Broadcasting
Dog's breakfast
Paul Johnson
Fleet Street has got more pleasure out of the crisis at TV-am than any other event in months, partly because it dislikes TV per- sonalities as such, chiefly because it believes, and is glad to be proved right, that newspapers are better than the Box at delivering the morning news. News is what the crisis is all about. As I have said several times in this column, breakfast TV is news or it is nothing. It succeeds in the United States not by benefit of glamorous Presenters but because it contains a high content of hard news — stories, most of them on overnight film, and a surprisingly large percentage televised live. When it inter- views people it does so because they are in the news that morning and not because they are famous for being famous. The first mistake in the breakfast saga was Made by Lady Plowden and her col- leagues at the IBA. They should have awarded the breakfast contract to ITN. ITN, which is one of the best news- gathering and presenting services in the world, had the experience, skills and resources to provide the solid news content Without which breakfast TV cannot suc- ceed. It would then have been able to mount, in effect, a 24-hour news service which would have strengthened its overall news coverage and so the quality of its con- tribution to independent TV as a whole. In short, to give the franchise to ITN was ex- actly the sort of responsible, serious and far-sighted decision that the Great and the Good are put on quangos like the IBA to take. Instead, they opted for short-term, show-biz glamour. The next mistake, for which I presume Peter Jay, as both chairman and chief ex- ecutive, was responsible, was to assume that breakfast TV would generate a lot of adver- tising income from the start. In fact it was always a leap in the dark, a risky, marginal venture, liable to run up against British quirkiness and resistance to change. At breakfast, when people are in a hurry and .distracted, running a TV show interrupted ,by advertisements, often lengthy and bunched together, in competition with a state service which carries no ads at at, is a tremendous hazard — and TV-am made the collateral error of allowing the BBC to get a vital fortnight's start on the air. In the cir- cumstances, then, it was vital for TV-am to keep its costs under the strictest possible control, allowing them to rise gradually on- ly when expanding revenue justified it. The glamorous presenters, for instance, should have been placed on ratings-related produc- tivity contracts, studio space should have been rented, not built, and the top people should have foregone all the expensive perks until the viewers appeared en masse. Instead, financial controls were poor, and so the gap between revenue and expenditure was far more alarming than it need have been, and inevitably drove the big shareholders to act.
The third and critical mistake was in con- tent. It can be stated in three words: not enough news. The news was short, poor, thin, delivered in an informal and slovenly fashioned, often by people who looked as though they did not quite understand or even believe it. I thought it was a most sinister portent when the Head of News was driven to resign. In any news organisation there must be a pyramid-hierarchy, with the base — reporters, presenters or what have you — firmly at the bottom. But of course with a company founded on meretricious glamour-pusses, paid more than anyone else and with slices of the equity, the 'So what's new about walkabout?'
likelihood is that the pyramid would become inverted: and that, it appears, is what happened. For this error, too, Jay was presumably at fault. He failed to exert authority and allowed his celebrated col- leagues to forget they were just news- readers and performers. Instead, they tried to run the show and of course ended up with anarchy. In a newspaper it is always fatal to usurp the principle of editor's prerogative. Staff collectives rarely work — and the more brilliant, talented etc, and therefore self-opinionated, the staff are, the less likely is it to work. As a result, hard news was crowded out by soft personalities.
This last error was critical partly because at breakfast news is paramount but also because British viewers have a very am- bivalent attitude towards TV personalities. They make them. They like to break them too. Their attitude is proprietorial. Just as Catholic congregations in southern Italy will pelt with rotten eggs statues of their favourite madonnas and patron saints when bad weather fails to respond to their inter- cession, so British viewers enjoy punishing those they raise to eminence. The viewer does not like the personality to step outside the role and time-slot for which he or she became famous. The public sees it as presumptuous, and there was a certain amount of conscious malice in its positive refusal to watch the stars of TV-am, though it is significant that this anti-glamour resolve, which reflects basic British puritanism, had not been extended to TV- am's weekend broadcasts. On weekdays, however, the British want their news served up seriously, with some appropriate for- mality, and above all in reasonable quanti- ty. They can become accustomed to the odd joke, and even the intrusion of a degree of low key personality; but it must be done gradually, cautiously and humbly.
I do not know whether TV-am can be saved in its present form. Jonathan Aitken, who has had an astonishingly successful City career in recent years, will presumably get the finances back under control. The fuss being made in some of the newspapers (e.g. the Observer), about his combining the chief executive role with being a Tory MP, is misconceived. Aitken is far too am- bitious to sacrifice his political prospects for a small TV company which may never succeed. A full-time professional will have to be brought in to run the company as soon as its immediate problems are sorted Out. My advice to Aitken is to do a deal with ITN. It is hard to see TV-am suc- ceeding unless its news is not merely good but superlative; and I do not think this can happen without the full editorial, managerial and financial participation of ITN.. TV-am is peculiarly vulnerable and exposed because, unlike Channel 4, no other element in the commercial TV struc- ture has any interest in its success or failure. By locking itself into ITN, the company would force the network as a whole to iden- tify itself with TV-am's fortunes, and this would be the most likely guarantee of its survival.
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