What The Green Movement Got Wrong

Channel 4 commissions grown up TV shock! Once a bastion of intelligent documentary making, recent offerings have failed to engage the audience in any kind of discourse. It has even seemed at times as though the ground rules of observational documentary making were being jettisoned in favour of the kind of jeopardy obsessed nonsense served up by the digital channels.

So congratulations to whoever commissioned “What the Green Movement Got Wrong”, a good old fashioned polemic, espousing a controversial point of view and challenging its audience to engage in a healthy and intelligent debate.

In essence, the programmes thesis was that we need to reconsider the possibilities offered by technology in resolving some of the planet’s major issues such as famine and global warming. The programmes most controversial point was that the green movement’s effectiveness in slowing down and in some cases halting the adoption of nuclear power as an alternative energy source forced energy providers further down the road of fossil fuel based energy. The consequence was the massive pollution of the rivers and skies that we now know is responsible for global warming.

Naturally real controversy has broken out as contributor Adam Werbach, former president of the conservation group the Sierra Club, attempts to distance himself from the programme saying that he was not made aware of the polemical nature of the programme (though the title must have been a bit of giveaway) and that his views were misrepresented.

The programme was at 75 minutes, slightly longer than it needed to be, but it featured no celebrities and chock full of interesting facts. I particularly enjoyed the footage of the elderly residents of Chernobyl, who seem positively sprightly in comparison to some of the denizens of  the UK I’ve come across in my travels.

The programme can and no doubt will be criticised for taking the deeply unfashionable position that it does and an extreme view would say that it does little more than articulate the views of the pro-nuclear lobby. However, there is a perfectly valid debate to be had around this topic and if we close our ears to the pro-nuclear lobby then we are not having a balanced discussion. We’ve seen too much Television that patronises the audience.

This is the kind of Television I love and I hope we see more of it.

The Armchair Assassins

This post may be a long one, and it may well degenerate into an angry rant, but in the immortal words of Peter Finch in the classic movie, Network, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore…”

It’s this government, it’s the so called Big Society, it’s every time I hear David Cameron telling me what’s good for me, it’s every time I read that the Northern Rock have taken just 12 months to recover 50% of the deficit that had the tax payer bail them out, every time I read that the cuts in public services are for keeps and that HSBC have earmarked several million pounds to cover their bonus payments, but it’s especially when I hear Jeremy Hunt waxing lyrical about public service television whilst simultaneously axing the Film Council that provides funding for the film industry this country is so rightly proud of.

According to Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, broadcasters need to go beyond issue-raising and embrace problem-solving. “Our investment in public service broadcasting in this country is substantial, so we want PSBs to have a real impact in informing, educating and shifting opinion.

“We have one of the best PSB systems in the world but it’s time to move it on. We need it to take responsibility for advancing people’s understanding of issues for themselves and to come up with concrete solutions.”

Like so much Tory rhetoric this appears to be almost reasonable, but taken in conjunction with the pronouncements made by the same Jeremy about the axing of the film council, I start to worry about the quality of thinking behind the changes the Tories have in mind.

“Many of these bodies were set up a considerable length of time ago, and times and demands have changed. In the light of the current financial situation, and as part of our drive to increase openness and efficiency across Whitehall, it is the right time to look again at the role, size and scope of these organisations.”

Role, size and scope? Of the Film Council? Or perhaps he was thinking of bigger fish, even the BBC? This is what Tory advisors, free market thinktank  the Adam Smith Institute have to say on the subject:

” ….The BBC would, over a limited period of time, allow licence fee payers to either lapse or switch to voluntary subscription.
“Public Service” would be redefined to essentials and the monitoring of these would come from a specialist unit within the relevant Government department.
Core public service content would be “free” and include news, but not entertainment genres or most documentary and factual output. The over 75 free-access options would continue.
Content intended to promote the UK (like the present World Service) should be directly funded by Government as it is now.”

So looking forward to the formation of a government department monitoring the public service – why I’d almost describe it as a nanny state.

But I’m being bitter and sarcastic, instead, let’s consider the position of the Public Service Broadcaster we have, the BBC. The BBC has it’s hands tied by the BBC Charter which dictates that the BBC must remain editorially impartial.  The BBC is also forbidden from (ab)using it’s position for commercial gain, a situation that poses real problems for an organisation attempting to plan ahead in the face of anticipated Tory cuts.  Jeremy Hunt would like the BBC to have a real impact in informing, educating and changing opinion.  He’s moved decisively to kill off the film Council, so what is his plan to change the role of the BBC? It’s a problem.

What if the nightmare scenario, that the Film Council cut is a first step designed to take the heat out of a much more decisive and vicious swipe at the heart of our broadcasting industry, turns out to be true?  Let’s take a look at the alternative, the free market. Independent television is run along free market lines more or less, subsidised inadequately by advertising revenue, bodies like the Film Council, the BBC, and, as the more successful indies are talking to the likes of Time Warner, American money.

Commercial television, by definition, is unlikely to provide the kind of socially informative content that will make a real difference to British society, precisely because of the free market. There is very little money in making TV that appeals to UK only audiences.  The indies need to sell their programs abroad to remain competitive.  At the same time, commissioners are ruled by viewing figures pulling advertising revenue and while this is the case, we will continue to be fed a diet of reality tv and ‘celebrity’ led documentary.  One person who arguably kicked the trend was Jamie Oliver, and he produced his ground breaking ‘School Dinners’ program for Channel 4,  five years ago. This was crusading television at it’s best, informative, entertaining and it made a difference. The government of the day (Labour, not Tory) sat up and took notice, and acted.  It was, as the resounding emptiness of our TV schedule ever since reveals, exceptional.

I’m sick of the Tory party and their patronising chatter. It’s like being surrounded by a gaggle of hectoring seagulls. If they are serious about the power of public service television, then let them free the BBC from the confines of it’s charter, because nobody is better positioned to deliver quality game changing television than the BBC. Let them also forget about trashing the film council – not because we don’t want to sponsor more Keira Knightleys,  exceptional as she is, but because the next game changing idea will come from the independent sector and it will need funding. But I’m rambling, the cuts, as David Cameron took the trouble to explain today, are here to stay. Sadly, at least for the next five years, so is this coalition, this confederacy of dunces.

Celebrity Presenters (stop the world, I want to get off!)

Witless, vapid and contributing nothing save a supersized ego to the sum of human knowledge. Ok, that may be a subjective opinion, but am I the only one who has grown to detest celebrity led Television documentaries to the point where I will actually refuse to watch them?

There is a trend these days towards hiring ‘celebrities’ to front documentaries on subjects which a discerning audience may safely deduce are of,  let’s say limited interest to the vacuous twerp presenting them. The nadir of this miserable format is surely ‘Lindsay Lohan’s Indian Journey‘, a documentary with a fascinating subject; child trafficking, ruined by the most inappropriate  presenter.  The identity of the halfwit who came up with the idea that Lohan’s vast experience of scandal sheets, rehabilitation and straight-to-video films would qualify her to pontificate on this subject is unknown, but I wait in trepidation for them to commission a series featuring Amanda Holden on “Joan of Arc – the making of a martyr”.

Budgets are being cut, format television is in, the hapless viewer is in the grip of an industry that has promoted a generation of reality TV makers into editorial positions. Is it any surprise then that TV is in such a mess? Google has replaced imagination, researchers armed with Apple Macs scour the web, retrieving facts by the million …and completely miss the human stories that used to make documentary such a fascinating form. Commissioners pore over these tepid offerings, invent a suitably tabloid styled title and then, hedging their bets, invest half the budget in a celebrity presenter. Ratings are everything, quality is out, superficiality is in.

I would like, just for a change to see an old fashioned documentary that breathes life into it’s subject, one that makes me want to find out more. Genuine enthusiasts are endlessly fascinating given the chance and in some cases, possessed of a passion for their subject which is TV gold. That doesn’t mean that all celebrities are as banal and self interested as the dismal duo cited here, but please, before documentary as a medium is reduced to the depths so effortlessly plumbed by “My 100 Best Rock Songs”, can we stop patronising the viewers and return to the type of television we used to do so well?

Cutting Edge: Too Poor For Posh School

In a perfect world, I like a television documentary to offer some insight, to make me think and to show me something I don’t already know.  In real life, I’d happily take any two of those options.

The current series of Cutting Edge has been a mixed bag. Starting with the excellent ‘Eight Boys and Wanting a Girl’, a fascinating and controversial film offering genuine insight into the condition of gender disappointment it continued with ‘My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’, a good, if one dimensional film about travellers. At this point the series seemed on course to deliver excellent viewing figures as well as interesting TV, however the plot was well and truly lost with the dreadful ‘Too Poor For Posh School’, a toadying paen to public school life that achieved nothing, other than to patronise its contributors and manipulate its audience.

The premise of the film was that we would follow the progress of a selection of students competing for entry to Harrow Public School via the ‘Peter Beckwith Scholarship’, an arrangement that has the benefit for the school of guaranteeing that at least two of the yearly intake are blessed with talent or intelligence. The assumption, accepted without question by the programme makers that the recipients would somehow be made for life, seemed questionable. No doubt there are advantages to an education in the company of the moneyed middle classes, but statistically at least there will be a proportion of these children who will turn out to be as feckless and wasted as their equivalents in state funded education.

The director was given excellent access; to the boys, to the teachers and headmaster and emerged with a film that unquestioningly accepted the view that a public school education is best and that Harrow is the best of the best – both highly controversial statements given that only 1 in 7 Harrovians graduate to Oxford or Cambridge and that the most challenging obstacle to entry is the school fee – in the region of £30,000 p.a.

Beckwith himself seemed like a decent chap, although his assertion that the beneficiaries of his generosity would sally forth to do good in the world was naive at best. Any lingering impression of humility was dispelled when we were shown an extraordinary ritual, held yearly, where the ‘Beckwith Boys’ past and present gather to tell their benefactor how their lives have been changed for the better – a ghastly event straight out of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

The manipulation? We are told at the beginning of the programme that there are only two places on offer – we follow the efforts of four children and see two successful candidates before cutting to a scene showing the third, Tumi, receiving what we assume to be bad news…except there are really three places and Tumi is successful. Trite and manipulative. What would have been more interesting would have been to find out why one of the successful candidates chose not to accept the scholarship, in favour of a similar award from Eton.

Finally, a minor point – why does the same piece of incidental music crop up in all the programmes in the current series? Is it intended, like the dreadful mock tabloid titles, to be a signature? If so, it fails. Like this particular programme, it is an irritant.