Page 161 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Notes 149
PART III

11
Normative knowledge: the breakdown of the public service ideal
1 The people meter was pioneered in Europe by Irish Television Audience Measurement and by
Telescopic in West Germany, both in 1978.
2 However, for a more cautious view see Morrison (1986).
3 Of course, programming policy can be problematic for commercial television too, but in this
context it is always ultimately economic calculations that form the deciding factor for both
causing and solving the problems.
4 See Burns (1977) for an in-depth analysis of the organizational culture of the BBC.

12
Britain: the BBC and the loss of the disciplined audience
1 It should be noted that the use of entertainment for educational purposes has not only been a
theme in conservative cultural politics. It has also been practised by radical groups, who
aimed at raising the consciousness of the popular classes. Think, for example, of the work of
Bertold Brecht. See also the case of VARA, to be discussed in Chapter 13. All these popular
educational projects can in fact be seen as part of the same modernist desire for general
cultural enlightment.
2 See, for theories of the politics of national culture, Gellner (1983) and B. Anderson (1983).
3 It should be noted that British commercial television has been strictly regulated so far. ITV
was granted the monopoly privilege to sell spot advertising time for its revenue, and was at
the same time held to comply to rules and regulations concerning programming just as the
BBC was. Thus, with the advent of ITV the BBC’s ‘brute monopoly’ (Reith) was subverted
and replaced by a ‘comfortable duopoly’. Competition then has been a very limited affair in
British broadcasting: it is a competition over audience attention, not over advertising
revenue. This structure is likely to be fundamentally transformed in the 1990s, as the
Thatcher government intends to completely deregulate the television market in Britain. See
the Home Office White Paper, Broadcasting in the ‘90s: Competition, Choice and Quality
(1988).
4 In the first years of commercial television, figures showed that the BBC lost a lot of its
audiences to the new channel. Within the BBC, there was some disagreement about how
many per cent of the audience share would be sufficient for the BBC to keep its authority.
Some thought 35 to 40 per cent would be enough; others preferred to strive for a 50:50 split
between the BBC and ITV.
5 This is the central argument made by Burns (1977) in his study of the development of BBC
organizational culture.
6 The BBC even has the official ‘duty to study the reactions, needs and interests of the public
they serve’ in order to provide ‘suitable and sufficient means for the representation to the
Corporation of public opinion on the programmes broadcast in the Home Services and for
consideration within the Corporation of criticism and suggestions so represented’, as stated
in Article 15 of the BBC Charter. See Home Office (1977).