COLUMNS Outside the box
Andrea Mullaney
Scene from ‘Coronation Street’
For reasons too boring to explain – involving a broken satellite dish, roof access, snow and seemingly intractable diary clashes – I was recently without television for three months. Well, sort of. Having spent eight years as a TV critic and regularly talking about various programmes on radio, this provided some amusement to acquaintances who assumed that most of my days and nights tended to revolve around the box, leaving me like a square-eyed worshipper gazing bereft at the stand-by button.
‘But what on earth do you do in the evenings?’ asked a soap opera addict, for whom life without nightly visits to Albert Square, ‘Coronation Street’ or ‘Emmerdale’ is as unthinkable as any of those shows’ characters deciding to stay in and watch telly themselves instead of going out to the pub to argue with their neighbours. Others hastened to assure me that they themselves ‘hardly watched it’ either but envied me the time freed to, presumably, finally read ‘War And Peace’.
But in fact, I really didn’t miss much and I don’t mean that in the sense of the tired cliché that there’s never anything good on: there’s always something, at some point, though not necessarily at the moment you sit down and start channel-flicking.
I didn’t miss ‘Wolf Hall’, or ‘Cyberbully’, or the touching tribute to the late Rik Mayall or the engagingly nuts live resolution to the ‘EastEnders’ murder mystery. I didn’t miss ‘Broadchurch’, though after it became clear that the sequel had no reason to exist other than ITV greed, I probably should have. I didn’t miss the extraordinary scenes of hostages fleeing the Sydney siege or coverage of the Oscar speeches.
Because, of course, I just watched it all online. The big box in the living room may have been out of order but I still ‘had’ TV. I had iPlayer and 4OD and STV Player; I had clips on the BBC website or Twitter or YouTube and I could even have had Netflix or Amazon Prime’s online TV services, if I’d wanted to pay for them. The screen was smaller and watching in company was awkward, but possible. If I was browsing Twitter and saw that everyone was talking about the latest outrageous thing said on ‘Question Time’, I could jump over to the BBC site and watch it live. Otherwise, I caught programmes whenever it suited me, pausing them, rewinding them, looking up something else during the dull bits. In fact, in the end I only got the satellite itself fixed because the appointment had, finally, been made and anyway it was probably better for my neck not to be hunched over a laptop screen all of the time.
And this, in effect, is how we’re all watching TV now, whether our telly works or not. There’s been an increasing move away from the old linear model, where we sat down to watch whatever the channels presented – what Raymond Williams, one of the first academics to take the study of television seriously, called the ‘flow’ of one programme into the next – since the advent of video recorders, DVDs and multi-channel services. Lip service is still paid to, for instance, the ‘battle’ for Christmas Day ratings, but it’s almost meaningless: missing something on its broadcast may, at worst, mean that you get spoiled on the plot or result before you get the chance to catch-up. Even an ocean can’t stop you from seeing your favourite programme any more, now that viewer demand has led to near-simultaneous transmission of American shows over here, just hours after their first screenings instead of the months it used to be. The control has passed from the broadcasters to the viewers, more or less.
You may still, unconsciously, associate certain times with certain programmes or types – Sunday night for a period drama, teatime for the news – but that’s becoming an outdated habit of older viewers who still remember circling the things they planned to watch in the Radio Times. In fact, even that venerable magazine now includes a two-page spread every week which recommends programmes to watch on catch-up (usually the same ones it told us to watch when they were first shown, which is a nifty bit of journalistic recycling).
For younger viewers, not only is on-demand TV taken for granted, actually owning a TV might be beginning to seem like a quaint little idiosyncrasy, like making tea in a teapot rather than with a kettle. Many don’t bother, just watch online, and they’re not even required to have a TV licence unless someone can show they were watching a BBC channel in real time: wait an hour and they’re perfectly legal (so, sadly, that live ‘Question Time’ barney means I can’t apply for any kind of partial discount. Thanks a lot, David Dimbleby!). And even with all the convenience of tablet or laptop viewing, they’re watching less: consumption by 16 to 24 year olds falls drastically every year, with other entertainment options taking their attention.
Advertisers on the commercial channels aren’t yet too concerned, since the more loyal older viewers have more money, but it’s clearly a long-term issue for broadcasters. Which is why the BBC’s director general Tony Hall, in a big speech this month, talked a lot about a snazzy, more interactive future for the corporation, aiming to lure back drifting viewers with an app that will give personalised recommendations, increasing the use of online services (it was previously announced that ‘youth’ channel BBC3 is to go online-only) and generally try to be less like Auntie, more like a cool older cousin, yeah?
It may work; they have to try something. While other channels can simply chase whatever pulls in the most advertising for the least cost, with token nods to their public service requirements, the BBC is contractually obliged to chase many competing targets at once, to contain everything from cutting edge to cosy, to give everybody what they want without wasting a penny of that £145.50 licence fee (so often tutted over by media outlets closely associated with cable channels which charge a good deal more and produce much less in the way of original programming – but which are optional). The BBC has become massively top-heavy, with its astonishingly comprehensive websites, radio stations and multiple channels: something’s got to give.
Hall’s speech was in response to the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee’s latest report on the BBC and, specifically, the future of that licence fee. Much to the corporation’s relief, the committee couldn’t come up with a viable alternative to it right now, though everyone knows it will have to change eventually – perhaps by closing that digital loophole, or replacing it with a German-style universal flat rate fee which no longer takes into account if you even own a television.
Clearly the licence fee isn’t a system that you’d design if the BBC was just being launched today, but equally clearly no one – other than those with vested interests in undermining the whole idea of a public broadcaster – can find a better way to ensure that it exists. For all the whinging about the BBC’s faults, the other channels simply can’t rival its sheer volume of original output: as a TV critic, searching for something new and even vaguely interesting to write about, the BBC was genuinely the only show in town most weeks. And those who rave about the great American dramas like ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Mad Men’ quickly realise if they ever go over to the US that they are oases in a desert of dross.
Of course, that’s fine if you’re just going to dip in and out of TV, as many of us are now choosing to do, or, at least, doing it by default as our tastes become more demanding and we’re no longer content to just soak up whatever we’re given. But in my three-month TV ‘hiatus’, I did miss something: the accidental discovery of something I hadn’t planned to watch or that wasn’t being talked about. In choosing to watch only what I truly wanted to watch – and not even getting round to all of that – I did free up more time, but I’m afraid I didn’t use it to read ‘War And Peace’. Personalised, on-demand, solipsistic TV viewing is all very well, but it’s once again narrowing our options, not expanding them. And if the BBC can’t come up with some way of reinventing and sustaining itself, we’ll all miss out.
By Andrea Mullaney | March 2015