Britannia Radio

Enough excuses. The BBC must confront its moral crisis
Swearing, protests and controversy are nothing new. But shared values
have been lost, and with them good judgment

o Joan Bakewell
o guardian.co. uk, Thursday November 20 2008 00.01 GMT
o The Guardian, Thursday November 20 2008

The recent Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand scandal demonstrates that a
moral crisis haunts the BBC. And Channel 4 and ITV too are having their
integrity questioned. An insidious falling away of moral integrity has
crept into broadcasting - to such an extent that its leaders seem unsure
how to react and what criteria of behaviour and judgment to invoke. You
know the sort of thing: comedy must be edgy, contemporary; ageing actors
must not be insulted; and recorded phone calls must have their
contributors' consent. "It's your BBC," they say, and then are surprised
when 37,000 viewers say what they think. What a moral muddle.

Television is about more than entertainment. It is part of the weave of
cultural life; the essence of what it means to live in Britain is to
have the kind of television we have. At his recent launch of Channel 4's
winter season, Julian Bellamy, the head of programming, said he would
not be reining in the bad language used by Jamie Oliver and Gordon
Ramsay. "It is," he said, "a real and authentic expression of how they
feel at the time." He was speaking after Michael Grade, the ITV chief,
and Andy Burnham, the culture secretary, had both called for less
swearing on television. Rather alarmingly, Bellamy said of the Ross-
Brand disaster: "You must not let occasional misjudgments tip us into a
new era of cultural conservatism and censorship."

Now, I am no cultural conservative: I am perhaps the only broadcaster to
go further than Ross and Brand, having, in my BBC2 series Taboo,
discussed the erect penis while actually surveying one naked - him, not
me - in the studio. It was my serious suggestion that such a spectacle
was not intrinsically corrupting and might have its natural place in a
play or film, and did not deserve to be censored. But it is not cultural
conservatism to want to discourage the progressive coarsening of our
comedy shows and reality programmes. There is censorship; but there is
also judgment. It is part of that public service remit to acknowledge
that some things are simply too offensive to too many people.

The people who manage television are clearly conscious of the collapse
in confidence in their institutions: they know that the scandals about
rigged quizzes and viewer deceptions have alienated much of their
audience. And this matters because they desperately need vocal public
support for the BBC's bid to renegotiate the licence fee; and, for ITV
and Channel 4, the deals to be struck with Ofcom about the degree of
subsidy they can expect, and whether this will come from the BBC's
licence money. They know that, besides being morally reprehensible, the
recent lapses in judgment could have serious financial consequences.

The BBC and ITV of the 60s and 70s were closed institutions: they
commanded the loyalty of their staff, who on signing up became entitled
to the use of canteens and clubs, welfare facilities and a pension at
retirement. The broadcasting and creative unions were strong, giving the
sense of an industry with common interests and unavoidably similar
values.

Today the BBC has no makeup department or costume design, no prop making
or set building; it has all been outsourced. The people who swarm
through its doors today are planners and marketing people, press
officers and managers. There are currently some 600-700 independent
programme-making companies, employing about 4,000 people - and making up
an increasing share of the broadcasting output. Many of these
independents are staffed by people who have never worked in the BBC or
any of the ITV companies. They may have been to one of the numerous
courses in journalism, but there are plenty who have not, and who
possess no grasp of libel law or the industry's own constraints on what
can be said and done. The 25-year-old who was ostensibly the producer of
Russell Brand's Radio 2 programme was employed by one such company:
Brand's own.

Not only is television's workforce disparate - it is also shifting. Just
when you might have been in a job long enough to absorb something of an
operating ethic, there are take-overs, sackings, mergers, management
restructuring. They don't happen once. They happen all the time. Where
in this organisational mayhem do recruits learn the basic probity that
once came with the weekly payslip? Why and how should anyone build up
any sense of loyalty when their lives are so precarious?

I am not one of those who speaks of a golden age, as if there are no
good programmes made today. I am well aware there are good programmes
made in a quantity that was impossible before the present range of
channels. But the 60s and 70s were certainly a golden age for producers
who knew that, while there were only three channels, there was space for
highly creative and challenging programmes. To give but one example:
from 1964 the Wednesday Play rode high with a reputation for daring new
ideas and styles. BBC1 screened more than 200 such plays in prime time.
They caused trouble, brought protests, and had swearing. But they were
made within a unique and shared concept of television that has gone.

This is not a cry to put the clock back: it would be both impossible and
in many regards undesirable. It was John Birt's great achievement to
prepare the BBC for the digital age, and to see through the launch of
its website into one of the most respected and popular in the world. But
I believe that we have come to a point in the road when considerable
reassessment is due of the values that have come to prevail in the west
over some 30 years. Are we forever to explain the low level of much
British television by the proliferation of channels? Is the issue of
standards really a race to compete with Rupert Murdoch?

I am struggling to hold on to what appears to be a vanishing concern:
how to rescue that sense of shared values - between the companies and
their staff, between the broadcasters and their audience - that has for
decades created a mutual understanding precious to maintaining a civic
entity. I believe - and I think broadcasters and their listeners and
viewers believe - that it would be a public good were a clear moral
framework to emerge as we move into ever more complicated forms of media
communication.

• This is an edited extract from the Hetherington Memorial Lecture,
delivered last night at the University of Stirling; read the full
version at guardian.co. uk/media

http://www.guardian .co.uk/commentis free/2008/ nov/20/bbc- television
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