Last week, on my own blog, I mentioned that I had sat next to Andrew Rawnsley at a lunch.
Andrew is Political Editor of the Observer and presenter on the ITV Sunday morning programme, The Sunday Edition.
The day after the lunch ITV announced that it was about to axe the programme.
I found this news particularly depressing for a number of reasons.
Independent TV stations are the first to complain that they don’t operate on a level playing field, and, that the licence fee disproportionately finds in favour of the BBC.
They make this complaint the loudest when the topic of political/religious/ current affairs programming is raised - as do the BBC when it happens.
If Independent TV stations ever want to make a case against the BBC licence fee then dumbing down their own programming is the wrong way to go about it.
When I was a girl, one bad winter, my coat was provided by the church. I remember the coat well. It was off white in colour and three quarter length with a big collar. It was way too big for me. I knew that. I knew that everyone would know that it hadn’t been bought specifically for me; but I pushed that thought to the back of my mind because the coat was such good quality.
I aspired to buy a coat of my own just like it one day.
Despite the fact that I was living through what were very hard times we did have a television.
The television gave me hope. I knew that one day I wanted to be the mum on the cornflake advert who waved her husband off to work, then went back into her beautiful fitted kitchen where her perfect children were eating their cornflakes.
I watched Wendy Craig in Butterflies and knew I wanted to be pretty, funny, and yes, even scatty because I saw that as a virtue. I wanted to live in her nice house and make everyone laugh just like she did.
I went on safari with Survival and I never missed an episode of Angels.
The TV was my window on a world of which I knew nothing, but which I knew I wanted to aspire to.
Today TV consists of reality game shows and the karaoke wannabe equivalents.
It’s not all bad. I watch X factor and strictly come dancing along with the rest, they are excellent programmes. But what came first - TV’s obsession with fame and game shows or the public’s poverty of aspiration?
Independent TV will slowly become another name for Low-grade TV, and any hope the independent sector had of making a case against the BBC licence fee, will be lost forever.
And so will a generation of children. I sat glued to Angels and became a nurse. I watched Survival and lived in Africa. I never missed Country Boy and have a passion for the rural way of life. I watched Brian Walden on sundays and became an MP.
What will the kids of today who look around searching for inspiration become? Where will they look? Who will they be?
When they realise they aren’t going to be famous or a super model and no-one is going to give them a million pounds on a game show, what will they do?
As someone said to me yesterday, “remove hope and aspiration and society is so much easier to control.”
Makes you think doesn’t it? Or have I been watching too many episodes of Spooks!
So true Nadine. What you don’t mention is what you will do to stop ITV and the others from dumbing down to this low level of programming. How can we stop it?
What you are seeing is the resuklt of ill thought out advertising bans. These are simplistic solutions to complex problms.
Not only do they not work but in this case they have unitended consequences. So junk food advertising is replaced by junk television instead.
OFCOM estimate the present restrictions on advertising foods high in fat, sugar and salt have deprived tv of 50 million. If a watershed ban is brought in than that will deprive tv of 250 million.
If you want good tv Nadine then don’t clamp down on commercial freedoms.
The output of the commercial channels is to a limited extent governed by the conditions of their licence. However, within the constraints of that licence, they’ll just chase ratings because that’s the key to increased advertising revenues and improved profits. The result is that quality TV (which is nearly always more expensive to produce in the first place) largely goes out of the window.
Of course we should expect this. But what concerns me is that the BBC, a once world-respected broadcaster, seems to be following the same route.
They now devote so much air-time to promoting their own output that they are looking more and more like adverts - albeit for a very narrow set of products.
Rather than concentrating on innovative programming, much of their output is copy-cat versions of similar programmes that can be seen on the commercial channels.
Then, of course, we have the ‘phone-in problem’ and the distortion of truth in the interest of sensationalism.
I support the BBC and would argue against abolishing the ‘licence fee poll tax’; but that support is entirely conditional on them differentiating themselves from their commercial competitors. In this, I think they are failing at the moment.
I don’t know the answer to the question posed in your blog. Hopefully TV is not the only medium through which youngsters can find inspiration.
There’s probably little that can be done to improve commercial TV, but we should not allow the BBC to sacrifice quality in the interests of ratings. There is, after all, plenty of ‘ratings fodder’ to be found elsewhere.
By the way, no, you’re not watching too much ‘Spooks’. I’d believe this government capable of almost anything in order to remain in power.
How can we go about getting the BBC and its private competitors to raise their collective games?
There is quite a lot of decent programming out there. You can go on safari or to the bottom of the sea on Discovery; History and Biography are similarly interesting.
Part of the issue is the lack of ‘watercooler moments’ - when people talk about the pick of the previous night’s telly by the watercooler in the office. The advent of +1 channels, previews a week earlier on E4 and the proliferation of channels mean that the chances of people having been watching the same thing at the same time is less, removing part of the reason for which people would tune in.
That having been said, I do wonder if some of the soaps are not so much guilty of dumbing down as presenting a particularly bleak version of life. It would seem that Albert Square and Coronation Street have, between them, more than there fair share of philanderers, ne’er-do-wells and cads. It may be that they are giving false impressions of how people should behave and so on.
It is a shame that the Sunday Edition is being axed. It was a good show.
What about the dumbing down of the House of Commons?