ABSTRACT

By reflecting on changes in UK television production over the past decade, this chapter intends ultimately to point to cultural work to be done and, indeed, to make a contribution to that work. In the May 1997 British general election, New Labour achieved a landslide victory. Skeptics doubted that anything profound had changed in UK political culture, whilst the more optimistic found just talk of ethics and communitarian values a welcome corrective to the discourses of aggressive consumerism and individualistic self-reliance typical of the Tory years. The four years between New Labour’s first landslide victory and their second landslide victory of June 2001 have probably done more to confirm rather than dispel the skeptics’ doubts. Nonetheless, how far a cultural shift will be effected still remains to be seen, but it is important at least to keep open the conversation (in Rorty’s sense, 1989: 318). In Chapter 1 of this book, Graham Murdock does this by throwing an ethical-political light critically to illuminate the corporatizing dynamics of today’s cultural production. This chapter functions in that light.