Page 163 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Notes 151
international dimensions, and is not so nationally specific as some commentators have
implied.
12 For Greene, inclusion of provocative programmes was a logical corollary of his philosophy
that the BBC should be a true mirror of all trends in society. See Chapter 12.
13 Many of these programme makers belonged to the New Left, the liberal leftist movement
that swept the Western world in the 1960s.
14 As a matter of fact, Van Onderen was blandly categorized as ‘information’ in official VARA
discourse, thereby disregarding the radical activist aspect of the philosophy from which the
programme evolved (Programma Advies Raad 1973).
15 In 1969 VARA changed its statutes: it loosened its formal ties with the Labour Party and the
Social Democratic Trade Union, and decided to broaden its political commitments to all
groups on the left. This, of course, was instigated by more general developments within the
Left: with the emergence of the New Left and other new social movements, such as
feminism. With the change of statutes VARA expressed its wish to serve as a forum for all
these groups, but this ‘podium function’ never achieved substantive results. See Pennings
(1985b).
16 See also De Bock (1983). In this paper De Bock, then head of the Audience Research
Department of the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation, proposes market segmentation as a
necessary survival instrument for broadcasting organizations. He uses VARA’s case as an
example.
17 See Cirese (1982) for an illuminating account of Gramsci’s complex theory of popular
culture. See also Hall (1981).
18 In this sense, Van Dam’s discourse reminds us of Laclau’s theoretical rejection of the
Marxist dogma of the necessary belongingness of certain social elements, e.g. the working
class, to certain ideological movements (e.g. socialism). According to Laclau, such
belongingness is not a predetermined given, but must be actively articulated in concrete
political practice. See Laclau (1977).
19 Thus, it is misleading to suggest that the search for quality does not figure at all in American
commercial television. See e.g. Feuer et al. (1984). See, on the difficulties with the concept
of ‘quality’, Collins (1989a) and Brunsdon (1990).

14
Repairing the loss: the desire for audience information
1 Silvey’s past as an advertising researcher must have played a significant historical role in
setting the direction of the development of BBC audience research. Furthermore, he made
several trips to the USA where he acquainted himself with American audience measurement
systems, although he was very well aware of the limitations brought about by the
commercial nature of the American research enterprise.
2 When ITV, the British commercial television institution, was etablished, it set up a completely
separate, metered ratings system (TAM). In this respect, the relationship between buyers and
sellers of broadcasting time is comparable to that in the United States. For a long time, then,
two competing audience measurement operations existed in Britain. The results often
conflicted: the findings generated by the BBC system were often favourable to BBC
programmes; TAM findings tended to produce estimates of audience size that favoured ITV
programmes. These discrepancies led to widespread scepticism about the credibility of the
figures in the British press, and spawned extensive methodological discussion. See e.g.
Silvey (1974), Chapter 11. In 1981 BBC and ITV embarked on a shared audience
measurement system designed to cover the entire field of British broadcasting. This system,
using AGB people meter technology, is carried out under the responsibility of an