management or the
producers of the programmes: the reduction of uncertainty.
In the 1950s, for example, the BBC Audience Research Department in response to the
then widespread public concern about the social impact of television, occasionally
embarked upon forms of research into the effects or effectiveness of programmes, but it
is telling that Silvey (1974:173) himself was ‘thankful’ that research in what he called
‘the field of the social—as distinct from the broadcasting-centred—effects of viewing’
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was eventually left on the side. Similarly, most ad hoc studies commissioned to the
Dutch Audience Research department are surveys examining issues that are extensions of
regular ratings research (e.g. the response of specific target categories to specific
programmes), and do not concern larger issues of social effects or impact, much to the
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regret of the current head of the department, Wim Bekkers. In general, then, the Annan
Committee’s complaint that ‘the research efforts of the broadcasting organizations have
been too piecemeal, too narrow and too superficial’ still has not lost its pertinence (Home
Office 1977:452). But how realistic would a restructuring of research in more satisfactory
directions be?
From the institutional point of view, it is of course not surprising that public service
audience research is almost completely instrumental to the institutional interests of the
broadcasters themselves—‘broadcasting-centred’ in Silvey’s words. Audience
measurement information tends to be used as a form of public relations, as a sustainer of
legitimacy, as a means of probing market conditions, in short, it provides the broadcasters
with a discourse of symbolic reassurance. As Burns (1977:134) has noted, with ratings
the relationship between broadcaster and audience is ‘taken care of through a procedure
which ‘reduces awareness of the public to the safe dimensions of percentages’. In this
sense, Burns holds that audience measurement is a barrier, rather than the bridge it was
intended to be, between public service broadcaster and audience. Indeed, it is hard to see
how ratings, including the appreciation indices, can articulate the fundamentally
qualitative, living relationship with the audience which public service broadcasting has
striven to achieve.
Evidence for the institutional complacency reinforced by ratings discourse can be
derived from observations of the way in which programme makers deal with the numbers
their programmes get. Thus, Burns saw how ‘the figure’ tends to take on a life of its own
on the BBC studio floor:

The shock of a reported A.R. figure of 63 for a programme in a 1963
comedy series which had touched 75 was enough to disrupt the first hour
or two of rehearsal of a subsequent production. Very little work was done.
The atmosphere of dejection deepened with every new arrival. Clusters
formed around the leading actors, the floor manager, and the assistant