The Hindu : Karnataka News : It’s British TV, stand by for ratings out of London

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Friday, Aug 31, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka

It’s British TV, stand by for ratings out of London

Hasan Suroor

Problems of quality and trust afflict British television at large.

A generally well-informed Indian critic recently wrote a piece gushing with admiration for British television programmes while denouncing the fare dished out by Indian TV. Although the critic had a point about the bankruptcy of ideas in much of Indian television output, the praise for British telly was grossly exaggerated. And, ironically, some of the British TV programmes singled out for praise exemplified precisely what the writer was railing against in relation to Indi an TV: its obsession with ratings.

My intention here is not to hold a brief for Indian TV which, barring some exceptions, is unremittingly trite but then nobody has ever really claimed that it is great. British TV, on the other hand, is regarded by most Indian TV critics as the epitome of excellence and routinely recommended as a model for others. So, how good is it?

In recent months, some of Britain’s most respected TV channels, including the BBC, have been caught (mind you, ‘caught,’ not simply accused) faking programmes; and, worse, manipulating phone-in shows in which people are asked to participate using premium-rate phone lines. The BBC has been fined £50,000 and Channel Five £300,000 for faking winners of phone-in quiz programmes. At least 20 more complaints against a host of channels are being investigated by the media regulator, Ofcom.

So much for British TV industry’s ethics. (Our own boys haven’t yet plumbed those depths, though with globalisation on the march it is only a matter of time before they catch up with the Joneses.) No wonder, according to opinion polls, the trust in Britain’s leading public service broadcasters — BBC, Channel 4, and ITV — has very nearly broken down: a subject that dominated the industry’s annual jamboree in Edinburgh last week. Typically, the BBC’s response has been to send its staff on a course to re-learn the art of truthful programme-making!

And what about the quality of Britain’s television output? Considering the resources at their command and the fact that they have been in business for much longer, it would be foolish to compare British broadcasting networks with their fledgling Indian counterparts. Yet despite the resources and experience, much of British television remains pedestrian.

Even the BBC, flush with billions of pounds in licence fees, has a very patchy record. Occasional flashes of brilliance are overshadowed by ratings-driven bilge prompting some of its own important figures to question whether it is, indeed, fit for purpose. The BBC’s public service broadcasting remit obliges it to make programmes that the risk-averse commercial networks, dependant as they are on advertising revenues, will not make.

Yet there is a growing sense that the BBC is squandering taxpayers’ money on replicating the worst of commercial broadcasting. Increasingly, its programmes are made with an eye on the ratings rather than on quality.

Insider’s criticism

The most stinging attack on the BBC has come from one of its own star insiders, Jeremy Paxman, the high-profile presenter of Newsnight and one of Britain’s most valued, though often controversial, television personalities. In a lecture at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, Mr. Paxman (who by the way earns up to £1 million a year from the BBC) accused the organisation of dumbing down, failing to live up to its objectives, and betraying the trust of its viewers. He warned that if the BBC failed to justify the licence fee, which currently fetches it an assured annual income of £3.5 billion, it risked losing public funding.

“I guess there will be one more licence fee settlement. But can we be certain there’ll be a fourth? Or a fifth? The idea of tax on the ownership of a television belongs in the 1950s. The BBC is going to have to justify its existence not by the way it broadcasts (a reference to its obsession with digitalisation) or the buildings out of which it works, but by what it broadcasts,” he said.

Problems of quality and trust afflict British television at large because, as Mr. Paxman pointed out, there are “too many people in this industry now whose answer to the question ‘what is television for?’ is: ‘to make money.’”

Novelist Lionel Shriver said that when she was growing up in America she admired British TV but now it was in danger of becoming as downmarket as American TV — dumbed down, patronising, and addicted to ratings and sensationalism.

The Guardian columnist Jackie Ashley, who has worked for most of Britain’s leading networks, including the BBC, attributes the crisis to a loss of confidence and panic in the face of increasing competition fro m the new media such as the Internet.

What happened to newspapers in the 1960s and the 1970s when faced with the rise of television was now happening to television itself, Ms. Ashley wrote.

At the Edinburgh conference, there was much self-flagellation and expressions of mea culpa from senior TV executives but it was accompanied by the sort of hand-wringing that people indulge in when they are either floundering or lack the will to look the problem in the eye.

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