In this chapter I will examine the institutional structures of British youth television and how, in the mid 1990s, contemporary dance culture came to be represented by one particular televisual text entitled BPM, a 55 minute-long programme commissioned by Granada Television, and terrestrially broadcast on the British ITV network early on Sunday mornings between January 1993 and December 1995. The reason BPM has been chosen is that it was the only regular programme on terrestrial British television during this period that dealt solely with contemporary dance culture.

Once I have described the socio-economic and discursive determinants that led to the creation of youth television texts such as BPM, I will then examine some of the key concerns of institutional analyses of television. This then allows me to examine televisual discourse on youth culture in general, and dance culture specifically (the third aim of this thesis). I achieve this aim through an analysis of two key discourses in the production and commissioning of BPM; the discourse of post-Reithian public service, and the discourse of free-market liberalism. This then leads the way to chapter 4 where I propose a set of theoretical techniques for the analysis of the relationship between dance music, dance culture, and television.

The collapse of contemporary cultural studies’ analyses of youth in the 1980s coincided with the creation of the television genre of ‘youth television’. Within the global television industry, the major pressing concern of the 1980s was an expansion into new markets, combined with an attempt to win new audiences. This expansion was made essential by the advent of satellite and digital cable technologies, as well as the deregulation of broadcasting brought about by right-wing Western governments. As Simon Frith points out, it was the previous systems’ failure to attract young audiences¹ that meant that ‘youth television’ was seen as a way to expand overall audience figures, and young people were targeted, by both broadcasters and advertisers, with a previously unseen zeal. This desire to attract new audiences was increased by the pressure being applied by advertisers to attract wealthier viewers. The youth audience was seen as a prime example of such a group (Frith, 1993, p.68-73)².

A number of economic and technological factors made this expansion into the youth market possible.

The suggestion that "one should consider the basic unit of consumption of television to be the family/household rather than the individual viewer" (Morley, 1992, p.138) has become increasingly invalid. If we accept Morley’s suggestion that "the use of the television set has to be understood in the wider context of other competing and complementary leisure activities" (Morley, 1992, p.139), then of major interest to us is how the new televisual form of youth television interacts with both youth and ‘adult’ cultures.

Frith quotes BARB figures as showing that in multi-set households (which by 1988 constituted nearly half of all UK households) the youth audience could, for the first time, exercise their own distinctive choices over what to view (Frith, 1993, p.72-73). This meant that, for the first time, broadcasters could directly address what it viewed as a youth audience, without concern for the popularity of ‘youth television’ within other social groups. Hence the British television industry saw the advent of ‘narrowcasting’³.

Within this analysis, we should never underestimate the power of advertisers, and the role they play in the network of power relations that eventually determine the form and content of youth television. Paterson states that

An analysis of the origins of youth television should also look closely at the power of public service ideology, where youth is viewed as a societal grouping with specific needs that should be addressed by the media, irrespective of the needs of advertisers. Whilst the example in the paragraph above might seem to highlight a connection between academic, common-sense and televisual discourses on contemporary dance culture (a concentration on hedonistic recreational drug use), the public service ethos in British television means that there are also differences between televisual discourse and its common-sense and academic equivalents. Naturally the public service ethos is strongest within the BBC, but it is also visible within the ITV network and Channel Four. Crucial to my analysis is the suggestion that public service ideology is placed on top of financial pressures, with Tony Moss, Deputy Head of the BBC’s Department of Youth and Entertainment Features in the early 1990s, stating that "attracting more viewers cannot be our sole criterion. We want our programmes to inform, challenge, and educate" (in O’Kelly, 1992, p.15). Within the independent networks, there are statutory regulations that limit independent broadcasters from outright commercialism, and there is also an ideology of professionalism, irrespective of legislation. Certain elements of the youth television genre attempt not merely to package an audience for the benefit of advertisers, but also, in traditional Reithian terms, to inform, educate and entertain.

This issue of public service ties in with what is viewed as a major secondary aim of youth television, the desire to increase the representation of young people. There have been two broad aspirations here, based on the ambiguous nature of the word ‘representation’. These are to increase the number of young people seen on television, and to increase the number of young people working within television. What is important is the different approaches taken by broadcasters in their attempts to achieve this goal. In short the discourse of public service ‘overdetermines’ the production of youth television. Approaches within the BBC, the ITV Network, and Channel Four have been widely divergent, and the approaches taken have significantly altered both the form and the content of specific programmes, and the genre as a whole. An example of this was the way Bill Hilary, Channel Four’s Commissioning Editor for Youth Programming in the early 1990s, declared that "the time when broadcasters can set themselves up as the spokespeople for young people is over. I want to get away from that and get back to the grassroots and what young people are saying for themselves" (in Godfrey, 1993, p.30). Nevertheless, as McRobbie suggests, the differing approaches of, for instance, Channel Four and BBC2, "continue to reflect a different image of youth than that found, for example in the Daily Mail" (McRobbie, 1993, p.410).

The influence of the public service ethos in the production of British youth television has led to a move away from television aimed at an empirically defined youth towards the targeting of a discursively defined youth, where anyone can be youthful. In a much cited interview, Janet Street-Porter, Head of BBC Youth and Entertainment Features in the early 1990s, suggested that "I suppose the programmes we make are for people who don’t have a lot of responsibilities" (in Smith, 1989). Stephen Garrett, Bill Hilary’s replacement at Channel Four, appeared to say much the same thing; "it’s less to do with actual age now, it’s more of a, hmm, attitude. An unmarried 35-year-old may have a more youthful attitude than a married 25-year-old with two kids" (in Lyttle, 1991, p.15).

Despite appearances, Street-Porter and Garrett have not stumbled across a new social category here. There has always been an element of ‘irresponsibility’ (particularly financial) and ‘attitude’ within discursive definitions of youth throughout the 20th century. This was hinted at in the previous two chapters. In chapter 2 I showed how youth consumerism is viewed as problematic in the thrifty Majorite and Blairite 1990s, where ‘sensible’ spending patterns are emphasised, and hedonism frowned upon. As a consequence young people are often rebellious in their consumerism (or, alternatively, consumerist in their rebellion). And, as I demonstrated in chapter 1, there are elements of consumerism in contemporary dance culture that can be termed radical.

Because television is still, primarily, a domestic medium, conflicts and power relationships within the domestic sphere are crucial determinants in how television is received and used; "the selection and use of messages will be shaped by the exigencies of those local environments" (Lindlof and Meyer, 1987, p.2). As Morley states

However, in his stressing of gender imbalances in the appropriation and use of new technologies, Morley is ignoring the crucial generational split in the appropriation and use of technology. As Frith notes, this split effects what texts are produced, the form these texts eventually take, and fundamentally structures the context in which texts are received. The satellite broadcasters of the 1980s were aware from their research that the young audience were more prepared to use new technology, be it computer games or satellite receivers⁴, than older generations, and therefore gradually adapted their advertising strategies, as well as increasing the output they devoted to the youth audience. Thomas Johansson takes this argument further, suggesting that "young people are dependent on electronic media in their search for a specific lifestyle" (Johansson, 1993, p.15, see also Snow, 1987). Here again we can see the dual nature of technological change, with youth co-opting technology and using for its own purposes.

New technological developments have also meant that the television set has become a site for non-broadcast material, with rented videos, computers, and video games becoming widely available. As Morley and Silverstone suggest "the television is no longer a source only of broadcast programming; its screen has become the site of a whole range of entertainment and informational services, under varying degrees of viewer control and increasingly subject to viewer choice" (Morley and Silverstone, 1990, p.31). Here we can see how one of the initial technological factors allowing youth television to happen, namely the wider availability of videocassette recorders, meant that youth television had to happen, for the use of videocassette recorders to view non-broadcast material meant that the percentage of young people’s time in front of the television set spent watching broadcast programmes was perceived, by advertisers and broadcasters alike, to be steadily decreasing. New technology therefore proved to be a double-edged sword. The advent of domestic-youth-oriented personal computers by Sinclair, Atari and Commodore, all of which used the domestic television set for their visual output, and the current popularity of ‘entertainment systems’ marketed by the Japanese electronics giants Sega and Nintendo, further compounded this.

In his discussion of the effects of new technology, specifically cable technology, videocassette recorders and computers, Jim Collins suggests that "these technologies have produced an ever increasing surplus of texts, all of which demand our attention in varying levels of intensity" (Collins, 1992, p.331). However the point crucial to our analysis is that with a surplus of cultural texts, the site of reception becomes a battleground for competing texts from financially motivated producers.

The primary aim of youth television was, therefore, to draw young audiences away from both non-televisual forms of entertainment, and away from rented videos, computers and video games. In the early to mid 1990s this led to the broadcasting of programmes, such as Gamesmaster and Movies, Games and Video, which were aimed at video game players and videocassette purchasers and renters. Combining this phenomenon with television advertising for videocassettes, computer consoles and cartridges, we have a situation where the uses of the television set combine and clash, where the interests of one part of the broadcasting industry are directly lined up against the interests of another part of the industry. In order to increase advertising revenue, broadcasters attempted to package for advertisers ‘youth’ with disposable incomes. One way of doing this was to broadcast programmes concerning specific ‘youth’ themes, but, in the case of Gamesmaster and Movies, Games And Video, broadcasters find themselves promoting technologies that were seen as the cause of their inability to reach the youth audience in the first place. As Noble suggests

This can be combined with the phenomena noticed by Paterson where

One major economic factor that has led to an expansion of youth-oriented television is the increasing availability of cheap programming material in the form of pop music videos. An example of this is The Chart Show. Produced by Video Visuals Production Limited for Yorkshire Television, The Chart Show relies entirely upon promotional music videos for its programming content, thereby massively cutting production costs. One reason for this is the relatively inexpensive nature of pop music videos. Whilst the cost of producing say, a new Madonna or Michael Jackson video could well be over the equivalent of a million pounds, this cost is recouped through sales across the world. Combine such videos with ‘DiY’ videos produced by pop groups for niche markets, and broadcast on programmes such as BPM, then low-cost ‘music television’ has become a reality in the 1990s.

Now that the circumstances that led to the production of programmes such as BPM have been outlined, I want to clarify some basic principles concerning the relationships between the television text and its audience, before going deeper into an analysis of the production of BPM itself.

As Michael O’Shaughnessy suggests "television must connect with people’s actual experiences, both in terms of our real lives and our fantasy lives; unless we can recognize ourselves, our desires, and our dreams in television it will mean nothing to us" (O’Shaughnessy, 1990, p.94). O’Shaughnessy suggests there is a ‘connection’ between television and people’s lives. Here I would agree with O’Shaughnessy’s choice of words. It is not the case that televisual representations of the dance floor are a ‘reflection’ of the dance floor, or that televisual representations of the dance floor have a one-way ‘effect’ upon contemporary dance culture; there is a three-way relationship between the text, the referent of that text, and the audience. This three-way relationship will be dealt with in more detail in the following chapter.

Sarah Thornton suggests the "media are there and effective from the start" (Thornton, 1994, p.176). This is certainly true. McRobbie’s analysis is similar, suggesting that television positions its

One of the difficulties inherent in an examination of the three-way relationship between a specific textual form (BPM), its referent (contemporary dance culture), and its audience is that youth television is an under-theorised genre, and representations of the dance floor particularly so. The study of youth has so far been concerned with when young people present themselves as visible entities, not as audiences. Whilst there has been a plethora of work published on children and television⁷, the role of young people as television viewers and as an audience has largely been ignored (see McRobbie, 1984, p.141).

Of the research that has been completed, very little has actively sought out young people’s views. This mirrors the process that Buckingham highlights when he suggests that

A project such as the one I complete in the following chapters (an examination of the relationship between a specific youth culture, its televisual representation, and the audience) is needed by both academia and by youth culture in their respective searches for meaning, in their search for explanation. The limited research on youth television that has been published has generally concentrated on examining the institutional structures of youth television⁸. Whilst this work is valuable, it too is essentially incomplete. We cannot understand the precise meanings produced by youth television whilst working within an analytical paradigm that is dominated by a kind of institutional determinism. It is not the case that the meanings produced by youth television are directly determined by the actions of the institution. An analysis of the institution can however begin to examine the parameters within which textual encoding takes place, and is a necessary step towards examining the text itself, and the inter-discursive space of contemporary dance culture. A brief examination of the production of BPM will highlight what an institutional analysis can tell us.

BPM was made by Music Box, a subsidiary of Sunset and Vine (who specialise in the production of sports programmes), and who are owned by Molinaire, a large post-production company. BPM’s mode of production was an unusual one. Made on a shoe-string budget of £8,000 an hour, the production team of BPM consisted of a Director who doubled as a camera operator, an Associate Producer, a Producer, a Production Assistant who doubled as a second camera operator, and a sound engineer. Such a non-standard ‘cottage industry’ approach means that we cannot necessarily talk of a ‘house style’, and, due to it being television’s only sustained attempt to represent dance culture, we cannot precisely locate BPM within any formal or generic conventions. This will be seen to be of importance in the following chapter.

Armed with these few details and a knowledge of British television, we might begin to discuss the possibilities for a television programme that represented contemporary dance culture, or we might at least begin to discuss the limits of such a budget and production crew. In a private interview Simon Potter, Producer of BPM, hinted at the results of such limitations:

With specific relation to the former, there is a recent movement within media studies that, in reaction to the work of David Morley, suggests that the primary site of analysis should be the television text. This movement can be traced back to the 1970s and the popularity of neo-Althusserian analyses of the process of interpellation. This textual determinism is as limiting as any institutional determinism, in that it ignores all the lessons learnt by the reception studies and the contextual analyses of the 1980s. Meaning is not inherent in the text itself. A chain of televisual signifiers has no meaning outside the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations of the language of television. A comprehensive analysis of the meanings created by television should embrace production, distribution and audience, as well as textuality. As Paul Smith states

The quotation from Paul Smith above is also of relevance to an analysis of BPM in that it can be used to address directly the conflicts between the two discourses that are most important in an institutional analysis of BPM. The following section outlines these discourses; the discourse of post-Reithian public service¹⁰, which was dominant in the production of BPM, and the discourse of free-market liberalism, which was dominant in the commissioning of BPM.

The discourse of post-Reithian public service is held in high regard by the production team responsible for BPM, who view contemporary dance culture as an invigorating and dynamic culture that is not adequately represented by ‘mainstream’ television, and a culture that receives detrimental publicity across a variety of other media. For them, the role of BPM was twofold; firstly to educate non-participants in the value of dance culture, and secondly to inform participants of the latest trends and the latest musical texts. Two quotations from Simon Potter demonstrate that this was the case;

The producers of BPM were, at times, good spokespeople for contemporary dance culture. Although working within Independent Television Commission guidelines concerning impartiality, BPM did explicitly criticise government policy, and therefore implicitly criticised common-sense discourse (common-sense discourse fully supports, for example, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994). Potter cites three occasions when BPM directly criticised the government; an interview with The Drum Club, a feature on the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, and a feature on Spiral Tribe, an organisation that runs illegal raves. Potter suggests that the BPM team were not "pulling any punches in terms of criticising government policy" (Potter, 1995).

Whilst maximising audience share was a priority for Potter (he obviously wanted as many people to watch his programme as possible) this was not the primary objective of his approach. Potter characterises BPM as responsive and discriminating, rather than transitory and inattentive; "the audience is quite small for that time of night, but the audience are watching it for a particular reason. They are going to go out and buy the records. It’s not like a chart show audience where there’s a lot of kids watching it casually" (Potter, 1995). Here Potter is taking a qualitative approach to his search for an audience. He is relatively unconcerned that his audience is not as large as it might be, so long as the audience that is watching gain enjoyment and a ‘use value’ from the programme¹¹. This was emphasised later on in our interview when Potter talked about BPM’s coverage of experimental music, music that was pushing the aesthetic boundaries of dance culture. In particular, Potter suggested that such music was "only going to appeal to a very limited number of people within our audience demographic, but if we think it has merits despite that, we’ll cover it" (Potter, 1995). This can but emphasise the post-Reithian approach employed within the production of BPM.

The discourse that was dominant in the commissioning of BPM was free-market liberalism. Simply put the ITV network commissioned BPM in 1993 because it thought that BPM would be able to deliver a substantial section of the lucrative youth market to advertisers. ITV management re-commissioned it for two more years whilst this was perceived to be happening. However, for reasons not entirely revealed to either the public, the press, or to the BPM production team, ITV management decided not to re-commission BPM for a fourth series. Whilst Granada, who commissioned BPM on behalf of the ITV network, refused to discuss with me the dropping of BPM, reports from two dance culture magazines suggested that market research had shown that other styles of programming would be more profitable than BPM:

Of particular interest to us is when these two discourses clash, when the producers of BPM are following an agenda that directly contradicts the discourse responsible for its commissioning. Simon Potter gives an example of how these two discourses conflicted, and how, in particular, the discourse of the free-market interfered with BPM’s post-Reithian public service ethos;

Here we have two discourses fighting it out. On the one hand we have the discourse of the market that became dominant in the 1980s, and on the other hand we have the Reithian values that were dominant within television production from its conception until the mid 1970s.

Potter also suggests that, although BPM represented the politically resistive nature of contemporary dance culture in a positive light, educating outsiders in the ways and mores of dance culture, and informing dance culture participants of the latest trends, the discourse of free-market liberalism nevertheless had an indirect effect;

It appears that, in particular, the Reithian discourse has gone full circle. In 1923 the Sykes Committee defined broadcasting as "a valuable form of public property" that should be subject to "the public interest", rather than market forces (in Scannell and Cardiff, 1991, p.6). For half a century or so successive governments reaffirmed Reithian ideals, whilst broadcasters, particularly those involved in the ITV network, often fought against the restrictions that Reithian regulations made on their programming and their profits. This was certainly the case with independent producers in the 1960s and 1970s fighting against the monolithic BBC and ITV ‘quangos’. Now we have Simon Potter and his team at BPM desperately trying to retain certain Reithian values, and fighting against the imposition of regulations based upon a free-market ideology that has become dominant in the management of the ITV network.

There is a dichotomy here between what might be viewed as a radical text and the ‘New Right’ production methods that produced it. Not only is the Althusserian model lacking here, but any model that posits a causal link between economic base and cultural superstructure would be inadequate. Again the Gramscian perspective is useful. We are living in an entirely different conjuncture than the 1930s, and to suggest that broadcasting in general, and Reithianism in particular, are the same now as they were then would be erroneous. When the conjunctural terrain changes, ideological positions change. In the case of this analysis, a particular production ethos, Reithianism, has become disarticulated from the political position that produced it (paternalism) and is now used for an opposing political purpose¹⁴. This was at least partially confirmed by a statement made by Simon Potter in which he defined himself a socialist.

More recently we can see how the institutional structures and production practices of BPM have become disarticulated from the political ethos that produced them. Although some have suggested that the broadcasting industry was the only ‘state’ industry to avoid privatisation, this is not the case. The Conservative government’s privatisation of broadcasting was more ‘subtle’ than the highly publicised sales of, for instance, the gas and electricity industries. ‘Producer choice’, the internal market, and increased competition have been instrumental in forcing the BBC to operate within a free-market model¹⁵. The ‘auctioning’ of ITV franchises has forced ITV companies to increase profits in order to fund their bids, to the detriment of programming quality. Channel Four was founded as an ‘independent publisher’ rather than as a state producer of programmes. Central to many of these changes has been a split between production and distribution. The BBC, the ITV network and Channel Four are forced to buy programmes from independent production companies, and we have seen a consequent lessening of power of the Independent Television Commission and the BBC Board of Governors, which is essentially what the Conservative governments of the 1980s set out to achieve.

The ‘frontiers of the state’ have been ‘rolled back’ and state control has been replaced with the ‘hidden hand’ of the free market. The production of BPM is situated within an essentially right-wing model. However one by-product of the commissioning system has been the production of radical texts such as BPM. Neither the ‘vulgar’ nor the Althusserian Marxist analyses that are central to much of the discipline of media studies are applicable here. The radicalism of BPM is neither a direct reflection of the economic system that produced it, nor part of its role as an "Ideological State Apparatus" (Althusser, 1971). The same is true for other programmes that have been spawned by the lessening of control over production caused by Conservative privatisation. It is unthinkable that the Conservative Governments of the 1980s intended that their restructuring of the British broadcasting industry would lead to programmes such as BBC2’s Gaytime TV. We must not forget that, whilst the ‘New Right’ ideologies of the 1980s may have had a libertarian impulse, the Thatcher governments contained both economic liberalism and moral authoritarianism in equal measures. The liberal ‘permissiveness’ of both Gaytime TV and BPM were anathema to Thatcherism, yet they were both products of the Thatcherite conjuncture.

At which point Gramsci should again re-enter our analysis. Programming is not directly related to the structure of its production, and neither is it completely autonomous; rather broadcasting is the terrain upon which ideological battles are fought out. BPM is the result of struggle; struggle between dance culture and commercial forces eager to attract a market with a relatively high disposable income. It is also the result of struggle between those who support free-market values and those who support a post-Reithian perspective.

The first section of this chapter introduced us to various social, economic, technological and discursive determinants that led to the creation of the televisual sub-genre of British youth television. This then led to an analysis of various theoretical issues that should be taken into account in an institutional analysis of youth television in general, and BPM in particular. I then outlined the basic production set-up of BPM. This led to an analysis of the discourse of post-Reithian public service that was influential in the production of BPM, and the discourse of free-market liberalism that at least partially determined the commissioning of BPM. I then examined how these discourses conflicted during the three years that BPM was broadcast, as well as examining the applicability of Althusserian and Gramscian models in the analysis of these discourses.

Having successfully provided a critique of common-sense discourse and contemporary cultural studies’ discourse on contemporary dance culture (the first and second aims of this thesis), and critically examined certain televisual discourses that have shown themselves to be at work in the production of BPM, now is the time to develop a new methodology, to develop new theoretical ways of examining contemporary dance culture and the relationship between contemporary dance culture and its televisual representations.

1.Frith quotes market research as stating that in the mid-eighties 16 to 24-year-olds only made up 9% of the television audience, despite making up 15% of the population as a whole, and whilst the average viewer watched 27 hours of television per week, the average 16 to 24-year-old watched only seventeen hours per week (Frith, 1993, p.68).

2.Frith quotes Greg Dyke, head of programming at LWT in the late 1980s, as stating that "the viewing figures are going down and the sports appeal mainly to older viewers. I want to reach a younger audience which in ITV terms means anyone under 45. We’re being urged by our advertisers to change our programme mix to attract better-off viewers" (quoted in Leapman, 1988). Here we can see the precarious nature of the entire structure of broadcasting, with public service ideology going by the board in the quest for increased revenue.

3.This is backed up by Paterson’s suggestion that

5.Meaghan Morris, drawing upon the work of Andreas Huyssen, Tania Modleski and Patrice Petro, is concerned that, in the rush to accept zapping as a ‘radical’ cultural practice, cultural studies is validating a view of television reception that draws upon ideas of "mass culture as woman" (see Morris, 1990, p.23, see also Huyssen, 1986, pp.44-62, Modleski, 1986b, and Petro, 1986). In particular Morris suggests that modern television viewing is characterised by media studies as "distracted, absent-minded, insouciant, vague, flighty, skimming from image to image. The rush of associations runs irresistibly toward a figure of mass culture not as woman but, more specifically, as bimbo" (Morris, 1990, p.24). This is an important debate, and one that will be dealt with in more detail in chapter 5.

6.For a more detailed explanation of Williams’ observations concerning segmentation and flow in television broadcasting, see Williams, 1990, pp.78-118.

7.For a survey of research on children and television see Buckingham, 1987 and Buckingham (ed.), 1993. Research on children and television is beyond the scope of this thesis as, by definition, it falls outside the social and generic categories of youth culture and youth television. However, work on children and television can be seen as a parallel project to my work on youth and television. In particular both sets of research highlight anxieties, power relationships and contradictions within contemporary cultural forms. Buckingham suggests that, in order to complete these tasks, research should be defined historically, and connected to "evolving definitions of childhood and of recurrent responses to the perceived impact of new cultural forms" (Buckingham, 1987, p.2). In studying youth television we must therefore study the referent of youth television (youth culture), societal definitions of youth, and the relationships between ‘youth’ and the television industry. In particular, attention should be paid to Buckingham’s mention of ‘new cultural forms’. Contemporary dance culture, as reformulated in the wake of the acid house boom of the late 1980s, appears to be one such new cultural form that has galvanised both the imaginations of participants, and the fears of society as a whole.

Another major difference between my research on youth television and previous research on children and television is that my approach is multi-disciplinary. The majority of research on children has been located within the competing paradigms of the effects’ tradition, critical mass communications research, the uses and gratifications approach, and cognitive psychology. The use of these approaches has led to the fragmentation of research in this area. An exception to this is the work of Bob Hodge and David Tripp in their book Children and Television (Hodge and Tripp, 1986). Hodge and Tripp’s approach is more cautious and self-reflexive, and, crucially, it draws influence from a variety of academic disciplines. This thesis follows this tentative move, in that it combines semiotics, anthropology, Marxism and other cultural theories and positions.

8.For an example of an institutional analysis of youth television, see Frith, 1993.

9.This interview was completed two weeks before BPM was taken of air. The circumstances of it being dropped will be dealt with later.

10.BPM should be viewed as post-Reithian rather than Reithian because although it attempted to inform, to educate and to entertain its audience, it did so through the provision of texts that had low cultural value (i.e. dance music) as opposed to the high culture texts provided during the heyday of pre-war BBC Reithianism. In Reith’s day, the nearest equivalent to dance music was jazz. Whilst Reith did not entirely exclude jazz from the schedules, he did cite it as an example of ‘pure entertainment’, and to use "so great a scientific invention for the purpose of ‘entertainment’ alone [would be] a prostitution of its powers and an insult to the character and intelligence of the people" (Reith, 1924, p.17).

Equally Reithianism is based upon the principle of universality, with the construction of an ‘ideal citizen’ as the reader inscribed within the text. The post-Reithian BPM text is produced for a demographic segment, despite Simon Potter’s reservations about such an approach (for a more detailed analysis of Reithianism see Scannell and Cardiff, 1991, and Briggs, 1961).

11.Finding out the precise viewing figures for BPM proved to be a difficult business. Simon Potter maintains that the Broadcast Research department at London TV Centre, the ITV network’s central audience research bureau, consistently refused to divulge the audience figures for any programmes within the ‘night-time’ section of their schedule. However, once, the programme had been withdrawn from the schedules, London Weekend Television provided me with the results of their audience research (including total audience, audience share, and audience breakdown in terms of age, gender and social class):

Series Total audience Audience Share

1993 97,000 60.1%

1994 82,000 46.9%

1995 80,000 50.3%

Series Age Group Gender Social Grade

         4-15     16-24     25-34    35-44     45-54     55+     M     F     AB     C1     C2     DE

1993     7%       22%      27%     17%        13%     14%    63% 37%   8%    20%   31%   41%

1994     6%       26%      24%     16%        14%     15%    59% 41%   7%    20%   31%   42%

1995     4%        27%     24%     16%        15%     15%    59% 41%  10%   18%   33%   39%

12.It could be suggested that, within a Reithian discourse, viewers from lower social groups were, in fact, more prized than higher social groups, for it was working-class audiences who were in most need of education and ‘culture’. This ties in to the ‘mass society’ or ‘mass culture’ thesis that was so influential within British society in the 1920s and 1930s. For a summary of the ‘mass society’ thesis see Strinati, 1995, chapter 1, and Carey, 1992.

13.Scannell and Cardiff affirm that universality was one of Reith’s central ideals when they suggest that, for Reith, "broadcasting had a responsibility to bring into the greatest possible number of homes in the fullest degree all that was best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement" (Scannell and Cardiff, 1991, p.7).

14.A parallel can be drawn between the change from Reithianism to post-Reithianism and changes in Labour education policy. During the post-war period, Labour’s education policy was centred on a belief in comprehensive education in mixed-ability groups. This was a central tenet of post-war socialism. However, with the collapse of the "post-war consensus", this position has become disarticulated from the politics that created it. Labour’s policy is now based around "setting", where pupils are taught in groups of comparable academic ability. Other left-wing groups and parties are following this move, with, for instance, support in the mid-1990s from the RCP/Living Marxism group for selective grammar schools (previously a purely Conservative perspective). Perhaps this analogy is not such an obscure one for two reasons. Firstly, Reithianism and post-Reithianism both have education as a central defining element. Secondly, as Pierre Bourdieu suggests, education is central to the concept of cultural capital that is explored elsewhere in this thesis (see Robbins, 1991, for an outline of Bourdieu’s analysis of education).

15.Some would suggest that the government did not ‘force’ the BBC to adopt market principles, but the BBC ‘jumped’ more than it needed to, adopting a Thatcherite line just as Thatcherism was declining. Either way my point stands, that although it remains part of the state, it is now semi-autonomous, or perhaps, in Althusserian terms, ‘relatively autonomous’.