Box Ticking
There’s an article that the Guardian ran on its website on 2 January 2024. I started to write a reply under the line but for some reason, the web browser threw a hissy fit and I lost what I’d written. At that point I couldn’t really be bothered to start again. But later, after having mulled it in the background in my head for a bit, I thought I’d have another go. It has sat in drafts for too long, so it’s time to polish the turd and sprinkle some glitter on it.
For a start, I do sort of agree with parts of what he’s saying, but the more I think about it, the more problems I can see with it.
There are lots of TV channels now. For example, when tallking about shows like Children of the Stones, which the article spends a bit of time discussing, there’s little consideration of the fact that this show, that first ran on ITV in 1977¹, was broadcast in an environment very different to that of today. There was one ITV television channel. Except there sort of was, but sort of wasn’t: not quite. There were actually sixteen: Grampian, Scottish, Border, Tyne Tees, Yorkshire, Granada, Anglia, HTV (West, and Wales), Westward, Southern, ATV, Thames (and LWT from Friday teatime to Sunday), Ulster, and Channel. Which you saw depended on which part of the country you lived in. If you were lucky, you might live somewhere that overlapped regions (like Yorkshire/Tyne Tees), and you’d be able to receive more than one, and would have the excitement of whether, for example, to watch Richard Whiteley on Calendar (Yorkshire), or Bill Steel on Northern Life (Tyne Tees) of a weekday teatime². They were all part of a single network, albeit one with significant regional opt-outs. This meant very different regional news, and an … interesting … selection of regional programmes. But it did also give the network About Britain, which allowed it to show some of those idiosyncratic regional things across the entire network if there was a suggestion it might have wider appeal. The days of fully regional broadcasting, and Independent Local Radio regulated by the IBA are long gone now, another product of Thatcherite deregulation. Today, the ITV Network has 5 core broadcast channels (ITV1–4, and ITVBe), as well as more segmented genre-focused channels in streaming.
Meanwhile, there were two BBC TV channels, BBC1, and BBC2 (which also both had regional variations). They would close down during the day for an hour or so in the afternoon. This was usually after a brief burst of children’s then schools’ programmes on 2, or Pebble Mill on BBC1. In the latter case, the restart was the first place I ever became aware of the Welsh programme Pobol Y Cwm, as it was sometimes on just before the afternoon children’s programmes started again just before 4 o’clock. Today, the BBC has eight dedicated TV channels: One, Two, Three, Four, CBBC, CBeebies, Parliament, and News, as well as the hybrid arrangements for BBC Scotland, BBC Alba, and S4C.
At that point Channel 4 and Channel 5 didn’t even exist.
So, most of us had three channels, and (for better or worse) that was it. There was much less airtime to fill, and a much more varied diet needed to be provided by those curating the output to keep a wider selection of the viewing public interested for at least some of the time. Of course there was a fair amount of “filler” material, especially during daytime. It’s the reason you had fairly inexpensive studio “talk” shows like Houseparty, or easy studio setups like Quick on the Draw, or Looks Familiar (these latter two were both wonderful, by the way), interview shows like Mavis Nicholson’s, Dorothy Sleightholme on Farmhouse Kitchen, or even the embryonic Emmerdale Farm. Daytime TV viewing was not then habitual, and in many homes the radio was the principal daytime accompaniment. The box might even not go on until the kids came home from school, or there was a specific reason to watch. We were also still emerging from the three day week earlier in the decade, so “not wasting electricity” was still a factor too with those hulking valved boxes.
Today of course, we still have much the same thing, with make-over shows, quiz shows, or antique programmes, and some shows showing across multiple channels for whatever reason. But there are more of them (shows, and channels) now, including the repeats, which didn’t happen then for this type of content. There is simply so much more space to fill, so there’s a lot of cheap TV about. A single set and a block of recording isn’t that expensive to produce, really, particularly if you do a load at once. Then of course there are the old “back catalogue” archive repeats, which are nice to have in their place, and they are so much cheaepr than lots of expensive new drama too.
And then … there’s “reality”³ television. Stick some willing idiots in a place and point the camera at them. No need to employ lots of expensive script writers, costumes, sets, or other creatives: just let the monkeys caper while we peer through the cage bars. Yes, I’m looking at you, Love Island⁴. Shows like Strictly involve performance and skill for sure, but that also means those green-lighting the show need to extract maximum value, fill up a lot of an evening schedule, have a footprint on Saturday and Sunday, and top up with spin-off shows through the week. There is an audience for it, and that is just fine, because TV needs to please lots of segments.
Lots of this stuff is about the economics of filling airtime. The stuff that is decried as cruft by some is designed to be exactly that: cheap, cheerful, disposable, and ephemeral. It’s not the banquet of Brideshead Revisited or Jewel In The Crown , and it’s not meant to be. It’s comfort food: the televisual equivalent of a McDonalds Happy Meal. The commercial channels need to provide it to bring in advertisers, and the BBC need to be seen to justify their existence by providing alternatives in those slots.
And then there’s the audience itself, if you can even say there is a single audience at all. Part of that audience is different now, and in some cases aging. Today’s youngest kids may watch CBeebies, but they aren’t always sitting in front of a TV to do it. As they grow up, a TV programme is just another stream, and not that different from any other. The brand loyalty built up over decades for a service like the BBC, or those ITV regions of old, is dissipating. So those organisations have to branch out and diversify to attract those viewers. Sadly, it also risks alienating others, as we’ve seen with changes in BBC Local Radio, and the continued (or threatened) shuffling arund of BBC Three and BBC Four on and off the terrestrial platform. It’s a knotty problem.
Perhaps it’s just me, but the moral climate also feels a bit different to what it was back in the late 1970s, especially when it comes to things like children’s television. As Stephen Brotherstone & Dave Lawrence mention in their (really good) Scarred for Life books, there was something of a sea change around the early to mid-1990s as deregulation and the introduction of satellite television began. They date it to around the broadcast of Ghostwatch, and its immediate aftermath. There was at least one well-publicised incident following the (infamous) transmission of the programme that caused consternation in the press (not without justification, to be fair), and this probably marked the beginning of a commissioning environment more focused on safeguarding and compliance than had been the case previously. Not that we live in entirely censorious times, of course, but the goalposts have definitely moved; things that were considered worth taking risks with then don’t get past commissioning processes now, for whatever reason.
More channels also means more fragmentation. When Brideshead Revisited was first shown in 1981, an audience of 8–10 million or more would not have been unexpected for the peak-time broadcast slot it had. Hardly anything gets that kind of live audience now (time-shifitng and streaming interfere with things even more), so the mechanics of advertising and the money available to spend on programmming for those slots has changed as a consequence. And there’s more narrowcasting, with channels mixing content on the main outlets, instead booting genres off to their own specialist bubbles. People have more “personalised” options, but there are seemingly far fewer of the happy accidents in TV viewing now than I had when I was younger. It’s noticeable that ITV in particular concentrates on shows they think will comfortably attract audiences, with well-known names and established formats. Of curse they do, their business model is increasingly reliant upon it, and the advertising market is not good right now. So you get more detective shows, “celeb” game shows, and “edgy” (but actually fairly formulaic) relationship dramas. You’ll notice that even Mr Bates v the Post Office, shown in the first week of 2024 has a bunch of very familiar faces designed to pull the audience in, before you even think about the content⁵. At the same time, the BBC has to make the shrinking value of the TV licence spread further, concentrating on things it knows have audience appeal. Or they look to spread risk, which means for example bringing Disney into the picture to help produce Doctor Who. There isn’t the funding, nor perhaps the creative courage, to commit resource to anything as ambitious as a perennial strand like Play for Today or other one-off single dramas. Risks need to be justified against budgets, and failure (for a given value of failure) is expensive. And that’s where that article comes back in. ‘Weird’ TV is a risk these days: a risk seldom worth taking.
So why don’t we have more weird TV? Well, some it is still out there, on online platforms, or streaming services (e.g. Squid Game), or bought in from overseas (like lots of Scandinavian, and other European dramas that showed up for a while). Some of it doesn’t get past the commissioning on major networks, and some of it is just too expensive to produce without a partner now⁶. You just have to look harder. The world of television isn’t like it was in 1977; no amount of rose-tinted nostalgia is ever going to bring that back.
¹ Shown between 10 Jan 1977 and 21 Feb 1977. This was the Monday 1645 slot used by other shows such as The Tomorrow People, the earlier Ace of Wands (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Stones), and later on, by Dramarama.
² Unless you were the sort who preferred a bit of Mike Neville on BBC Look North.
³ Do not get me started on this shit. Especially not “scripted reality”, which feels neither scripted (unless it’s been done by a lobotomised AI bot), nor real, and which needs to be launched on a nuclear missile straight into the heart of the sun. The cult of the “nonebrity”, like Gemma Collins, for example, has been hugely toxic in popular culture. Remember when people were famous for having talent and being good at something? I miss little things like that.
⁴ But I am very pointedly not watching. I like having braincells, and would like to keep them.
⁵As it happens, the content is extremely good, and is very much worth watching, unless of course you have a low anger threshold, and would run the risk of putting your foot through the screen when you see how so many perfectly decent and law-abiding people were treated as a result of corporate shithousery.
⁶ And even in the “good old days” specialist programmes like Horizon were commonly co-productions with overseas networks (the name WGBH Boston pops into my head).
