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

A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION
This chapter will explore the extent to which
these “territorial inequalities” are relevant
to the UK television system and discuss the
kinds of action that broadcasters have taken
to address the situation. Given that television
policy remains a ‘reserved’ matter for the
Westminster parliament, with devolved
administrations having little control over the
shape and content of television, the chapter
also seeks to consider whether the present
arrangements are fit for purpose or whether,
in the light of changing constitutional
arrangements, they need to be updated
and a new approach developed that more
adequately serves all the population of the
UK.
Television’s role across the UK
Unlike their multichannel counterparts, public
service broadcasters are required to cater to
all the geographical constituencies of the UK
and, according to Ofcom 348 , they do this in
several ways.
First, they make programmes either
produced or set in different parts of the
UK to transmit to all UK audiences. Recent
‘network’ programmes have included The Fall,
produced in Northern Ireland, Doctor Who,
which is made in Wales, Broadchurch made
in Dorset and Happy Valley and Last Tango in
Halifax produced by the Manchester-based
RED production company. The intention here
is both to represent parts of the UK to the
whole of the UK – the ‘intercultural’ mode of
address that we referred to in Chapter 2 – as
well as to redistribute TV budgets outside of
a London base that has long performed the
same role for British television as Hollywood
studios have for US television.
PSBs also produce news and current affairs
programmes in and for Scotland, Wales
and Northern Ireland and the English
regions as well as a small range of nonnews
programmes. This refers to the crucial
‘intracultural’ form of address in which a
community speaks to itself in order to get to
grips with shared experiences and problems.
The BBC and Channel 3 licence holders are
required to produce a specific amount of
each genre broken down into news, current
affairs and non-news (although, as we saw
in Chapter 6, ITV is no longer required to
produce standalone non-news programmes in
its regional English output).
Finally, there are services aimed at minority
language speakers: for example, S4C provides
Welsh-language television for the more than
half a million people who speak Welsh while
BBC Alba provides programming for Gaelic
speakers in Scotland.
We discuss the growth in ‘network
production’ later in the chapter but research
carried out for Ofcom as well as the BBC
Trust 349 shows that that there is especially
strong demand for material produced in
and for ‘the nations’ – as Scotland, Wales
and Northern Ireland are referred to – and
the English regions. Although there are very
different political and cultural contexts that
pertain to the ‘nations’, as distinct from
the ‘regions’, they are key spaces in which
communities are able to find out about
issues that directly pertain to their lives and
their identities. As the managing director
of UTV told us, audiences for its Live at 6
news bulletin are often bigger than those
for Coronation Street while Ofcom research
suggests that “the importance people place
348
Ofcom, Public service broadcasting in the internet age: The Nations of the UK and their regions, Ofcom 2015, p. 5.
349
For example, see the BBC Trust’s Purpose Remit Survey reports and Ofcom’s Nations of the UK and their regions.
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