ABSTRACT

For most of the BBC’s existence, the principle of ‘public service’ embodied in the 1926 Charter had not been the special preserve of the Corporation. Indeed, the idea that some organizations should operate for the public good and at the public expense was shared by all political parties, as well as the leaders of private industry and commerce, and ordinary voters. In the 1980s, however, the idea was strongly challenged for the first time. For broadcasters who had taken ‘public service’ for granted, life suddenly became uncomfortable. One problem was the issue of political independence. Institutions like the

BBC, whose raison d’être included the principle of impartiality, are never at ease with very ideological governments. Their distress becomes acute when there is only one party in office for a protracted period. In the case of public service broadcasting, it needs the threat of potential opposition power as a sabre to rattle warningly at governments. Yet, as the Conservative Party won one election after another from 1979 onwards, British politics became increasingly one-party rule. Indeed, the emergence of a coherent, highly ideological project for the transformation of British politics and society after 1982 put the BBC even more under threat. The new Thatcherite project was highly individualistic: it argued that

public interest could only be secured by maximizing the capacity of individuals to choose; and that government should seek to abandon controls, not exercise them. ‘Deregulating’, however, often had an ironic effect: a policy supposed to get government off people’s backs often turned out, in practice, to be highly centralizing. Frequently, fiercely dirigiste measures of deregulation became instruments for delegitimizing, eradicating and diminishing any institution or organization that had alternative views. In addition, the project could be a politicizing one. The fashionable neo-liberal creed often ignored cultural constraints: like scientific socialism in a different era, it was over-rational. ‘The New Right’, as John Gray points out, ‘failed to perceive the dependence

of individualistic civil society on a dwindling but real patrimony of common ideas, beliefs and values’. In other words, the possibility of extreme individualism depended on the cultural, educational structures that formed active,

independently minded individuals. Public service broadcasting had been founded precisely to shore up and improve the common store of ideas, values and knowledge. Thus, the story of public service broadcasting in the 1980s and 1990s had a far wider resonance than the question of whether people watch one chat show or another. It is a story of whether a plurality of voices can survive – and at what cost – in monolithic times. Of course, the BBC and all responsible broadcasters always are, always

have been, and always will be, worried about how to deal with politicians. The problem is that recently, handling politicians has become more important than making programmes, thinking of new programmes, relating creatively to audiences, or expressing what is going on within the nation. On the other hand, only if broadcasters abandon trying to provide a comprehensive and objective schedule, and opt instead for entertainment, will the pressures cease. In turn, all politicians seek to influence, cajole, bully, manipulate and

prejudice, if they can, how broadcasters deal with their affairs. Broadcasting is far too important to them for seemly good manners. Indeed, consideration of how the media will react is playing a larger part in political calculation than before. Policy, not just its presentation, is increasingly tuned to media reaction – despite, or perhaps because of, the declining capacity of media news organizations to interpret and process sophisticated news. In a sense, nobbling the media, however you do it, is just politics. However, what marked out the 1980s was that political pressure assumed

a new form. For the very first time since British broadcasting started in 1926, the issue became not merely what the BBC did, but whether it would survive at all. Indeed, to some members of the Conservative government, the BBC as an institution, and public service as an ideal, began to be seen as key obstacles to its attempt to revolutionize how Britain was run, and its ways of thinking. Public service was seen as the inefficient self-serving camouflage of groups who wanted to protect their own interests from the correcting force of competition. Mrs Thatcher put the case inimitably in her memoirs: ‘Broadcasting was one of those areas – the professions, such as teaching, medicine and the law were others – in which special pleading by powerful interest groups was disguised as high minded commitment to some common good’.1