John Ellis

 

[The White Paper on the future of the
BBC](https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/522824/DCMS_A-BBC-for-the-future_linked__1_.pdf)
is broadly good news for the organisation, but that's only because the
real damage has already been done. [George Osborne's budget
raid](https://cstonline.net/bbc-charter-review-how-bad-will-it-get) cost
the organisation £630 million, and led to the closure of BBC3 as a
digital broadcast channel amongst other cuts. So the 12 May White Paper
proposals seem relatively acceptable, even though each one of the
following is a new departure for the BBC:

- a unitary board
- Ofcom and National Audit Office oversight
- top-slicing the licence fee
- a new remit
- co-operation with local news organisations.

A long and public campaign has been fought by the BBC's defenders to get
to this point. The 2015 Green Paper (which floated ideas to see what
might be acceptable) was based on such allegations as:

- BBC distorts the market in news, internet, radio and TV
- BBC should no longer have the central aim of being a universal
  provider in broadcasting
- BBC should become a market-failure guarantor, providing only that
  which commercial interests cannot provide
- BBC should no longer be a self-regulating organisation but should be
  regulated by Ofcom
- BBC should not be funded by a 'regressive tax' (Whittingdale) like the
  licence fee

Now we have White Paper that proposes an eleven year BBC charter, funded
by an index-linked licence fee. It builds into its new mission statement
that the BBC should be providing services 'for everyone'.

The huge response to the consultation process (192,564 separate
contributions) put paid to a lot of the most insane ideas from think
tanks and friends of Whittingdale. The horrendous proposals that were
leaked during the weeks running up to the White Paper's publication were
fought off by a concerted lobby by grandees and the [open threat of
rebellion](http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/10/bbc-white-paper-conservative-mps-independence)
by former Tory minister Damian Green. Lord Patten, the man who delivered
John Major's election victory and went on to be last governor of Hong
Kong and BBC Chair, [elegantly exposed the press head of
steam](http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/03/bbc-strictly-lord-patten-john-whittingdale)
behind Whittingdale's anti-BBC campaign by saying "Where are these
constituencies where the voters worry more about the BBC than they do
about having a job, or getting a home, or putting food on the plate? I
can tell you the answer: they don't exist. No­ one actually lives there.
Like Old Sarum, they are rotten boroughs with grandiloquent names. Old
Murdoch; Great Dacre­-upon­-Thames; Lesser Desmond."  And it also helped
that Whittingdale does not exactly have the Prime Minister's ear since
he came out as a prominent backer of the Brexit campaign.

So the BBC can be glad that it has many friends and is dealing with a
dysfunctional government at the moment.

Here are the main proposals:

- A new mission statement, the first since 1922: "To act in the public
  interest, serving all audiences with impartial, high-quality and
  distinctive media content and services that inform, educate and
  entertain"
- A unitary Board, replacing the dual structure of BBC executive board
  and BBC Trust, which was widely seen as not working after a decade's
  worth of problems
- Ofcom to act as the overall regulatory body for the BBC, including
  dealing with complaints, replacing the semi-self-regulatory Trust
  structure
- An 11 year charter, reviewable in mid-term after five and a half years
  so that renewal no longer coincides with the election of a fixed-term
  parliament. It will also have an index linked licence fee for at least
  the first half of its life
- The licence fee that will apply to BBC iPlayer viewing as well as
  off-air broadcasting (students please note!), allowing i-Player to
  become portable so that licence fee payers outside the UK will be able
  to log into it
- Ofcom to monitor the BBC's 'market impact' and all of BBC programming
  to be open to independent production (except news and current affairs)
- Top-slicing the licence fee to create a fund for public service
  programming of £20 million a year, open to all comers. Examples used
  are programmes for children and minority ethnic cultures
- A series of concrete initiatives on diversity including target to
  ensure that 15% of lead roles go to BAME actors by 2020 and 50% of
  lead roles going to women. On the management side, 15% of senior
  leadership roles will be reserved for BAME applicants, 10% for LGBT,
  8% for disabled staff, and a gender balanced senior leadership team
  will be in place by 2020.
- BBC spending and value for money to be monitored by the National Audit
  Office
- An innovative partnership with local news providers including a pool
  of journalists and sharing footage with local newspaper websites
- Revelations about which onscreen talent earns more than £450,000 a
  year

I didn't make the last one up, by the way, but it seems to be popular.
There are also warm words about management efficiency and making archive
content available, but these recommendations are scarcely concrete.

So where are the big problems? The extensive leaking of proposals and
'proposals' and even "proposals" in the last few weeks made me think
that they were going to sneak something really big and nasty past us
all. But in the end, for the reasons stated above, that does not seem to
be the case. Nevertheless, there are some key issues to keep an eye on.

Most observers, and the BBC itself, agree that the new combination of
unitary Board and Ofcom oversight is a desirable plan.  Ofcom is
probably concerned that the volume of complaints it will receive will
dwarf those for other channels. The BBC averages about 200,000
complaints a year, an index of how much people regard it as 'their'
broadcaster. By contrast, last week Ofcom said that "no programme \[from
any other UK broadcaster\] in the last 7 days received more than 10
complaints".

However, the composition of the proposed new unitary Board is a big
problem.

The White Paper proposes that six appointments are made by the
government as public appointments, including Chair, Deputy Chair and
representatives of the nations and regions. These six would be joined by
another six to eight appointments made by the BBC itself, including both
its most senior executives and a relatively small number of
non-executive appointments. This gets very close to being a board
effectively controlled by state appointees. That's the real problem and
will have to be resolved in the coming months. The new charter will
apparently enshrine the BBC's independence, but the realpolitik of the
last few months, and Whittingdale's antics in particular, show how that
independence can be compromised by the actions of a few in powerful
positions.

Beyond this, the BBC is concerned by the level of National Audit Office
involvement, particularly where 'value for money' is concerned, pointing
out that there are several commercial areas of BBC activity, like BBC
Worldwide, which are not funded from the licence fee.

Any producers working for shows like *Casualty* or *Holby City* or
*Eastenders*, which are made in house, will be concerned that all BBC
programming will be open to independent production. On the other hand,
if the BBC Studios project (currently shedding senior staff by the day)
ever gets going, the inhouse production teams will be able to tender for
work for other providers... potentially giving a further public service
boost to UK TV content. There is a real risk here to the distinctiveness
of BBC programming which the White Paper otherwise defends. The risk has
been enhanced by the budget cuts, reorganisations and uncertainties of
the last year or two. The BBC's few remaining leaders will need every
ounce of their confidence building skills to reduce that risk.

Then there is the top slicing proposal. This is something that free
market enthusiasts have been after for years. It first surfaced in the
1990s, when Sky executives were bleating on about the BBC having an
unfair advantage, and saying that they would make great public service
programming if only they had access to some licence fee funding. Now in
2016, it will probably happen, but in a small way and for a three year
experimental period. £20 million a year will be diverted to a fund for
producing public service content, given out by a board of the great and
the good. The BBC could lay claim to some of the money along with anyone
else. This seems reasonable enough, as the besieged inhabitants of Troy
once remarked. But we should all be aware that this does make it easier
to privatise or part-privatise Channel 4 ([another Whittingdale
project](http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/news/c4-posts-record-revenues-amid-climate-of-uncertainty/5103563.article?blocktitle=Top-Stories&contentID=2298))
as this public service fund would provide a useful figleaf, seeming to
guarantee that a privatise Channel 4 would still be able to function
within its remit. And, of course, in the longer term it would mean that
the BBC's licence fee income is endangered from a totally left-field
direction: the top-slice fund will, if successful, inevitably want to
grow larger.

Perhaps the most startling proposal relates to local news. Local
newspapers are dying on their feet, and they have perceived that BBC is
preventing them from surviving. In fact, their scale and areas of
operation are very different. James Harding proposed a form of
co-operation when he first arrived at the BBC in 2013. Now the White
Paper offers, with the BBC's agreement, that 150 local journalist posts
should be BBC-funded, and that footage for regional BBC news should be
shared with local newspaper websites, giving them a considerable boost.
The trick will be, of course, enabling this without further cuts to the
BBC's own domestic news-gathering services, already compromised by the
increasing demands of World Service and decreasing overall income. This
proposal, in a relatively quiet way, ushers in a new area of BBC
co-operation with other threatened news organisations... one which,
unlike the top-slicing proposal, leaves the BBC's editorial values
firmly in place.

So we still have a BBC, free as it has been since 1922 to innovate
ceaselessly in its internal structures and sometimes in its programming
as well. But it has been a close call, and the fight is not over yet.
The new charter will have to come into force on 1 January 2017 (as the
old one runs out) so there is not much time to fix the remaining
problems, particularly about how the powerful unitary board will be
composed in practice. And we face an extremely volatile national
political situation over those next few months.

 

 

[**JOHN ELLIS** is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway University
of London](http://www.rhul.ac.uk/mediaarts/home.aspx){target="_blank"}. 
He leads [the ADAPT
project](http://www.adapttvhistory.org.uk/){target="_blank"} on the
history of technologies in TV, funded by a €1.6 million grant from the
European Research Council. He is the author of *Documentary: Witness and
Self-revelation* (Routledge 2011), TV FAQ (IB Tauris 2007), *Seeing
Things* (IB Tauris 2000) and *Visible Fictions* (1984). Between 1982 and
1999 he was an independent producer of TV documentaries through Large
Door Productions, working for Channel 4 and BBC. He is chair of
the [British Universities Film & Video
Council ](http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/){target="_blank"}and also oversees the
Royal Holloway team working
on [EUscreen](http://www.euscreen.eu/){target="_blank"}.  [His
publications can be found
HERE](http://pure.rhul.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/john-ellis%28ea0b732c-c82f-47bf-9d49-8f14fecc12ba%29/publications.html){target="_blank"}.


The White Paper on the future of the BBC is broadly good news for the organisation, but that’s only because the real damage has already been done. George Osborne’s budget raid cost the organisation £630 million, and led to the closure of BBC3 as a digital broadcast channel amongst other cuts.

BBC TO STRUGGLE ON

The doctoral thesis is the most problematic aspect of academic
endeavour, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Unlike
the sciences, where a doctoral student is typically part of a team
attached to a research project, in our area it is typically a lone
pursuit... and a very lonely one at times. The tradition is that
candidates offer their own topic, rather than apply for already defined
projects, a haphazard process which leaves promising areas unresearched.

The PhD is commonly regarded as an [apprenticeship for academic
life](http://www.findaphd.com/advice/finding/why-do-phd.aspx). Nowadays
it is a default demand for an academic job, something that is an
obstacle to recruiting people coming from successful careers in the
media.   Yet PhD research hardly beings to cover the roles that most
academics play for the majority of their careers. A PhD is no
apprenticeship for designing and delivering a course; for developing
innovative teaching methods; for 'giving feedback'; for playing an
important administrative role like 'Admissions' or 'Career Development';
for acting as a personal advisor to students and the rest of it. Indeed,
you could say that three or four years forced concentration on a single
project would significantly erode these skills in many people.

With current pressures from minister Jo Johnson [towards a TEF (Teaching
Evaluation
Framework)](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/jo-johnson-commits-teaching-excellence-framework),
it's likely that a few of these skills will become part of the
requirements of a successful doctoral student in the future.  At the
moment, however, only the lucky (or unfunded) candidate is handed
teaching work by the department responsible for their supervision. And
there is the feeling that this can distract from the essential work of
finishing the PhD "on time".  Especially now, because administrations
around the country, made anxious by the [number of uncompleted
PhDs](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/phd-completion-rates-2013/2006040.article),
are squeezing the permitted time before submission. Clearly, something
will have to give before long.

So what does the PhD train someone for? Perhaps it prepares a would-be
academic for the writing of a monograph, for academic publishing and the
REF. Even here, there are two issues. One is simply the possibility that
REF2014 will turn out to be the last such exercise. There has to be some
silver lining to the massive cuts and rolling back of the public sector
just about everywhere you look, and this might be it. BIS, Sajid Javid's
department in which Universities and Science sit (Jo Johnson being the
junior minister in the department with direct responsibility), has
agreed to cut 40% of its expenditure as part of the Treasury's plan to
roll back the state (if not abolish it completely). There is not much
that can be cut in "our" area, given that science research spending is a
protected category and student loans are now off the books.

So what to cut? Student grants? Quite possibly they can be converted
into loans... and then what? The most obvious candidates are the
research councils and HEFCE itself. One unified research council is a
possibility. And as for HEFCE: its central role of allocating state
monies to English universities no longer exists. REF2020 remains a key
role, but then the whispers are that it is a very expensive business. It
is too expensive for the amount of real difference it can make to the
allocation of research spending, as the free market [Institute for
Economic Affairs has
argued](http://www.iea.org.uk/publications/research/abolishing-the-higher-education-research-excellence-framework-the-ref).
So, get rid of HEFCE, get rid of REF2020, and the savings are made. I
really doubt that the Scots and Welsh councils would want to continue
the exercise if England doesn't. So more savings there too. So there may
be twin pressures towards developing teaching skills as well as research
skills in the potential academics going through the PhD rite of passage.
This is the kind of gossip that a responsible blogger has to offer their
reader these days. It's good clickbait but will not necessarily happen.
Even so, there will pressure towards developing teaching skills as well
as research skills in the potential academics going through the PhD rite
of passage.

My other issue with the current PhD regime concerns its status as a
'rite of passage' into academia. There are major differences in
expectation between different institutions and between the differing
tendencies within research on media and communications. What exactly is
this rite of passage meant to prove? I have read a number of PhDs (and
indeed books based on PhDs) which feature [extended literature
reviews](http://phdlife.warwick.ac.uk/2014/01/04/writing-a-literature-review/).
I have attended vivas where the candidate's lack of an extended
literature review has been a major issue for some examiners. So there is
a tendency among our colleagues to regard proof that a candidate has
read, digested and critiqued the leading works in the field as an
absolute necessity. This is a more sociological model of a PhD, perhaps.
When done well, it leads to fresh conceptualisation, but that is a lot
to expect from a young scholar. More often, it leads to some enormously
stodgy outputs, where a ritualistic citation of works from the canon
just runs on and on.

Obeisance to the great god of theory is possibly a sign of a discipline
that remains unsure of itself. Certainly, I was surprised, having done
other things for a few years, to discover that my book *Visible
Fictions* had proposed something called 'glance theory'. When writing
the book, it was offered more as an empirical observation. Perhaps our
discipline sets too much store by the idea of 'theory' and elevates
simple speculation to that status. Yet at the same time, I am also
worried by those theses which seem to rely for their definition of
concepts on surveys (often doctoral literature reviews edited for
publication) of relatively recent date which report on older research
and older writing.

Such theses, light on the lit. review, often offer detailed empirical
evidence and deductions from that evidence. They certainly are a new
contribution to knowledge (the other requirement of a PhD), and they
conform to a very different model of a PhD. This could be called the
historian's model, where a doctoral thesis is usually expected to dwell
on the detailed study of a very specific instance or event. Broad sweeps
or overviews are anathema at the PhD level within history. They are seen
as the prerogative of a later stage in a historian's career. And the
category of the 'broad sweep' includes the generalising theory.

As an area that crosses disciplines, media and television studies seem
to operate according to both models. Some candidates will cheerfully
cite Foucault and even argue with some of his premises. Others confine
themselves to methodological observations. So do we need consistency?
Well, when the requirement for a lit review means that a candidate
required to undertake major rewrites, we most certainly do. Of course,
the careful choice of external examiner can avoid such problems, but
such tactics do nothing to help the development of the discipline.

In short, we seem to have an approach to doctoral research that is not
'fit for purpose', or rather, is not sure what its purpose is. Many of
the issues are common right across humanities and social sciences:
solitary study of a self-selected area; lack of preparation for the
teaching career for which it is seen as a necessary prerequisite. But
this question of the basic models of a satisfactory thesis seems to be
unique to our area.

 

[**JOHN ELLIS** is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway University
of London](http://www.rhul.ac.uk/mediaarts/home.aspx){target="_blank"}. 
He leads [the ADAPT
project](http://www.adapttvhistory.org.uk/){target="_blank"} on the
history of technologies in TV, funded by a €1.6 million grant from the
European Research Council. He is the author of *Documentary: Witness and
Self-revelation* (Routledge 2011), TV FAQ (IB Tauris 2007), *Seeing
Things* (IB Tauris 2000) and *Visible Fictions* (1984). Between 1982 and
1999 he was an independent producer of TV documentaries through Large
Door Productions, working for Channel 4 and BBC. He is chair of
the [British Universities Film & Video
Council ](http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/){target="_blank"}and also oversees the
Royal Holloway team working
on [EUscreen](http://www.euscreen.eu/){target="_blank"}.  [His
publications can be found
HERE](http://pure.rhul.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/john-ellis(ea0b732c-c82f-47bf-9d49-8f14fecc12ba)/publications.html){target="_blank"}.


The doctoral thesis is the most problematic aspect of academic endeavour, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Unlike the sciences, where a doctoral student is typically part of a team attached to a research project, in our area it is typically a lone pursuit… and a very lonely one at times.

WHAT IS A PhD AND WHAT IS IT FOR?

Dana Delaney stars as Megan Hunt in a heavily trailed new series on
ABC, *Body of Proof*, set right here in Philadelphia. Delayed from an
autumn launch because of her illness, Delany plays a medical examiner
with more than a touch of the Dr House about her. But being female and
maybe approaching 50, she is a very welcome addition to American TV's
crowded medical facility. She used to be a neurosurgeon until she lost
her manual dexterity as the result of a car crash. She comes across as
opinionated, stubborn and right; but troubled and insecure. She
over-identifies with murder victims; buts into the bumbling police
investigations; has no friends (this is mentioned several times) but is
in one of those difficult post-divorce relationships with ex and
daughter that any long-form series needs to keep its plots well fuelled.
It should work; it might; but the first episode was a mess. It couldn't
be otherwise because the episode construction was overly constrained by
the commercial breaks structure imposed by ABC \[[see my previous blog
on this](https://cstonline.net/letter-from-america-2)\].

The initial episode had to combine a self-contained murder story with
the initial establishment of characters and their backstories. It just
couldn't fit it all in. Some regular characters stood around with
nothing to do. Sonja Sohn, the wonderful Kima Greggs from *The Wire*,
was a silent accomplice to the old-school Detective Bud Morris (John
Carroll Lynch) until she got to read the murderer her rights at the end
of the show. Surely the most unrewarding part she has ever played. The
episode story was also flawed. Hunt investigates the murder of a young
woman who, she deduces, had been having an affair with her boss. It
ended with a surprise twist: it was the boss's wife wot did it, not the
boss as we had thought. The denouement was perfunctory in the extreme.
It has to be squeezed into a five minute segment. The husband's reaction
to the devastating revelation was not explored at all. He turned around
and shut his front door even as Sonja Sohn's recitation of suspect
rights was being faded down. It was almost as though the series creators
were making the case for a couple of extra minutes' screen time.

They had done their best. They had maximized their dramatic real estate
by reducing the title sequence to a mere card at the end of the first
segment. This is now standard practice in commercial network TV in the
US: the only way that writers can get any more space to tell their
stories. By the time that Dana Delany played Katherine Mayfair
on *Desperate Housewives*, the show had reduced its elaborate title
sequence (with expensive Danny Elfman theme) to a four second sting. The
title sequence is toast so far as the networks are concerned. However,
the title sequence is still a feature of the few commissioned series
which appear between the movies on premium channels like HBO and
Showtime. HBO's *Treme* has an elegant combination of archive footage
and stills that emphasise post-Katrina damp and mould. The title
sequence has become the TV equivalent of hardback book publication: a
display of quality, a conspicuous deployment of enhanced sensual
enjoyment. Hardbacks have better paper and are a more pleasing object;
series with title sequences have music and graphics and the promise of
no (or at least fewer) commercial breaks.

So what will become of* Body of Proof*? Will Megan Hunt empathise
exclusively with white crime victims from the well-off suburbs, or will
she get a steady stream of cases from Philly's murder central districts
like Kensington? 80% of the city's murder victims are reputed to be
black, and this is a city with one of the highest murder rates in the US
(305 in 2009). But the rate is dropping and the police (maybe because of
their ace medical examiner) have a 75% clear-up rate, well above the
national average. Or am I asking for *Body of Proof* to turn into *Prime
Suspect*?


Dana Delaney stars as Megan Hunt in a heavily trailed new series on ABC,
<em>
 Body of Proof
</em>
, set right here in Philadelphia. Delayed from an autumn launch because of her illness, Delany plays a medical examiner with more than a touch of the Dr House about her. But being female and maybe approaching 50, she is a very welcome addition to American TV’s crowded medical facility.

Postagens de Rogue Scholar

BBC TO STRUGGLE ON

WHAT IS A PhD AND WHAT IS IT FOR?

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE TITLE SEQUENCE?