The Hetherington Lecture Joan Bakewell Nov 19.2008 …….

Ladies and gentlemen, Thank you for inviting me to give the 2009 Hetherington Memorial lecture, created to honour the memory of one of the most distinguished journalists and editors of his day. He was editor of the Guardian for 19 years until 1975, Controller of BBC Scotland for three years after that, and ended his career as research professor in Media Studies at Stirling University. While having nothing like his distinction and perspicacity, or his physical stamina as a hill-walker, I can claim connection with all three media institutions: I have for over 4 decades maintained a freelance’s working relationship as a broadcaster with the BBC and other television channels, I enjoyed 3 years as a columnist with the Guardian, and I was recently made an honorary fellow of Stirling University. It was with Professor Hetherington’s integrity and radicalism in mind that I chose to speak of the “Credibility Crunch – the media and morality.”

1 I chose that title shortly after I agreed to give the lecture and had at the back of my mind then, a lurking fear that perhaps by November times would have moved on and when the day came both the phrases and the subject matter might seem a little dated. Surely crunches would be a thing of the past: by now a tired journalistic cliché for a state of affairs that had come and gone. More particularly I thought that in terms of television, -which is what primarily concerns me here, - the period of unhappy scandals that had hit the headlines would surely have passed….. what Peter Fincham, briefly controller on BBC 1 - in this year’s Mactaggart lecture described as “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,” this unhappy time must surely have run its course. Especially as he went on “we should all feel remorse at this collective lapse of standards, inadequate systems, poor investigations, recriminations, apologies.”

My title couldn’t be more timely. The recent Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand scandal demonstrates that a continuing moral crisis haunts the BBC. And Channel 4 and ITV too are having their own integrity questioned.

2 I wish to examine how an insidious falling away of moral integrity has crept into broadcasting to such an extent that its leaders seem unsure how to react and what criteria of behaviour and judgement to invoke. You know the sort of thing: comedy must be edgy, contemporary, ageing actors must not be insulted, and recorded phone calls must have their contributors consent. “It’s your BBC they say”, and then are surprised when 37,000 viewers say what they think. What a moral muddle.

It wasn’t always so: I am in a better position than most to say it, as my own broadcasting career goes back to the 1960s, and so I have lived through the changing culture and known it at first hand. I want to offer some first hand evidence of what attitudes were once commonly held, how they enshrined a consensual set of moral values and how those values have fragmented under the pressure of proliferating channels and the intensifying rivalry for audiences. And all this premised on a neurotic dread of declining finances – commercial revenues or the licence fee – which threaten the overstretched ambitions of the media leadership.

3 My evidence starts in a book that I together with Professor Nicholas Garnham published in 1970. Over a period of 6 months we interviewed some 90 of the leaders in BBC television. Beginning with Lord Reith whom I interviewed, we took evidence from BBC’s and ITV’s founders, from engineers and executives, but primarily from programme makers. These were the makers of comedy _ Bill Cotton Junior and Ned Sherrin – of news and current affairs – Geoffrey Cox and Anthony Smith, - of arts programmes – Melvyn Bragg and Jonathan Miller – of drama Dennis Potter and David Mercer. These were individuals in the thick of it, having rows about programme content and scheduling, comedy complaining there was too much current affairs (they don’t do that anymore ) but while pushing at the boundaries, all sharing a common television culture and ethic. Nicholas Garnham and I quoted Coleridge to define what we saw as their higher purpose:

“…to preserve the stores and to guard the treasures of past civilisation and thus to bind the present with the past; to perfect and add to the same and thus to connect the present with the future”.

4 It was irredeemably high minded….in fact it was Coleridge defining what he saw as the function of the clergy. When we cheekily called our book The New Priesthood - no one laughed: it was commonly agreed that beyond the laughter and jokes, the rows about shocking Wednesday plays, the satire of That was the Week and the cutting edge reporting of World in Action there was a shared understanding of common values, and a belief in television as a common good. The year was 1970.

Here is Norman Collins, who in the late 40s was Controller of BBC Television, “If you have a total monopoly as the BBC had, there has to be someone in charge of that monopoly. At one time it happened to be me. I remember that, driving home late one night after I’d been going through a very much over-loaded tray of programme proposals all of which required decisions, the truth suddenly came to me. I realised that if I had given a reverse decision in pretty well every single case that had put before me, it would make just as much sense as the decisions which I had very carefully arrived at. In other words it lay in my decision and my decision alone, whether the work of any particular or writer should be seen on the screen at all. Now that was a moment in my

5 career – a moral decision on the basic iniquity of a monopoly.”

Two comments about that: how simple life was when decisions were made by one man going through his in- tray. And second, his coming to what he calls a moral decision – not based on ratings or money or audiences. He went on to be a director a major ITV company - ATV - so perhaps such thoughts came later.

We interviewed Lord Charles Hill who had been director of ITV’s controlling body – the ITA, Independent Television Authority. He subsequently became Chairman of the BBC. Here’s what he had to say: “In my authority days an arts programme was required of every programme company (there were 14 of them, each with its own independent franchises covering a particular part of the country) The authority didn’t say what kind of arts programme: it said it would not approve their schedules unless there was an arts programme…. the authority’s job is to see there is a public service attitude in a commercial service.”

6 He then went on to reflect on the attitude widespread among university graduate producers who were currently the powerhouse of BBC programme-making: “The majority of the great British public look to television for relaxation. Criticise them for it if you will, but the fact is undeniable. …And when the British public seeks relaxation, there is nothing to be ashamed of in seeking to please the largest number on BBC 1: it is excellence that matters in both programmes for the majority and those for the minority” The defensiveness of his remarks captures the mood of high-mindedness that held sway along what was a cultural media elite. It has been unthinkable for decades now that such a patronising, de haut en bas outlook should govern television’s attitude to its audience.

Indeed the mood was changing even as Charles Hill spoke. The pioneering programme on which I worked in the late 60s, Late Night Line Up on BBC 2, was already mixing what then might have been called high art and low art; putting out nightly programmes that contained a mix of the serious and the fun: talk, rock music, jazz, poetry, comedy and cultural criticism. So I do not one of those who speak of a golden age, as though there were no good programmes made today. I am well aware there are good programmes made in a quantity that was impossible

7 before the present range of channels. But the 1960 and 70 were certainly a golden ago for producers who knew there was space on all three, and then four, channels for highly creative and challenging programmes. To give but one example. Between 1965 and 1972 the BBC’s Wednesday Play was riding high with a reputation for daring new ideas and styles. In a total of 8 years, on prime time BBC 1 there were 231 such plays. They caused trouble, they brought protests, and they had swearing. But they were made within a unique and shared concept of television that has gone. What I want to trace is where and why we lost the sense of shared values that once prevailed among us.

One of the great strengths of the BBC has always been what’s now called its brand image. It earned universal acclaim by its wartime radio broadcasting, around the world, and the force of that reputation for integrity and truth-telling comes down to us whenever things go wrong in today’s BBC. Recent concerns about the decline of the World Service’s Russian service are a direct descendant of that reputation: if not the BBC, then who? The creation of ITV in the 1950s drew its staffing from BBC personnel who took with them the same rigour of outlook. They shared values that were accepted and current in the broader

8 community: but by their choices, they also reflected and endorsed those values.

The BBC and ITV of the 60s and 70s were closed institutions: they commanded the loyalty of their staff, who at the moment they signed up became immediately entitled to annual holidays, the provision of BBC canteens and clubs, welfare facilities and a pension at retirement. (no maternity leave, though, as yet: women weren’t seriously in the frame.) The broadcasting unions were strong: at the BBC the Association of Broadcasting Staff, the ABS was founded in 1956. By 1961, 52% of the total staff belonged, a year later it was 56%, a year later 1963 it was recognised by the TUC. The ITV union was the ACTT, the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians, and had a closed shop in some ITV companies. Membership of these unions, together with the creative unions, Equity for Actors, the MU for Musicians, gave a sense of a common industry sharing interests and unavoidably similar values.

These Staff instinctively took on the institution’s ethic: they were trained by their elders in the hierarchy, learning directly from practitioners the way things were done. This applied to make-up departments, costume design, set-

9 building just as much as to programme department staff. They became BBC animals. The BBC’s television centre was a factory whose work-force swarmed through the gates each morning to make on site, the programmes that would go round the country and beyond. Today the BBC has no make-up department, no costume design, no prop- making or set building; it had all been out-sourced. Instead the people who swarm through its doors today are planners and marketing people, Press officers and managers.

Today’s television workforce is industry wide: the BBC still employs 23,000 people, although over 25% of output goes to independent. Of the 23,000 some 75 % are programme makers, 4% are in administrative and secretarial roles, and the remaining 21% provide what the BBC defines as professional services: overseeing programme finances, providing legal advice and such. . There are currently some 6 – 700 independent programme making companies, employing around 4000 people – and making up an increasing share of the broadcasting output. Many of these independents are staffed by people who have never worked within the BBC or any ITV company at all. They may have taken a degree in media studies and have more particular skills that many who arrived at the

10 BBC or Granada untrained. They may have been to one of the numerous courses in journalism. But there are plenty who didn’t and who have no grasp of libel law or the industry’s own constraints on what can be said and done. The 25 year old, ostensibly the producer of Russell Brand’s programme on BBC Radio 2 was employed by one such company: Russell Brand’s own.

Not only is television’s workforce disparate – but it is also shifting. Just when you might have been in a job long enough to absorb something of a company’s operating ethic, there are take-overs, sackings, mergers, management restructuring. They don’t happen once. They happen all the time. Where within this organisational mayhem do recruits to the industry learn the basic probity which once came with the weekly payslip? Why and how should anyone build up any sense of loyalty when their lives are so precarious and the ground shifting?

The behaviour of management doesn’t help. I think BBC employees were surprised to learn in the mid 90s that when he became deputy Director General, and then Director General John Birt didn’t at the same time become a member of the BBC staff. He was a freelance, paid through a private company which meant he paid les tax. It

11 was John Birt’s achievement to transform the BBC into a corporate business run along lines current in the managerial practise of the time, as expounded by McKinsey, whom indeed John hired as consultants to the BBC. It was in line with this direction, that he created a remuneration package for a small group of top BBC executive that put them on a par with top managers in other businesses, and at a greater distance from their workforce. The ideology of the free market were brought within the BBC.

This co-incided with a squeeze on the cost of making the goods of this particular corporate enterprise. Despite important reforms that brought in new specialist reporters to current affairs, individual programme budgets have been progressively cut, possibly – who knows - hindering programme makers from operating to their full creative potential. At the same time BBC Enterprise as was, later BBC Worldwide, began publishing magazines, making promotional toys, and more recently paying £75 million to acquire the Lonely Planet Tour Guide books business.

12 By the 1980s of course, it was generally alleged in the culture at large that there was no such thing as society and each must be free to make his or her own way in life, in pursuit of promotion, wealth and success. The ways are numerous and the pitfalls many. That was when the forces that ran television began to lose the loyalty of their troops and anything like coherent moral leadership.

Today responsible producers tell me of their misgivings at being directed informally not to renew the freelance contracts of those who work for them without allowing a 2 weeks break. That way the BBC avoids being responsible for all that is involved in employees rights: holidays, sick leave, maternity leave. etc. Loyalty to such an organisation? I don’t think so.

ITV has recently had its own crisis: Because it is one of the original analogue broadcasters it is or should be subject to public service constraints – the constraints laid down by parliament to maintain public service obligations. They are there to support a civic obligation to audiences to provide serious broadcasting among the mix: a presence in the schedules of religion, arts, current affairs, children’s programmes and regional broadcasting. ITV has recently defied such an obligation, taking an axe to its local

13 newsrooms, , merging 17 regional newsrooms to 9 and including many local news personnel in their 1000 staff cuts. What’s more Ofcom, the regulator set up by Parliament to maintain and strengthen public service broadcasting, has gone along with the decision.

The reasons are not hard to find: the massive slump in advertising revenue has plunged ITV into financial crisis. Ofcom agrees with ITV that, in the digital age, the benefits of being one of the first analogue broadcasters are diminishing.

Technology, money, I’ve being caught up in the wrong language. I am struggling to hold on to what appears to be a vanishing concern: how to rescue that sense of shared values, between the companies and their staff, between the broadcasters and their audience that have for decades created a mutual understanding precious to maintaining a civic entity.

Television is about more than entertainment: it is part of the weave of cultural life; the essence of what it means to live in Britain is to have the kind of television we have. At his recent launch of their 2008 winter season of programmes, channel 4 boss, Julian Bellamy said he

14 would not be reining in the bad language used by Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay. “It is”, he said, “a real and authentic expression of how they feel at the time.” He was speaking after ITV chief Michael Grade and Culture Secretary Andy Burnham had both called for less swearing on television. Rather alarmingly Mr Bellamy went on, speaking of the Ross/Brand disaster, “You must not let occasional misjudgements tip us into a new era of cultural conservatism and censorship.”

Now I am no cultural conservative myself: I am perhaps the only broadcaster to go further than Ross and Brand, having, in my series “taboo” discussed the erect male penis while actually surveying one, naked - him not me - in the studio. It was my serious suggestion that such a spectacle was not in itself intrinsically corrupting and might have its natural place in a play or film, and did not deserve to be censored. But it is not cultural conservatism to want to discourage the progressive coarsening of our comedy shows and reality programmes. There is censorship: but there is also judgement. It is part of that public service remit to acknowledge that some things are simply too offensive to too many people.

15 Ah, but what about “Jerry Springer – the Opera”. Plenty of people objected to that. Indeed many Christians held that their figurehead, Jesus Christ, should not be used as in a way that seemed to lampoon his very nature. In fact, Jerry Spring- the opera was itself an excoriating and ironic attack on the seedy values of an exploitative television show. You will remember, too that there were complaints at the time it was released about Monty Python’s The Life of Brian. Local fans had to organise bus trips into neighbouring towns where the councils’ watch committees were less disapproving. Again, the Python team were at pains to point out that it was not an attack on Christian piety, but about Brian, who as we all know because they told us: “He’s not the messiah; he’s a very naughty boy.” The Life of Brian was born of the culture of its time, with jokes depending on a familiarity with the biblical texts that might not be so widespread today. And it is unthinkable that such a film could be made about Mohammed. Our sense of judgement is not rigid, it shifts gradually with the time: but it is part of civic life that it is commonly shared and takes people along with it.

The people who manage television are clearly conscious of the collapse in confidence in their institutions: they know that the various scandals about rigged quizzes and viewer

16 deceptions have alienated many of their audience. And to them, this matters because they desperately need vocal public support for their bid to renegotiate the next round of in the BBC’s case, licence fee, and in the case of ITV and Channel 4 the deals to be struck with Ofcom about the degree of subsidy they can expect, and whether or not this will come from the BBC’s licence money. They know that apart from being morally reprehensible, the recent lapses in judgement could have serious financial consequences.

What are they doing about it? The BBC has embarked on a programme of educating its staff and those it employs from outside, in programme-makers’ morality - what is allowed in programme making and what is not. I can report in detail - but at second hand - on what specific cases were set before an audience of Independent producers to demonstrate where to draw the line.

Example one: a group of disabled people has climbed to a snow-capped peak. The camera is with them, noting their brightly coloured clothes, their pleasure at their success, their sense of achievement. We cut to a shot taken from a helicopter looking down on people in bright clothes at the top of the peak – but they are not the same people. Is that

17 cheating? No, because the shot merely helps tell the story: disabled people made it to the top: that is the truth of the story. That is what the camera tells and the audience will believe.

Second example: now things get just a little stickier: it is a natural history programme about a fish that lives in the depths of the ocean. Attenborough is doing the voice over, and the script very carefully avoids saying “here is a fish at the bottom of the ocean” because the fish is actually filmed on a tank in the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol. Natural history filming is often confronted with such problems: catching nature in the raw in inaccessible locations and at moments of drama - animals catching and eating passing insects – may be totally impossible or simply waste hours of time and valuable resources. So insects are often popped into the way of hungry animals. The story it tells is the story the audience believes to be true. It is a filming technique, not a misrepresentation.

Next: stickier still. A film about the dangers of food contamination, showing food in the kitchen, being prepared, eaten and a man then feeling ill. The programme then shows the insides of the intestine and the effect of the disseminated poison on the gut. No, the man hasn’t been

18 poisoned: a pig has been poisoned and a camera put inside its gut to show the true effect of such poisoning. The pig, I’m lead to believe, was subsequently killed. The programme made no mention of the pig. Hmmm.

Finally, drama. The story of Stephen Hawking and how he came to have one of his outstanding scientific insights: a eureka moment such as we all like to believe great discoverers have. And here it is: an actor playing Hawking is at a railway station with a friend: among the comings and goings they part. Then Hawking calls him back - excitedly. Have you paper, pen? No? Chalk then. We see Hawking draw with a piece of chalk on the station platform whatever signs and diagrams demonstrate his major breakthrough. It’s dramatic – and the actor is convincing. But it simply never happened. The impression the audience takes away from the programme is that something happened when it didn’t. The BBC’s defence of such a dramatic representation was that Hawking gave his consent, and it helped convey the excitement of science. But the truth about science – as anyone who has seen Darwin’s own notebooks, is that is long and painstaking, and something many of us would call achingly tedious and unbearable prolonged. It was at this point – so it is related to me – that discussion really

19 took off among the programme-makers who heard the presentation. Was not Hawking colluding in perpetuating an incident as true when it never happened? The BBC’s explanation was that at the head of the programme a written disclaimer had appeared on the screen to the effect that some of the scenes in this programme were dramatic recreations.

This is not a cry to put the clock back: it would be both impossible and in many regards undesirable. It was John Birt’s great achievement to prepare the BBC for the digital age, and to see through the launch of its website into one of the most respected and popular in the world. But I believe we have come to a point in the road when considerable re-assessment is due of the values that have come to prevail in the west over some thirty years. Are we to forever to explain the low level of much British television by the proliferation of channels. Is the issue of standards really a race to compete with Murdoch?

While the world tries to salvage the global economic system is a good time to take on matters of social responsibility and how things might be different in the future. A tiny example: only last week a top comedian

20 wrote of how he was able to give his stand-up comedy routine just as effectively using far fewer swear words than usual. In fact by rationing them, he found they carried more force and had more dramatic impact to shock. Producers of the Wednesday Plays of the 1960s could have told him as much long ago.

The degree of change currently going forward in the USA will affect us all. It is too early to know how, but it already clear that the culture has changed. Will Hutton writing in the New Statesman reports that Barack Obama is a strong supporter of public service broadcasting and favours caps on media ownership. Ronald Regan had removed what was called the Fairness Doctrine that operated in the media before his time. That doctrine had required equal time for different points of view on the broadcast media. Its removal gave free reign to the tide of shock jock radio presenters, and the partisanship of Fox News. There is a rising expectation that the new administration will reinstate the fairness doctrine. Early indicators of change are not always reliable: hope can cast of golden glow across modest signs of improvement. Nonetheless I believe - and I think broadcasters and their listeners and viewers believe – that it would be a public good were a clear moral

21 framework to emerge as we move into ever more complicated forms of media communication.

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