THE JAMES MACTAGGART MEMORIAL LECTURE 2008

PETER FINCHAM

Thank you and thank you for inviting me. It’s an enormous honour to be asked to deliver the MacTaggart lecture. It really is one of those “are you sure you meant me?” moments. Over the years the MacTaggart has had some mighty distinguished speakers – people who have influenced television greatly, behind the screen, on the screen, beyond the screen. Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, Dennis Potter. Giants all of them.

But just as John Lennon’s wonderful song Woman was eventually displaced at the top of the charts by Joe Dolce’s Shutuppa Your Face, so I find myself here today, following in their footsteps. It’s a humbling place to be.

A year ago Jeremy Paxman began his MacTaggart with the words ‘Oh dear. What a terrible trade we work in.’ Nobody shouted him down. He caught the mood of the moment. These august surroundings favour the reflective. Self- analysis, with a dash of self-reproach, even a hint of self-flagellation: that’s the flavour we like at Edinburgh. To many of us telly people this is the nearest we come to going to church. The MacTaggart sometimes has the whiff of a sermon about it, and I’ve occasionally found myself shuffling forward in my seat and getting ready to say prayers at the end.

Well here we are, twelve months on. Still a terrible trade? I hope not. I’m going to attempt something that’s perhaps unfashionable this evening and outline a vision for television that’s unashamedly optimistic. I think it’s a great medium, with a great future. But we need to remember what it is, and not fool ourselves into thinking it’s something that others tell us it ought to be. It’s a medium whose fundamental aim is to entertain its audience. If we succeed in that we’ve got a future. If we don’t, we haven’t. Whisper it quietly – we’re in showbusiness.

I’ve been coming to Edinburgh for many years – as a student, as an eager up- and-coming independent producer, even – I kid you not – as the musical director of Cameron Mackintosh’s touring version of Godspell. Two memories stay in the mind. As a callow 21 year old, playing the piano in the Cambridge Footlights May Week revue, I first toyed with the idea of a career in what nowadays we call the creative industries. My aim was to write musicals. I saw myself as a less commercial version of Andrew Lloyd Webber - commercial being a dirty word in the student lexicon.

1 Alas, it was not to be. My musical career started badly, lost momentum and fizzled out altogether. A significant handicap was that I wasn’t very good at my chosen instrument, the piano. My Footlights colleagues – Griff Rhys Jones, Jimmy Mulville, Rory McGrath, Clive Anderson – used to mock me mercilessly as I sat at the side of the stage hammering out the wrong notes and coming in on the wrong cue. Many of them of course have gone on to enjoy highly respected and lucrative careers in the media, and I like to think that in recent years I’ve got as much pleasure out of turning down their programme proposals as they did out of making fun of my piano technique.

My eventual entry point into television was pretty random. Sometime in the late 80s, while running a small radio commercials company called TalkBack, my partners Mel and Griff and I hit on the wheeze of suggesting to the BBC that we make Alas Smith and Jones ourselves. We’d read somewhere about the growth of independent TV production, and thought ‘we’ll have a go at that’. We put the idea to the BBC and to our surprise received a letter from the controller of BBC One saying he was keen to strike a new deal and was delighted to subcontract the production to TalkBack. The controller’s name was Michael Grade, another MacTaggart luminary. Later that very same day he left to become chief executive of Channel Four. He is now of course my boss at ITV. Small world.

Armed with Michael’s letter and the kind of self-confidence that stems from complete ignorance, I bought a book about TV production, copied the budget form from the appendix and started filling it in. Lacking any other skills, I put myself down as executive producer. I took the view that this was the job I was least likely to get found out in. Let’s take a show of hands. How many people here have described themselves at one time or another as executive producers?

Let’s hope the lightbulbs don’t need changing.

My second big memory of Edinburgh is much more recent. A year ago, in fact. I’d put my executive producing days behind me and made the surprising leap to becoming controller of BBC One. Being an e.p. – as I learned to call it - was all very well but it had its drawbacks. I remember Dawn French once introducing me to the glamorous actress Amanda Donohoe on the set of a series we made called Murder Most Horrid.

‘What do you do?’ she asked.

‘I’m the executive producer,’ I answered, and I swear that during the seven syllables that make up the title she’d turned away and washed me out of her life for ever.

2 By contrast, saying that you’re the controller of BBC1 is a nice, put-that-in-your- pipe-and-smoke-it type of reply to strangers who ask what you do at parties. When I joined the BBC, I found it a remarkably warm and welcoming kind of place. I’d worked for many years in an environment where you needed to make money, or you went out of business. Programmes were wonderful things, but profits were perhaps more wonderful still. Lurking in the background when making key editorial decisions was the thought, screw this up and we’ll have to remortgage the house. That kind of reality, only too familiar to those of you who run your own businesses, and I respect you for it, concentrates the mind. At the BBC, somebody turns up with a wheelbarrow full of money each April and says can you make sure you spend it by next March. They’re keen to know what you’re going to spend it on, but it’s not quite the same as worrying about whether there’s enough cash in the bank to pay the VAT.

Anyway, I loved being at the BBC – believe me, I’m not here to attack that remarkable organisation, quite the opposite – and I think it’s fair to say that, like the maiden voyage of the Titanic, my time there went very smoothly for a while.

It only takes one iceberg though, doesn’t it, and sometime in the summer of last year I hit mine. What followed was variously called Queengate, or Crowngate, or any other gate they haven’t used before, and when I came up to Edinburgh last year it was pretty much at its height. I took part in a ‘controller session’ – I’m doing another one tomorrow - in which I was interviewed by Jeremy Vine for an hour. His victims on Newsnight rarely got more than five minutes. I wasn’t so much brought into the hall as smuggled in with a blanket over my head. A week or so earlier I’d had the bizarre experience of being tipped off by one part of the BBC – the press department – that it would be a good idea to stay with friends that night because another part of the BBC – the news department – were sending a crew to camp outside my house. As I discovered, being at the heart of a media storm is an odd mixture of the surreal and of the very real. Not much fun, to tell the truth.

Crowngate of course got mixed up with the whole Trust in Television crisis which broke over the industry last year, and which has continued lapping at the sands ever since. It’s been a grim and unsavoury episode in television’s history – money taken from viewers on false pretences, competition winners faked, awards given to the wrong people, the interests – and the votes – of viewers ignored or over-ruled.

Let me be quite clear – we should all feel remorse at this collective lapse of standards. Inadequate systems, poor supervision, investigations, recriminations, apologies – it all has a peculiarly British feel to it, but as we now know from the

3 fireworks and the singing at the Olympics opening ceremony, fakery in television is a global phenomenon.

Earlier in the year I was invited to meet a group television executives and presenters from the central Chinese province of Hunan, who were visiting the U.K. to find out how we do things over here. I didn’t know who was who, though one of them had a penetrating stare and struck me as looking a bit like a Chinese Jeremy Paxman. During the coffee break I asked our host, who was British, how famous the presenters in the group would have been back in Hunan.

‘Oh, quite well known,’ he replied.

‘What sort of audiences do they play to?’

‘Not usually more than a hundred million.’

Not like Jeremy, then.

We went on to talk about trust in television and he told me the salutary tale of a reporter on Bejing TV’s Life Channel called Zi Beijia. Zi was a young producer/director working for Transparency, BTV’s weekly consumer show, the equivalent I dare say of Watchdog.

In June 2007 he had a tip off that steamed buns – a favourite snack in that part of the world – were on sale in the city’s market stalls with fillings being made with cardboard, rather than the minced pork and vegetables that were the normal ingredients.

Zi investigated, but failed to come up with any proper evidence. Reluctant to drop the story, he then enticed a group of four migrant workers to make some buns with the necessary filling, filmed the results and handed in his edited story.

10 days after it was broadcast the network became suspicious, investigated Zi’s investigation and turned him over to the authorities, where he was sentenced to a year in prison.

Why, you might ask, was his story ever broadcast? It’s not hard to imagine. News is a fast-moving business. It was colourful and even plausible. Anybody who, like me, has worked at the BBC and tried to get a decent sandwich at Television Centre will be familiar with the suspicion that cardboard has been introduced to the recipe.

4 In China, producer/directors on shows like these are paid by results. If it doesn’t get on, you don’t get paid. The temptation to gild the lily may be strong. But if television wants to retain, and grow, its relationship of trust with its audience, then in the core area of news the truth is indivisible. We need to be able to look our viewer squarely in the eye and say, you can believe what we tell you. If they don’t, they may not look us in the eye at all.

It’s simple enough. And yet, it’s complicated. Television does so many things. Imagine going to a play in the West End and somebody popping up in the interval and telling you the news headlines and what the weather’s going to be like the next day. You’d find it odd. But in TV, we do it all the time. We mix genres. We take the audience in this direction, then lead them off in that. We’re greedy. We want their belief, and we want them to suspend their disbelief.

It’s this side of television’s remit that I want to focus on primarily this evening. We’ve spent so much time in the past twelve months talking about deception that I worry that we haven’t found time to talk about the other side of the coin: invention. Invention – creativity, call it what you will - is at the heart of what we do. It’s what those in the posh seats might call art and the rest of us would broadly call entertainment. That’s the baby, and while we’re busy throwing out the bathwater let’s keep a firm grip on it.

I don’t come armed with a long list of cures for television’s ills - somebody once told me that any speech that contained the word ninthly had almost certainly gone on too long - nor have I arrived crystal ball in hand to peer into the future and guess which way the medium is heading. My contentions are few and are as follows: television is a creative medium; it needs to be free to be creative; its unique power lies in its popularity; and although I have great respect for those who regulate it, the medicine they are ministering may be as likely to kill it as cure it.

The great Hollywood producer Darryl Zanuck when predicting the early demise of television once said ‘People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.’

Well indeed. This was before the advent of the 50 inch plasma screen, of course. But he had a point. That screen remains blank until we think of something to put on it. And what we put on it, generally we create.

Television takes viewers on a journey. This journey may be literal or metaphorical, intellectual or emotional – it doesn’t matter. Television tells stories. We get caught up in those stories, and we embark on that journey, willingly. It’s

5 a medium that you can escape into. Day after day, week after week, millions of people escape together.

We’re all familiar with the expression ‘being glued to the screen’. And we all know what it means. Being on the edge of your seat, letting your supper get cold, ignoring the phone when it rings. It can happen in a great football match, in one of those big talent searches that have come to dominate Saturday nights, in a drama, in a reality show, in a great documentary.

The word that encompasses all this is entertainment. Not entertainment in the narrow, shiny floor sense of the word – though as it happens, viewers like shiny floors, and why on earth shouldn’t they – but entertainment as the thread that links all the great television genres, high, low, shiny, dark, the full palette of moods and colours. At the end of the day, when we settle down for the evening – assailed by media choice, dizzy with electronic options – we will turn on the television if we think we’ll be entertained. If we don’t, we won’t.

Now you might think, why put the emphasis on this? Surely it’s obvious, it doesn’t need to be said at all. Well I wonder.

During my enforced sabbatical after leaving the BBC – very enjoyable, by the way, you get to see your family a lot and make up for all those Bank Holiday weekends spent in Edinburgh – I found time for a bit of walking, a bit of cycling and quite a bit of TV viewing that was purely for pleasure. I also found time to read all 137 pages of Ofcom’s phase 2 report into public service broadcasting. I wonder how many of you can say the same. Don’t worry, no show of hands on this one.

What you’ll find in this report, and it’s echoed in Channel 4’s lengthy doorstopper Next on 4, is a version of television that is understood by regulators, consultants, strategists and media commentators. It has a language all its own, and I dare say we’ll be hearing plenty of it this weekend. It likes to imagine television as a form of social engineering.

Unfortunately, if the person in the street, or indeed on the sofa, were to overhear us talking this language, they’d wonder what on earth we were on about.

The nearest anybody got to a successful definition of PSB was surely Lord Reith when outlining the purposes of the BBC. He got it down to three words – inform, educate and entertain.

By the time we get to the four purposes of PSB as described in the recent Ofcom reports, three words have grown into 118, as follows -

6 Informing our understanding of the world – To inform ourselves and others and to increase our understanding of the world through news, information and analysis of current events and ideas.

Stimulating knowledge and learning – To stimulate our interest in and knowledge of arts, science, history and other topics, through content that is accessible and can encourage informal learning.

Reflecting UK cultural identity – To reflect and strengthen our cultural identity through original programming at UK, national and regional level, on occasion bringing audiences together for shared experiences.

Representing diversity and alternative viewpoints – To make us aware of different cultures and alternative viewpoints, through programmes that reflect the lives of other people and other communities, both within the UK and elsewhere.

What?! Is that’s what on the telly tonight? God help us – let’s go to the pub instead.

I don’t suppose Lord Reith would have been familiar with the phrase ‘less is more’, but he might nevertheless have raised one of his menacing eyebrows if he’d heard what his simple prescription had grown into.

Here we have the deathless language of the committee, each word carefully weighed, balanced and rinsed of all life and passion; a definition of PSB that exists only in the minds of those whose job it is to write such definitions.

Later in their report the authors refer to, and draw authority from, the results of a survey they commissioned. In this, 2,000 or so adults are asked whether they agree or not with a number of statements which together reflect the attitude of the public towards the role of television in society.

Top of the list, with 83% in agreement, is that they ‘personally learnt useful things from watching TV.’ A bit further down, 75% of respondents agree that ‘TV should help to promote understanding of religions, cultures and lifestyles’

At the very bottom of the list is the notion that ‘TV’s main role should be to provide entertainment, rather than information or education.’ It’s the first and only time the word ‘entertainment’ is used. Only 27% agree with it.

So there we have it. Let’s scrap Saturday nights completely. Drama’s out, and comedy too. No role for sport – the Champions League final, Euro 2008, the

7 Olympics. The 14 million people who tuned in to the final of Britain’s Got Talent weren’t there to be entertained but to watch TV promote understanding of religions, cultures and lifestyles.

Don’t get me wrong. Television needs regulators, just as roads need traffic wardens. But you wouldn’t ask your traffic warden to give you advice on what sort of car to buy, still less how to drive it.

The methodology is to say the least flawed. Take the wording of the worst- performing category, that ‘TV’s main role should be to provide entertainment, rather than information or education.’ All you need to get a sensible answer is to replace the words ‘rather than’ with the words ‘as well as’, and it would go roaring up the charts. But the authors of this report have fallen prey to the age-old temptation to lead the witness, and faced with a loaded, when did you stop beating your wife type of statement like this, it’s not surprising that respondents react like student friends of mine in the 1970s who, when asked why they kept a copy of Penthouse magazine under their pillows, answered ‘for the articles about classic cars, of course’.

Does this matter, you might ask? Maybe this is the necessary rhetoric that television needs to sign up to in order to access the public money that keeps the whole thing afloat. Maybe this is the equivalent of the Highway Code – it’s good that it’s there, but when driving stick it in the glovebox, not on the dashboard.

Maybe. But I don’t think so. Those of us who work at the box office, rather than the box-ticking, end of television see it – dare I say – in a more realistic light. Yes, television is culture. Television is, at its best, art. Yes, television can, should and does reflect society in all its diversity. But what sets it apart from theatre, from novels, from museums and galleries? Here’s what - it reaches millions of people. A typical episode of Coronation Street, on an ordinary Monday night – eight, nine million viewers. It is still, in this highly fragmented world, a mass medium.

You might think, if you were attempting to define PSB for this modern, competitive age, that your very starting point would be, what can we do to help ensure the continuing breadth of television’s appeal. But Ofcom’s four purposes are the opposite - a recipe for the niche, the marginal, the worthy. Try hanging them outside a West End theatre. See who buys a ticket. It’s like starting with a packed Wembley Stadium and ending with one of those recreation grounds where fifteen football games are being played at once. Lots of opportunities to take part. No spectators, though.

8 Now you might say, why is this of concern to the man from ITV? From ITV’s point of view, there’s a simple answer: hand back the licence, stop being a PSB altogether. Yes, we could do that. Television could split down the middle, like the medieval church. The BBC and Channel 4, chastened by public money, beholden to regulators and politicians, take the high road. The rest of us go the other way.

Do we really want that? I hope not. Television’s at its best when high and low intertwine. Let’s keep the road as wide as possible, so that we can all travel down it. Range and variety define this remarkable medium. The BBC has for decades been the home of all sorts of joyous nonsense. It realised almost from the off that its audience wanted What’s My Line or The Goons as much as it wanted 24 Hours or Panorama. ITV, commercially driven, competitive and audience focused, encouraged current affairs to flourish, the arts, the news. The seemingly contradictory ingredients were the recipe that created the distinctive flavour of mainstream television.

In the early days, of course, audiences were easy to come by – the medium was new, and choice was tiny. I don’t suppose the Labour politician Nye Bevan would have been found drinking in the same bar as Darryl Zanuck, but he was another who wrote off the new medium in its early days, looking forward to a true socialist future in which the public had got over what he called the ‘delirium of television’. As it turned out the delirium has outlasted the true socialist future.

Television is a broad church, but it doesn’t want empty pews. As fragmentation of the media accelerates, as it becomes harder to hold onto truly mass audiences, as 9 million becomes 8 and 8 becomes 7, it becomes more important to defend those parts of the television culture that have wide appeal than those that don’t. The unique power of broadcasting, as we correctly call it, doesn’t lie around the periphery, it lies at the very centre. That’s the bit to sustain and nourish, though often it’s the bit we take for granted.

Some people think that the journey from 9 to 8 to 7 million has an endpoint of zero. It’s a tempting scenario, but wholly mistaken. Audiences don’t only aggregate in large numbers due to lack of choice, they do so because the desire to be part of an audience, to share an experience, is a strong and enduring one. In the past week alone, look at the Olympics; look at the launch X Factor. That audience, peaking at over 12 million, who have made the positive choice to watch a programme together in the context of limitless choice, has more cultural value than the audience of 12 million twenty years ago who might have watched an indifferent episode of an ordinary drama because there was nothing else on.

9 And it’s not just about the numbers: today’s programmes, at their best, have more power, more resonance, more depth of response than their predecessors. Was Come Dancing actually better than Strictly Come Dancing? I doubt it. What’s big gets bigger, spreads wider, goes deeper. Phone voting, tarnished as it may have been, tells us something we want to hear: viewers care; they’re engaged.

A couple of years ago the then Secretary of State at the DCMS Tessa Jowell, and I salute her for it, stood up in the House of Commons and bravely said the words ‘entertainment is a public service’. She wasn’t reminding ITV of this – no need. She was reminding the BBC, in the build-up to charter renewal. The remarkable thing is that it seemed a remarkable thing to say.

At ITV entertaining our audience is part of our DNA. So is our commitment to providing our services free to the consumer. This is another one of those ‘we’re so used to it we take it for granted’ factors and, in these straightened times, a rather important one to the viewer. You might think that it would matter to politicians too. You’d be lucky. For some reason those organisations dependent on the public purse, and those who seek to become so, are clasped more warmly to politicians’ bosoms than those who say don’t worry we’d rather look after ourselves.

But we like being free to air at ITV and we think this is where the world is heading towards, not departing from. Look at what’s been happening recently in the music industry. For years we’ve been used to paying for music. First on vinyl, and then – what mugs we were – all over again on CD. More recently, and I’m ashamed to admit it, if I can’t find the CD and the LP’s no good because I haven’t got a record player, I pay for it a third time by downloading it onto iTunes. But I’m unusually stupid like that.

The more sensible consumer, meanwhile, is saying to the record company we don’t want to pay for this stuff at all, you sort it out, take some advertising, see if you can make money that way, not our problem. And bit by bit the music industry is arriving at the very economic model that commercial television was based on in the 1950s.

This isn’t something you’d have predicted ten or fifteen years ago, but then, gratifyingly, the world doesn’t always develop the way people expect. Back in the 1980s, before my afore-mentioned and frankly embarrassing musical career – did I mention my spell as the deputy musical director of the West End production of Bugsy Malone? I shudder to remember – my fellow musos, as we called each other, all used to have yellow stickers on their instrument cases with the slogan ‘keep music live’. It was the age of synthesizers, of electronic drums. It seemed

10 reasonable to believe that live music was endangered and might die out altogether.

Were they joking? Live music in 2008 is bigger than ever; it’s the only way bands make any money. Concerts and festivals are booming as never before; synthesizers and drum machines are gathering dust. A couple of weekends ago I was sitting in a field in Suffolk at the Latitude festival listening to Sigor Ros and Elbow. Why? I don’t even like Sigor Ros and Elbow. But like the thousands of people around me, I liked being part of an audience. Don’t underestimate that appeal.

What sometimes seems inevitable sometimes doesn’t happen. Back in the 1960s one of the worries about television was that creeping Americanisation would stamp out the distinctively British character of the medium. In 1965 the ITA issued an instruction that in the heart of peak-time, from Monday to Friday, no more than two out of five programmes could come from the U.S., and no more than three could be crime series or westerns. With the incisive logic known only to regulators they covered the possibility that one of the British offerings would be a western.

What happened in reality was that Americanisation was rejected by viewers, whose tastes turned out to favour programmes that are home-grown and, largely speaking, set in the U.K. This has continued to this day. American imports mostly find niche audiences on minority channels. Television has a wonderful ability to open a window onto another world, but increasingly we like it to hold up a mirror to our own. Those of us who commission and schedule mainstream channels are only too familiar with the power of the B-word – Britain. A Picture of Britain, the Nature of Britain, Britain’s Got Talent, the Great British Dish, How We Built Britain, Britain from Above, Britain from Below - we’ve been slicing and dicing Britain for years now and there’s no sign of it stopping. I’m not knocking these programmes – many are wonderful, some I commissioned – but I’m making the point that audiences have made it clear what they want British television to be about: Britain.

No problem with that: trust audiences, and trust their tastes, and you won’t come unstuck.

But here’s the rub. To supply all these programmes, to satisfy this demand, needs a steady and full-blooded commitment to very substantial programme budgets, and in a world of fragmented audiences that gets steadily more challenging. An hour of 9.00 drama – best part of a million pounds. We make a lot of it, more than ever by most calculations. But will that go on for ever? We can’t be sure If you look at the mainstream channels, their programme budgets

11 have remained pretty robust over the years. They’ve been defended and sustained by those who see the value of high quality programmes, not only in commercial or competitive terms, but in cultural terms too.

To some extent this has been a gravity-defying act in itself. A cursory glance at an old copy of the Radio Times will reveal that there are far more original programmes on the big channels today than there were twenty years ago. Logic would have told you that the opposite would have been the case – that audiences of 18 million could buy more programming, at a higher cost, than audiences of 8 million. But it hasn’t happened.

I must say that when I was on the other side of the fence running TalkBack I took the never-ending supply of commissioning funds absolutely for granted. I was an indie in the early days, when we were the small axe that started chipping away at the mighty oak of broadcasting. Well lately that mighty oak’s started to sway in the wind. In the world of commercial television, you look at the numbers and wonder what would happen when what comes in, what gets spent and what ends up on the table simply don’t add up any more. It’s all something that Mr Micawber would understand perfectly, and it threatens us all: broadcasters, indies, talent.

Some, of course, think that there’s a perfectly straightforward solution to this problem: spend less on the programmes. No less a figure than Greg Dyke is one of them. Slash the budget is Greg’s solution. Take £150 million off the screen. Another 50 million off the overhead. That’ll fix it. Well it’s reassuring to know that Greg at ITV would show the cost-cutting zeal he studiously avoided at the BBC. But it’s cold comfort for the viewers.

It’s amazing, I think, how little comment a remark like Greg’s provokes. We’re so punch drunk with the idea – false, in my opinion – that the tide of technology will sweep the battered old pier of television into the waves, that we scarcely notice when one of the dominant figures of its recent past advocates removing one of the supports in the hope of stabilising it.

In reality, of course, this is how the scenario plays out. Take £150 million off ITV1 and 9.00 drama disappears almost without trace. Some big entertainment survives, but it’s mostly the cheaper kind. The soaps are safe. Regional news – not a hope. We’d cling on to live football until the contracts need renewing.

Does anybody here think that’s a culturally desirable outcome?

It gets worse. When I was at the BBC there was an unspoken assumption that the BBC One budget could be justified, and sustained, as long as it was pegged, in broad terms, to ITV1. Any significant differential and it would become hard to

12 defend. So it might prove in the Greg Dyke scenario. A downward spiral is created in which ‘what’s the benefit?’ is replaced by ‘what’s the justification’?

In this scenario, the BBC One schedule is held up to the searching light of the four purposes of PSB, like a supermarket checkout assistant holding up a dodgy 50 pound note. It turns out that parts of it make people laugh and smile. Well, we can do without those. You think I’m exaggerating. During my time at the BBC I was summoned to appear in front of the Trust to address the question, or was it the accusation, why do we give away cash prizes in entertainment programmes. ‘What’s the justification?’ I was asked. Because it increases the drama, makes the programmes more exciting, because the viewers like it, because the days of fobbing winners off with a three piece suite or a cuddly toy have gone, because… because… why was I even having to justify it? At one point I was asked, ‘what is distinctive about the way we give away cash prizes?’ I don’t know… in brown envelopes? Swiss bank accounts? Shares in Northern Rock?

Trustees, governors, regulators – in all cases, a distrust of television having mass appeal seems to lurk beneath the surface. Few today, I dare say, remember the redoubtable figure of Lady Plowden, vice-chair of the BBC governors in the 1970s, who memorably described the soap opera Crossroads as ‘distressingly popular’. She’d be glad to know that her views are alive and well in 2008.

BBC One’s no longer my responsibility, of course. But ITV1 is. The two channels are part of a very small club with very few members. They need defending, and they need sustaining. We can’t resist fragmentation, or time-shifted viewing, or multiple platforms. We can’t and we shouldn’t. But unless we fight hard to assert the importance of mass audiences we may find that broadcasting as we know it simply goes niche and splits into a thousand pieces. No point in lingering by the watercooler any more, the chances of anybody having watched the same programme as you last night are remote. More work gets done in the office, perhaps; but culturally it’s a loss not a gain.

There’s much here that unites the big broadcasters, but plenty that separates them too. One thing you immediately realise when you make the short journey from TV Centre to Grays Inn Road, is how incredibly comforting, how altogether agreeable in so many ways it must be to have a licence fee to see you through the forthcoming recession. Like sitting in front of a log fire with a blanket over your knees rather than standing outside in the wind. Another thing you realise – and I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for us; no point; you won’t – is that ITV simply doesn’t have the image of the cuddly underdog. Not long ago I was talking to Charles Dunstone, founder of the Carphone Warehouse. I have an odd link to Charlie. He and my wife knew each other as teenagers and attended the same

13 ballroom dancing classes in Bishops Stortford. They get all misty-eyed at the memory. It’s a story I’ve never quite got to the bottom of.

‘Your business has got pretty big lately,’ I said to Charlie.

‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but I’m still seen as the one of the little guys. Helps a lot.’

ITV, since the year it really took off, 1956 – the year I was born, as it happens – has never been seen as one of the little guys. It’s never felt deserving of help. But consider the facts: over 6,000 hours of original programmes made each year, the vast majority in the U.K.. No foreign ownership. No public subsidy. Free to air. The only fully commercial PSB committed to commissioning and broadcasting a seven day a week schedule of original programmes, across a family of channels, many of them made by the people in this room. The most successful digital channel in the U.K. in ITV2. The second most successful in ITV3. Gold and silver on that particular podium.

Of course you might take the view that if television in the sense of original programmes is so important then maybe government money is the right – or inevitable – way to keep the show on the road. That’s how they see things at Channel Four where they’ve chosen to don the hair shirt of public subsidy. Let’s hope it’s a comfortable fit for that irreverent and free-spirited organisation.

In America, the networks have been battling with commercial pressures for longer than we have over here. Their response has been: don’t shrink to fit the new world; get bigger, get bolder. In February of this year, the final of the Superbowl attracted an audience of 98 million viewers. The second biggest in history. So much for audiences not being what they used to be.

Like many things in life, you can view the glass as half empty or half full.

Take the growth of the iPlayer and of ITV’s catch-up service. Isn’t this in many ways a perfect example of the continuing power of television? For ages we’ve worried that the internet is nibbling away at the foundations, that time spent in front of the computer is time not spent in front of the television. But what’s been the fastest growth area in the internet this year? Downloading those apparently old—fashioned things: TV programmes. Sitcoms, dramas, reality shows, entertainment: we love them. Turns out there was nothing wrong with them in the first place.

Of course our computer screens and our television screens won’t remain separate for long. With fragmentation comes convergence. But at each stage in this extraordinarily rapid evolution the power of telly asserts itself. We used to

14 look on the web for words. Now we look for pictures, and preferably moving pictures. A couple of summers ago, YouTube swept into our lives in what seemed like a matter of days. We developed a taste for accessing content through the web. And a lot of the time, what is that content derived from? Television. That’s why Viacom’s suing Google. Audio-visual content, as seen on a box in your living room – plywood, plastic, plasma, on your telly, on your computer, beamed up through the central heating – who cares? – we’re still lapping it up. Always will, I suspect.

The mistake often made is to confuse platforms – a means of delivery – with the medium itself. The experience of new mediums is that they don’t usually displace the existing ones. Everybody has to move up a bit, but there’s more room on the bench than you thought. Cinema didn’t kill theatre, television didn’t do for cinema, video didn’t even kill the radio stars.

There’s a tendency, as technological innovations come at us like a swarm of locusts, that we lose sight of this. But we shouldn’t. Imagine if we’d invented it last. Imagine if we’d had video games first, and mp3 players, and then perhaps some limited distribution cable system where you had to dig up the streets to reach your audience, and then DVDs that you carry around in a plastic sleeve and that your kids smear jam over, and then a method of downloading programmes which clogs up the memory of your computer, and then finally somebody had said ‘Eureka, we’ve found a way of broadcasting the stuff, simultaneously to millions of homes, so people can watch it at the same time, free, and chat about it with their friends the next day at work’. We’d have thought it was the best idea of all.

What do I believe in? I believe in programmes, in working with talent, in ideas, in producers, in television that surprises you a bit, that makes you laugh, think, keeps you on the edge of your seat, television that – at the very least - keeps you awake.

Many years ago I was coming back from my summer holidays on the Suffolk coast, and I decided to hitch a ride with a friend of mine who was travelling back by boat. In the early hours we got stuck on a sandbank in the Thames estuary and we were up all night fixing the problem and worrying that we’d get run over by a passing oil tanker.

My first appointment on the Monday morning was to watch the final cut of Stephen Poliakoff’s film The Lost Prince. I arrived at the screening room exhausted, flopped into one of those comfy chairs they provide, the lights went down and I thought oh my God I’m going to fall asleep. But it was so imaginative, so true, so defining of everything that high quality television should be, that I

15 never wavered for a minute. ‘So good I didn’t doze off’ isn’t the sort of feedback Stephen looks to his executive producer for, but in this case it was praise indeed. That’s the sort of television I believe in.

I’ve been lucky enough to work in the independent sector during its first great boom era in the 1990s, to run BBC1, and to have become Director of Television at ITV. I may now have ruled out a future career as a regulator, but you can’t have everything.

My prescription at ITV is straightforward: quality, popular television that brings audiences together. Culturally rich, UK-based. The best production values. A full range, from drama to comedy to entertainment to factual to the arts to sport and the news. Television’s been broad, inclusive and varied for fifty years – why on earth would it want to change now?

I’ve mentioned our digital channels which have a clear and confident sense of their mission and of the audience they are aimed at. That clear sense of purpose may seem harder to maintain for mainstream channels, the super-tankers of television, less agile that they’d like to be, buffeted by the waves of technological change. But steer a steady course and there’s no need to feel threatened.

In the past year, rocked as we have been by the concern that audiences might have lost trust in what they’re watching, I worry that we’ve lost sight of what makes programmes worth watching in the first place: creativity, imagination, invention. That television is there to delight, to surprise and to inspire, above all to enjoy. It’s not a branch of the education service. Wrap it up in the woolly words of political correctness and the short term illusion of warmth will soon give way to the reality of suffocation.

The legendary Sidney Bernstein, the founder of Granada, used to make all his employees hang a picture of P.T. Barnum in their offices to remind them that they were in showbusiness.

When at the BBC, munching on a cardboard filled sandwich and gazing out across the industrial wastelands of Shepherds Bush, I used to remind myself, and others, that showbusiness was the trade we’ve chosen.

In the offices of Ofcom, with their lovely view of the river, they talk of this, they talk of that, but I wonder whether the word showbusiness ever passes their lips.

It’s tempting, when delivering a MacTaggart lecture, to identify a once in a lifetime crossroads that television is standing at, the fork in the road that takes us irrevocably one way or another. I’m reluctant to over-simplify. But I think it’s fair

16 to say that between now and 2012 we have a choice: we could let fragmentation wash the existing order away and seek comfort in television that ticks the right boxes; or we can fight to say that the ‘broad’ is a key part of ‘broadcasting’; that television will serve society better if it unites audiences than if it scatters them; that regulators and politicians can make all the high-falutin’ demands they like but if people don’t turn on to watch we’re all just whistling in the wind; and that those who want to reach big audiences with high quality, popular television should be encouraged in that mission.

Keep Music Live was the musicians’ slogan in the 1980s. Keep Television Popular is mine today.

Thank you.

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