A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL WORLD

A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION
much to fear if they neglect its message. This
is all the more crucial in a situation in which
there are more platforms and channels to
choose from and where, as the actor Idris
Elba put it in his call for broadcasters to
embrace diversity, “if young people don’t see
themselves on TV, they just switch off the TV,
and log on. End of…” 308
We are not at all suggesting that public
service television is a monocultural space
or that broadcasters have totally failed to
recognise the identity claims as well as
the demographic and social shifts that are
changing the face of the UK. Channel 4’s
heavy investment in and promotion of the
Paralympics and the BBC’s commissioning
of a range of programmes concerning
transgender issues is evidence of such
recognition. What we are arguing is that
‘opening up’ television – to a full range of
voices, cultures, narratives and identities – is
an ongoing process and that public service
television needs constantly to renew itself.
If it fails to keep pace with changing tastes
and attitudes, then it will undermine both its
popularity and its legitimacy.
Indeed, as long as different social groups are
not adequately addressed and as long as they
are ignored, stereotyped or patronised, then
struggles over visibility and representation
will continue. One topic that has generated
a significant amount of debate in recent
years is the representation of working class
lives in reality television, 309 a genre that
has – formally speaking – allowed ‘ordinary
people’ to enter a television world in which
their presence, until then, had been largely
confined to soap operas, ‘kitchen sink
dramas’ and Alan Clarke productions from
the 1970s. Factual entertainment is relatively
cheap to produce, popular with audiences
and has the added attraction of dramatising
the experiences of ordinary viewers for
ordinary viewers. It has won hearts and
minds with programmes like The Great
British Bake-Off but it has also antagonised
whole sections of the population with,
for example, what has been described as
‘poverty porn’ 310 – programmes (usually with
the word ‘benefits’ in the title) which explore
the ‘reality’ of life for some of the poorest in
society. In his lecture to the Royal Television
Society, the writer Owen Jones condemned
the “malignant programming” that “either
consciously or unwittingly, suggest that
now – in 2013 – on British television, it’s
open season on millions of workingclass
people...” 311 Professor Bev Skeggs, a
sociologist who has studied reality television,
put it to us that this is “social work television,
the moral television that tells people how to
behave as better mothers (though very rarely
better fathers interestingly) and how to look
after children.” 312
Of course, broadcasters themselves insist
that television programmes that can help to
stimulate a discussion about, for example,
how to cope with poverty in ‘austerity
Britain’ are invaluable and responsible.
This was precisely the argument provided
by the producers of Channel 4’s Benefits
Street in 2014 where the claim by the
channel’s head of documentaries that there
308
Idris Elba’s keynote speech to Parliament on diversity in the media, January 18, 2016.
309
Reality television, as the format expert Jean Chalaby reminds us, “is a broad church, with many strands in constant evolution, and therefore does not lend itself easily
to grand statements.” It includes a variety of categories including observational documentaries, factual entertainment, reality competitions, talent competitions and
constructed reality. See Jean Chalaby, The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution, Cambridge, Polity, 2016, pp. 43-44.
310
See ‘Who Benefits? Poverty Porn’ at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, August 23, 2013.
311
Owen Jones, ‘Totally Shameless: How TV Portrays the Working Class’, November 25, 2013.
312
Comment at ‘Are you being heard?’, Inquiry event at Goldsmiths, March 23, 2016.
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