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Mactaggart Lecture We’re All in this Together 2015 MacTaggart Lecture Armando Iannucci 8/26/2015 1 James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, August 2015 Thank you very much. Staring nervously out at you all, my future sitting in front of me, my mind goes back fifteen years, when I was lassoed into a BBC Brainstorming session on the Arts, and I spent the day in a brightly-painted room at the mercy of a team of professional arts brainstormers. These were experts paid to be spontaneously positive; they had degrees in being upbeat, and had trained with some of the world’s most optimistic people. ‘This is a day to let your hair down’ said the leader. ‘It’s all about having fun. We want to have fun.’ And then she looked straight at us. ‘If you’re not prepared to have fun, get out now.’ I got out, and resolved the last thing I would ever do is trap a group of talented people in a colourful room and subject them to one-sided opinion masquerading as open debate. Until now. So, if you’re not prepared to hear why I think politicians have got the British television industry completely wrong because they peer at it through a filter of their own prejudices, and that’s a fact, then get out now. To those staying, can I start by saying what an honour it is to be asked to give this James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture tonight, and in this its 40th year. Looking back to 1976 we can see how far the TV landscape has changed. Then, the big classics were Thunderbirds, David Attenborough, and Poldark; let's congratulate ourselves on how far we've come. 2 We were told television would by now have changed utterly. We were told that by people paid to know. They said viewing would decline and be replaced by mobile and laptop alternatives. And indeed, brash new entities such as Amazon and Netflix have emerged. Bringing streaming digital pictures, - a telecommunicated sequence of visual data, or tele-vision if you will – which immerse us in dynamic new forms of storytelling, such as the one-hour drama, and provide us with revolutionary new stories, such as House of Cards. I suppose what this really tells us is that there are eternal verities, even in television, which time will never change. We may alter and innovate how we watch, from set to laptop to tablet and, yes, unbelievably, to a watch, but we still crave to view the same things. Basically costumes and cakes. Ah, but wait, the experts told us wait, our attention span will diminish, and we'll hop from three-minute clip to six second vine, to nanosecond blap, tiny singularities of entertainment that spell the death of long-form viewing. Instead we binge-watch four seasons' worth of quality box set in one weekend, sitting through what is effectively a 48 hour television programme while our children grow hungry and cold. So much for experts. Their guess is as good as yours, but more expensive. They proclaimed the death of the book, but did so in best-selling books. Economic experts failed to predict the banking crisis, but still cashed their cheques. Earlier in May, polling experts said there would be a hung parliament: they carry-on like we still think they're credible; or maybe that's what their polling is telling them. 3 The truth is, nobody knows anything. And that’s because we’re all individually full of contradictions. We’re all annoyingly, deliciously, unknowable, beyond algorithmic reach, for now. In fact, the recent General Election provides a perfect matrix of confused, contradictory information. It was the election in which the public punished the Lib Dems for not stopping the Tories and did so by voting in the Tories. It was the election in which the party advocating the Living wage decisively lost, to a party now advocating the Living Wage. It was the one in which Nicola Sturgeon became the most popular hated politician in Britain. And it reached its climax with the leader of UKIP resigning and then rapidly unresigning in a new form of statecraft which I can only describe as Bungee Politics. This place is a mess. We are a mess. We don't know what we want. So, trying to be specific and prescriptive in this unknowable landscape is a fool’s errand. It would be a fool indeed who would try to quantify precisely what, say, our broadcasters should do: he or she would be really mad if they tried to define the purposes and scope of certain TV channels. Madder still if they did it by say some sort of panel of experts, and a mad mad system that would then take these expert findings and enshrine them in law. Oh dear. I've called this lecture "We're All in This Together" and I hope George Osborne, the Prime Minister Regent, doesn’t mind my borrowing his useful phrase for these times. Over the years, many political phrases have caught my eye. I remember particularly in 2010 noticing the Orwellian contortions language had gone through to arrive at the Tory campaign slogan, Vote for Change, Vote Conservative. 4 But believe me, saying tonight "We're All in This Together’, I'm not being ironic. Playful, maybe, but deadly serious. British television needs to be at its strongest: with a big global fight ahead, we need to consolidate all our talent and expertise. Yet, Broadcast and Production have grown ever more discrete and separate, perhaps rather wary of each other, and now politicians have exacerbated that division. Ministers have come to see Broadcast, those on the Executive Branch of television, as the only group to talk to, marginalizing the creative community that drives Production, and which I believe is actually the core strength of British television. If we don't do something to redress the balance, to allow the voice of the creative and production community in TV to be heard loud and clear, the politicians will become our masters rather than partners and supporters. Acting as if they alone are the experts. It will be a distracting interference and ultimately harmful to British television. Plus tonight there'll also be jokes. And half-way through as a form of half-time entertainment -- this is true -- a detailed battle sequence. So, on we go. First off, that global fight I mentioned. It's really one centred on the extraordinary pace of change. What seemed like the white-heat of technology one day can the very next feel as old and as outdated as the phrase 'white-heat of technology.' No company is too big to fail. Netscape once looked invincible, until it went the way of CompuServe. And I bet there are some older members of the audience here tonight who remember Microsoft. My first experience of how quickly the generations adapt their viewing habits was 18 years ago, when I took my son, who was about three, to the cinema for the first time. It was a long and execrable film called “Flubber.” As we came out I 5 asked him what he thought, and he said 'It was good. It was like a big video you can only see once." From that focus group of one, I determined two things. Firstly, children are acutely aware of the limitations of their viewing environment, but, secondly, it doesn’t seem to spoil their enjoyment of what they’re watching. As long as the content is good, they’ll put up with much. This is good news for those who make quality programmes. People will hunt them out, by any means possible, and on whichever device is available. Hence Amazon and Netflix, and now YouTube pouring money into generating new content. That's the good news for the creative industry. Everyone wants to make television. The bad news is, everyone wants to make television. Cheaper, user- friendly technology, means we're living in both the Golden Age of TV, and a global bucket of swill. For every Sherlock and Breaking Bad there's a billion more people filming their brother squirt baked beans from his nose and anus. So, in this cacophony, it's more important than ever that we have strong, popular channels, highly respected for their quality, that act as beacons, drawing audiences to the best content available, and providing a confident home for the best programme-makers. Faced with a global audience now, British television needs its champion supporters, it needs its cheerleaders. Who will they be? The government? Not while they consistently talk of reining in our greatest network. The broadcasters? Not while most of their energies are dissipated fighting off political attacks on their impartiality or finances. 6 Now, of course, our friends in Whitehall would argue that, as the BBC’s charter comes up for renewal, it’s important to see how the Corporation can operate even more effectively. I'd argue back that starting a debate on how the BBC should be funded just days after lopping 20% off its budget without discussion, seems pretty much to me like shutting the stable door after the horse has been bolt-gunned. But never mind. Let's assume the horse is still alive and revival is a real possibility, even though, for obvious reasons, Rolf's Animal Hospital has been incinerated. So I'm going to do some cheerleading of my own. I'm not an expert. I don't run a network, and I've never consciously multi- platformed.
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