A <strong>FUTURE</strong> <strong>FOR</strong> <strong>PUBLIC</strong> <strong>SERVICE</strong> <strong>TELEVISION</strong> 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. 106
THE PEOPLE SHOULD BE TELEVISED If the viewing public that is meant to be at the heart of public service broadcasting do not see themselves on screen or do not recognise the representations that do exist as valid, then broadcasters have a credibility problem they need to address. 107
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