The BBC's last fling
Grace Wyndham Goldie
Television is generally believed to have a profound effect upon the way voters behave in general elections. In fact nobody knows whether this is true, to what extent it may be true, and, if true, how this television influence actually operates.
For these uncertainties we must be thankful. If there were any certainty about the methods which could be employed to make television a kind of button-pressing mechanism which would guarantee that millions of voters would each put a cross on their ballot papers against the candidate of a specific political party, then that knowledge would be worth untold gold and would inevitably be bought by one or other of the contending parties. Probably, on present showing, by the Conservatives. Voters would then be puppets whose strings could be pulled by whoever could pay the price demanded by the most efficient advertising agency. At this moment that agency is widely thought to be Saatchi and Saatchi, and, as everybody knows, this is the firm which the Conservative Party has engaged to handle its election publicity — including the production of its television Party Election programmes.
The decision to use Saatchi and Saatchi was warmly defended by no less a Conservative than Lord Thorneycroft, chairman of the party, and the heavy hand of Saatchi and Saatchi was accordingly conspicuously evident on Thursday, 19 April, in the first of the official Conservative Party television election broadcasts. One of my acquaintances, a staunch Conservative, called it 'an insult to the intelligence' but went on firmly, 'I suppose they have to appeal sometimes to the lowest common denominator'. Another staunch Conservative, whom the previous speaker would certainly have put in the 'lowest common denominator' category, dismissed the broadcast more effectively as `a load of old rubbish'.
Actually in its own way it was an honest piece of work. It did not pretend to appeal to the intelligence, the judgment, or even the self-interest of any group of citizens. Instead, it could be called, in all its expensive crudity, an expression of British nationalism. The scene was a running track with a crowd of hired extras cheering the various runners, some of whom were British, wearing (to the best of my recollection) Union Jacks as singlets. The others were nondescript foreigners. Men rushed out to hang heavy weights labelled 'inflation' and (I think) 'over-manning' and other indications of trouble round the necks of the British runners who stumbled and fell under the weights they were carrying while the foreigners, weightless, surged ahead amid cheers from the extras and an excited commentary which indicated that rescuers were on their way. And, in due course, other men, symbolising, it was to be supposed, the Conservatives, leaping on to the course, removed one by one the weights from the necks of the British runners who, throwing their weights into the crowd and running free and fast, won the race amid even heartier cheers from the crowd of extras. Britons had taken their rightful place, first, and had left the foreigners far behind. And in the midst of all this, though static and neither running nor cheering, came Michael Heseltine and Margaret Thatcher who, in interviews, sustained the theme of Conservatives taking the weights off Britain which had been put there by Labour, so effectively that they seemed to be as much hired extras as the runners and the actors in the crowd.
I don't imagine that even Saatchi and Saatchi or Lord Thorneycroft thought this effort a success. Americans were performing rituals of television political salesmanship of a more sophisticated kind as long ago as 1968, when President Nixon was elected by means described by Joe McGinnis in his book The Selling of the President which Alistair Cooke declared to be 'a terrifying account of what happens in an age which regards the advertising man as an important ally of the politician'.
It would be easy to dismiss the first Saatchi and Saatchi programme as merely ridiculous. But what if the Conservatives were to win the election? Victorious, already wedded to the idea of more commercialism in television and in love with advertising, they are not likely to abandon the use of professional advertising men whose methods are associated with their success. Labour's reaction, if defeated, is equally predictable. 'The media' will be blamed. Already, on the eve of the election, Mr Tony Benn was prominent at the Institute for Workers' Control conference in Nottingham. The subject of the conference was 'Democratic Accountability in the Media' and Mr Benn himself called not only for a Press Council to help newspapers to sustain themselves but also for an organisation which 'would be permanent in bringing together Socialists within the media'. In other words he was presenting in 1979 the very ideas which he put forward in 1976, when they were part of Labour's official policy and associated with Mr Benn's demand that the BBC and IBA should both be abolished.
In the present election campaign very little light has been thrown by the official party election broadcasts on either the election issues or the personalities who would form the alternative governments between which we are being asked to choose. Such light as has been cast by broadcasting has come from non-official programmes presented by the BBC and Independent Broadcasting. There have been an unprecedented number and variety of programmes, ranging from the Jimmy Young show to Robin Day's daily 'Election Call' on Radio 4, the special interviews and campaign reports and televised Press Conferences on BBC News and ITN, the more specialised coverage in the BBC's The Money Programme and ITV's TV Eye, to the largest and more ambitious treatments in Weekend World and Panorama. I cannot remember any election campaign since 1951, when election broadcasting on television timorously began, in which the nonofficial coverage has been so good, so complete and yet so varied that it has never seemed merely repetitive. On radio, Robin Day has given heckling a new dimension by keeping both questioners and spokesmen to time and to the point without ever intruding an opinion or an attitude of his own. Here radio certainly triumphed over television; on television these 'phone-ins' are too laborious and equipment-ridden to be convincing. But, unfortunately, this may be the last election campaign in which broadcasting will be used so effectively. For whichever party wins the election, broadcasting, according to their declared policies, is certain to deteriorate. If the Conservatives get in they are pledged to increase commercialism and, with the 'fourth' television channel handed to advertisers, costs, wages and salaries in the commercial companies going up and nobody willing to put up the licence fee, BBC services are bound to suffer. And, without adequate competition from public service television, commercial television is almost sure to lower its standards. If Labour should win, the government, unhindered by effective opposition, will be able to carrY out its declared intentions which will increase the possibility of government interference with the freedom of broadcasting and increase, also, the danger of the new controls which Mr Benn has so recentlY advocating in Nottingham. Perhaps in any case, it would be as well to give up any hope of enlightenment from broadcasting at times of election and return instead to the ancient practice of attending meetings.
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