Tory Television…

27th Nov 2009

In a promise to intro­duce mas­sive reforms to TV reg­u­la­tions, Natalie Tim­mins dis­cusses the Tories plans for tele­vi­sion in a bid to usher in an age of free­dom for operators

AT the Media Fes­ti­val in Man­ches­ter this year, shadow cul­ture sec­re­tary Jeremy Hunt indi­cated the Con­ser­v­a­tive ini­tia­tive to pro­mote flex­i­bil­ity within the tele­vi­sion sec­tor in order to encour­age eco­nomic and com­mer­cial growth. On Mon­day 16th Novem­ber, Hunt con­tin­ued this notion by stat­ing that the Ofcom report call­ing for a relax­ation in cross-media own­er­ship did not go far enough. So what does the future hold for the tele­vi­sion sector?

The Ofcom report itself sug­gests that the eco­nomic cli­mate calls for a relax­ation upon the cross-media own­er­ship rules, instead opt­ing to allow any sin­gle media sta­tion to own more than one news­pa­per, radio sta­tion or chan­nel licence within a sin­gle area, the only restric­tion being that no sin­gle media sta­tion can own more than fifty per cent of their local mar­ket share.

Dub­bing the restric­tions on cross-media own­er­ship as the dark ages, the Tories have promised that lift­ing these restric­tions can pre­vent a com­mer­cial cri­sis within the tele­vi­sion sec­tor. Under this, Hunt plans to increase com­pe­ti­tion for the BBC, which leads us to con­sider what our tele­vi­sion licence would be pay­ing for?

The con­tro­versy over the tele­vi­sion licence – which pays for the BBC to remain advert-free, a com­mod­ity that many of us appre­ci­ate but some of us would do with­out – would increase fol­low­ing the poten­tial changes.

The major deci­sion would be this: will the licence fee be scrapped when con­sid­er­ing that the BBC is not the dom­i­nant chan­nel any more? On one hand, hav­ing a selec­tion of chan­nels that don’t have to inter­rupt the drama every fif­teen min­utes with the never-ending DFS sale adverts is very much appre­ci­ated, and it’s not like it’s just two chan­nels ben­e­fit­ing from the licence fee any more – the growth of the BBC tele­vi­sion and radio chan­nels has more than jus­ti­fied the need for some sort of expense cov­er­age in lieu of adver­tis­ing. On the other hand, what’s a lit­tle adver­tis­ing for the ben­e­fits of station-wide free­view? Surely it’s worth nine min­utes of adverts in an hour-long pro­gramme, or will it com­pro­mise the qual­ity of our favourite pro­grammes by los­ing a key area of funding?

Hunt’s sec­ond stress is on the 12 per cent decline in tele­vi­sion and radio adver­tis­ing in the past year, lead­ing to eight com­mer­cial radio licences being handed back, 100 local news­pa­pers clos­ing down and approx­i­mately 900 jobs being lost.

The focus on build­ing up the media empire is cer­tainly achiev­able, with a five per cent increase in the num­ber of stu­dents tak­ing a media stud­ies course at GCSE level in 2008 com­pared to the pre­vi­ous year, and 22 per cent of Social Sci­ences stu­dents going on to get a first at degree level, indi­cat­ing a ris­ing trend in media stud­ies and thus a ris­ing demand for jobs within the area.

If we adopt an Amer­i­can sys­tem of hav­ing ded­i­cated chan­nels depen­dent on the areas of broad­cast­ing, the sta­tions wouldn’t be with­out qual­i­fied indi­vid­u­als to fill the sched­ules. If this works with the wide vari­ety of localised radio sta­tions, why couldn’t it work with tele­vi­sion? Open any TV guide and you’ll see regional vari­a­tions listed on many of the chan­nels within pro­gram­ming and news shows, so the prob­a­bil­ity of ful­fill­ing regional chan­nel vari­a­tions is entirely likely, espe­cially with ini­tia­tives like the BBC Three’s Be on TV, which encour­ages young peo­ple to be artis­ti­cally cre­ative and express their tal­ent. The stu­dent view­ers are becom­ing the mas­ters and dom­i­nat­ing the screen, so the Tory changes could ensure that the ben­e­fits line isn’t filled with poten­tial media tycoons.

It seems that the Tories are onto some­thing, encour­ag­ing growth instead of restrict­ing the tele­vi­sion indus­try to the bare min­i­mum by lim­it­ing sta­tion own­er­ship, and in the process poten­tially pro­vid­ing us with more qual­ity pro­gram­ming to flick through. We’ll just have to wait to see if the Tory-vision will become good television…