I’m introducing 3 Denis Mitchell films tomorrow evening, at the BFI Southbank. Here’s the link.
These are:
Morning in the Streets (1959)
A Wedding on a Saturday
The Entertainers (both 1964).
More to come about the BFI Visions of Change season and box-set when I have a reprieve from teaching!
I.
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“We don’t make programmes about ordinary people – we make programmes about remarkable people who don’t happen to be famous”
(Alastair Wilson, BBC Manchester)
Denis Mitchell, c. 1957 (courtesy of Betty Mitchell)
Last Thursday (09/07/15) was quite a red letter day for me, as the BBC Radio 4 broadcast a half-hour tribute to a hero of mine, the innovative and influential but sadly neglected documentary pioneer Denis Mitchell.
The filmmaker Michael Darlow, who worked with Mitchell at both ATV and Granada, believes that ‘it is a measure of the continuing low esteem in which television is held as an art form’ that there are so few sustained assessments of Mitchell’s remarkable body of work:
Had he made his films for the cinema it is a fair bet that the true successor of John Grierson and Humphrey Jennings would, in a career spanning more than thirty years and one hundred programmes, have had numerous books and analytical articles devoted to him. (Darlow 1990)
And perhaps it can be said that radio is placed even lower in the cultural hierarchy, so that Mitchell’s pioneering work in that medium has hitherto been more or less forgotten, or at least obscured by the long shadow cast by his award-winning documentary films. That is why I’ve subtitled this post ‘Seen But Seldom Heard’.
There have been several television profiles of Mitchell (one made by Darlow for ITV’s Aquarius arts programme in 1970 and one made by the BBC following Mitchell’s death in 1990). Darlow’s in particular is excellent and revealing, but neither of these explored his radio work in any detail whatsoever. So it was pleasing to not only hear people like Ken Loach, Kevin Macdonald, Gillian Reynolds and Mary McMurray (Denis’ researcher at Granada Television, and clearly someone who has a deep understanding of his significance) discuss Mitchell’s use of sound, but also to hear many extracts from Mitchell’s People Talking radio series throughout. This series was Mitchell’s purest expression of his love for the vox populi (‘I’d fallen in love with the human voice’ he would say in interviews), and his commitment to documenting the extraordinary lives and impressions of what are repeatedly and fallaciously termed ‘ordinary people’.
The programme was edited quite skilfully to showcase the most remarkable moments in Mitchell’s radio programmes, although of course this meant that a sense of his exploration of a theme or slice of life in an individual programme was lost. So, for example, in 1955’s Night in the City (more on this programme later), Mitchell captured the nightly rituals (nuns praying, people working in the sewer, a tramp walking in order to keep warm) that go unnoticed or ignored because they are hidden from view, or because they are utterly taken for granted. Those unique voices Mitchell recorded often acted as a continual backdrop in the profile, rather than being ‘centre stage’, and the eerie nighttime silences that so effectively interspersed the voices were removed. But this is undoubtedly symptomatic of the considerable difficulties of outlining the shape of a wildly prolific and varied four-decade career in British radio and television into a 30-minute programme!
These extracts, however, did give a sense of how his work is, by turns, evocative, humane, yearning, raw, magical, vivid, perplexing, hilarious, bleak and surreal; or sometimes all of these adjectives at the same time. This was due to the incredible candour – and frequent bloody-mindedness – of his interviewees, and the sheer poetry of their vernacular speech. But it was also due to Mitchell’s unique understanding of people’s flaws and their hidden depths, and his artistry in editing and juxtaposing thoughts, reflections and epigrams.
I would, however, like to make a number of observations about Mitchell which the programme did not really convey, at least fully. These will allow me to showcase some of my archival research on Mitchell, and, more importantly, hopefully this post will hopefully serve to underline how unconventional his early work was, especially for the 1950s, and how it does not fit into any easy categories. In my opinion Mitchell was the greatest artist ever to have worked in British broadcasting, and it is unfortunate that he has frequently been overlooked in popular and academic histories of the media.
This is absolutely fundamental to Mitchell’s personality and career, and is something that was not just a passing phase or affectation, but something that speaks to a passionate inner belief in non-conformism. The earliest indication of this was in 1954, when Mitchell was a BBC features producer at the BBC North Region, and made a programme for the People Talking series entitled ‘Flying Saucers’, which was broadcast on the Light Programme on 20th May 1954. Unfortunately, only tantalising interview excerpts survive – not the finished programme. The following year he made a programme for the same series called ‘Unusual Beliefs’, which featured Violet Van der Elst (1882-1966), a psychic and renowned campaigner against the death penalty; Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956), an occultist and talented artist who had no ambition to sell his works; Cecil Hugh Williamson (1909-1999), Britain’s leading expert on witchcraft; and Egerton Sykes (1894-1983), explorer, archaeologist and ‘Atlantologist’. Mitchell also made a recording trip to the Isle of Man, where he documented an ancient belief which was still retained by an element of the community that myrrh is lucky, and that it bursts into bloom during the hours of darkness on old Christmas Eve. Again, the programme has unfortunately not survived, aside from this remarkable Isle of Man interview.
It can be said that cults, cranks and crazies feature in several of Mitchell’s radio and television programmes during this period; today this seems remarkable for a period in British history that is characterised by austerity and conformism. It is, however, important to emphasise that Mitchell’s interest in eccentrics was not exploitative; he was keen to capture the experiences of those ‘out of step’ with society rather than patronise or condemn them, which was also true of his genuine interest in tramps, prisoners and homeless people.
Incidentally, Mitchell’s interest in these areas slightly preceded that of Dan Farson, who, in the late 1950s, made series for ITV like Out of Step and People in Trouble about unconventional ideas like nudism, UFOs, witchcraft and Spiritualism.
Mitchell liked to walk around Manchester at night with his tape recorder, and often spoke (indeed he does in an archive clip from the recent BBC programme) about how he would sit in bomb sites during this post-war period, and would wait until people ‘came out of the shadows’ to speak to him. He would then befriend them, recording the conversation as it unfolded. This anticipated the approach to recording which would be used decades later by the sound artist Hildergard Westerkamp in the regular programme Soundwalking, broadcast on community radio station Vancouver Co-operative Radio in the mid to late 1970s:
I developed an interesting, fairly passive style of recording. I would just stand someplace and record. Then people would approach me. I got some very interesting conversation. I found the tape recorder a way of accessing this landscape… (quoted in McCartney 1995).
Mitchell combined a passive approach to recording with an active approach to editing – through his skill in gathering and editing actuality and ambience we as an audience attain the ‘strong pervading sense of a single sensibility responding to widely diverse materials’ (Reisz 1959: 52), to quote Karel Reisz, who wrote a perspicacious article on Mitchell’s work, which he greatly admired. Listening to Mitchell’s masterful 1955 programme Night in the City, it is difficult not to share his infectious sense of wonder and mystery at the city at night and its unique soundscapes. This sense of wonder, which is concomitant with Mitchell’s ability to make the everyday miraculous, can at least partly be attributed to the fact that, after returning to Britain from South Africa, he saw everything afresh. This was pointed out to me by Linda Mitchell, who explained that Denis had made recordings predominantly in agricultural areas when he had worked for the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) in the 1940s.
In exploring Manchester at night, Mitchell shared a great deal with the many English writers featured in Matthew Beaumont’s recent book Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London, who shaped how we imagine the urban night and ‘helped define the condition of social displacement and spiritual homelessness that is central to our understanding of the everyday experience of capitalist modernity’. If that sounds too dryly academic, just look at my transcription of the opening of Night in the City (also later made into a film for BBC television, in 1957).
ACTUALITY: (church bells and footsteps)
[Prostitute’s voice:] You’re walking along the streets and you’re seeing all the lights on and you’re just wishing to yourself “Oh, if only I could get in there” y’know. You’re walking about all night looking at things.
(up footsteps and fade under)
ANNOUNCER: Night in the city. It’s deserted and cold. But on the brick croft, round the watchman’s fire, in the shadows of the warehouse, there are people talking. People caught up in the restlessness and loneliness of the city night.
(footsteps and policeman whistling ‘Dirty Old Town’)
MITCHELL: Past midnight. Time to explore the city. This symbol of art and order. This beehive. Explore, for it’s no longer workaday and familiar; it’s an unknown land. A poultice of silence has been spread over it. Silence and shadow have transformed it, and have wrapped mystery and menace and beauty around the shabby warehouse, and croft and dock and bombsite and canal and shunting-yard. (‘Dirty Old Town’ theme – sung by Ewan MacColl with guitar by Fitzroy Coleman)
As we have seen from the above extract from Night in the City, Mitchell was skilled as a script-writer. (Incidentally, it has also been claimed by a reputable source that he wrote some of the lyrics to Dirty Old Town!) However, he generally preferred to dispense with a script altogether, creating instead the nucleus of a radio programme or film soundtrack by editing together extracts from dozens of hours of tape recordings. The impressionistic, ‘stream of consciousness’ style that resulted from this modus operandi meant that Mitchell was rightly referred to as a poet or artist of the documentary form. However, it is arguable that Mitchell’s work in radio was also a continuation of that journalistic tradition of social investigation exemplified by the early Manchester Guardian:
The Guardian was no longer confining itself, as it had tended to do, to reporting what public men said and commenting on it, or to describing events which happened in the public eye or led to actions in the courts. It was itself making news out of the hidden occurrences of ordinary life, bringing out dark things, which the enlightened conscience of middle and upper class England ought to have known, but did not. (Tremayne 1995: 33)
Mitchell befriended and collaborated with several Guardian journalists during his time at BBC Manchester, and in 1953 he co-scripted and co-narrated a remarkable radio programme with a Canadian journalist, Patrick Keatley. Entitled Horses Can’t Talk, it was an investigation into the cruelties involved in the transport, sale, slaughter, and human consumption of horses. Keatley had published several articles on the subject in the Manchester Guardian. As a result of these shocking articles, the Royal Commission had been appointed to investigate horse slaughter.
Mitchell and Keatley’s powerful programme featured not only actuality of slaughterers, dealers and veterinary surgeons, but the ‘bona fide’ recording of the agonised drumming of hooves by a pony whose slaughterer had failed to put him down at the first shot. As might be expected, it was a controversial programme, receiving much comment from the listening public, various organizations concerned with animal welfare or trade, and polarised responses from Members of Parliament. In fact, questions were asked about the programme in the House of Commons, and a motion of censure on the BBC was actually tabled (but not debated), which stated that an allegation of cruelty in the slaughter of horses was in conflict with the Committee of Inquiry!
This topic has renewed relevance and topicality, due to the recent (2013) horsemeat scandal. Shockingly, Mitchell and Keatley interviewed a trader in their programme who asserted that electrical pumps were being used to drain blood from live horses, in the preparation of horsemeat which was then being sold as veal. Plus ça change.
Another interesting aspect was the inclusion of a remarkable short sequence in the middle of the programme, in which we hear a recording of a production meeting in which Mitchell and Keatley argue – politely but firmly – over editorial and ethical decisions in how to report the slaughter of horses. Mitchell accuses Keatley of ‘colouring the issue’ by writing about a frightened pony ‘waiting for death’, questioning his presumption of a horse’s sentience. As Mitchell noted in a BBC memo, ‘We hold rather dissimilar views and draw rather different conclusions from the evidence we produce on record, and this will be reflected in the narration.’ The decision to include this sequence was bold and original, and introduces a clever self-reflexive element to what might otherwise be seen as fairly ‘straight’ reportage.
Throughout his career, Mitchell was to confound those people who tended to ‘pigeon-hole’ him for his use of the impressionistic ‘think-tape’ technique about working class subjects by creating gritty observational (‘fly-on-the-wall’) documentaries or current affairs documentaries, for example, for Granada Television’s World in Action. Horses Can’t Talk was an example of Mitchell not as ‘auteur’ (as he was subsequently cast) but as the “dryly monosyllabic journalist” described by his contemporary Philip Donnellan and colleague Norman Swallow (“no interviewer has extracted more by saying less”).
The very calm, avuncular and ‘cosy’ image we have of him from the few filmed interviews that exist belies the fact that Mitchell was wildly energetic and prolific throughout his career. He was seemingly making up for lost time, having started work in British broadcasting – he had previously worked for the South African Broadcasting Corporation – relatively late in life, at the age of 38. On 3rd April 1949 the South African Sunday Express ran a story about Mitchell which began as follows:
When a radio producer fell asleep over his restaurant meal in Johannesburg two nights ago, only the members of his party knew the reason – he had completed 32 ½ hours without a break arranging the radio programme Our Country, which ran for an hour, and which featured 140 interviewees. He is Denis Mitchell, and it was his last programme for the S.A.B.C. He intends trying his luck in Britain.
Denis Mitchell in Africa, during the making of Rhodesian Journey, 1953. Courtesy of Betty Mitchell.
In 1986 Frank Shaw wrote an account of assisting Mitchell both with the radio programme The Talking Streets and its television ‘adaptation’ Morning in the Streets in 1958-9:
He lugged the heavy recorder himself. I filled the big pockets of my overcoat with tapes. I took him to people – in pubs, shops, pensioner’s clubs, youth clubs, council offices, round the docks, up back streets, to churches, police stations, drinking clubs, parks, garden suburbs, wash houses, on the docks, bobbies, priests, publicans, do-gooders, criminals, boxers, dockers … We worked a ten hour day, drinking while we worked, snatching meals anyhow – in taxis until the drivers objected to the smell of chips. This meant half-a-dozen or so tapes a day, each containing an hour. He did cutting at night time…
There are sixty full seconds to a minute with Denis Mitchell. (Shaw 1986)
As is often the fate of the pioneer, Mitchell developed original ideas and approaches which were then taken up by others and no credit given to the original progenitor. Mitchell’s influence on the MacColl/Parker/Seeger Radio Ballads was rightly acknowledged by Gillian Reynolds in the recent People Talking programme. The exact nature and extent of the influence may never be known, and certainly deserves further research. However, there are some key connections. Firstly, Mitchell had worked extensively with Ewan MacColl at BBC Manchester from c. 1953 to c. 1957 (see below), and also sometime during the mid-1950s spent some time in Birmingham giving training to staff at the BBC Midland Region, including Charles Parker. During this time Mitchell scripted a radio feature produced by Parker about the British Industries Fair at Castle Vale.
Courtesy of Birmingham Archives & Heritage.
Mitchell and MacColl collaborated for the first time on a radio feature called Lorry Harbour. Broadcast on Friday 4th January 1952, it portrayed the life of long distance lorry drivers who travel the ‘trunk’ roads and stop at all-night transport cafes, and MacColl wrote ‘Champion at Keeping Them Rolling’ and ’21 Years’ for the programme (which were to enter into the trucker repertoire).
In 1953 Mitchell commissioned MacColl to write folk songs that acted as linking narration for a feature called The Railway King about George Hudson, and thereby build up a portrait of Hudson as what Mitchell termed a ‘folk-character’. That same year Mitchell again secured the services of Ewan MacColl as a scriptwriter and narrator, for the six-part series Ballads and Blues (1953) about the roots of folk music, which showcased British and American folk, blues and jazz. This series – which was divided into themes such as love, war, the railways, the sea – featured the cream of British and American folk talent, and introduced MacColl to a gallery of musicians and contacts he’d use over the next 20 years, including future Radio Ballad regulars like A. L. (Bert) Lloyd and Seamus Ennis. Both The Railway King and Ballads and Blues clearly prefigure the Radio Ballads.
From L-R: Denis Mitchell, Ewan MacColl, Neva Raphaello, Big Bill Broonzy and (seated) Humphrey Lyttleton. During the production of ‘Song of the Iron Road’ for the Ballads and Blues series, Broadcasting House, 1955.
In later interviews and recorded recollections, however, Ewan MacColl minimised or entirely ‘wrote out of history’ the pivotal role of Denis Mitchell in creating these programmes. (For example, in the recent (2014) book of interviews Legacies of Ewan MacColl MacColl discusses The Railway King and Ballads and Blues as programmes devised and written by himself and Bert Lloyd). In bringing some of the ideas and techniques he had earlier developed in collaboration with Mitchell into the Radio Ballads, MacColl was undoubtedly emboldened by Mitchell’s move into television, and also his growing contempt for what he regarded as the ‘selling out’ of his increasingly successful (and largely apolitical) former friend, collaborator and Manchester neighbour.
As important and magical as the Radio Ballads were, they were often too densely packed with speech and song, and what they were arguably lacking was Mitchell’s skill at ironic juxtaposition and the creation of uncluttered and evocative soundscapes.
Conclusion
I’m now hoping that the recent radio programme, and a current British Film Institute project to showcase classic television documentaries of the 1950s and 1960s (watch this space!), will restore some critical attention to the work of Denis Mitchell in both radio and television. There are many fascinating bye-ways in Mitchell’s career – for example, the ‘double biography’ of Quentin Crisp and Philip O’Connor by Andrew Barrow (2004) gives an interesting and kaleidoscopic perspective and ‘back story’ on Mitchell’s film profile of Crisp for World in Action (1970) and film collaboration with O’Connor The Changing Village (BBC, 1962); Mitchell’s relationship with Crisp; and the author’s own relationship with Mitchell.
I’ll finish by including here a letter sent to Mitchell by the comedian Spike Milligan in 1959.
Denis Mitchell Esq.
BBC Television Centre
London W12
Dear Denis Mitchell,
I always keep my television in the toilet because most of the subject matter is best fitted to that little precinct.
I must tell you that your ‘Soho Story’ was magnificent, one of the most marvellous pieces of television to date. I think that’s about all.
Sincerely,
Spike Milligan
P.S. How did you manage to get it past your idiot hierarchy? (Milligan 2013)
© Ieuan Franklin, 2015.
References
Newspaper sources (South African Daily Express and picture of ‘Ballads and Blues’ production) courtesy of Linda Mitchell.
Photographs courtesy of Betty Mitchell.
Archival sources:
Various files at BBC Written Archives at Caversham, including:
BBC WAC North Region, Features, People Talking, Unusual Beliefs, N2/96
BBC WAC North Region, Features, Horses Can’t Talk, N2/51.
BBC WAC North Region, Features, Lorry Harbour, N2/65.
Published sources:
Barrow, A. (2004). Quentin and Philip: A Double Portrait, (London: Pan).
Beaumont, M. (2015). ‘Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London, (London: Verso).
Darlow, M. (1990). ‘Denis Mitchell 1st August 1911 – 1st October 1990. A Celebration of his Life and Work’ (National Film Theatre Programme, London), unpaginated.
McCartney, A. (1995). “The Ambiguous Relation.” Contact! 9(1).
Milligan, S. (2013). Spike Milligan: Man of Letters, (London: Viking).
Reisz, K. (1959). ‘On The Outside Looking In: Denis Mitchell’s Television Films’, in Whitebait, W. (ed.) (1959), International Film Annual No. 3, (London: John Calder).
Shaw, F. (1986). My Liverpool, (Liverpool: Gallery Press).
Tremayne, C. (1995). “Made in Manchester.” British Journalism Review 6(3): 33-37.
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So…the book that I’ve edited (with Hugh Chignell & Kristin Skoog, both of Bournemouth University), ‘Regional Aesthetics: Mapping UK Media Cultures’. is coming out in September! Not long now. Here’s the link to the book on Palgrave’s site for more info. We still have to correct the proofs, but the substantive work has been done. It’s been hard work but we’re excited – we think all the chapters are lively and varied, and there are some nice links between the chapters, and between this book and the Swedish collection which partly inspired it (we nicked their ‘Regional Aesthetics’ title phrase/concept, for a start!)
One of the most enjoyable parts of putting the book together was writing the introduction. I wanted to go beyond just summarizing the structure and content of the book, but coming up with new material to elaborate the overall theme and concept of the book was quite challenging. As often happens when I sit down to write something without having a clear idea in my mind about what I want to write, I came up with quite a lot of material which we didn’t have room to include!
So I’m going to include it here, in an edited and slightly ‘annotated’ form, in a couple of blog posts. This first one is about globalization and ‘cultural diffusion’, and takes as a case study a certain goal ritual by Cardiff City Football Club!
Globalization and Cultural Diffusion
In an article published in 1986 called ‘Decentralization and radio broadcasting: on the ‘possibility space’ of a communication technology’, the Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand distinguished between two key principles of human integration and sociability; the territorial and the functional modes:
In the territorial mode of integration nearness is the supreme category and therefore thinking, loyalty and acting become highly place-bound. Conflicts arise across geographical boundaries between neighbouring groups. In the functional mode of integration, on the other hand, similarity is the supreme category. Thinking, loyalty and action become of a ‘non-place’ kind and unite what is similar in function over wide geographical areas. Critical boundaries emerge between interest groups, whether these are made of up of subsets of the population or of professionals in competing sectors.
(Hägerstrand 1986: 8)
Hägerstrand goes on to outline how Sweden had, until the advent of rapid industrialization in the second half of the twentieth century, been a largely agrarian and territorial society based around face-to-face communication. Since 1945, Hägerstrand argues, the functional mode of organization developed globally, but to an exceptionally high degree in Sweden (p. 10). Although Hägerstrand acknowledges that no one mode is ever completely predominant in any given society (there is a balance), he notes that electronic media (in comparison, for example, to local and regional newspapers in the Swedish example) have a heavy bias towards the functional.
Incidentally, it is remarkable how much congruity there is between these models of human integration, and James W. Carey’s models of communication as ritual and communication as transmission. Essentially a ‘ritual’ model of communication is based around community, interaction, participation and the ‘local’ sharing of meaning and interpretation, whereas a ‘transmission’ model of communication is based around unidirectional flows of didactic or ideologically-loaded information across great distances. Although I hesitate to suggest this bilateral model can be directly translated into a political Left/Right split, for simplicity’s sake we can think about the differences between the Low-Power FM movement and Fox News in the US, and how they exemplify these different modes.
Now it might be useful at this point to extend Hägerstrand’s theoretical framework by proposing and exploring the idea of a dialectic between the territorial and functional modes, a dialectic which can be said to be constantly in evidence in the modern media ecology. This might encourage a revised way of thinking, following Doreen Massey, about the binaries of local and global, space and place.
The technical devices and structures of communications technology have traditionally tended to reduce or eliminate reciprocity, the interactive ‘give and take’ that takes place in face-to-face discussion or transaction. Mass media are typically defined, therefore, as unidirectional and impersonal communications emerging from a central source to a dispersed and often powerless audience, in contrast to interpersonal communication, which is characterized by two-way face-to-face communication by co-present actors (Purcell 1997: 101). As Kristen Purcell has observed, these are unquestionably useful heuristic tools, providing an analytical framework by which communication in many settings can be conceptualized, ‘yet their conceptual ability is undermined by the tendency to historicize the ideal type relationship’ (101).
Although Hägerstrand rightly believed that new technologies played a role in isolating people by eroding (their need for, or reliance on) local, face-to-face communication, he did not foresee how the Internet would change the very patterns and nature of interpersonal contact. Mass media and interpersonal communication need, then, to be removed from a linear historical context, and placed in a continuum or a dialectical framework. We will now turn our attention to a case study which provide evidence of this dialectic ‘at work’.
It is, of course, a truism to state that globalised communications have made the world ‘smaller’. But by examining cultural practices that migrate and shift in location and meaning with the help of media, we can explore in further detail the notion, often implicit in viral videos and memes, that we are all part of the same interconnected media ecology. The example explored below also serves to highlight the mutable or inextricable nature of the categories of local, regional, national and global, which can instead be seen as overlapping ‘layers’ of identity.
‘Do The Ayatollah!’
This case study, Cardiff City Football Club’s ‘Do the Ayatollah’ terraces victory ritual, actually long predates the existence of social media (the ritual celebrates its 25th birthday this year). When the club’s manager Sam Hammam performed this gesture – slapping the forehead (or the air above the head) with both hands at the same time – from the side of the pitch after the club’s victory over Leeds United in the FA Cup in 2002, it was criticised by the Leeds manager David O’Leary and the Football Association. This was because some commentators deemed it unseemly, and questioned whether it was a contributing factor to the subsequent violence between Leeds and Cardiff fans at the end of the match, which was the focus of a BBC documentary at the time. Whether or not this was the case, the resulting national coverage led to Hammam mistakenly being credited with initiating the ritual, which some assumed was linked to the manager’s Lebanese heritage. In fact, fans had been performing it for over a decade.
BBC Sport Video – The origins of the ‘Ayatollah’
The ritual has actually been traced back to a live performance at Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre by the Welsh-language political punk band U Thant (named after the UN General Secretary), whose lead singer Rhys Boore began mimicking a gesture that he had witnessed in television coverage of the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini, where people hit their heads with their hands to signify sorrow and grief. This was an expression of emotional pain through physical pain, and inspired the singer to replicate the gesture in performance. On the following day, 15th September 1990, some Cardiff fans travelled up to an away game at Sincil Bank, home of Lincoln City, and during the game fan Phil Stead (aka Eric the Red), who had been at the gig the night before, led friends in performing the head-tapping gesture as a drunken expression of despair at the way the game was unfolding. It quickly spread to the terraces and became very popular with fans of the club, who have subsequently performed the gesture when goals are scored, and chanted ‘Do The Ayatollah!’ to persuade players on the pitch to do the same.
Craig Bellamy does the Ayatollah. Photograph: Jon Candy (Creative Commons).
In the process of its popularisation it has thus lost its original meaning of strife and grief, becoming equated instead with euphoric celebration in the new context. In 2008 ‘The Ayatollah’ was the focus of songs written in support of the club prior to them playing in the 2008 FA Cup Final, and it is now regularly performed as a victory celebration by figures in other sports who have roots in Cardiff (such as Olympic swimmer David Davies).
Of course, the story of ‘Do the Ayatollah’ demonstrates the ways in which media and sport traverse borders, nations and cultures. It is also a demonstration of the continuance of ritual in popular culture and ritual as popular culture. Like sport itself, at face value, it might be seen as a ‘sort of viral contagion, collective insanity’ (Rowe 2004: 1) that has gripped a cross-section of humanity! More seriously, the practice signifies the ways in which local and specific practices lose their context and original meaning when they are uprooted and transplanted into an entirely different culture. Geographers refer to this as ‘stimulus diffusion’ – the process whereby an idea or innovation spreads from one place to another, and develops new uses or meanings in the process.
Exemplifying Guy Debord’s concept of the ‘spectacle’ as ‘a social connection between people, mediated by images’, the gesture is regarded by fans as something which asserts their distinctiveness and gives them a unique identity, a form of self-identification in being from a particular place (Cardiff). To this end, it is often used in addition, or in contradistinction, to forms of national celebration such as singing the Welsh National Anthem before rugby matches, in order to signify the importance of local identity. It underlines the way in which forms of ritual or cultural practice cannot be contained in simple categories: an Iranian expression of suffering (national) is adopted by individuals in Cardiff’s music and football fan cultures (local, esoteric), before becoming more diffuse and being used (by Cardiffians) to both celebrate victory and symbolise their local identity in Welsh, British, or international sporting contexts (e.g. the Commonwealth Games).
Do the Ayatollah!
References
Hägerstrand, T., 1986. Decentralization and Radio Broadcasting: On the `Possibility Space’ of a Communication Technology. European Journal of Communication, 1(1), pp.7–26.
Purcell, K., 1997. Towards a Communication Dialectic: Embedded Technology and the Enhancement of Place. Sociological Inquiry, 67(1), pp.101–112.
Rowe, N. 2000. Sport, Culture and the Media. Open University Press: Buckingham.
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This article contains a very interesting account of the cult comedy ‘Coast to Coast’ (1987) by its writer Stan Hey. Please forgive the long preamble by me!
I was recently asked by Edinburgh University Press to do a short blog for their website, in connection with the article I had published last year in the Journal of British Cinema and Television – as a result of my involvement in the AHRC-funded Channel 4 and British Film Culture project (based at the University of Portsmouth) – on 2 British road movies from the 1980s, Fords on Water and Coast to Coast. This was quite fortuitous in a way, as I felt there was some ‘unfinished business’ in terms of the article. I felt I had neglected Coast to Coast, particularly as I had not managed to get hold of the film’s scriptwriter Stan Hey (a scriptwriter, crime novelist and all-round good guy who is probably best known for writing episodes of Auf Wiedersehn Pet and Dalziel and Pascoe) in time to be able to interview him for the article. My intention to make up for this was laudible but unrealistic, as EUP only wanted about 300 words and I gave them almost 2,500 (the basis for this blog)!
So in the end I gave them a much reduced blog of 600 words which doesn’t quite redress the balance but hopefully clarifies the way in which the 2 films managed to combine that difficult (and potentially explosive) mixture of comedy and social critique. Both films were about two men – one black and one white – hitting the road to escape the boredom and deprivation of Thatcher’s Britain and in their ensuing adventures had to steer a zigzag course across Britain to avoid the police (both films) and a range of crooks and loafers (Coast to Coast) played by great character actors such as Pete Postlethwaite (who actually appears in both films) and Peter Vaughan. These two intriguing low-budget films (both shot on 16mm colour film) were both funded by television and could be described as bi-racial buddy-road movies – a sub-genre that is familiar in the American context but practically unheard of in Britain. The two films have never been released on VHS or DVD, and, indeed, had never been repeated since the year they were originally broadcast on television. As a record collector, I must admit that I am attracted to things that are rare and obscure – and these films were the cinematic equivalent of hen’s teeth!
There were a number of very interesting parallels and contrasts between the two films, which I explored in the article. However, as I mentioned earlier I did feel that in the end I neglected Coast to Coast in comparison to the other film, partly because I simply ran out of time. Fords had a fraught production history that, like the film itself, captured nicely the political fragmentation of the period, and the challenges faced by a politically radical young filmmaker venturing into the feature film arena. Coast to Coast is a more conventional film than the visually ambitious and experimental Fords on Water, a Trotskyist road movie that depicts Britain rapidly becoming a police state, with insufficient welfare to feed 5 million unemployed. Fords contains black humour, but of course its bitter outlook on Thatcher’s Britain is the prevailing taste left in the mouth. Coast to Coast is in thrall to Motown rather than Marx, as a road movie about a mobile disco specializing in soul music run by an unemployed black Liverpudlian DJ called Ritchie (played by Lenny Henry) and an American army deserter called John Carloff (played by John Shea). In this context it can be easier to write about politics than humour, and to therefore privilege films (like Fords) that tend to use humour as a vehicle, or as light relief, for a political message.
Although I was quite pleased with the way the article turned out, as I explained earlier, one particular regret that I had was that I didn’t interview Stan Hey – the writer of Coast to Coast – as I didn’t manage to get hold of his contact details until after I had submitted the article. This is a chance to redress this – below is Stan’s wonderful response to my questions about how the film came about.
STAN HEY:
“The idea of a British road movie had been rattling around my head for dozens of years, and was probably triggered by an early affection for the Hope/Crosby ‘Road’ films which I used to watch on telly as a kid. The travel, the comradeship, the caper, the jokes, and the girl, always seemed like attractive elements.
Growing up I redeveloped the taste by way of some of the ‘road’ films that came out in the 1970s, mostly originated by small US production companies. Films like Five Easy Pieces (1970), Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins (1975), The Passenger (1975), The Last Detail (1973) – and, in a more comedic vein, Colin Higgins’ mad caper Silver Streak (1976) – starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor – with a train deputising for the road.
By the early 1980s, I’d just about established myself as a working writer, able to earn a living through TV series and episodes – comedy and drama, outlines and development. What I’d not achieved at that point was getting my own ‘voice’ heard.
In my free time, I started making notes, Coast to Coast being the ironic title early on, and then the wish to write something about Liverpool, and my youthful passion for soul music. Thanks to Silver Streak I wanted a black/white buddy-buddy set-up but with the Englishman being the black guy. I knew about Lenny Henry (from Tiswas of course) and because he was also dating Dawn French who was introducing him to non-Variety-type people. Sandy Johnson was one of them. So I pictured Lenny as my Scouse character, an innocent caught up in something wacky. The American AWOL pilot idea came from all the Greenham Common/Cruise missile politics of the time. The gangster plot evolved as I observed and mingled with a few types in my local pub – not a dive, but a posh-ish Maida Vale hang-out for smartly-dressed, semi-retired crooks. One of them became ‘The Chiropodist’ (played by Peter Vaughan).
The binding was the music – I’d loved black music from the early 1960s, pre-Beatles. And yet Liverpool’s black community was virtually cut off from the City, despite being several hundred years old. There was little mingling in the city’s clubs, not that I could get into all of them at just 16, and I read a book about the shebeens and all-nighters of Toxteth and the racial and musical purity of The Sink, a black soul club which would occasionally let white kids in if they behaved – a tally was paid at the door ‘odds’. I never made it, just stood outside, listening.
My agent got the script to Lenny, and a month or so later I met up with him and Dawn, and it was clear that he liked it, and that she thought he should do it. Linda Seifert, my agent, also showed it to Sandy – who read it on a tube ride, I think, and wanted to do it. Except that we didn’t have any money, or a producer, or a production company. But by sheer coincidence a few months later, the BBC began to think about making films for television that would get a cinema release – presumably egged on by the successes of ‘Film on Four’ (The Ploughman’s Lunch, Letter to Brezhnev and My Beautiful Laundrette etc.).
The main people behind this initiative were Head of Drama Peter Goodchild – now often forgotten despite this pioneering move, Goodchild wanted to gain the cooperation of the BBC unions, so that we would agree to work ‘on film’ (i.e. 16mm) and allow a cinema release without incurring punitive royalties or restrictions. His main supporters was a producer called Graham Benson, small and ebullient, cigar-chomping, every inch a would-be Weinstein (though they were unknown as yet). Benson was a great enthusiast for new work by new directors and writers and had put on several series of half-hour films called ‘Premiere’. He wanted these talent to be able to make proper public-paying films at the BBC. He was assisted by Martyn Auty, sometime film critic, script editor and a budding producer in his own right. It probably also helped at the time that Michael Grade became Director General of the BBC – the former head of London Weekend Television was always an innovator.
Sandy and I prepared new drafts, went on a few ‘recces’, and I started to dream up a cast that they might accept – we had Lenny on board but finding the American actor would prove difficult because of Equity rules of the time (use an American already in UK, or better still, use an English actor, playing an American). We got round that by casting John Shea who’d recently played John F. Kennedy in Central TV’s mini-series – he was American but had his UK ‘card’.
As for the rest, I wrote some names down next to the list of characters, some from the Liverpool TV and theatre background, some from programmes I admired and some just a wacky guess. Peter Vaughan and George Baker seemed a good idea for the smart, older gangsters. Pete Postlethwaite, not yet Spielberg’s world greatest actor could be the Scouse racketeer using his train staff work as a cover for shipping stuff. Cherie Lunghi appealed as I knew was northern rather than posh south as she appeared. Incidental characters were fulled by comics such as Bobby Knutt. Within a week we had a list and it was largely passed by the production team.
Meanwhile I worked on a sound-track – the first was more eclectic list of rare soul records but the BBC team either couldn’t find track them down or couldn’t clear them because copyright was obscure. Auty managed to get a deal through Motown UK, refererred to Motown HQ, and agreed a package deal to the exclusion of other labels – this was a bit harsh but I still liked and knew the music and soon had the tracks linked to the action in the script in dramatic or corny fashion.
A last recce was conducted in December 1985, in Liverpool, through the Lake District, across the Pennines, down to the USAF base at Mildenhall (Sandy and I had to make a special visit for that) and then on to Mistley and its quayside. There was a read-through on a snowy Friday in January 1986, and early in February, we started shooting – first two weeks in and around Liverpool; next three weeks literally ‘on the road’ as a crew/unit going from one chosen location to another, recreating the journey. This was tiring but fun. The weather was bleak which suited a movie of a Loner and a Deserter on the run.
The major problem concerned the US base – at the end of the first week, permission to film was withdrawn, no reason given. Benson got onto his large portable phone in a Liverpool bar and actually got his secretary to put him through to the Pentagon. No change. The designer was sent ahead to ‘Americanise’ the Air Museum at Duxford.
The reason for the withdrawal of permission to film became apparent five days later, when the base launched the infamous air-raid on Libya/Ghaddaffi’s palace.
At the London Festival, where the film was well-reviewed (‘a gem of a small-scale movie’ – Variety) and well-received, it was announced that Motown were going to release the sound-track.
Unfortunately neither the album nor the cinematic release came about. The film was shown on BBC (BBC2 rather than BBC 1) and soon repeated, then that was it. The deal with unions wouldn’t come until the next decade; Motown had agreed only a two show deal and wanted zillions for a cinema version. The BBC couldn’t release VHS or later DVDs despite the demand – and that’s pretty much the story today, though Sandy, Lenny and I still get e-mails, tweets, letters and so on about a repeat, a screen showing, a DVD (dodgy or otherwise). Sandy and I once planned a small secret screening at one of the country’s village/small town screens. We may still do it. 30th anniversary anyone?”
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On a day when Sue Bruce-Smith, Film4’s Head of Commercial and Brand Strategy, declared (at the Westminster Media Forum) that Channel 4’s PSB (public service broadcasting) remit is crucial to Film4’s purpose and risk-taking approach, it seems appropriate to post a blog that considers other ways in which C4’s has delivered its remit through its support for a broad film culture, focusing in particular on the first 10 years of C4.
What follows is a revised and shortened version of a presentation I gave at the recent BFI Media Conference in London (July 2014), mentioned in the previous post. The presentation was about Channel 4’s scheduling of films and Film4’s (the Film4 channel) marketing of films, with a particular emphasis on film seasons. I’ve decided to divide these up, so this particular blog article is solely about Channel 4’s scheduling of films in its first 10 years or so (1982 to 1994). Thanks to Rachael Keene for allowing me to use material from a conference paper she gave at SCMS this year.
This is all new research and comments are, of course, welcome!
….
C4’s Remit and Film
With the establishment of Channel 4 in 1982 came the possibility for a change in British broadcasting. It looked set to become terrestrial television’s trendy young upstart, promising ‘experimentation’ in form and content to audiences that felt under-served by the duopoly of the BBC and ITV companies. In 1980 Parliament passed a new Broadcasting Act, which stipulated the obligations the new broadcaster must fulfil – thus announcing Channel 4’s statutory remit. Firstly the Act dictated that programmes broadcast on Channel 4 must ‘contain a suitable proportion of material calculated to appeal to tastes and interests not generally catered for’ by existing channels. Secondly it stated that the broadcaster must ‘encourage innovation and experiment in the form and content of programmes’ and generally ensure that the fourth channel had ‘a distinctive character of its own’.
Given the repeated references to programmes (rather than content) in this remit, it is perhaps not surprising that discussion and assessment of C4’s interpretation of and commitment to this remit in the British press focused almost exclusively on televisual genres. However, C4’s approach to film content was also highly innovative and often seemed to fulfil the remit admirably. In an unprecedented move for British broadcasting, C4 commissioned feature length dramas for television, which were unambiguously described as films, rather than dramas, or plays, as had typically been the case in earlier years. Film nevertheless tended to be left out of the great debate about the revolutionizing of access to TV for independent producers (see Mike Darlow‘s Independents Struggle for a peerless in-depth history of this), because it was not specified within the remit, and because it was a different medium, and one tainted with the whiff of commercialism. During its thirty year history film has become a key facet of the broadcaster’s identity, playing a central role in its schedules, its marketing campaigns, its promotional material and annual reporting – and, crucially, its remit and public profile.
Another largely unreported initiative was C4’s activities in building and broadcasting a large library of existing features films that had been produced both in the UK and abroad, many of which had rarely or never been screened before. These were screened across a range of time slots in the context of seasons, strands and standalone premieres.
The (Black) Art of Scheduling
“Scheduling is at once the most crucial and most conservative area of the television institution. The placing of the programmes, the relation between them and the viewing taken as a whole offered on any one night is as important if not more so than any one single programme can ever hope to be. The schedule is in itself the bearer of meaning, politics and values. ” Alan Fountain [i]
In this 21stC era of more or less instant and unfettered access – video on demand, Netflix, catch-up, file-sharing etc. – scheduling may have lost some of its cultural impact, as the dominant activity among viewers, especially young people, often seems to be what used to be called ‘time shift viewing’ or descheduling programmes (e.g. using 4OD, or a set-top-box that records, like Sky+). But in some ways, given the deluge of digital content that is available to us nowadays, the role of the scheduler becomes even more crucial and meaningful. Film purchases or planners have always performed an essential curatorial role, like film programmers putting together a film festival.
This is what Film4 has referred to in the past as its “editor of choice” role – I like to think of this as the repertory function of Channel 4 or Film4 and their film library. And it’s a central part of what can be thought of C4’s film policy, and can be related to C4’s remit to be innovative and distinctive as a broadcaster. To understand this we can turn our attention to how C4’s repertory function has developed over its first decade.
The Repertory Function of C4’s Film Library
Throughout its first two decades on air Channel 4 used regular film strands and seasons as a means of showing its commitment to world cinema, and as a means of classifying content and ensuring viewer loyalty. These were organised around particular themes, directors, stars, genres or national cinemas. This paralleled the contemporaneous repertory approach of the National Film Theatre, London’s Scala and Electric Cinema Clubs, and the regional film theatres of the 1980s. These themed seasons were especially important, due to the lack of seriousness with which television created cinema, in terms of the majority of programmes about film. But more broadly, in the era of media scarcity (i.e. before VOD and DVD/Blu-Ray special editions) film seasons came to exercise an almost pedagogical role in educating audiences about film. As Andy Medhurst noted in 1995,
Purists tend to forget that Pwlheli and Peterhead are rather more than a taxi journey from the NFT, and that television is our national repertory cinema…Television can secure films a place in the national consciousness they could never hope to gain through the minority practice of cinema screenings. Themed seasons draw on a public-service, broadcasting didacticism, inviting viewers to develop critical faculties through comparative analysis.[ii]
Film seasons occupied distinct spaces in the schedule and showcased films ranging from golden oldies to art house and world cinema. A 1980s strand entitled Saturday Matinee, for instance, included archival content purchased by the channel’s first team of film buyers, showcasing classic British films and Golden Age Hollywood movies. The regular World Cinema strand from the same period showcased international films, encompassing a broad range of national cinemas and time periods. World Cinema consisted of films bought by Derek Hill, who was one of the very first C4 employees, and also the longest-serving of the initial team – he actually began buying films for the channel in 1980, 2 years before the channel launched, and carried on working at C4 until 1994. From the outset he benefitted from the largesse and open-mindedness of Jeremy Isaacs – as Derek recalled in a recent interview for our project:
He said, you know, go out there and buy what you fancy, more or less. And I said what’s the budget, and he said ‘oh, details’. And at the end of the month I rang him up and said ‘I’m afraid I’ve spent a million pounds…’ and he said ‘Well done, keep going!’ It’s not like that now.” [iii]
Jeremy Isaacs backed Hill in his determination to acknowledge a broad film culture. C4 also published so-called ‘back-up’ publications – booklets and pamphlets – to coincide with some of their film seasons, which served that pedagogical role Medhurst referred to, and which attempted to generate some coverage and create some audience impact.
C4 film publications
Commercialism and Competition
During the early 1990s there was much discussion of the direction Film on Four would take under the leadership of its new head, David Aukin, who had come in from the National Theatre. There was also discussion of the tension between the creative elements in the drama department and the channel’s commercial interests, including those of Film Four International, Film on Four’s international sales arm. Bill Stephens, Channel’s Head of Sales, admitted in 1991 that there would be a lean towards a percentage of C4’s films being more commercial, and that the nature of the channel’s remit – to produce alternative programming – resulted in films that by their very nature are harder to sell than mainstream product.
The wider debate about the balance between commercialism and risk in Channel 4’s commissioning and programming had been raging since at least the late 1980s – the Broadcasting White Paper in 1988 and Broadcasting Act of 1990 had, in many ways, heralded a deregulated era of broadcasting. This regulation threatened to eliminate the separation at C4 between production and scheduling on one hand, and finance and funding, on the other. In 1987, Channel 4 had shown Claude Lanzmann’s 9-hour documentary about the Holocaust, Shoah, over one weekend, without the interruption of commercial breaks. In a coup for this strategy, the documentary was watched by a remarkable two million viewers. A year later Rod Stoneman of C4’s Independent Film and Video Department observed in a debate at the ICA that, if C4 had to sell its own advertising it would have a serious cashflow programme if it chose to show Shoah at primetime, let alone anything else.
When the channel did begin selling its own advertising in 1993, many observers worried that there would be a huge sea-change; that the channel would fundamentally shift, become more downmarket and more commercial. A Sight and Sound editorial in November 1992, the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Channel 4 in 1982, had wryly noted,
As a measure of the road Channel 4 has travelled in its ten years, one might note that Film on Four was one of its major innovative contributions to television in 1982; in 1992 the same channel has given us The Big Breakfast.
This criticism of dumbing-down echoed much of the commentary around Michael Grade’s appointment as Chief Executive of the channel in 1988. Yet time and again the people we interviewed during the ‘Channel 4 and British Film Culture’ project told us that, overall, and with the benefit of hindsight, the appointment of Grade did not have an unduly negative impact on Channel 4’s programming, and that Grade gave commissioners the independence that they needed. Certainly the criticism of American imports during Grade’s era was rather unfair, as this had been a central component of Jeremy Isaacs’ strategy from the beginning (with shows like Cheers, Roseanne, The Golden Girls and so on).
Whilst some experimental programming was curtailed, it can be argued that the key to the channel’s ratings and revenue success in the early ‘90s can be attributed not to a big shift ‘downmarket’ in the type of programmes, but by a sharper scheduling strategy. And for this Michael Grade, renowned as a master scheduler, can surely take some credit.
At the time ITV was C4’s main rival when it came to scheduling, and a key tactic of Grade’s scheduling was to ‘pummel ITV’s weak prime-time shoulder’ as one journalist put it – playing popular entertainment and films against the News at Ten slot. Many readers will undoubtedly remember ITV’s major film premieres being interrupted – in fact cut in half – by the news. Barry Wood, Deputy Head of Acquisitions at ITV’s Network Centre admitted in 1993 that this was regrettable, but noted “we always say at least you can have a bath during our films….we know that many people tend to watch the 9 to 10 part and tape the second half because they have to go to work the next morning.”[iv]
From today’s vantage point it seems bizarre that millions of views just accepted this. It does seem like a completely different time – an era of media scarcity compared to the era of media plenitude we have today. As the Farrukh Anwar noted at the time in an article about the censoring of films on TV,
…Despite occasional cuts for length (Chinatown), more frequent trims for sex (Fatal Attraction) and violence (Die Hard 1 and 2); as well as heavy redubbing of “motherloving” swear words, the British public rush home in huge numbers to watch a film on terrestrial television. Even a 40 minute interruption by Trevor McDonald and the weather report does not deter them. [v]
At this time Channel 4 were gaining the sort of viewing figures (in the region of 7 to 9 million) for films like The Abyss, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Nuns on the Run that would have looked pretty respectable on ITV. However, these were not necessarily the sort of films that chimed with Channel 4’s reputation for an adventurous and art-house approach to scheduling films in seasons that I discussed earlier. John Naughton wrote in the Evening Standard the following year (17th May 1994) that there seemed to be “fewer low-budget feature films than in the old days and a great deal more of the venerable bought-in Hollywood variety”. This was symptomatic of C4 competing with ITV for advertising revenue; the US imports were beginning to be used as an audience-driver in the area of film where they had previously been used in the area of comedy and drama.
Indeed, the ITV companies had themselves complained in 1993 about C4 showing such mainstream films, which they claimed had no place in a minority channel, and had actually conducted their own analysis to show how C4’s programming had become more populist.
Article from The Independent, 5th March 1993, with its comparison of schedules in 1993 and ten years previously.
The essential context for this is that ITV was in competition with C4 for advertising revenue for the first time. Previously C4 had received a guaranteed income from ITV, in return for the right for ITV companies to sell advertising in their region on C4.
Indeed, it is very interesting to compare this to the relationship 10 years previously, when the Independent Broadcasting Authority (the forerunner of OfCom) was more rigorous in ensuring the complementary nature of ITV and C4 programming. Documents from the IBA archive are quite illuminating in this respect. A draft memo dated 17th March 1983 (I’m not sure whether it was ever sent) from the Deputy Director of Television to Paul Bonner, C4’s Controller of Programmes expressed disquiet at a “long list of one hundred films and TV movies that had been passed over from ITV to Channel Four”, conveying their impression that it contains “at the best, rather mainstream ITV type material”. The memo is quite candid in its advice to C4:
This note is really to ask two things. Firstly, can we hope that quite a few programmes in the package will be quietly forgotten? Secondly, can we ask that if you were to contemplate a peak-time slot for the more ITV type programmes, we should be given a good deal of warning?
So in 1983 the IBA were so anxious about competition that they expressed disquiet about C4 scheduling in prime-time films like The Shadow Box, a TV movie directed by Paul Newman that won a Golden Globe and 3 Emmy Awards that C4 actually acquired from ITV. Clearly they had just assumed it to be a horror movie! But ten years later it was ITV who were criticising C4 for scheduling mainstream movies like The Abyss in prime-time! The ‘83/’93 comparison does reflect the rapid pace of the deregulation of television during the 1980s and early 1990s. Interestingly Mike Bolland, who had been one of the original commissioning editors at C4, commented in 1993:
The important thing is to know where to draw the line…Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure – great. Terminator 2 – no. There is a value judgement at the edge of that commercial thing that is quite difficult to make but I think that still C4 makes it. [vi]
Such comparisons might at first seem spurious but I do think that they help to make a broadcaster’s identity and policy more tangible and comprehensible to ‘outsiders’. Issues about media commissioning, policy and regulation can perhaps be made more interesting and accessible by using specific film examples in this way. Fast forward two decades on from Bolland’s observations to an interview my colleague Rachael Keene conducted last year with Tim Highsted, Senior Editor, Acquired Feature Films at C4. Highsted stated that C4 has always sought to buy the ‘best’ and ‘most provocative’ and ‘interesting’ films, citing this as the motivation for purchasing the Lord of the Rings trilogy for transmission across the broadcaster’s portfolio of channels. While admitting that The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) is, undeniably, a Hollywood blockbuster, he suggested that ‘it also has the sensibility of a Channel 4 film’, because it is ‘unique’ and ‘special’ and was ‘extraordinary for its time’. Although avowedly belonging in entirely different cinematic territory, he likened the Lord of the Rings films to Lars Von Trier’s uncomfortable art house horror movie Antichrist (2009), suggesting that they are both ‘unique’ and therefore qualify as purchases that fulfil Channel 4’s programming remit.
Returning to 1993, it could also be argued that, at first, the kind of innovation and imagination that had once gone into creating film seasons was now being used to construct wider themed seasons which incorporated all kinds of programming, particularly archive programmes, reportage, and specially commissioned documentaries. This was a period characterized by regular themed evenings, weekends and weeks. Seasons of thematic programming from the same year like Gimme Shelter (about homelessness) and Bloody Bosnia (about the Bosnian conflict) were imaginatively conceived and demonstrated Channel 4’s commitment to ‘commitment broadcasting’, if you’ll excuse the repetition. They were also highly topical, and demonstrated that C4 could construct a season within 2 months (Bloody Bosnia) or even 2 weeks (Dinomania, see below). I must here give a quick plug for The British Universities Film and Video Council’s Channel 4 Press Packs 1982-2002 resource, a database resulting from the digitization of a 20-year complete run of C4 Press Packs, which is absolutely ideal for this sort of analysis of C4 programming.
1993 themed seasons
In the summer of 1993 the channel broadcast a special season on D.W. Griffith and also the landmark premiere of Derek Jarman’s Blue. There was also a rash of themed evening and weekends, some of which were able to cash in on prevailing trends in popular culture. For example between 16th and 18th July 1993 there was a themed weekend about dinosaurs called Dinomania, which was timed to coincide with the Jurassic Park wave of fandom. Peter Keighron wrote in Television Today about how, by dumping a turkey of a movie like The Land That Time Forgot into the middle of a themed weekend, the channel drew in an astonishing 4.3 million viewers for a film that would normally be lucky to scrape together 1m scheduled on its own [vii]. This exemplified Grade’s strategy of getting the best out of everything, rather than the ‘chequebook scheduling’ strategy of depending on the obviously more popular programming to do all the ratings work.
C4’s success at this time, was due to its scheduling strategy as much as its programmes. But at this point Channel 4’s film policy could embrace both Derek Jarman and Doug McClure! A certain ‘canniness’ was being applied to film scheduling to squeeze out added value wherever possible; feature films, which had once been Channel 4’s particular forte when it came to imaginative scheduling, were now only part of the mix. It must be remembered that films were, and still are, subject to potentially restrictive contractual obligations agreed at the time of acquisition. For example, rights to a package of films were often bought for a period of 7 years, which typically allowed 3 transmissions. Therefore the question of when to deploy them to maximise audiences became key.
The scheduling of purchased film content has to fulfil certain commercial requirements. First of all it is imperative that films are screened before Channel 4’s broadcasting rights expire, as is the case with any other channel that purchases feature films. It is also important that a broadcaster reliant on advertising revenue gains the highest possible viewing figures for their film purchases. Seasons provide a context in which older or less familiar films can be screened on television, providing a linking theme that acts across a number of weeks to promote viewer loyalty. So in this way we can see scheduling as operating at the intersection of economic motivations and editorial motivations.
This is only a snapshot of C4’s activities in this area at this time, and I hope to continue a broader discussion of C4’s film policy, in relation to its remit, in subsequent blog posts.
Notes
[i] Quoted in Julian Petley, ‘C4: Is Innovation Being Ousted by Convention?’, Television Weekly, 15th February 1985.
[ii] Andy Medhurst, ‘Box of Delights’, Sight and Sound, January 1995, p. 23.
[iii] Derek Hill, interviewed by Rachael Keene and Ieuan Franklin, 16th January 2013.
[iv] Quoted in Farrah Anwar, ‘Short Cuts’, The Guardian, 24th November 1993, p. 4.
[v] Farrah Anwar, ‘Short Cuts’, The Guardian, 24th November 1993, p. 4.
[vi] Quoted in Peter Keighron, ‘Toeing the Commercial Line’, Television Today, 16th September 1993, p. 24.
[vii] Peter Keighron, ‘Toeing the Commercial Line’, Television Today, 16th September 1993, p. 24.
Posted in Channel 4 Research
Tagged 1980 Broadcasting Act, Channel 4, Derek Hill, film seasons, Film4, IBA, ITV, Jeremy Isaacs, Michael Grade, Rod Stoneman, scheduling, Sue Bruce-Smith
Last week I gave a presentation at the BFI (British Film Institute) Media Conference, at the BFI Southbank in London. Interesting to go to an event predominantly for 16+ educators from schools and FE colleges rather than a purely academic event. It is now a two-day event, which hour-long sessions, and five sessions running concurrently. So very different from the academic panels with 3 x 15 or 20 min papers etc. This is conducive to a more collaborative or workshop approach, although I must say I didn’t manage to do this. The next post I write will be an edited version of my presentation, which was about Channel 4’s scheduling and marketing of broadcast film content.
I didn’t manage to attend many of the sessions in the conference – my own session clashed with Jon Savage talking about youth culture! But I did see Owen Jones do a talk on ‘Representations of the Working-Class in British TV’, which was pretty good and insightful. Essentially his argument – predictably enough – was that caricatured representations of chavs or benefit culture are edging out accurate or authentic representations of working-class life.
Related to this topic, one of the things I hope to post in the near future is an edited version of an interview I did a few years back with Tony Garnett, who I’ve just discovered has been coaxed out of ‘retirement’ (I didn’t think he would ever retire) to act as Executive Producer for Undercovers, a TV drama series about the undercover police officers who infiltrated British activist groups (e.g. environmental) for 50 years, and the women who, unknowingly, had long-term relationships and even children with the men. It sounds really good – it’s being written by Simon Beaufoy and is to be produced by Spanner Films. It’s being filmed this autumn, and should be broadcast early in 2015.
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Ieuan Franklin 