As I’ve argued before, good television is not determined by having one public service broadcaster funded by a licence fee, but by having a plurality of channels competing to drive up standards.
Before my boss, Tim Gardam, became my boss, he was a senior TV executive. A couple of months ago, he delivered a lecture in honour of Donald Baverstock, a legendary controller of BBC television.
It’s well worth reading in full, but this section will suffice for now. Not least for its devolutionary vigour, and spooky prescience:
If you look at the sad plight of ITV today, and recall its confident beginnings, itsOkay, so ITV has landed Michael, not Lew, Grade - but close, and a cigar.
seems to me that ITV’s mistake, around 2000, when faced with the tidal wave of digital competition, was to misunderstand where its residual power lay. Its sense of its public self, equal in stature to that of the BBC, was in fact its greatest asset.
As late as the 1990s, News at Ten was better than BBC News, ITV drama more adventurous, ITV Arts scheduled earlier in the evening than the Arts on BBC 1, ITV ran authored documentaries with equal impact. But, in facing the frightening competition of multi channel television, ITV chose deliberately to disavow its public inheritance, not to modernise it. In doing so, it diminished itself in the public’s imagination and in public esteem.
ITV did need to create a single brand, but I think it made a strategic mistake in seeing its regional identities across Britain as a problem not an opportunity. Think now what an unrivalled asset those old ITV local loyalties would have been in the online world where success depends on building up a close identity with one’s users. The ITV regional brands would have created extraordinarily powerful portals driving viewers through the TV screen to online networks targeting different communities of interest in Yorkshire, Granadaland, Tyne Tees, and across England. Local advertising revenues online would have replaced lost television advertising. …
Is it too late for ITV as a whole to recover its public stature? I don’t think it need be but I don’t think it wants to. Its public impact, as authentic as the BBC’s, used always to be its greatest asset, and one no new rival can hope to supplant. The modernisation of those values is a task which Lew Grade and Sidney Bernstein would once have relished to take on.
3 comments:
Plurality of TV channels are not driving up standards. They are causing advertising revenues to be spread ever more thinly, and thus ensuring that there aren't the budgets required to make quality productions. One state broadcaster is not the answer - but neither is a dozens of channels of shite. There is only so much shopping TV, Poker channels, and quiz channels that can be sustained.
Rubbish though they are, the various "quiz" (and I use the word loosely) and shopping channels aren't really in competition with ITV1 for advertising because they raise their money in a different way.
You don't need big money to make a good TV show either. There are also other revenue streams for a TV station (licensing of TV shows owned by them and merchandising for starters).
Also, to get the best advertising revenue you need something which is popular. The Superbowl has the most expensive advertising rates because so many people watch it. If your programs are of good quality then you get more advertising revenue.
The quiz and shopping channels have very low starting costs, so don't need so much income from advertising, especially when you make income from phone calls etc. (it should be possible for a successful channel to make money just from text messages and phone calls).
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