Daily Mail, June 2010
Have you noticed the promotion the BBC has been running for their niche channel BBC 4 recently? After snippets of what look like enticing, grown-up, forthcoming programmes it ends with the selling pitch “Everyone needs a place to think”.
That’s absolutely right. Everyone does need a place to think and television is exactly the place to encourage fresh ideas and debate. But if the BBC mandarins are of the opinion that BBC 4 is the place for the thinking, does that mean they believe the rest of their TV output is for those who don’t want to think?
It sometimes would appear so, which is why when this week Stephen Fry launched an attack on the standards of the television programmes now being made for adults in this country, describing it as “infantilised” and likening it to “chicken nuggets” ‒ things we all like, but only now and again, he’s dead right.
And I’m very glad he said it because, although I might have had some differences with some of his outbursts in recent years, and I suspect even he might admit he does say some pretty silly things occasionally, it probably takes someone with his broadcasting clout to make his colleagues sit up and listen. Most home-made peak viewing time television is no longer grown-up.
With even BBC 2 schedules stuffed with reality pap about cooking, DIY, frocks, game shows, while BBC 1 and ITV continue with their competition dramas almost invariably ending in tears, it’s nearly all escapist fun; TV you can watch while you’re doing something else ‒ anything else ‒ but not something to sit down and watch seriously
Fry is right, too, when he says how much we all admire Doctor Who.
The recent episode by Four Weddings’ screenwriter Richard Curtis in which the Doctor goes back in time to meet and save Van Gogh will have inspired and encouraged millions of children to look differently at art history. This is TV at its best, being entertaining, educational and extremely creative. It was a brilliant idea.
But as much as you and I might have enjoyed the programme, Doctor Who is aimed mainly at children. Great for them, but where are the programmes for adults, shows which are, in Fry’s words, “savoury, sharp, unusual” which “surprise and astonish”?
They’re still there, defenders of the current BBC faith will tell us, and point at Life On Mars, Ashes to Ashes and Spooks. And, yes, those shows are good, up to a point. Certainly they’re flashy and well-made, but mainly they’re comic caricature television, and they don’t for a second hold up a mirror to real life.
There’s absolutely a place for that kind of drama, but there has to be somewhere, too, for the serious stuff, programmes and dramas that make you stop and think and reflect on your own prejudices or question your beliefs.
For sure there’s nothing like that in the endless soaps of Casualty and Holby City, Coronation Street and Emmerdale. Cheaply made these sponges on TV drama budgets use money which might be better spent elsewhere.
Quickly, often tackily produced, melodramatic and endlessly confrontational and generally lacking in wit or humour, the main dramatic point of soaps seems to be to make sure viewers turn on to the next episode to find out what happens next. It isn’t real drama that these programmes offer us, it’s addiction.
Not too long ago, probably when Stephen Fry was growing up, BBC Television ran two truly great channels that helped glue the nation together. Yes, they were in competition with ITV but standards were amazingly high.
With less broadcasting time to fill then it sometimes seemed that every programme had to be polished and edited down to its tightest, whether it be drama, comedy, sit-com or documentaries. All the jewels had to be squeezed into the smallest space.
Today there are four BBC channels which broadcast from before dawn until deep into the night, deserts of time to be filled, and maybe there just isn’t enough quality material to fill all that space.
Or can it be that the desperate search by executives to be able to report good viewing figures has got in the way of good programming, that interesting material is endlessly being dumbed down and fronted by a celebrity presenter in order to attract the largest possible audience? I think it might be. Every show, it would appear has to have a famous and probably expensive face fronting it. Why?
Faced with this accusation programme makers and schedulers will no doubt point out that they can’t live in the past, and that there wasn’t the competition for viewers when a Dennis Potter or a John Mortimer was writing for television in the Seventies and Eighties.
They have to get good viewing figures to justify their jobs.
Do they? Really? It’s possible to understand that argument from ITV, although it’s now hard to believe that this channel once made brilliant documentaries for World In Action and terrific drama as a matter of course.
But, yes, things have changed. There’s a lot of competition now for them from Sky and other satellite channels, not to mention DVDs. ITV have to make money to survive as a business, and making money is only achieved by satisfying advertisers with big audiences.
So I suppose they have something of an excuse.
But it’s no excuse for the BBC. They don’t have to make money. We give it to them through our licence fee, in my case very happily, because I’m a great BBC fan. But there’s no imperative for them to get huge audiences. Their only imperative surely it to make great television, as the Americans, once mocked as having the worst possible TV, are now doing so very well with their series Six Feet Under, Lost, 24 Hours and The West Wing.
Somehow we don’t do that over here so much any more.
But nor is making great television achieved by aiming specifically at certain demographic groups made up of mainly younger people. Indeed many older viewers who write to me feel that TV is purposely pitched at young adults, and that there’s nothing for them to watch.
I’m sure there’s some truth in this. It may be the result of the ageism which seems endemic among television staff, but it’s certainly a nonsense that so much of TV appears to be made for young audiences, who don’t want to watch because they’re out living their lives, as they should be, while those who do want to watch, namely older people, can’t find anything to suit them.
I used to think that as the number of television channels grew so would the quality. But that hasn’t turned out to be the case, although I know that when viewers get used to seeking out BBC 4 ‒ “the place to think, as the BBC tells us ‒ they might find some very nice surprises.
So, what kind of programmes do I think the heads of drama of all the TV stations should be commissioning? Well, here’s a clue for drama. Some years ago BBC-2, I think, ran a series called Decalogue by a Polish film maker, each episode being a drama concerning a modern look at one of the Ten Commandments. It was stunning, sometimes frightening, moving, and very, very thought provoking.
They could give something like that a go. I think that’s what both Stephen Fry and I would like to see.
