Whose finger on the button? british television and the politics of cultural control

‘The study of television’, John Corner suggests, ‘has suffered from a lack of historical studies’. This was ‘a particular problem in Britain’, where studies of television were prone to ‘privileging questions of policy and organisation’ rather than obtaining a sense of the power of television as a medium, assessing its cultural content and reception by viewers or the status and meaning of the medium, the television set and activity of watching it. Corner's own work on television history has broached such matters, but exceptions like Tim O'Sullivan's exploration through audience research and oral testimony of cultures of televiewing (in everyday life and as civic ritual around national events) in a Corner-edited volume apart, has not induced many others to do so.1 1. John Corner, Critical Ideas in Television Studies (Oxford, 1999), pp. 126–127. Tim O'Sullivan, ‘Television memories and cultures of viewing,’ 1950–65, in John Corner (ed.) Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural History (London, 1991). Corner has hit upon a broader debate about the predilections of post-1945 British history that necessarily impacts upon writing about television more than radio, since television only became a mass activity in the mid-1950s. Critics charge that contemporary British history has too readily reproduced the categories used by its subjects (particularly political, social elites) and resisted integrating its own sub-disciplinary boundaries (of the political, social, cultural, economic).2 2. Introduction, in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort & Chris Waters (eds) Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945–64 (London, 1999). Thus, there are studies of the magnitude of Asa Briggs’ and Bernard Sendall's history of broadcasting—authoritative accounts of personnel, policy and structures, but in which programming itself is less prominent. Des Freedman charts the Labour Party's oscillating television policies, but is less able to capture the mien of the television viewer.3 3. Bernard Sendall, Independent Television in Britain, Volume 1: Origin and Foundation, 1946–62 (Basingstoke, 1984). Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume V: Competition, 1955–74 (Oxford, 1995). Des Freedman, Television Policies of the Labour Party 1951–2000 (London, 2003). Television has featured as an adjunct of press and media histories,4 4. James Curran & Jean Seaton, Power without Responsibility (London, 1997); Ralph Negrine, Television and the Press Since 1945 (Manchester, 1998). but has not received the sort of treatment that film or inter-war radio has. Yet there seem grounds (popularity above all) for regarding television as more intimate to Britons than either film or radio.5 5. Daniel Lemahieu, A Culture for Democracy (Oxford, 1988); Paddy Scannell & David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, Vol. 1, 1922–39 (Oxford, 1991). Programme content, meanings and reception have been more cultural studies’ terrain. Many historians would concur with Dominic Strinati and Stephen Wagg that ‘whereas popular culture was once dismissed … as mass culture … now its importance is such that, on occasion, it may be taken too seriously’. What historians consider the interpretive and contextual abandon of cultural studies—in its postmodernist forms at least—has not encouraged them to stray into this territory. Yet that disserves the majority experience of television (which is as viewers) and its diversity as a genre and impact on everyday life. Might a history of television move beyond discussing it chiefly as an institutional mode of communication to the exclusion of its cultural forms; contemplate it visually and as something not only produced but also consumed? The extent to which it has not done so betrays historians’ biases, since what was produced was (somewhat) easier to know. It suggests the degree to which historians have shared in classing television as culturally corrosive rather than attempting to account for its popularity. As historian Peter Mandler has it, whilst ‘suspicion of television’ was widespread at its 1950s outset, ‘it lingered among academics, and among historians more than most’.6 6. Dominic Strinati & Stephen Wagg (eds) Come on Down? Popular Media Culture in Post-War Britain (London, 1992), p. 1. Peter Mandler, History and National Life (London, 2002), p. 123. Historians, in short, might prosper from spending more time watching television and less time sitting in judgement on it. Janet Thumim's recent collection attempts something like this, broaching programme content (for instance the penchant for nostalgia programming, repeats of vintage, retro-classics), gendering viewers and attending to the television set as a technology requiring expert maintenance. Whilst always cognisant of the fluidity of meaning of a programme amongst individuals and across time and thus the ‘difficulties of ‘knowing’ the historical audience’, its essays attend to ‘what audiences do with the ‘texts’ they consume’. The text analogy might seem more useful to literary than historical scholars, but does flag up the numerous meanings television and its programmes might generate, both at the time and over time (as select television programmes become seen as representative sources for a certain period, understandings of them often shift dramatically). Nor does it preclude researching what another media historian John Ellis describes as ‘the temporary meaningfulness of programmes at their initial broadcast’, from which ‘can be extrapolated much about the material culture of the time’.7 7. Janet Thumim (ed.) Small Screens, Big Ideas: Television in the 1950s (London, 2002), pp. 4–5, 10. John Ellis, ‘Television and history,’ History Workshop Journal, 56 (2003), 278–285. See also Journal of British Cinema and Television, 1(1) (2004) for further comments from Ellis and Corner. Rather than reflecting or fashioning society and values, this article provides evidence of a more interactive, dynamic relationship between television and its viewers in the imagining of both by politicians, cultural commentators [from the New Left to Mary Whitehouse's National Viewers and Listeners’ Association (VALA) and educational pressure groups] and television critics. Debates about television as it became a, if not the, popular leisure and cultural activity amongst Britons in the 1950s and 1960s, were fixated with the content of programmes, their impact on audiences and the act of televiewing. In this were disclosed assumptions and readings of cultural quality and perceptions of television's audience. Television's textuality entails both the content and reception of programming and the social setting and meanings put by televiewing. It illustrates this through debates at commercial television's inception in 1955 and the government commissioned Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting (1960–1962) and its legacy—debates it argues have since been rehearsed repeatedly. It assesses television's impact on politics as a medium and how the main parties viewed it. Labour was critical of Independent (commercial) Television (ITV) broadcasting and paternalist in traditional British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC, the public broadcaster) style towards audiences, but the Conservatives cannot be reduced to cheerleaders of ITV, pandering to audience tastes. Their suspicions of its social effects co-existed uneasily with a belief that competition would improve programming, resulting in Pilkington and by the later 1960s in Whitehouse's campaign to ‘clean-up’ television. Both parties then are better understood as relating uneasily to television. Socially (or in taste terms) both were closer to (although hardly uncritical of) the BBC's content; politically the Conservatives took the credit for ITV and its popularity at the risk of alienating its middle class vote; Labour's opposition put it at odds with its traditional supporters. This provides a good example of how a political party does not automatically reflect their electorate. Both were reluctant to hand over to popular, remote control of television—and Labour especially protective, doubting the audience's ability to handle their newfound and prized choice gainfully. But television's popularity limited party control of it. As important was that as a medium television was changing how politics was performed and (in both its popularity and content) disturbing politics’ claim to inform cultural life and politics’ authority per se.