The Language of Television

Uses and Abuses

Albert Hunt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135043247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The first part of this book assesses how television presents viewers with information - contrasting the 'official reality' of news and current affairs programmes with the anarchic view of the world put out by such as Morecambe and Wise and the two Ronnies. It challenges the politics of programme schedules and takes care to consider the language used in programs designed for different purposes.

The second, inspiring part contains accounts of three of the author's collaborative video projects which aimed to use the medium of video storytelling to access a different way of teaching. The third and most polemical part of the book explores more about education in relation to television and video. Originally published in 1981, it is a book about the way that television, through massive and constant reinforcement, made its own language the only language; and it presents the attempts – instructive, hilarious, occasionally quite touching – made by the author and students to discover other possible languages that television might use.

PART ONE

The Television We've Got

exploring a hidden curriculum

In the past thirty years television has radically changed the way most of us spend much of our time.

The change came about very rapidly, sometime between 1950 and 1970.

In 1950 only ten per cent of the population of Britain had television sets. By 1963 only ten per cent were without them. The number of television licences issued rose from three million in 1953 to fifteen million in 1968. By the 1970's Raymond Williams was able to state “categorically” that “most people spend more time watching various kinds of drama than in preparing and eating food”.

It's clear that any medium which engages so much of our time and attention must in some way be affecting our perceptions of the world. In other words, television is educating us already, whether we realise it or not.

What form does that education take? What view of the world and of our place in it is being offered, night after night, by the television we've got? And how would that view need to be modified if we were trying to invent new forms of television in order to create new forms of education?

The television we've got has, over the past thirty years, taught us three basic lessons, simply by becoming a part of the social landscape.

First, television has taught us to expect to have professional entertainment on tap in our own homes. This expectation was unimaginable before the invention of radio, and it has led to the assumption of what is virtually a new human right: the right to be entertained in your own living-room. If the right is withdrawn — through a technicians’ strike, or a black-out, or because the set breaks down — we feel physically deprived. The guardians of human rights talk a lot about freedom of speech and freedom of the press, but the right to express yourself in print only directly affects a small minority, the writers themselves. Whereas if the freedom to be entertained in your own home were suddenly suppressed, it would directly affect the entire population. Forced to choose between losing a couple of newspapers or a TV channel, most of us would, I suspect, give up the papers.

Secondly, television has taught us that we have another right — the right to choose not to be entertained. At its crudest, this right is expressed in the phrase, “You can always switch off.” But it also includes the right to withdraw your attention, even if the set remains on, to vary your degree of concentration as and when you choose.

At first sight, this right may seem too obvious to be worth mentioning. But if we’re thinking in terms of television's hidden curriculum, then it needs to be seen in relation to the hidden curriculum of schools. For in our compulsory education system the schools teach that the educator has the right to demand your full attention at any given time. In this context the right not to pay attention becomes an educational positive. (If a teacher bores you in school, you can't switch to another teacher. Conversely, a TV set never orders you to answer questions on what you've just seen.)

Thirdly, if television has taught us these rights, the television we've got has also taught us that the rights are only granted us by the grace of a higher authority which defines the limits within which they may be exercised. You may have the right to switch off, but you can't switch off what's not there. And what's there depends entirely on what “they”, the higher authority, decide to allow.

In Britain, the highest authority is the Government. Over the decades successive Governments have decided that there should be first one, then two, and eventually three (sometime four?) channels. Governments have also decided the terms on which these channels shall be licensed out. Companies which don't comply with these terms are simply prevented from broadcasting.

Television has taught us that this situation is entirely reasonable and normal. After years of regular viewing, it becomes difficult to believe that the three channels, in their present form, have not been there since the day of creation. Our imaginations may range over possible alternatives (a channel for pornography?). Our direct experience, night after night, teaches us that this is what television must inevitably be.

And that it's unthinkable that the television services could function in any other way.

If television teaches us that the television we've got is the television that must be, it also teaches us that the terms on which that television is allowed to function are entirely reasonable and normal as well.

These terms are most clearly stated in the Independent Broadcasting Authority Act. The Act instructs the IBA to provide radio and television “as a public service for disseminating information, education and entertainment”. The Authority is ordered to ensure that programmes “maintain a high general standard … and a proper balance and wide range in their subject matter”. Nothing must offend against good taste or decency, or “incite to crime or lead to disorder”. A “sufficient amount of time” must be given to news, which must be presented with “due accuracy and impartiality”. “Due impartiality” has also to be preserved “as respects matters of political or industrial controversy or relating to current public policy”. The Chairman of the BBC's Governors accepted similar rules in 1964.

These terms have become so widely and unconsciously accepted (if they were made the subject of a referendum, they would probably be universally affirmed), that it becomes difficult to recognise them as the reflection of a particular class ideology, with particular social and political interests. It also becomes difficult for us to recognise that they are in conflict with the way most of us want to use television.

The millions of people who bought or rented television sets in the late 1950's and early 1960's acquired them for one over-riding reason — they were hungry for entertainment. The commercial television companies, which began operating in the 1950's, held the promise of providing this entertainment: hence the sudden viewing explosion. The politicians, however, who laid down the terms on which the commercial companies would be allowed to operate, imposed on them the obligation to provide, not simply the entertainment that people were hungry for, but a “balanced” diet, which included information and education as well. Keith Waterhouse (novelist, playwright, and author of the highly popular TV comedy series, Billy Liar) wryly notes the results of this imposition in an article in the Daily Mirror of 8 June 1978: “Any ITV mogul will tell you — or perhaps he won't — that he didn't get where he is today by offering entertainment to the people. He had to pretend, with a straight face, that he was in the business of education. Look at the prospectuses of the commercial TV companies and you would think they were proposing a string of sixth form colleges … I’m reminded of the Victorians and their passion for improving literature’.”

The reference to the Victorians is particularly apt. West Indian cricketer and historian, C. L. R. James, calls attention in his book, Beyond a Boundary, to a nineteenth-century popular hunger that closely parallels our contemporary hunger for TV entertainment — and he also notes authority's response to that hunger. “A glance at the world,” he writes, “showed that when the common people were not at work, one thing they wanted was organised sports and games. They wanted them greedily, passionately. So much so that the politicians who devoted themselves to the improvement of the condition of the people, the disciples of culture, the aesthetes, all deplored the expenditure of so much time, energy, attention and money on sports and games instead of on the higher things.”

A glance at our world shows that when “the common people” are not at work, one thing they — we — want is television entertainment. But our politicians, devoting themselves to our improvement, have decreed that we can only have our entertainment as part of a “public service” which will also provide information and education. They've taught us that this state of affairs is normal and natural, but in fact the decree reflects a highly paternalistic and authoritarian view of “the masses”, similar to that of the politicians of the late nineteenth century.

The nineteenth-century politicians, who were the representatives of the dominant middle-class ideology, saw the masses as a barbarous, irresponsible and potentially violent mob. G. A. N. Lowndes, in what is usually seen as the definitive history of public education in England in the late nineteenth century, quotes Dostoevsky's Winter Notes on my Summer Impressions on the population of London in 1863: “For instance I was told that on Saturday night half a million working men and women with their children spread like a flood over the whole town … Drunkenness is everywhere, but it is joyless, sad and gloomy … The women are in no way behind, and get drunk along with their husbands while the children crawl and run about among them. Many of these husbands thrash their wives dreadfully. The children of these people, almost before they are grown up, go as a rule on the streets … At the Haymarket, I observed mothers who brought their young daughters to trade with.”

This was the kind of picture that Bradford MP Forster brought to his job as Vice-President in charge of the Education Department in the Gladstone government of 1868. In introducing his 1870 Education Act, Forster used the word “help”. Of children between six and ten, he said, “we have helped about 700,000 more or less, but we have left unhelped 1,000,000, while of those between ten and twelve, we have helped 250,000, and left unhelped at least 500,000.” Förstern way of “helping” the children of the working classes was to impose on them a compulsory education system which reflected the dominant middle-class values of discipline, competition, obedience to authority, and self-interest.

Our politicians follow those of the nineteenth century in seeing us as an irresponsible mass. Left to ourselves, we'd be a prey to the ITV moguls, who, in their greed for the quick profits made through advertising, would try and grab the largest possible audience by appealing to our most debased instincts and offering us an uninterrupted stream of rubbish, which, it's assumed, we would accept without question. To save us from ourselves, the politicians have forced the moguls to offer us dollops of “the higher things”.

If we’re trying to discover the hidden curriculum of the television we've got, it's necessary to ask what these “higher things” are saying to us. They are there as a result of decisions taken from a particular authoritarian point of view. How is this point of view reflected in the nightly offerings of information that the networks have been forced to include? What picture of the world, and of our place in it, is being communicated by these programmes which are, by decree, supposedly contributing to our improvement?

A glance at any evening's offerings, between six o’clock and bedtime, on either of the popular channels, reveals two distinct types of programme. There are, on the one hand, the programmes which do no more than try to entertain-during the period under review they ranged from the comparatively simple Crossroads and Coronation Street to highly sophisticated programmes such as The Morecambe and Wise Show, The Two Ronnies, Till Death Do Us Part, Colombo and The Sweeney. The entertainment programmes inevitably include a lot of situation comedies, a lot of action series, and a lot of old movies.

On the other hand, there are the offerings which are trying to tell us something — the News, Panorama, World in Action, This Week, TV Eye, Tonight (the names change from time to time, but the intention and the format remain the same). And there are the weekly documentaries.

The division between the two types of programme is clear and distinct, and teaches us a particular way of looking at the world.

First, the division teaches us that, in the words of Brecht, “there is a very sharp distinction between learning and amusing oneself.” This in itself contains two hidden assumptions: that learning is essentially unentertaining, and that entertainment teaches us nothing.

Secondly, we’re made aware of two different tones of address. The entertainment programmes normally address us in the manner of one adult talking to another: they invite us to share the world they create, and if we don't like that world, we simply move on.

The information programmes, on the other hand, address us as people who need to be told something. The language they use isn't the language we'd normally use in talking to each other. It's the language of what the film-maker, Luis Buñuel, once called “official reality”. It's also the language we once grew accustomed to in the classroom, the language of those who are in the know, and whose job it is to pass the knowledge down to us. The newsreaders, the presenters of current affairs programmes, the expert interviewers who, night by night, interpret the world for us, are all like very affable schoolteachers. Like naughty schoolboys, we try to catch a glimpse of Angela Rippon's legs under the desk.

Thirdly, because of the clear distinction between information that we ought to know, and “mere” entertainment, we’re made to feel that only the informing, authoritative tone is “serious”. We’re taught to equate knowledge of the world with the presence and language of expert authority. And so we see the world through authority's eyes, are conditioned to articulate what we see in authority's phraseology.

Finally, we’re also assured repeatedly that the information we’re receiving is “impartial” and “accurate”. And so the sense of “impartiality” becomes associated with a particular tone. The tone is that of authority. When we’re made to look at the world through authority's eyes, we’re being encouraged to believe unquestioningly that we’re seeing a picture of objective reality, which becomes identified with the “official reality” of authority. And since this is the only way news is presented to us, it becomes difficult to imagine that any other way of looking at the world could possibly exist.

What is this picture of the world that our television information services unconsciously equate with objective reality? (I stress unconsciously because the reason that the view is communicated with such conviction is that the communicators themselves aren't aware that they’re expressing a view at all. They accept totally that theirs is the only objective way of looking at the world.)

The Glasgow University research unit which produced the book Bad News tried to construct the picture by recording every item of news televised over a long period, and analysing the results. They measured footage, examined the choice of visuals, studied the words, and reached the conclusion that what they called the “agenda” of the news programmes was both limited and biased.

Regular viewers, however, don't normally record and analyse programmes. All they’re left with at the end of an evening is impressions — picked up alongside other, sometimes more vivid, impressions left by the entertainment programmes.

Two experiments we carried out at Bradford suggest that these impressions may be much more hazy than the makers of news and current affairs programmes would care to imagine. The makers are very conscious of their responsibility. They've been given the job of telling the “truth”, without allowing their own personal bias to show. And they believe that if they fall short of what they regard as their standards of accuracy, they might do social harm by leading viewers in wrong directions. Our Bradford experiments could relieve them of some of their anxieties.

In the first experiment, a group of us looked carefully at a twenty-five minute news programme. Afterwards, each of us in turn, and separately, recorded on video a verbal description of what we though...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Raymond Williams
• Introduction
• Part One: The Television We've Got —
• Part Two: Report on Three Projects —
• Part Three: Towards a Popular Education
• Appendix