The future isn’t what it used to be

Ten years ago some media bigwigs produced a book predicting what British TV would look like in 2014. Dusting down the pages this week, Raymond Snoddy notices some gaping holes, a few direct hits and a strange little surprise…

It’s not often that a time capsule of British television turns up which allows us to test the tricky business of forecasting the future. Forecasts about the future of the media in 10 years time are two a penny. Then, however outrageous the predictions, everyone forgets and we move on to consulting the crystal ball about the next decade.

But there on the pile ready for recycling was a booklet, TV In 2014 – The Future Isn’t What it Used to Be, a collection of essays, musing and rants published by UKTV in 2004.

Here we have the best predictions of the likes of Peter Bazalgette, at the time chairman of Endemol UK, Barry Cox, chairman of the Digital UK Stakeholders Group, Jane Featherstone, joint managing director of Kudos, Alex Graham, managing director of Wall To Wall and Samir Shah, managing director of Juniper Production.

The big black hole in all the futuristic thoughts about 2014 is the complete absence of social media, even though Facebook had already been set up, though not Twitter, and there is an awareness by some that digital, the Internet and mobile are inevitably going to change things, perhaps in radical ways.

Unsurprisingly, the most extravagant predictions by far come from Bazalgette.

With the help of Big Brother and an associated 24-hours a day Big Brother channel, Channel 4 now rules the roost and has become the main commercial network through appealing to specific demographics.

“Those that tried to appeal to a general audience – BBC One and ITV – were screwed long ago,” says Baz.

In fact the BBC is already available only through subscription and not enough people are signing up so the Corporation is being forced to target more “cynical and derivative” programmes.

Adds between programmes are already a thing of the past by 2014 and commercial messages are got across by subliminal means and motivational wording in programme scripts.

As for Big Brother, with its commercially attractive ageing audience, there is only one issue – the average age of the people in the Big Brother House is 72 and they are still taking their clothes off which is a bit of a problem.

Cox has a rather more serious approach and, given his role, can quite realistically look forward to the successful completion of the switch-over to digital. He goes a little off the rails when he starts thinking about what this new digital multi-channel world will mean in 2014.

In a fully digital Britain the main channels could have lost a third of their audiences. In fact, the launch of new channels by the incumbent broadcasters helped to limit the overall loss as things have turned out.

As a result of the audience loss, Cox predicted the BBC licence fee could command far less public acceptance and the limited need for public intervention in the broadcasting market should be met by taxation rather than licence fee. Up to a point.

Meanwhile, the viability of the commercial public service broadcasters “could be seriously undermined.”

I hope Barry Cox didn’t sell all his LWT shares prematurely.

Alex Graham successfully predicted further convergence between television and computer games and that contemporary boundaries of taste would come under increasing pressure – but he insisted that whatever the genres the audience would still discriminate between “good” and “bad.”

For Jane Featherstone the danger was that by 2014 all channels would blur into an undifferentiated blandness and people will turn to other outlets, perhaps watching programming on their computers instead of television.

An increasing number of channels and the arrival of SkyPlus and TiVo in every home by 2009 would put real pressure on advertising revenues.

“Soon, our audiences will simply not be watching the ads and there’s going to be a major readjustment in how programming is funded,” says Featherstone.

Samir Shah feared that although the BBC would still be there in 2014, Prime Minister Michael Gove – not yet but definitely maybe – has slashed the BBC licence fee.

“We can be sure that technology will have combined digital television, TiVo, the Internet, telephony in ways we cannot yet imagine,” says Shah hedging his bets.

There is also a danger of a narrower range of subjects coming out of the commissioning process – adding to people’s knowledge on subjects they know already rather than risking leaps into the unknown.

In a final “flight of fantasy”, Shah wondered whether new technologies might give television the opportunity to develop a more transactional model. Such a pay-per-view world could raise money for less than obvious documentaries such as The Last Peasants in Europe.

And then the greatest surprise of all – to find out that you have written the last chapter on winners and losers – without any memory trace surviving. Dear God, what is in there and how well does it stand up now?

To argue that all the multi-channel offerings would undermine the main broadcasters by 2014 is a fantasy. Tick.

The biggest winner will turn out to be the BBC. Half a tick though not even Gypsy Rose Lee could have predicted the Savile and Newsnight scandals.

After years of modest performance in television BT will finally get its act together and become a serious rival to BSkyB. Double tick.

Roman Abramovich will tire of merely being owner of Chelsea and buy ITV. It seemed like a safe prediction at the time but in the age of Putin it will clearly never happen.

Reuters, on its knees at the time will rise again a global information source. Yes but now there are sprightly rivals at least in breaking news like Twitter.

Unfortunately, Sir Peter Bazalgette did not become director general of the BBC as predicted – although he did quite well, and for some reason Greg Dyke didn’t buy All3Media so that he could fire all those Granada people who ran it (and in fact still do).

Yet if things changed less dramatically than expected between 2004 and 2014 – with the exception of the rise of social media – then the decade up to 2025 “could be time of radical and almost unimaginable change.”

You really never can tell.