The changes that this cultural revolution has wrought on programme-making forms has extended into every genre and not just been confined to television. The arrival of new media – web broadcasting, mobile phone transmission, etc. – has also so extended the possibilities that producers have struggled to keep up with technological evolution. For conventional broadcasters – the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 – this has meant the erosion of their audience base and their authority, leaving them to chase ever more desperately their shrinking audience share, particularly among the fickle 18- to 35-year-old demographic that the advertisers prioritise and pay premium rates to reach. Digital channels and web-sites allow much more accurate targeting of consumer groups, or ‘communities of interest’, and their proliferation spreads the funding resources ever thinner. This has challenged the conventional broadcasters to find new, better targeted ways of addressing their target audience.
One direct result is that the role of the presenter standing in front of the camera is less frequently the authoritative uncle doling out useful information and advice, more often the
‘best mate’ retelling entertaining stories that rely heavily on social recognition. It is no surprise that ITV’s highest-paid presenters are the former children’s presenters Ant and Dec, with whom a significant share of their audience have grown up, and who still maintain that cheeky, cheery chappie role, unencumbered by knowledge or gravitas.22No surprise also that the BBC’s highest-paid presenter, the 48-year-old Jonathan Ross, had to be suspended for three months for a childish prank that outraged older listeners, but was all too consistent with the risqué ‘naughty boy’ persona the multimillionaire likes to maintain.23Meanwhile, the
‘content providers’ – as producers of factual material including documentary have now become – have also been forced to frame their material in less serious, more engaging ways.
Put crudely, if the programme seems to be speaking in an intimate tone of voice about a recognisable subject or issue, the supposition is that people will much prefer this to being
lectured. It is this commercially-driven imperative that has licensed a much broader range of voice and popular argot than previously, allegedly rendering the Community Programme Unit’s access philosophy largely redundant. The Unit was closed down in 2000.
At a time of fast technological change, it also seems as if it is the technology that is driving the changing worldviews it conveys. But technology is neutral, amoral, merely the apparatus for conveying messages, and we need to pay greater attention to the messengers that seize these means, who they are and what messages they bring.
Three examples serve to underline the way in which the technological advances that succeed are those that fit purposes for which the context is ready.
(i) Video diaries – the triumph of the will
Arguably, Community Programme Unit’s key contribution to factual forms was the video diary. Now an accepted part of the programme-maker’s arsenal, the personal-confessional mode of one person travelling with their camera – and talking to it like a friend was a video revolution when it first appeared in 1991. Until then, programmes had always been shot by professional film crews, mostly on film, necessarily with separate sound. The relatively recent introduction of Beta SP had allowed the recording of sound on the same videotape, but at the operational disadvantage of having the sound recordist umbilically connected to the camera.
With the arrival on the market of home video, the possibility occurred of a do-it-yourself approach, one that was initially fiercely opposed by BBC engineers, keen to keep up their high technical standards. However, the series launch producer, Jeremy Gibson, managed to overcome their objections with a heavy commitment to lengthy post-production, and a new form was born. Video Diaries was a raging success, perfectly capturing the Zeitgeist. It put the programme-maker in the centre of the frame and spoke in the first person, legitimising the individual, experiential approach to life and filmmaking. It was the apotheosis of the personal over the political, of form over message. It has been blamed for being a contributor to the decline of authoritative, argumentative and analytical documentary, but it also has had some notable benefits, one of which was the bringing to the screen of Sean Langan (see Chapter 1). As Langan admits, he was lucky to get his initial Video Diary assignment, because the whole Community Programme Unit ethos was not to employ fellow media types but to offer the screen to the dispossessed. But what distinguished him was being equally ignorant of the form’s conventions.
What worked about it was because I didn’t understand the form. I wasn’t shackled. I didn’t come from News, I was a Features writer, and I hadn’t been in TV. I was dealing with a very serious subject that would only normally have been covered by Current Affairs or News – human rights abuses in Kashmir, insurgents – and because, coming from Features, I didn’t know the rules, and I was hopeless at filing quickly.24
It is the quirky, random and above all personal that is the chief legacy of the Video Diaries phenomenon in modern television. Quite a few formatted documentaries deploy the video diary as one element in their format, but it more regularly crops up on websites such as YouTube and Facebook (see below). The real resulting documentary revolution is that ‘up close and personal’ style that Richard Klein codifies as ‘immersive’. More and more documentaries are fronted by a ‘personality’ whose experience is being apparently captured, warts and all, for sharing with the audience, often with the vicarious enjoyment of their pain and problems.
Few of these are video diaries – with celebrities the crews may be quite big and the experiences as carefully constructed as drama – but the aim is to give that sense of personal journey to documentary travel and investigation, with the talent playing up for – and to – the camera.
It may be Paul Merton in China, or the celebrity posse climbing Mount Kiliminjaro for Comic Relief (2009), but the stress of their confected travels is mitigated by the knowledge of a large crew and, in the latter, an even larger team of bearers supporting their travails.
(ii) Web broadcasts – a community of fools?
The exponential growth of the web in the last few years, both in sites and bandwidth, has developed an even more voracious appetite for content than digital television. Where initially it was little more than a succession of sites for people to share their home videos and favourite clips, the advances of web technology have opened up a brand new industry of web broad-casters, covering a whole alternative universe of subjects and genres. Some are conventional broadcasters, led by the BBC, exploring new ways of recycling their current and past content.
A lot of other media, particularly print and radio, have seen this as a new way of securing distribution profile in a fast-evolving landscape where no one is sure what the future will look like. Most importantly, many individuals and groups have seen this as the ultimate democratic vehicle for getting their message out and finding people of like mind. Just as some music acts have managed to secure a fan-base and distribution without the commercial compromises demanded by a record company deal, web production evades the television gatekeepers, the barons of whimsy that are the commissioners. Without their quality controls, this ensures a veritable tsunami of indifferent and bad material, but the increasing sophistication of insert tagging, web search engines and consumer use, ensures that good material is identifiable from within the morass, bringing many new voices to the media firmament.
It is this extraordinary opportunity – seized by millions as their views are presented to cameras around the world for the first time – that is the real revolution, more than the marvellous technology that enables it. At a Televisual magazine conference celebrating ‘Intelligent Factual Television’ at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in London in May 2007, then Controller of BBC2, now Director of BBC Archive Content, Roly Keating said:
I think we are at the most exciting point in the media in my career, not least because it is so unpredictable. People wanting to find ways of addressing the world and telling them about their lives is a perfect fit for the internet.25
Many of the best and brightest of these new sites are likely to dazzle momentarily and burn out fast, like comets, since few are economically viable prospects. Just as poetry magazines, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, sprang up in moments of youthful creativity, but dis-appeared equally quickly, so will these; and the alternative, experienced by many of the first wave of web entrepreneurs, is that their brainchild has real business prospects, so is bought out making the progenitors fabulously wealthy, but honing the creative enterprise to the reductive corporatist goal of maximising profit. Friends Reunited was the prototype social networking site when it launched in 2000, and its founders sold it to ITV plc in 2005 for
£120 million, but its star was on the wane, soon to be superseded by other networking sites, like Bebo and Facebook. The video sharing website YouTube was only born in February 2005, and sold to Google 21 months later for $1.65 billion. So successful is the phenomenon that the BBC and CBS distribute some of their product on the site.
Anthony Lilley writes about these issues and is well-placed to identify which comes first, the technical chicken – or the curate’s egg she delivers. He is the Managing Director of Magic Lantern and also executive producer of Channel 4’s venture into online broadcasting, 4docs.
Most significantly, in September 2007 he was chosen to deliver the prestigious Huw Weldon Memorial Lecture at the Royal Television Society’s Cambridge Convention, which reflects a burgeoning demand among the great and good of the UK television industry to better understand new media and its impact on their world. Lilley’s talk was entitled: ‘The Me in Media: participation, interactivity and the rise of the people formerly known as the audience’:
Unfortunately TV has been drawing some of the wrong lessons from new media. It’s dangerous, for instance, to believe that TV is so important that every other medium aspires to be just like it. Interactive media isn’t TV with clicks. [Broadcasters] have, by and large, underinvested in the creative potential of social media. They have, by and large, and I include the BBC in this, taken some short-sighted decisions to use new technologies defensively – to protect TV income or to provide new means of distribution . . .TV’s obsession with channel thinking is part of the problem. If you think – as many broadcasters do – that the name of the game is battling other broadcasters for audience share and advertising – and that channels are the best tools to use to do this – then you’re fighting the last war.26
As Lilley says, the contemporary obsession with new media is only an expensive way of misunderstanding that, while delivery platforms will continue to change and evolve, the only core constant is good content, programmes that people want to watch, however it is delivered.
‘There are seeds of survival for those traditional media players who are deft, creative and ambitious enough to seize the opportunity. We still need shared stories to bond us together and those stories can still be commercially successful, make no mistake’.27There is, however, a view that some big broadcasters are making big mistakes.
(iii) User-generated content – but is it news?
In some ways, the BBC has been traumatised by the digital revolution. The founder of UK national and public service broadcasting (and the figurehead of world broadcasting), it has had to adapt increasingly fast to the rapidly changing styles, systems and substance of the broadcast landscape. Its recent history has been marked by desperate and costly attempts to master the new media platforms it finds itself competing in. Its digital television channels, BBC3 and BBC4, following troubled births, have been critical successes and its website a world-leader, but these have to be funded from the same long-established funding base that was constructed to resource the terrestrial services that pre-date this digital age: the licence fee. This arcane tax on television set ownership – always a bugbear to commercial rivals – is spread ever thinner to fund new services, at inevitable cost to the core services it was set up to deliver. As the BBC spends hundreds of millions of pounds on new initiatives under the rubric of ‘Future Media and Technology’, such as the long-delayed iPlayer, which enables web-watchers to catch up on recent television programmes – and which will eventually deliver a free archive service – thousands of production staff are being made redundant. Like the loss-making websites of most leading newspapers, no satisfactory means of monetising these new services has been found, so the old services bear the brunt of the costs.
Many BBC personnel privately feel that the technological beast has been engorged at the cost of the BBC’s core function and value, as programme-maker. They see its 80-year experience and esteem being eviscerated to fund a doomed attempt to control means of delivery in a global landscape dominated by the likes of Google and their cyber-cities. One former holy cow that now feels more like a sacrificial victim is BBC News. Despite rationalising the news-gathering that services both the rolling news operation the News Channel and the bulletins on the main channels, it has not been spared the axe that has fallen across the corporation.
The ways in which the Facebook generation communicate with each other do not sit easily with a tradition of news presentation that relies on a silver-haired gent in a suit and tie, normally accompanied by a younger, more fetching woman, delivering the tablets from the broadcast Mount of Zion. Techno-zealots argue UGC (user-generated content) – people sending personal accounts and pictures of events they have witnessed at first hand, such as the London 7/7 tube bombings, or the unsuccessful follow-on attempts two weeks later – will transform news coverage and put the punter in the picture in a role other than that of victim.
They may not yet be fronting their own reports, but the extension of perspective that UGC brings and the dialogue that is opening up between news organisations and their audiences is beginning to suggest the possibility of a more nuanced kind of news. Belatedly, news broadcasters are beginning to see the potential, not least in cheap sourcing to them. The expense of flying correspondents and satellite technology into remote regions is not worth it if they add no value to the picture – better a local with some unique insight should address the camera. (In the January 2009 Israeli military assault on Gaza, that was what Palestinian reporters did, as Western correspondents were forcibly excluded and left to stand impotently on the sidelines.) The underlying analysis here is that the BBC has been slow to recognise the editorial changes that the technological revolution has not only made possible, but increasingly demands. One senior BBC news executive, who prefers to remain anonymous, has this to say.
I think interactivity is about user generated content, it’s about listening, it’s about not treating a piece of journalism as a finished product. If you’re going to be successful, your journalism is a product of a constant to and fro, constant interaction with the audience . . . In the initial coverage of Virginia Tech there were eye-witness accounts from inside Norris Hall, which were given to the BBC, by people emailing the BBC because they had been surfing the web to try to find out what the hell was going on.28
In the past, before electronic communication, correspondents – usually by mail – would have been dismissed as ‘the green ink brigade’, the kind of obsessive viewer who always wrote in, often to complain, often in green ink. Now the news organisations are delighted to have the human contact with their shrinking audiences, and recognise that their divergent views and experiences can enrich their output. It has also called into question their unitary news values, the largely unquestioned professional ‘rightness’ of news priority and approach.
One of the leading Britons in world news, Chris Cramer (former head of news-gathering at the BBC and then chief executive of CNN for ten years) challenged those values in an interview he did with the UK newspaper The Independent, when retiring from CNN in 2007.
In his vision for the future, Cramer sees a role for more opinion-based journalism in television news. ‘There is a school of thought, not just in the US but elsewhere, that says
opinion television is somehow a bad thing. In other words, that television networks doing what newspapers have done for a couple of centuries is somehow a bad thing. I think it’s only a bad thing if it’s not clearly labelled.’ More stories, he is convinced, will be generated by the public. ‘The Saddam executions demonstrated how much this complements journalism. It’s real journalism and richer journalism. How would we have known about the dissent in the execution chamber without user generated content?’29
There are, however, contrary views expressed among professional journalists’ ranks. Chief foreign correspondent and sometime BBC TV newscaster Ben Brown represents the more dystopian view. ‘During the Buncefield oil depot fire30we had some good helicopter shots of the refinery burning but preferred to run some wobbly mobile phone pictures instead, to add this spurious sense of UGC excitement.’31 Other sources report that children in the neighbourhood would approach reporters with their mobile phone pictures of the fire, only to be told that the shots were too distant. The last that would be seen of these young aspiring citizen journalists would be their backs as they ran towards the fire to get the closer pictures.
No casualties resulted but it is possible to see the downside of this unlicensed flow and, while BBC News (at least at the time of going to press) does not pay for UGC, there are websites that offer cash for useable news pictures of this kind, possibly threatening the free flow of such material. And many do file elsewhere, branding themselves citizen journalists and filing on websites edited and graded by popular user response.