Page 133 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Repairing the loss: the desire for audience information 121
floor manager, with the producer circulating between them and the
telephone. ‘This’, it was explained to me, ‘is what it’s like on a morning
you’ve got a low audience figure.’ For cast and production team, it was
‘the figure’. Even after rehearsal began, the figure returned to the centre of
the stage during waits: ‘63—and I thought it was such a bloody good
show.’ The whole gathering was, in fact, engaged in a more preoccupying
task than rehearsal for the next show: the search for a reassuring
explanation. It was found eventually in the concurrence of a sports film on
the commercial network.
(Burns 1977:141)

Within VARA, too, a whole organizational culture around ratings has developed. For
example, VARA’s TV Magazine now unrestrainedly publishes a weekly Top Ten of
programmes with the highest gross ratings, creating an image of success to which Silvey
(1974:185) strenuously objected because such hit lists ‘encouraged an entirely fallacious
impression of the real significance of audience size’ and ‘would make it even more
difficult to dissuade people from the heretical belief that Bigger always meant Better’.
Furthermore, there are cases in which bottles of champagne are opened when a
programme gets a high figure; daily pools are organized to predict the figures of
tomorrow; and VARA’s in-house researcher often finds himself requested to offer
readymade explanations for unexpected fluctuations in the figures (even if the differences
are not statistically significant). In this respect, it is telling that the researcher’s help is
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called for only when the figures are disquieting or disappointing. In short, the figures
have come to play an autonomous role in indicating success or failure, supplanting any
more specific interest in what actual audiences have made of the services they were
provided.
Audience measurement data then inevitably channel the institutional view of the
audience in the direction of taxonomic abstractions which create distance, not proximity
to the ways in which actual audiences respond to the programmes and to television in
general. But it should be emphasized that ratings discourse has never gone completely
uncontested among self-respecting public service broadcasters. As much as managers,
producers and programme makers are inclined to take account of the figures made
available to them, there is also a widespread sense that actually there are more important,
more respectable things to achieve than satisfying ratings results and beating the
competition. The cult of fact induced by the very existence of ratings and related
information is countered by the continuing articulation of more normative forms of
discourse which serve to sustain a commitment, at least in words and in sentiment, to
other ideals, such as diversity, quality and, in VARA’s case, progressiveness. These
discourses are more oriented towards what should be than what is, they are more
prescriptive than descriptive, more philosophical than empirical. Even Silvey was aware
of the limitations which the empiricism of his work brought about:

We were sometimes chided for attaching so much importance to knowing
what people had listened to. What about the programmes they would have
listened to, if only they had been broadcast? A good question, but an