In May 2003, a chance sighting of a feature article on Adolf Hitler in an edition of the ‘middlebrow’ magazine Homes and Gardens published in 1938 led to a global dispute over the ownership of a set of longforgotten photographs of the Führer. Simon Waldman, the director of digital publishing at The Guardian newspaper, was intrigued by the ‘Hello!-style’ article that appeared to celebrate the dictator's country lifestyle (Waldman, 2003). Wanting to share the revelation with a wider audience, Waldman scanned the article and posted it on his personal weblog (online diary). As news spread of the feature, the weblog saw a dramatic rise in traffic, with many readers worldwide posting messages with comments on the finding. Waldman decided to highlight the massive interest in the article to the publisher of Homes and Gardens, IPC Media, one of the UK's leading magazine publishers, with a view to finding out more about the feature and its origins. Waldman received a prompt response from the magazine editor citing copyright regulations and requesting the immediate removal of the scanned article from his website. Surprised by this tactic to suppress the article, Waldman removed the article but posted the correspondence with IPC on his weblog. Suddenly, the episode became the centre of a lively debate on international copyright laws and whether IPC had a right to prevent an article of such historical curiosity from being circulated on the Internet.

High Court action, debt-laden media corporations, threatened strike action, collapsed pay-TV ventures and attempts to woo audiences with a puppet monkey: the marriage of the media and sport has taken some peculiar turns at the start of the new century. For most people, most of the time, sport means media sport. The media set our parameters of what sport means in society, and they offer our most regular contact with sporting heroes. Sport is one of the most cherished forms of media content, and broadcasting rights to access sporting events have become a central feature of the media economy.

The industries of sport and the media are inexorably intertwined. One cannot pick up a newspaper, watch television news or browse the Internet without noticing the ubiquitous nature of sport across all media forms. As new information and communication technologies are innovated at an incredible pace, so the appetite for sports content follows closely behind. There can be little doubt that the relationship between the two industries has been transformed in the multichannel age. However, the promised new audiences for digital television platforms, broadband Internet and third-generation (3G) mobile phones and heightened streams of income for sport have largely failed to materialise. If we take the case of the most popular media sport, football, more clubs are in debt than ever before as player salaries escalate and pay-TV channels struggle to sustain their investment in the sport in the wake of an advertising slump and a slowdown in new subscribers (Boyle and Haynes, 2004).

Introduction: Internet redux

When the Internet truly took off as a mass medium in 1996 in the guise of the World Wide Web, it was like an untamed wilderness ripe for discovery, and new users marvelled at the wondrous and instantaneous way in which information and images could be pulled to their desktops from around the world. It was an uncharted digital landscape with endless potential and possibilities. In 2005, a mere nine years later, our perception of the web is somewhat different. The first wave of e-commerce has come and gone, and lessons have been learnt. The survivors of the dot.com boom and bust of the early millennium – Amazon, Google, Yahoo, e-Bay – are now the doyens of the web, drawing strength from their global customer base and the ubiquitousness of their brands. More and more of us are happy to immerse ourselves in the virtual worlds of the Internet and to browse, buy and bank online. But perhaps most importantly in the context of media rights, more and more of what we do online and the ways in which the online world is organised are sanctioned by licence agreements, registration and contracts all protected under the sign of intellectual-property law. The analogy of the Internet as a wide-open frontier offering a brave new world is a common one, but so too is the belief that huge tracts of this virtual world are being fenced off for exclusive use available at a price.

Introduction

The balancing act that copyright attempts to achieve between the author of a work and the circulation of information and cultural knowledge that we analysed in the previous chapter has come under increasing attack. As the citation above by Lawrence Lessig suggests, the turn in what some have called the ‘digital moment’ (Vaidhyanathan, 2001) and others have interpreted as the ‘digital dilemma’ (National Research Council, 2000) has collapsed the distinctions between media producers and media consumers. While the use and reuse of media in cultural creativity is not necessarily a new thing, from jazz to hip-hop, it is the ability of more and more people to create and disseminate their creative output which is new and potentially radical.

Mark Thompson's MacTaggart Lecture identifies a ‘creative deficit’ in British television resulting in many programmes appearing ‘dull and mechanical and samey’. The culprit is not competition (identified by David Liddiment in the 2001 MacTaggart Lecture), which can have positive effects, but a twofold conservatism: the ‘risk-aversion of the schedule’ in tandem with ‘an older cultural conformism’. Even Channel 4, which was initially inspired by a commitment to risk, diversity, originality and a schedule in which ‘everything was an experiment’, has become ‘distracted by its ambitious digital plans’ and allowed its ‘creative decision-making to become too centralised and risk-averse’.

Thompson argues that Channel 4 must be revitalised to resume its place as ‘the creative space in the centre of British television’ where it must offer a distinctive kind of public-service programming to the BBC: ‘an improvised rhythm of experimentation and alternative ideas against the steady drum-beat of information, education and entertainment’. To achieve this, Thompson promises a fundamental review and restructuring of the schedule at Channel 4. But creative thinking alone will not suffice: the channel faces financial and other difficulties. Thompson rejects privatisation since ‘independence is a vital part of Channel 4's DNA’, but hints at the need for public support in the deregulated television market place. Government legislation, moreover, promises to liberalise media ownership in the commercial sector – creating the prospect of a single owner for Channel 3 – with evident and deleterious implications for the public sector of broadcasting, including Channel 4.

Dennis Potter begins his eloquent lecture by warning his audience that he does not wish to be kind or gentle: his ambition is to ‘land a few blows on some of the nastiest people besmirching our once-fair land’: especially on that ‘pair of croak-voiced Daleks’ (John Birt and Marmaduke Hussey) who head the BBC. Potter argues that the BBC is currently under attack and ‘driven on to the back foot’ by an ideologically motivated and malicious government, aided and abetted by supine managers at the BBC who have responded by taking ‘several more steps backward’. The creative culture of the BBC is being replaced by ‘management culture’, articulated via a ‘dogma-driven rhetoric’.

Television which used to offer a ‘window on the world’ has been ‘ripped apart’ and reassembled by politicians and cost accountants who now decide ‘what we can and cannot see on our screens’. Potter argues that we must build defences to protect broadcasting and democracy from the occupying powers of business, bureaucratic management and politicians. There must be regulation to control the growing concentration of ownership and the expansion of cross-media ownership. This simple act of ‘public hygiene’ might temper abuse, widen choice and maybe even return ‘broadcasting to its makers’.

The theme of this lecture is the ‘crisis’ facing British television triggered by the departure of ‘talent’ – by which Janet Street-Porter means ‘everyone who makes a difference to what hits the screen’. The cause of this malaise is television management, which has typically been composed of ‘“M” people’ – ‘Middle-class, Middle-brow, Middle-aged and Male, Masonic in their tendencies and, not to put to fine a point on it, fairly Mediocre.’ The final problem with M people is that there have ‘always been too many of them’.

The other problem with television is its structure. Senior managers, moreover, have lost any sense of purpose and have become ‘conservative, risk-averse caretakers of creaky structures and out of date formula shows’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, audiences for such programming are diminshing. Talent itself has contributed to the malaise in two ways. First, by cynically linking ‘commerce and crap’, talent has failed to recognise that making the highest quality programmes for the most discerning audiences will generate the greatest opportunities. Second, talent seeking promotion has typically moved into management for higher pay. Structures must be put in place which reward creative people for staying in creative jobs where they can deliver most value.

David Elstein's concern is to explore the Thatcher legacy to broadcasting which, he argues, is characterised by a shift away from social values to market forces as the key engines driving broadcasting. The Peacock Committee initiated this ‘sea-change’ by introducing notions such as consumer sovereignty and competition into programming considerations. Significantly, the Peacock Committee exceeded its brief by largely ignoring the BBC, while proposing ‘the groundwork for a powerful attack on ITV’.

Elstein argues that the 1988 White Paper (Broadcasting in the 1990s: Competition, Choice and Quality) and the subsequent Broadcasting Act 1990, with their requirements for the allocation of ITV franchises by auction, the financial restructuring and sale of ITN, the separation of Channel 4 from ITV and the creation of Channel 5, will have damaging effects on the commercial sector of broadcasting and lead to the ‘demise of those high-cost, high-quality programmes like Poirot [and] Who Bombed Birmingham?’

Elstein concludes that only the BBC is ‘currently immune to these commercial pressures’ but he queries ‘will it remain so?’ He suggests the licence fee will continue to provide funding for the BBC although his preference is for subscription, which he argues provides ‘the safest, most socially equitable, most politically insulated form of funding the BBC’.

Greg Dyke attacks what he describes as the ‘culture of dependency’ in UK television which subjects broadcasters to an increasing dependence on government ‘in some cases for their very existence and, in the commercial sector, for their financial success’. He argues that it is ‘not the role of broadcasters to spend their time currying favour with the government’ since this is antipathetic to one of the fundamental activities of broadcasters in a mature democracy: namely posing challenging and critical questions to government. But the Broadcasting Act 1990 sent a message to the ITV companies that ‘being a business was more important than being a broadcaster’. The result has been a shift in power to business executives rather than managers with a background in programme-making; programming promptly loses it critical edge.

Dyke alleges it was the relationship between Murdoch and Thatcher which ‘really changed the nature of the game’. This Faustian pact meant Thatcher enjoyed the political support of the Murdoch press while News International's majority ownership of BSkyB was exempted from consideration by broadcasting legislation. ‘The lesson was there for all to see: lobbying … was clearly effective.’

Just as T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock laments ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons’, British broadcasters could equally have measured out their lives with MacTaggart Lectures. From the early explorations of naturalism by John McGrath and Marcel Ophuls to John Humphrys’ accusation that some programming has become ‘meretricious, seedy and cynical’, the MacTaggart Lectures have offered us a route map across the shifting sands of British broadcasting, a compelling insight into the preoccupations, passions and ambitions of television's leaders. Bob Franklin is to be congratulated for compiling this unique collection of the MacTaggart lectures which offer readers invaluable insights into the development of television policy across three decades.

At the end of August every year, hundreds and now thousands of television workers, from young students trying to break into the industry to media moguls, gather in Edinburgh to hear the MacTaggart. The atmosphere resembles the beginning of the school term where the pupils come to hear what one of the senior teachers has to say or perhaps to a hushed cathedral waiting for a major sermon from a senior archbishop. Indeed, for many years the lecture was actually held in a church so British television's great and good solemnly squeezed into rows of rock-hard pews to hear the McTaggart Lecture delivered as if from heaven. The current venue, the McEwan Hall at Edinburgh University, with its grand D-shaped hall and elegant semi-circular galleries, has the grandeur and scale of a cathedral even if it isn't one and was in fact built by a brewing philanthropist.

Denis Forman argues that while technology has created the new broadcast delivery systems of cable and satellite, these developments are unimportant compared to the quality of the programming which they deliver. It is time we ‘directed our attention not so much to the messenger as to the message’. It is crucial to persuade politicians, with their privatising ambitions and monetarist policies that ‘the true value of our business lies in our programmes’.

The collapse of the plan to cable Britain offers testament to this view: ‘not many people are willing to pay … for a service that … is made up of the cheapest television programmes’. Direct broadcasting by satellite (DBS) will eventully be a success, but the rate of penetration will be slow until ‘you decide on the programme policy’.

Consequently, the future of broadcasting seems to rest ‘in the hands of the duopoly’. But there are problems here: sins both of commission and omission. First, senior managers seem more concerned with profits above programming, but ‘efficiency is the enemy of originality’. Second, idolatry and the worship of false gods such as ratings. Third, the sins of omission exemplified by timidity and cautiousness in programme-making. Finally, the failure to confront government challenges to freedom of expression such as the Official Secrets Act, as well as governments’ increasing commitments to news management.

Peter Jay criticises the current overregulation of broadcasting and outlines a possible future organisation for what he prefers to describe as ‘electronic publishing’: his assumption is that the problem of ‘spectrum scarcity’, which provided the original rationale for regulation, has been overcome. ‘Within less than two decades,’ he argues, we will inhabit ‘a world in which there will be no technically based grounds for government interference in electronic publishing.’

Jay sets out his vision. Every household will be connected by an interactive fibre optic link which allows ‘the nation's viewers’ to ‘simultaneously watch as many different programmes as the nation's readers can read different books, magazines and newspapers’. The television becomes like a telephone. Viewers dial to select programmes, a meter monitors quantity and kind of programmes selected and the television set is connected to a ‘central black box’ which is fed with ‘an indefinitely large number of programmes’ and which is maintained by British Telecom. Consumers buy programmes on a pay-to-view basis.

Jay believes this future form of electronic publishing will encapsulate and reflect in its structures, the principles of consumer sovereignty, freedom and choice. It requires no regulatory laws other than the general provisions for libel, copyright and obscenity, which already govern publishing. The state may wish to continue ‘to subsidise any particular categories of electronic publishing which are considered virtuous or in the public interest’.

John Humphrys addresses two connected themes. First, bad television has become ‘damaging. Meretricious. Seedy. Cynical’ and harms society; second, if journalists engage in self-censorship post-Hutton this will harm democracy. The Hippocratic Oath offers a sound principle for broadcasters and journalists – ‘First do no harm’.

Humphrys invited sixteen Channel Controllers to send him ten tapes illustrating the ‘case for television’. Having watched them, he concluded that the ‘best television’ is ‘better than ever’ but the worst has become preoccupied with sex, confrontation, aggression and violent language, ‘even in the soaps’. Reality TV is the real culprit. It turns ‘human beings into freaks for us to gawp at’ and, significantly, ‘erodes the distinction between the public and the private’. Three defences are offered. The ‘Blue Planet’ defence emphasises the availability of quality programming, market apologists claim they are simply meeting public demand for certain kinds of programmes, while the ‘no brow’ argument suggests that programming should no longer be classified into high or low brow, but simply as ‘no brow’. But Humphrys argues that good television ‘cannot pay the dues of the bad when the bad is indefensible’. Ofcom should intervene to prevent the supply of these ‘debit goods’ on terrestrial services in much the same way that it attempts to secure the provision of ‘merit goods’.

John McGrath shapes his recollections of working with James MacTaggart in London in the early 1960s into what Troy Kennedy Martin (1986) described as a ‘swingeing attack on naturalism’. Naturalism he argues imposes a certain ‘neutrality about life on the writer, the actor and the audience’: it presents a world that is ‘static, implied and ambivalent’.

McGrath argued that the television image is not conducive to naturalist drama because it lacks sensuality. While a cinema screen can ‘flood the senses’, a ‘television shot is at best nice’: it is akin to listening ‘to a symphony over the telephone’. Also, it lacks empathy: viewers are ‘looking at the screen, not being drawn into it’. Finally, television images are situated in the context of reported reality: viewers watching television drama will have witnessed, ‘napalmed women in Vietnam running about on fire’.

The ‘new drama’ which emerged required a style of ‘writing, directing, designing, sound plotting and lighting which was specifically for the lens of a television camera, not for the opera house’. James MacTaggart who produced and directed a series called Storyboard, The Wednesday Play and Diary of a Young Man was crucial to its development: his ingenuity in ‘attacking the directorial problems that the narrative drama raised was truly remarkable’.

Tony Ball, then Chief Executive of BSkyB, announced in the MacTaggart Lecture that an unprecedented majority (51 per cent) of the public, responding to a National Opinion Poll survey, believes that the BBC licence fee no longer represents good value for money. Worse, the poorest people feel most aggrieved with 60 per cent reporting their dissatisfaction with the value offered by the licence fee. With BSkyB now reaching 7 million homes offering viewers an ‘explosion of choice’, Ball argues it is time to reassess the relationship between broadcasters and government, as well as the character of public-service broadcasting. It is time to raise a ‘red flag’ to halt the BBC's ‘expansionary ambitions’.

Ball underpins his argument by offering three ‘cardinal points’ about government and broadcasting. First public funding offers no ‘sure-fire guarantee of quality’. Second, the greater the degree of public funding and government control, the greater the ‘scope for abuses’. Finally, in an age of spectrum abundance, publicly funded television must work harder than ever to justify its subsidy. Funding for the BBC is ‘money coerced from people under legal sanction, ultimately under the threat of jail’ and consequently there is a need for programme-makers to be accountable.