Intellect Books, £29.95
The BBC was founded by John Reith as a kind of "pilot service" through the moral, social and political shoals of early 20th-century Britain (the observation was that of the sociologist Tom Burns). It's the conclusion of this capacious and exhilarating book that in the past eight decades, we have dropped the pilot—and we have dropped him without thought of the treacherous nature of these shoals, and our inability to navigate them unaided. We are like Milton's hungry sheep, which "look up, and are not fed": the book's conclusion is, in Reithian-apocalyptic style, that "the voices in our study show a sense of despair… over the very lack of judgemental pronouncement over ways to live." Contemporary society is in large part in thrall, for its leisure time, to the broadcast media; but finds in these media a gamut of views, claims and positions, none ranked for their value, many disturbing to a dimly remembered traditional morality, all permitted by a benignly liberal Big Brother saying… whatever!
These despairing voices came to the authors through the medium of focus groups: the book's main author, David Morrison of Leeds University's institute of communications studies, is a profound believer in these forums, seeing in them a rare occasion in a fractured world for understanding the thinking of those whom contemporary society has prompted to withdraw from a no-longer-possible moral commonality. The authors have merged the evidence of these voices into a reflection on the age. If at times the result is too Spenglerian for my taste, it's still a rare and precious thing: a work on the modern media which reminds broadcasters that they are social engineers (they cannot help it); and that, being so, they have a greater responsibility than they usually accept to think through the effects of their engineering projects on our mental ecology.
In the course of this, they exhume the figure of Mary Whitehouse (pictured, below right), the fervidly Christian creator of the National Viewers and Listeners' Association. In the 1960s and beyond, Whitehouse pitted herself against a broadcasting establishment which she saw, correctly, as assisting in the dismantling of a definitely if vaguely Christian moral hegemony, in favour of a value-free smorgasbord of opinions, actively prodded along by her great satan, Hugh Greene, director general of the BBC from 1960-69. Greene did not destroy the hegemonic role of what had become the flabby spectre of a once muscular Victorian Christianity—but he was a major figure in the creation of a counterculture and opened the BBC doors to voices, classes and races which had been on the periphery till then. Whitehouse saw this as the opening of the gates of hell. Yet as she looks down (she died, at 91, six years ago), she will have a thrill of celestial schadenfreude at the book's finding that "what one witnessed in the focus groups was a cultural dismay, and a dismay at culture. People could not understand, nor give meaning to, the moral organisation of contemporary society."
The focus group people do not respond with the stereotypical "I blame the media." They like the media, watching large swathes of it. But they find it often rebarbative—the more because they are not supposed to. There are several passages of conversation with men and women who struggle to find words to express their disapproval of, say, homosexuality (a frequent example), while keeping that disapproval within what they see as the dominant ethos of "giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting dimensions." One man said, "My daughter's just got a boyfriend—should I be happy that she has got a boyfriend or should I be expecting her to come home with a girlfriend? Have I got to be happy when my son comes home with a girl or boyfriend?" In these "have I got to's?" is contained a world of suppressed grievance that a revulsion seen as natural can no longer find free expression—even within the home.
This could stand not as a count against broadcasters for their exporting of liberalism to their fellow countrymen and women, but as a vindication of their liberal mission: that if they have cast away godliness, they have elevated tolerance to a similar status, and are busy in the good work of teaching it to the people. There is something in this, I think: my generation, born in the first decade after the war, were the guinea pigs to Greene's liberalism, and some of us imbibed it gladly—while retaining, ineradicably, the reactions and prejudices of the generation which brought us up.
There are great riches here: from the interviews with senior media executives which show them seeking, in a torrent of rationalisation, to avoid being tied down to any precise definition of the public interest and the private life in order to retain maximum freedom to abuse the first and invade the second; to the discussion of popular television culture's celebration of celebrity—and thus "to live by outward appearance and in the process, to strip away at the critical faculty of being able to judge the lasting importance of something." Reithian accents there, certainly, but, because secular, unable to find sure ground. Whitehouse was right, but there is nothing to be done, except navigate and keep afloat as best we can.
