Metabolising Britishness

Is there such a thing as ‘Britishness’? More than ever, being ‘British’ is voluntary, not necessary. What is it? Where can we find it? What part do the media play not merely in representing it but in forging changing national realities? What, indeed, about ‘Englishness’? If the nature of the union between the different nations that compromise Britain is a problem – then the meaning of the ‘English’ nation is even more perplexing. Even raising the subject seems, in one kind of way, indelicate. Is it somehow offensive to even mention the idea of the nation in which we belong but towards which we have complicated allegiances – or which we may feel barely a part of? Surely we are all global citizens, all have multiple identities, which we shuffle and balance? It is quite acceptable, it seems, to assert and celebrate religious and cultural differences, or ‘being Scottish’ – or any number of the national minorities that so gloriously complicate our communities. In any case, we often like to think of ourselves as rather doughty, beleaguered members of minorities bravely asserting our identity against the nasty (and large) nations, or nasty (and large) majorities. As we are frequently shockingly ignorant of the alternative lives of other people we live in close proximity with, many injustices still occur. But actually, it is quite hard to assert, for example, English working-class identity, without being suspect. Of course, ‘nationalism’ can be a very dangerous force and typically, in harsh economic times, it is an appallingly destructive one. But does that mean we should abandon any sense of a unique national identity? What part do the media play in relating us to a common predicament? The media, however inadequately, tell us both much of what we know of

others we live with, and even more of what we believe. Images are perhaps one thing; it is when insensitivity turns into acts which alter how people can lead their lives that we need to consider more carefully. Despite many forces dissolving the capacity of nation-states to determine their own future and the nature of the economic and political interconnectedness of international fate, nevertheless we still live in nation-states. We still go to school in them, we get treated by their healthcare systems (or not), are policed within them,

walk on national roads and drink national water. But do we live within them in our imaginations? Perhaps we have, here, a special problem. No one quite knows what it is

to be British. ‘Britishness’, British history, customs and habits seem especially questioned. Indeed, everywhere there is an anxious inspection of national tea leaves for what they might portend (except, of course, we British don’t drink as much tea as we used to – perhaps even our auguries have become unreliable?). What is ‘Britishness’? This is not the first tentatively anxious enquiry into the mystery. It tends to come up when people are uncertain about it – for if you are clear about what it is and that you feel it, there is no question to be asked. Despite the revolutions in how we live, are there continuing sensibilities and processes that provide a recognizable architecture to what we want to be? The problem is not that Britain has changed, but rather, whether we need

it any more. The national project has, it is argued, been unsettled by colliding forces which play out in confusingly opposite directions. The media have a direct and symbiotic relation to the mystery of the British constitution. Unlike America, or France or indeed Russia, we have no written constitution, no set of legal documents that specify what we are and the nature of the contract we have all made in order to agree to live together. Of course, written constitutions do not guarantee the good life in themselves (the Russians have had a magnificently liberal constitution for nearly a hundred years, but the written rules have had no impact on how Russians have lived during any of that time). The British tradition is unwritten, based on experience and case law and a great, fragile machine of institutions that operate (at their best) according to a flexible interpretation of the duties and rights of individuals and the collective good. The media, in different ways, are central to this – for better and for worse. So in one way the media in Britain, as well as holding local, regional and national political actions to account (or failing to), play an especially important – although informal – part in our collective condition. Nevertheless, slightly subversively, one might observe that ‘Britishness’,

and certainly the British constitution, have always been a muddle: we just have a new, emerging muddle which has given some power (but by no means all or the most sensible bits) to a new, fairer settlement, recognizing Scottish and Welsh relative autonomy, wanting to include rather than exclude groups and religions and ways of life. Messiness sometimes works rather well. However, the great contemporary priority is tidiness and writtendown-ness. The holy grail of ‘transparency’ has been understood to mean that codifying everything that moves is seen as a solution to abuses of power, when a code is often merely a map of formal relations – when the most deadly of transgressions might still flourish in what people actually do. Many propose that we should write down more of the rules into a more formal constitutional settlement, and in some areas this is just what has happened

over the last decade. Although the worry is that the muddle no longer has any coherence, simply tidying up ‘Britishness’ will not make it real. There are a number of things nibbling and gnawing at our sense of our

selves. Firstly, there is the most fundamental disappearance of the sense of the physical frontiers of the nation. The British now have almost no grasp of the fact that they are still ‘an island nation’ (let alone Shakespeare’s ‘sceptred isle’), as people come and go by air not sea, communicate by internet not mail, when the lives of other lands (India or Turkey) are all so easily accessible through the media, where TV land (even if grasped over the internet) or ‘Facebook land’ occupy a large space in people’s sense of themselves. The vivid apprehension of our coastal edges and what they have meant (and still mean) has almost disappeared, and while we are still more geographically aware than most Americans, and can identify Europe and the continents, we do not have a strong national image of our parameters. Even within these regional limits (perhaps in contrast to the social mixtures of the myriad of national groups from elsewhere that now compromise British society) there is a sense of dissolution. The most obvious way that ‘Britishness’ is under strain is the rise and rise

of nationalisms within the union. Scotland, and to a lesser extent Wales, bustle with novel institutions and ‘feel’ no Britishness – on the contrary, they often define themselves in opposition to it. Scotland apparently wants to be shot of ‘us’. The political scientist and commentator Anthony King has written a mordant and shrewd assessment of the state of the British constitution. He argues that the devolutionary engine we have landed ourselves with has an in-built friction that will inevitably lead to separation as the ‘nations’ demand more of the centre and set themselves in opposition to it. Then what about England? (Which, as a child a very long time ago, I just assumed was Britain; the titles seemed interchangeable – as they did to many writers in the late twentieth century.) King’s conclusions are marred by a sharp and magnificent glumness, but, despite some acute observations (a reformed House of Lords, the author fears, could wind up comprising ‘a miscellaneous assemblage of party hacks, political careerists, clapped-out retired or defeated MPs, has-beens, never-were’s and never-could-possiblybe’s’2), it is perhaps too deterministic. As recent political and economic crises unfold a new sense of the need for the larger union may again emerge. But more profoundly his analysis is limited by a blindness to the shifting nature of power in every aspect of contemporary lives. In particular, he misses the huge, society-wide shifts in power that are the

cultural consequences of media technological change. Power has moved from producers to some aspects of consumer choice. Across all of the media industries there is a real revolution going on, from the music industry to the mutating publishing trade, to news, and from surveillance to consuming, in every aspect of private lives and societies there is a technologically driven Wild West frontier remaking old relationships of authority. This is not the utopia we were promised; there are many aspects that damage common and

collective goods. But it is irreversible and has tremendous unfolding consequences. Constitutional change must mirror a new compact that other forces are making with British citizens. The shape of power is changing, and what a nation is must change with it. There are many separatist enthusiasts around in the political and intellectual

classes. It is nevertheless perhaps worth noting that at least some of the advocates for the ‘break up’-of-Britain scenario tend to ignore Northern Ireland, which is far more settled in Ireland and in the EU and in the union than it has been for thirty years of bloody, grinding conflict, not least because, as Roy Foster shows in a tour de force of evidence and argument in The Luck of the Irish, the Irish state has changed out of all recognition – although in fits and starts. He sardonically points out with a certain glee that none of this has happened in any of the ways in which the instigators of the conflict hoped or predicted. Because Ireland has become secular, feminized, venal, successful, vulgar, and the very last thing it wants or is interested in is Northern Ireland.3 But perhaps Northern Ireland – for so long the most agitated of the nations – has become an inconvenient and complicating reality that many of the protagonists of dissolution prefer to ignore. While the political geography of the nation is fretfully bothersome (were

Scotland to declare independence the political geography of voting would consign England to a one-party state for the foreseeable future), the issue of national identity has been dislocated by many other forces as well. Many other aspects of ‘geography’, and indeed social and political landscapes, have disappeared. As Robert Colls points out in his troubled interrogation of national spirit, a ‘local’ and ‘regional’ map of Britain recognizable since 1840, at which policies were directed and in which people lived, has been replaced since the Thatcher government of the 1980s by a range of uncoordinated, unlocated ‘schemes’ and agencies driven by a multiplicity of public/ private bodies. What they have instead of region or local as a driving force is ‘efficiency’, and these ‘agencies’ have measured their achievements in (sometimes invented) ‘markets’ – not by how they elicit and represent different local interests. Colls observes, ‘as forces not entirely of the centre, nor in the centre, yet structured by the centre they came to replace the discourse of “geographical region” or “away from the centre”’. With this new way of talking the periphery ceased to be just geographical. ‘At a time when the centre lost the confidence in its power to order things and the metropolis felt less responsible for the rest of the country, the old national shape began to dissolve. This truly odd condition prevails’.4 Indeed, the whole landscape of Britain has disappeared since the 1970s, as factories became (in a way best captured by the dystopian novels of J. G. Ballard) ‘gated communities’ and ‘lofts’, while Methodist chapels – which were the engines of moral and political reform of the industrial revolution and after – have become paint shops. Cities and towns and the British countryside have all mutated, died away and sparked to life under many different pressures. Some cities have

been rekindled by government policies which have promoted new kinds of commercial development. Yet, glamorous new areas in Manchester, London, Liverpool, coexist beside enduringly poor areas. However, public spaces in cities have been revitalized in the past decade – money has gone into parks and decent play areas for children as an expression of a common value. But Colls points to a perturbing lack both of locality and of nation in our ideas of ourselves. There are aspects of ‘Britishness’ that are above locality, although no doubt

also shaped by it. There is certainly uniquely ‘British’ media ecology. It is altering fast under the pressures that are causing media industries everywhere to adapt or to disappear. Nevertheless it remains a very particular process. It has balanced a partisan press – which, like the press everywhere, is in sharp economic decline, but which is hanging on better here than in many other places – with a broadcasting landscape that is still ‘impartial’ and non-partisan. It has seen, most catastrophically, an absolute decline in local and regional news vehicles. How can Wales understand itself with only one local newspaper? How can councils operate without the scrutiny that the local media used to bring? We are losing the capacity to think locally. Yet the business patterns of the British media are distinctive, and so too is

the tone. The popular press is far less polite than the American press, and, although often appallingly irresponsible, not corrupted to the extent of the Italian press; religion plays less a part than it does in Holland, and radical news less a part than it does in France – and so on. But the determining difference is the existence of impartial news. The top of the British press has become more intelligent and more comprehensive: the opposite has occurred at the bottom. While individual opinions and views flood the net, those that get megaphoned by broadcasting are still largely managed in the pursuit of representative and balanced views. You may want to swamp the broadcasters with your opposition to a view or a programme, but they will still, in the public interest, interrogate your position, evaluate it and contextualize it. ‘Impartiality’, objectivity and the fierce contest about the limits of free speech are still features of the complicated media scene here. This has important repercussions for our understanding of international events Then there is the class system. It has been very unfashionable to discuss

class recently, yet differences still persist. Moreover, class and shifting class images are clearly represented in changing media systems and the changing fortunes of different media, as well as the more obvious symptom of content. The poor (what Orwell called ‘the common man’, and what we have learnt to call ‘the socially excluded’ – what, one wonders will another government call them?), the unhappy, how we talk to our children (or increasingly and horrifying fail to), the elderly, the changed role of women and the extraordinary challenges for young men, these are everywhere and common. How to think of the best nurture for young lives when children and parents have legal rights but there is no way of discussing in court the only thing a child can

thrive in – a home with, however it is constituted, a family – is a shared issue. When we talk and think of the nation, surely we also mean such broad sociological realities that together give us the flavour of the life within it. We also mean literature, plays, art, architecture, design, films, dance, music, humour: we mean sensibilities and environments. These broader realities are shaped in collaboration with the media. The next big challenges to ‘Britishness’ are the Siamese-twinned issues of

the multi-faith, multi-ethnic, multi-ness and the conjoined question of limits to the elasticity of ‘Britishness’. ‘Multiculturalism’ has been a shorthand way of talking about the first set of issues, and the very title shows how important the media have been to this. Finding representative voices, reaching out to communities, learning sensibilities, has been one side of the task. Discriminations have been fought with differing degrees of success. Just as the British way of dealing with these realities has been very different from, for example, the German way, so our media response has also been different. There are national differences in how to confront a shared experience of more varied societies. Yet there is another side to the problem – which was hardly mentionable

until recently. Is there a lowest common denominator of consensus about what defines belonging, which cannot be breached? Have we worried too much about diminishing hostility to new pieces in the national jigsaw and not worried enough about whether there is a shared reality? On the one hand, there is the problem identified so well by Geoff Dench in his work on the East End, that thirty years of well-meaning ‘triage’ in cash-strapped public services, housing, health and education have, in rationally allocating recourses to the neediest incomers from abroad, accidentally actively disadvantaged a section of the British working class, with disastrous political consequences.5 On the other hand, there is the problem of including and celebrating many differences. Finally, to be a nation, there has to be a sense of exceptionalism, of a

unique inheritance and worldview. Often such a concept of destiny has been forged through conflict with an outside force. Raphael Samuel argued ‘national sentiment as a historical force can hardly be studied without reference to the demonisation of enemies both within and without’.6 Yet the last national story that we could tell ourselves that had a legitimate and satisfactory ‘us and them’ in it – the story of the Second World War – fades and loses purchase. For several generations a sense of British ‘exceptionalism’ had been based on a myth, but also a powerful reality, and that is now increasingly frail. Nevertheless, this ‘us versus them’ view of national identity is a fairly conventional view, and there can be a more generous interpretation of pleasure in a heritage. The life of nations depends on how the past is lined up with the present.

This seems the great failure and a great opportunity of the moment we are struggling through. One of the things we need to revitalize is an

unembarrassed national history once more. ‘A nation’, claimed Edmund Burke in 1782, ‘is not only an idea of local extent, but it is an idea of continuity, which extends in time as well as numbers and in space’. Terry, a character in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads on the BBC, commented in 1973, ‘Not one of our memories is left intact’. Most people simply don’t know what matters about our history any more. Moreover, in a nation which has always used history to explore itself (just as the French have philosophers, and the Americans have political economists and Hollywood, we have history) there is a loss of historical memory and ways of remembering. Indeed, this is more than ever important, as in much of the wider academy, at least, there has been an almost complete abandonment of ‘Britishness’ as a source of understanding or study. Some universities, turned into businesses, have ducked the challenging task of rethinking a fit-for-purpose way of scrutinizing the Britishness of disciplines. Thus, despite being equipped with cohorts of able historians, many of whom still aspire to write stylish, clear English, we have been dreadful at re-inspecting our history collectively. A coy discomfort at aspects of the story has led us to bury it. We have recently failed to tell children any coherent (let alone interesting) national story. While they are taught about Hitler and the Tudors, older students learn little of the nineteenth-century struggle for the franchise; and while it is true that all 10-year-olds learn about an empire in school, it is not ours, of course, it is the Spanish empire and the Incas that they toil over. Who lives where and how on the streets of Britain is shaped by our history. So surely, by now we could confront the awfulness and the admirableness of our own imperial past? Meanwhile ‘globalization’, despite being a more peculiar process, with

more complex impacts than almost any of the ‘theorists’ who easily proclaim it have recognized, does mean that we share some cultures internationally – and perhaps lose our own. Yet, conversely, one of the most disturbing aspects the ‘globalization’ of the media is that it has led to cross-continental cultural ghettos and silos of narrow interests in which people only encounter the like-minded. ‘Nation shall speak unto nation’ – the BBC’s founding mission is far easier than it used to be, but it is far harder to get people to pay attention to anything other than the familiar and comfortable. Moreover, there is a wider sense of tectonic plates moving: Brazil, China and India are storming into the world arena. Where do we fit into this new, emerging map, and does anyone care? There is another problem: this is not about what we may or may not have

lost, but about the dominant way of thinking about ‘Britishness’. It has become common to see a sense of the nation as a plastic and fluid construct. Linda Colley’s stimulating and influential book Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, in itself an attempt by someone who, as she explained, was not clear that she would go on living and working in Britain, was a pioneering example of this. In an authoritative and original account, she demonstrates

that a British identity was ‘forged’ in the eighteenth century out of popular anti-Catholicism and the real threats of French aggression, but also the comfort of watching successes in wars abroad with little direct experience of the reality at home, and out of a reworked monarchy. The British state predated the ‘idea’ of Britain. However, she also argues that there was a material basis to a sense of nationhood: ‘For all classes and both sexes, patriotism was more often than not a rational response and a creative one as well’.7 She is clear that the contemporary media played a large role in this nation-constructing enterprise. Elsewhere the notion of the constructed nature of nationality gained ground. Benedict Anderson’s definition of nations as ‘imagined communities’ was influential, as were, in a way, a wonderful set of essays edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition,8 which considered, with a glorious wit, the ways in which ideas of nationality were invented and accepted (I learnt that those kilts I had worn were the late survival of a Highland fantasy). But while Colley was austerely aware that the enterprise of founding a national collective project was precarious and vital, for many of the other writers, as all national sentiment was really little more than a ruling-class trick, there was the sense of the ridiculousness of much national invention, and its ephemeral duplicity. We have ended up with a comforting, moralized version of fluidity in which ‘the nation’ is seen as endlessly plastic. Indeed, many who have written about the media have persuasively written about the media’s capacity to alter and mould: but never asked questions about limits. These ideas of national remaking were picked up eagerly – and bowdlerized.

In a world where advertising can mould desires with such ease, why not remake – or ‘rebrand’ as it came to be called – the nation? Anthony Giddens, who famously thinks history is irrelevant, as it happened in the past, with his ‘Third Way’ was, in effect, one such immensely powerful, ‘rebrander’, while Mark Leonard’s branding Britain is another version of the same idea. We are in another bout of ‘designer’ Britishness now. Thus, what started out in the past as an empirical interrogation of collective processes in the hands of accomplished historians has turned into something quite different. It turned into a proposal to ‘redesign’ Britishness. New, more sellable ways to describe us were advanced with breathy excitement, for it was suggested if you could describe us differently, perhaps, hey-presto, we would be different. It was an essentially propagandistic and certainly ideological view of Britishness, self-consciously shaped for selling us to ourselves and abroad. The idea was especially attractive because it proposed a way of harnessing

the power of the media into a reinvention of our purposes. The media do indeed seep into and chemically alter much of our collective lives, and the mix of outlets that we have ended up with says all sorts of things about the national psyche. The British popular press, gaudy, sentimental, ruthless and dispiriting, is increasingly brutal with ordinary lives as well as with the more powerful (think Sally Clarke, the women who was wrongly convicted of

murdering two babies, on the basis of misleading expert evidence for which the expert has lost his job, and a local and national press campaign, for which no one lost their job – or ever apologized). The press tells us little about the wide world we find ourselves in, and in increasing cash-strapped times is marked by a narrow provincialism. Nevertheless, it is occasionally savagely truth telling, more often hysterical and ruthless – as only a wounded beast can be. Meanwhile, the utopia of better-informed, more intelligent and more deeply contextualized information is provided by a whole range of media – for the stratum of the educated and wealthy. In this way the prospect of ‘using’ the media to rebrand us looks like a way of managing the media to mould us for more useful ends – nevertheless, you cannot ‘remake’ Britishness as an advertising campaign. It will not work, because – dears – that is not what the ‘British’ are prepared to put up with. Actually, in such stubborn, prosaic refusals may still lie a national sentiment we can conjure with. Indeed, ‘Britishness’ can only be a co-production. The public has to collab-

orate – but will only do so in something that is useful and meaningful to it. ‘Britishness’ cannot be done to us – it has also to bubble up. This is especially the case in times of crisis – which has often been forgotten by the happy-clappy evangelists of re-engineering national identity. ‘Britishness’ has to be grounded in the soil of contemporary life, even if that is unsettling. Unfortunately, modern political and academic language is saturated with the easy encomiums of the seminar room, in which people ‘negotiate’ meanings and ‘discourses’ are ‘contested’. But these words disguise the reality of sharply felt losses and brutish triumphs. It is the real needs and desires of the public, not mythologized or convenient ones, that is the place to start a proper dusting down of Britishness. Being British is more voluntary than it has ever seemed before, but it has to start from realities. So is there anything ‘British’ left? Where can we look for our exceptionalism?

Actually, there is more of it around than people think: they look for it in the wrong places. But it is not a set of ‘things’ or ‘essences’. George Orwell, whose writing critically (and at times romantically) inquired into the British condition so influentially in the twentieth century once characterized British life as ‘Heavy breakfasts and gloomy Sundays’. Although Orwell’s essays still resonate with brilliant insights and indeed offer a model of scrutiny and wit, there is no point in trying to pin down ‘Britishness’ to any such list: Orwell’s modesties have been swept away in a blizzard of shopping. The Conservative Prime Minister John Major’s attempt to specify Britishness as ‘maiden aunts on bicycles and warm beer’ certainly never hit the mark, even in the late twentieth century. Early New Labour’s ‘Cool Britannia’ has been spat out. Yet there are qualities which, on closer scrutiny, endure, although some of them we may find deeply unattractive: that surely is part of the British point. The ‘media’ play a special role in representing (and at times whipping

up) national characteristics. But what is unusual in Britain is that British

‘exceptionalism’ has been defined and reinforced by a unique media institution which has played a role in metabolizing the nation’s sense of itself, but which has also represented ‘Britishness’ abroad: the BBC. The Corporation may, or may not, survive the next decade of rocky problems, with technology, rapacious international businesses – perhaps even more threatening than domestic political vandalism – and a certain capacity for auto-destructiveness posing a set of interrelated looming threats. Nevertheless, inspecting how it has done Britishness is illuminating. The Corporation has an obligation to the nation because it is for the nation – so it has endlessly to try to sort out what the nation is. Mainly, the BBC metabolizes the nation by worrying about it. It adds reflective anxiety and creative imagination to the problems it confronts. This is clearly a quality in news and journalism: but it is as much an issue in drama and documentary and in the very administrative principles of the thing. In particular, it is the ‘newsiness’ of the programming in general – the way in which news provides moral and political climate for other kinds of creativity – and in turn the embedded nature of news in the wider programme-making milieu, that can make for a fertile and sensitive Petri-dish culture. Of course, the BBC cannot and does not survive alone, but that, perhaps, is the point. It is enmeshed in ways of doing things and values elsewhere in other British institutions. So examining what it does tells us something about it, but it may also tell us something more general about the puzzle of us and our present uncertainties. The Corporation metabolizes Britain (when it gets it right) by airing its

virtues; by bestowing recognition on groups, issues, achievements, and failures; by including the mad aunts and errant teenagers in the family group; by show-casing and polishing up the crown jewels of culture; by washing as much of the dirty linen as it can find right out there in the street and by taking the mickey out of the whole attempt. The Corporation has been able to do this because it is part of the British

‘unwritten’ and informal constitution and, as such, it has related to the British public as citizens, but in a quite different way from any other official body. It consumes an alternative set of data about the British people on the move socially, technologically and aesthetically from any department of state: for it lives in the minds and hearts and imaginations of people at play. People have always had to choose to spend their time with the BBC, and even though the competition for attention has become far more intense, the Corporation has always had to win and woo. So it has never been able to ignore what the people want for long (although it has at some times been out of step with the national mood, and at others it has been able to express and lead it). Yet, at the same time it is enjoined to engage with the public not only as consumers but as members of an evolving society. So the BBC’s sense of the nation is at an angle to any government’s. The BBC metabolizes the nation materially by distributing recourses

according to a political and citizenship map of Britain, not an economic or

market one. The media have, over time, been given many privileges: even very broadly defined as the content-producing organizations they still are. They acquired these benefits because, ultimately, they have to serve the public good. The argument for this remains simple: in democracies, electorates need to be recognized and informed; now there is plenty of information available, but navigating it or having attention focused on the things that matter is far more difficult. Distributing resources has meant access to radio, television and now digital technologies, and reshaping the production and ideas map of the country. If the BBC is national, then it has somehow to be part of the wider nation. This is so ‘taken for granted’ that it is almost invisible in the British mind, yet it has been a powerful engine of integration. A shrewd media regulator, Ofcom, which is empowered to try to make sure that the commercial and public roles of the digital and broadcasting industries are properly conducted, observed that the whole of the independence tussle was being played out in Scotland ‘through the prism of broadcasting’. Yet there is a devilish paradox in the drama unfolding north of the border: market forces alone would not support an independent production market of any size in Scotland, yet the Corporation is being asked to invest in one. Those campaigning for this are not interested in a better service for any audience, but in developing an economic capacity at home: and yet the decision to invest such resources can only come (and is coming rather generously) from the ‘British’ BBC: the logic of economic and political decisions is quite different. Then there is the ‘representing the nation’ to itself. This is, in part, an

issue of representing the bits of the nation to themselves, partly an issue of representing the bits of the nation to the whole and partly a matter of correcting the overall picture by the nuancing that regional perspectives and realities bring. It has done each task variably well over time, at sometimes falling into clichés, but at others creatively harvesting local differences and local contributions to enrich the national brew. Some of this is to do with news, putting the nations and regions on the collective mind-map, as keeping them alert to their own condition is one part of the task. It requires political will. But metabolizing the nation has to be continually reinvented. Take

Northern Ireland: the BBC in the 1960s and the early 1970s was part of the problem that was about to erupt. It was staffed solely by members of the Protestant community, failed to ‘see’ the minority community and was unreflectively ‘Unionist’. But slowly it became more responsive, its staff became more representative, the voices it gave access to became more varied, and then, as the troubles gathered venom, it evolved into an admirably pioneering institution. This was a matter both of getting the balance of staff, news stories, plays, documentaries and children’s programmes appropriately right to the local audiences and of telling that story into the rest of Britain. Yet at first, when the sensitivity to the variety of Northern Irish voices had

improved, another error emerged: an understandable attempt to emphasize the positive distorted the story yet again. The BBC had to learn that it did not exist in order to ‘build the peace’ or ‘build the community’. Later still, visiting journalists from London, hungry for a scoop and some drama but who did not appreciate the local consequences of stories, had to be managed: they were too unresponsive to local meanings. Another corrective lesson: the BBC did not exist to tell exciting stories that were over-dramatized; ‘stars’ hunting for scoops did damage to the reality on the ground, and that reality was too important to be oversold back on the mainland. Yet, and this is also true, the visiting, observing journalist was also an important part of carrying meanings from community to community. ‘Outsiders’ brought something to the mix in the province and to the understanding on the mainland. Over time, the BBC learnt how to do it – and on the way produced a world-class news outfit in the region. Pat Loughrey, the first Catholic to be appointed to a senior position there,

and now Head of the Regions and Nations for the BBC, argued that the single most important programme that started the move in Northern Ireland was a phone-in called Talk Back, a loud, opinionated, shouting shop at first. There was political pressure to close it down, as it was thought to incite inter-communal violence, but the BBC held steady. After ‘about five years of both communities screeching poisonously at each other, they got it out of their system, realised there was a space in which they could be heard, and then they started to listen to each other’.9 This is one key way the BBC does Britishness: by listening to and allowing an arena for the variety of voices that reflect real communities. But in Northern Ireland the struggle to get it right was part of the bigger solution: there are no easy, quick fixes to attempting to be truthful.10