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Murdoch to the rescue
The LWT
experiment was a disaster. People from the BBC who thought they knew popular
tastes better than ITV did joined in an unholy alliance with those who
believed that there was so much money washing around in the system that a
profit was there for the taking, no matter what programmes were shown. Within
months, London Weekend was facing bankruptcy. They needed a saviour, and they
found him in Rupert Murdoch.
Within a few
months, Murdoch would be back out the door, removed in a blind panic by the
ITA, his company-saving programme schedule torn up and the company itself left
to try to survive on its own. From this, the industry had always assumed, came
Murdoch’s hatred of quality British television and his determination to
destroy it and the system that created it.
The industry
has assumed wrong. With preconceived ideas based upon his awful popularist
newspapers and apparent monopolistic media intentions, those in favour of
quality television have banded together with those who most fear competing
with the mighty News International. They point with glee at the original Sky
Channel and its diet of sixties and seventies American repeats, dubbed
euromovies and pop music filler items and pretend that Sky One is nothing more
than a continuation of this.
But they are
most definitely wrong. Murdoch the newspaper baron and Murdoch the television
executive are almost completely different people. Murdoch’s revised schedule
for LWT did move the heavyweight arts programming out of peaktime and into the
late evenings or mid-afternoons. But this huge crime was nothing more than
remodelling LWT’s schedules to the defining and successful ones of ABC and
Rediffusion, who had kept their arts programming out of peak, but used
peaktime profits to subsidise the programmes themselves. This is not only
sensible, but also the only course of action available when a station is
threatened with bankruptcy.
Murdoch’s
detractors point to Sky Channel in error as well. The original Sky Channel
existed before Murdoch appeared and its early schedules were more the
brainchild of the famous Ward Thomas of Trident and Grampian. Making use of
cheaply available material, they provided a loss-leader service aimed at
Europe as a whole rather than the UK. The idea was the same as the internet
start-ups today – be the first to be the biggest when it all takes off.
The conversion
of Sky Channel from a multinational endeavour into a UK-only organisation is
credited with the destruction of BSB, the IBA’s attempt to slam the stable
door after the satellite had bolted. Again, Murdoch’s enemies point to the
death of BSB as being the fault of Sky for competing with it. The analogue PAL
pictures were cheaper to produce than BSB’s ill-fated D-Mac technology, the
decoders less expensive, the services were offered free to dish owners but
largely subscription-based for those with a squariel. This, however, sounds
like competition – exactly what BSB said it was to provide against the four
terrestrial channels. That BSB should be happy to compete on someone else’s
turf, but not on its own, says much about the British way of doing business.
BSB failed,
and rightly so, because of its own ineptitude. Sky hastened this demise but
did not cause it. The merger between Sky Television and British Satellite
Broadcasting has parallels with the merger between TWW and WWN in the
mid-sixties – a rescue operation that actually saved more than it lost and set
the newly created company up to achieve greatness. The complaints that Sky
allowed no competition are nonsense – nobody wanted to compete, and Murdoch
cannot be blamed for others not having the guts or the deep pockets that he
had available.
But the ghost
of Sky Channel, that unforgotten hint of trashiness, still clings to Sky
Digital, as it is today. Many families choose an inferior competitor or go
without digital choice because they fear the waves of crap breaking over them
from Sky the moment they turn the box on.
Yet, Murdoch
has not lost his touch. You won’t find arts programming in primetime on Sky
One. But then, why would you want to? Instead, you’ll find it practically
24-hours a day on other channels on the Sky system. You won’t find an in-depth
history programme on Sky One, either. But again, why would you look to
entertainment channels for this when it can be found on the Sky-subsidised
History Channel or on UK Horizons, Discovery and a dozen or so more channels
devoted to factual information?
Popular wisdom
(an oxymoron) has it that Sky is Sky One and nothing more. Thus educated
people turn to OnDigital to expand their choice and avoid unwanted cheap
television. But here is the irony that runs through this scenario: OnDigital
has very limited space, so only the popular and populist channels get room.
Sky Digital has almost infinite space, allowing minority interests to thrive.
One wonders
who should be accusing whom of dumbing-down British television?
Dafydd Hancock
Compilation © 2002 Transdiffusion Broadcasting System
Text © 2002 Dafydd Hancock. All rights reserved. Used with permission
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