And So It Begins

A long time ago, I used to come in from work and flop down in front of the TV. It might be hard now for any intelligent person to believe that people did that back then. But as John Cleese recently remarked:

But I do proudly say that in the 60s, 70s and 80s we did have the least bad television in the world, and that’s quite a claim.

Then something happened - TV got broke. Not my set, but TV in general. Michael Cox in his book, A Study In Celluloid, A Producer's Account Of Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes gives an insider's account of what occurred.

Since the launch of ITV in 1955, the BBC and the Independent companies had shared a cosy duopoly. Both institutions had public service obligations, particularly in the area of news and factual programming in peak time. ITV also had a carefully defined regional structure which encouraged coverage of the world outside London and the development of talent from the provinces. The renewal of each regional franchise depended on the extent to which these standards were upheld. The result was a very successful mixture of entertainment and information, funded by advertising income but not driven by it.

The Broadcasting Act of 1990 was to sweep all that away in order to expand the private sector... ... All this inevitably produced the British television we enjoy today, in which ratings and cost efficiency are all-important and programme decisions are taken by schedulers and accountants.

To meet this challenge the ITV companies felt obliged to shake out the people who had given them thirty-five years of respectable success and replace them with a new breed whose cultural horizons were bounded by laptop computers and mobile telephones.

We had arrived in a new age when television was now targeted at the lowest common denominator. People like me, that's a lot of people, were no longer thought to be worth making programmes for. My realisation of this was a gradual process. I spent less time watching programmes, more time flicking through channels, trying to find something worth watching. Eventually I stopped expecting to find anything, instead I'd read the TV guide and plan to watch specific programmes. The problem was that often I'd realise at perhaps 9.00 I'd missed that programme at 8.30 that might have been worth watching. And if I remembered any great interval of time before 8.30 I'd not want to watch the rubbish that was guaranteed to preceed it.

I didn't realise it immediately, but it dawned on me eventually that TV was, for me, no longer an entertainment but rather an irritation that I could do without. I got rid of my TV set and that should have been that.

Only it wasn't.

There is a body of people who go by the name of the TV Licensing, TVL for short. As someone who does not watch TV I would have thought that they have no business with me. But TV Licensing has a different opinion. Their's, apparently, is the only opinion that counts. And in my next post we will begin to discover what that means for any UK householder who does not watch TV.