Paxman Scorns “Contemptible” Annus Horribilus
Last year’s annual MacTaggart lecture saw outgoing ITV boss Charles Allen use the platform to strongly criticise Channel 4. In 2007, under a cloud of deception and viewer mistrust, Newsnight anchor Jeremy Paxman took his turn on the podium to deliver a scathing speech.
Paxman outlined the trivial and more serious “contemptible” allegations of dishonesty and fraud in the TV industry over the past year, saying there was quite clearly a problem.
“Potentially, it is a very big problem,” he said. “It has the capacity to change utterly what we do, and in the process to betray the people we ought to be serving. Once people start believing we’re playing fast and loose with them routinely, we’ve had it.”
The premium rate phone-in debacle received the strongest reprimand from the veteran broadcaster. “I can see no circumstances at all under which you can justify defrauding the public on a premium rate phone line,” he scorned.
“In fact, I can’t quite see why there aren’t grounds for prosecution. And it seems to me things haven’t been much helped by they way they’ve been handled.”
He continued: “We’ve had the preposterous spectacle of some of the most senior figures in broadcasting running around like maiden aunts who’ve walked in on some teenage party, affecting shock and disbelief at what they’ve heard. It simply won’t wash for senior figures in the industry to blame our troubles on an influx of untrained young people: the ITV Alzheimer’s documentary and the trailer for the series about the Queen were made by a couple of the most venerable figures in the business.”
Paxman questioned the underlying philosophy of those in the television industry. “There are too many people in this industry now whose answer to the question ‘what is television for?’ is ‘to make money’,” he exclaimed.
“The loss of viewer trust in TV,” his argument went, “is a result of the failure of the industry to decide exactly why it exists in the first place… Too often it seems that the people at the top of this industry no longer ask themselves what they ought to be using this uniquely powerful medium for. Instead of seeking to enlighten the audience, they set out to second-guess them.”
The fact that the TV audience is getting older was also a “profound problem”, according to the high-profile presenter. “We have the spectacle of a bunch of middle-aged people in the grip of some comb-over compulsion. Youth. Where is it? Why doesn’t it watch us? How do we get hold of it? This is the great motive force in contemporary television. Why do they want to find it? The motive is the same everywhere. Money.”
The anxiety about irrelevance expresses itself in obsessions with the red button, with interactivity, fatuous opinion polls and podcasts, he said. “We’ve all heard the jargon, even if we’re not entirely clear what it means. In the process, something’s gone wrong. We’ve got too interested in the way we deliver what we do, at the expense of what we deliver. We have become obsessed with how the copper wire is organised, and forgotten about the electricity.”
Paxman admitted that the problems could be short-term, but expressed concern that the industry should not be too confident of this. “The BBC is going to have to justify its existence not by the way it broadcasts or the buildings out of which it works, but by what it broadcasts. We seem, far too often, to lose sight of this,” he remarked, leading some to later say he was in fact biting the hand that fed him.
He continued: ” There is a fight going on for the survival of quality television right across this industry. As an industry we need to lay out much more clearly what we’re doing and why. Let’s spend less time measuring audiences and more time enlightening them.”
It wasn’t all doom and gloom, however. “Despite the past few months, I do not believe that this uniquely powerful medium has been taken over by charlatans,” he conceded.
“But we ought to acknowledge that parts of it are in danger of losing their redeeming virtues. We need to be open. We need to admit it when we make mistakes. We need treat our viewers with respect, to be frank with them about how and why programmes were made, to be transparent [and] rediscover a sense of purpose.”
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