The James Mactaggart Memorial Lecture Jeremy Paxman Friday 24
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1 The James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture Jeremy Paxman Friday 24 August 2007 2 Jeremy Paxman: MacTaggart Lecture Friday 24 August Never mind the scandals: what’s it all for? Oh dear. What a terrible trade we work in. Blue Peter is bent. Five is a faker. Richard and Judy’s competitions give a glorious new meaning to their slogan ‘You say, we pay.’ (They did, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds.) Big Brother gets castigated for being an exploitative freak show. (Sorry, what’s the story there, then?) The ITV press office misrepresents a documentary. Channel Four’s Born Survivor Bear Grylls turns out to need Room Service. Even Children in Need, and Comic Relief, turn out to be guilty of something worse than insufferable smugness. The Prime Minister is mad at us. Even the Queen is cross. And that great Alpha Male, Gordon Ramsay can’t even catch his own fucking fish. Now, some of these so-called scandals are just nonsense: the shock of discovering that Griff Rhys Jones isn’t standing on a mountaintop for the title sequence of his latest series is one example: I can exclusively reveal that Newsnight’s old backdrop of a London skyline was a painting and that the famous Panorama slogan about being ‘a window on the world’ didn’t mean it was a pane of glass with a metal 3 handle. Other of the attacks will blow over. Some are wilful misunderstanding. And some are just part of the weather. We do not, for example, need to worry too much about being condemned by newspapers which reprint the foreign holiday snaps of a short-sighted nightclub bouncer to tell us there’s a Great White Shark lurking in the sea off Cornwall, and then providing useful tips on how to avoid being eaten (such as ‘don’t clap your hands and bark like a seal’.) But this needs saying, and it needs saying quite clearly. There is a problem. Potentially, it is a very big problem. It has the capacity to change utterly what we do, and in the process to betray the people we ought to be serving. Once people start believing we’re playing fast and loose with them routinely, we’ve had it. And the problem is not going to be addressed until senior people in this industry have the courage to come out and state quite clearly state what television is for. What I say tonight is my own ideas, not the views of the BBC. I don’t think it will do for senior figures in this industry to stay hunkered down, occasionally lashing out at young people in the business or setting up inquiries of one sort or another. What’s needed is a manifesto, a statement of belief. Let me say right now that some of the things of which we stand accused are contemptible. I can see no circumstances at all under which you can justify defrauding the public on a premium rate phone line. In 4 fact, I can’t quite see why there aren’t grounds for prosecution. And, frankly, I find it pretty hard to believe some of the television bosses when they say they had no idea what was going on. I know people who worked on ITV Play who told me the best part of a year before the scandal how bothered they were by what was happening. Whoever was responsible should be sacked. But in a way, that’s the easy part. My worry is really about the bigger picture. And I have to say that it seems to me things haven’t been much helped by they way they’ve been handled. We’ve had the preposterous spectacle of some of the most senior figures in broadcasting running around like maiden aunts who’ve walked in on some teenage party, affecting shock and disbelief at what they’ve heard. It simply won’t wash for senior figures in the industry to blame our troubles on an influx of untrained young people: the ITV Alzheimer’s documentary and the trailer for the series about the Queen were made by a couple of the most venerable figures in the business. The question we have to ask ourselves is, is there something rotten in the state of television, some systemic sickness, that renders it inherently dishonest? But the question behind that one is simply, What Is Television For? To take the first question first: is television inherently dishonest? Of course it’s not. The question is like asking do cars kill people? It rather 5 depends who’s driving. Right now the impression is being given that the only thing real on television is the cellulite on How to Look Good Naked. We should start with some acknowledgements, the first of which is that all television is artifice to some degree. Let’s not pretend it isn’t. Even the news: when we see a reporter in waders broadcasting live from a flooded street, do we honestly think the whole town is underwater, and with it the OB truck? Every time you stick a noddy into an interview, that’s artifice. Even the live television interview itself is artifice. The key thing is that the audience have to be able to have confidence in us to show them something which, while being manufactured, is a fair representation of the true state of affairs. That does not demand that things aren’t edited – or even that interviewees are not challenged or helped to express their views clearly. It demands that we can be trusted to handle the resulting material honestly. Lose that, allow the impression to get out that we can’t be trusted, and we’re throwing away the one commodity which makes our work worthwhile. Now, apart from a brief and undistinguished stint on Radio Brighton and a less than stellar period as a newsroom sub, I have spent all my working life in television. I went into it because it was exciting, because it was as creative as I could manage once I realised I didn’t have the talent to write novels, because I conned myself that I wasn’t really 6 starting work. And, in particular, because I got turned down for every other job I applied for. I have never regretted it, for a number of reasons. Because I work with clever, talented and funny people. Because it never really seems like work. And, most of all, because I think this medium matters. My point is this: if we allow the belief to take hold that the medium as a whole is guilty as charged, for it to be reduced to the abject, commercial amorality of much of the worldwide media, British television won’t be worth working in. We should all get out and do something more worthwhile, like selling timeshares or dumping toxic waste on poor countries in Africa. If we’re going to stay here, we have to rediscover the purpose of this medium. I once asked Tim Gardam, when he was editor of Newsnight – before he went on to run Channel Four – what people like us did before television was invented. “Oh that’s easy,” he said, “we went into the church.” There’s something in this. In the old days the Church offered young people who weren’t going to inherit the family estate or go into the army the chance of a comfortable, if not particularly well-paid, occupation which didn’t oblige them to get their hands dirty and gave them an ‘access all areas’ pass through the land. Much the same awaits television producers and researchers now. We could go on: the 7 skulduggery inside contemporary media organisations is every bit as pervasive as anything in Trollope. And there’s the uncomfortable sense that for some people events have no meaning unless they are somehow sanctified by the presence of television: how else are we to explain those people queueing for a DNA test to establish whether their sister may be their mother-in-law on confessionals like the Jeremy Kyle Show? But the broader comparison is the way that the media have come to occupy a very similar role to that once performed by nineteenth century clergy. Edmund Burke is supposed to have coined the expression ‘the Fourth Estate’ when he talked of the three Estates in parliament; the aristocracy, the Church and the commoners, and then pointed out that the reporters in the Gallery had more power than all of them. This was an absurd exaggeration then but it is much less of one now. In twenty-first century political life the aristocracy counts for nothing, and the church not for much. In effect there are two estates that count, the popularly elected and the self-appointed. When I was asked to give this lecture – and I realised I couldn’t wriggle out of it, as I’d wriggled out of it before, (PETER BARRON) I thought I knew what I wanted to talk about. It was about the relationship between those two estates, the media and political life. Broadcasting has utterly changed the way that politics is conducted in Britain. And then, a few weeks later, Tony Blair nicked my subject, in a speech at the Reuters 8 Institute in Oxford in which he talked about us being a pack of feral beasts. His analysis is the most sustained, high-profile critique of what we’re about, and I’m going to deal with what he had to say – and what’s become of television news - later.