As we come up towards ITV50 in a couple of months time, and in the wake of Lord Bragg's variable-quality self-congratulation for the so-called 'People's Channel', there is a lot of ITV-bashing going on. Some of us see the third channel heading downmarket with speed, dumping the once- (and Bragg-) heralded regional differentiation in favour of a flat, boring, undifferentiated, homogenized single company, in England and Wales at least, and producing wall-to-wall pap. Is this ITV-bashing justified?
Inevitably we must admit that, in fact, it's not that difficult to do, especially when we are given all these opportunities. But by and large, I think we bash ITV for the things we believe it no longer does, while on the other side of the coin, we bash the BBC when it looks like it might stop doing the things we think it does do and might perhaps head down the same path.
I think I might play Devil's Advocate for a moment.
To begin with, we really can't justifiably complain about the death of regionalism in ITV. It was set up that way originally because it was the only way of allowing inter-contractor competition that the Post Office would allow, as a result of the latter restricting the available channels. Very likely the ITA would have preferred two parallel national networks competing with each other as well as with the BBC, but they had to settle for a federal system which relied on the competitors also co-operating ? albeit with distaste, if reports of Network Managers' meetings are anything to go by ? to create a network. Thus regionalism as we knew it was the result of obligation and compromise, not of choice. We complain about its removal because we became used to it and thought, as a result, that this was how it should be done. If ITV had, from the beginning, been a national network with regional centres modelled along BBC lines, or a Dutch-style national layering system, we would have thought that was the best way ? and if it changed we'd bash that change just as vehemently.
The federal structure had other challenges too, such as the two-tier nature of the four big contractors covering the major population centres versus the rest, which limited the abilities of companies like Anglia, for example, quite dramatically as regards their access to the network, and in a sense condemned them to their evident parochialism. Of course Anglia couldn't make (many) programmes that matched up to those offered by the Big Four, although they had some notable successes. Survival is an obvious one; but also through their arrangement with Rediffusion (and the fact that Paul Adorian was an amateur archaeologist) they produced the first-ever archaeology programmes on ITV (Who were the Britons?).
Meanwhile, even ITV plunging downmarket is nothing more than a repeat of what it did in its early days, when the first contractors found it necessary to grab audiences to encourage advertising and thus avoid financial disaster. In doing so they demonstrated, just one more time, that competition doesn't actually raise standards: it sends everyone to the bottom. The current multichannel competitive environment assures that today ITV must do so again.
Arguably the astonishing thing is that ITV produces ? or perhaps I should say "has produced" - any programmes that were 'any good', by which I mean containing substance rather than mere froth. The problem, though, is that the public likes froth, and if you provide it, it will be watched; and if you need bums on seats, then you have to make programmes that will be watched - so if you are ITV, you will make froth. QED.
The apparent elitist could suggest that this is a 'problem with the audience' ? a topic that Joe Baldwin addresses in EMC's Third Programme this month ? and that if better educated, the population at large would enjoy educational and informative programmes as much as entertainment, just as kids brought up on wholseome foods and no sweets don't like the latter and actively prefer the former. This may be true, but it is not, however, the world in which we live.
Personally, I would argue for a better overall balance across widely-available channels between giving people what they want and giving them what we might consider 'quality programming' (and Reith would probably have called "what they ought to have"). But as you may have noticed, there are plenty of channels to find froth on ? and thus avoid quality ? at any time, so that simplistic plan no longer works in a multi-channel society as it might have done when there were only two (and even then you could always go down the pub if there was 'nothing on').
The fact is that if you produce 'quality' programming it will only be watched and appreciated by people who like that sort of thing, and that's a minority. If you rely on ratings, that's not something you can afford to do. Thus we should expect a channel that is a commercial concern intended to make a profit, funded solely by advertising ? ie that needs must be almost exclusively ratings-oriented ? not to produce minority (aka 'quality') programming unless obligated to do so. If we want it, or 'it is felt that it should be available', then we shall have to pay for it one way or another, probably in more ways than one.
All the more reason, then, to be far more concerned today about the potential erosion of public service broadcasting per se, than whether or not we are criticising ITV for doing what it is bound to do as a company that believes, under today's 'soft Thatcherism', that it needs to be profitable first, a maker of popular programming second, and a presenter of serious programming virtually only when it's forced to - which it more and more seldom is.
Bash ITV by all means when justified, therefore ? but let's just make sure as we do so that, at all costs, we agitate for there to remain a vibrant and strong PSB alternative to the apparent inevitability of prolefeed.
