Chair (Paul Norris): Ian Fraser has been found and needs no further introduction. Michael Jackson - we are very fortunate to have Michael Jackson, as he is a broadcaster of extraordinary experience. He served as controller of both BBC-1 and as head of BBC, controller of BBC-1 and 2, before becoming BBC Director of Television and then became chief executive of Channel Four in the UK, so has really done all the big jobs in the UK and then his move to the United States to head up Universal, one of the big studios there. And he has a reputation really as one of the great innovators in world television so I think we're very fortunate to have him with us and for Ian to be able to probe some of this fascinating territory and there will be time for questions, just as long as Ian sticks to time, there should be time for questions after the interview.
Ian: Thanks Paul I can take a prompt. Michael it's probably just as well this conference is about a new future for public broadcasting because you have been fairly scathing about the old model. “A battle standard we no longer need to rally to” you called it, “a pointless juju stick of British broadcasting” and, the cruellest cut of all I imagine, you describe public service broadcasting as “a term now drained of all purpose and meaning”. Let's start there. What happened to what was once a battle standard proudly raised?
Michael: Well I should explain myself obviously. But I guess I was reacting against a language which really comes from the 19th century, the language of public service and to me all too often it smacks of a kind of a paternalism, of a father knows best, even an imperial heritage and I also think if you think about the formulation that in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s it was really designed in opposition to commercial culture. There was a huge fear, especially in Britain, of the influence of choice, of American culture, of the marketplace. And I think it a rather unproductive fear. And so we, and the people who followed him, wanted to train people. And if you remember, I don't know if you remember, Reith actually had a pyramid of public taste. There was low taste at the bottom and at the top was high culture, the opera, poetry and the idea of the BBC was that it would inexorably drive people from the bottom of the pyramid to the top of the pyramid over the time, when presumably everybody was reciting poetry and no one was listening to popular music. Now of course we know that hasn't happened. But some of the vestiges particularly in language of that paternalism remained. The other reason I don't like the term public service broadcasting is that it all too often is used by the enemies of intervention in the marketplace to quarantine that intervention and what I mean by that is we're happy to have a little bit of public money, provided that it's going into things that don't really matter, that don't really affect the marketplace too much and I think has Greg very well said yesterday, one of the best things that the BBC and Channel Four and other broadcasters like that have done is to affect the whole of the marketplace, it isn't just a sort of, a small little island on the map of television, it's a continent on the map of television. So you know in essence I was arguing for different language and therefore for some different thinking and I much prefer an American term to describe what we all do which is not for profit. And I see not for profit as a more eloquent way of describing the job and the purpose of intervening in the marketplace.
IF: I think that one of the reasons that we have tended to want to embrace it and, it's a case I think of embracing it again, but certainly within the context of television is that because for the first time in ten, maybe fifteen, years we feel that we are empowered once again to talk in terms of public goods, public space and public service.
MJ: Yeah well and I think that's great among the - huge believer in that. But okay so do it for today, do it in response to the fact that people are a lot more sophisticated, the consumer is a lot more sophisticated, the people don't want to be spoonfed good things, they demand good things. And also I think of public service and not for profit broadcasting as something which isn't about market failure, it isn't about filling in the gaps that have been left behind by the broadcasters, it's about innovating and pushing the fabric and culture of broadcasting on and therefore I am really against the idea of intervention as a kind of heritage theme park. And just lastly I'd say that I actually think that when it's done well, it's a really commercial proposition. It's interesting about both the BBC and Channel Four is that that they give their commercial competitors a real run for their money and I think they do that because they can invest for the long term. As we've seen in the last ten years of contemporary capitalism one of the great flaws of contemporary capitalism, it is very much influenced by short term market and stock market in particular considerations, whereas the BBC and Channel Four are really able to invest for the long term and that turns out to be a really good business practice.
IF: You've got a reservation about the term, let's talk about the model. I said this morning that when we at TVNZ have been boxed around the ears for not being enough of a public service broadcaster, I have a feeling often that people, that some of the people attacking us are comparing us to a model that they apprehend as it were in the rear vision mirror. Was there ever really in your view a golden age of public broadcasting?
MJ: I think -
IF: How subversive are you prepared to be?
MJ: I don't know, it's a very complicated question to answer because I think there was in many ways but it was a dubious golden age, because it was a golden age based on the idea of limiting people's choice. And I remember you know when I, I suppose just before I grew up, the BBC used to have something called The Toddler's Truce and The Toddler's Truce was where BBC television went off the air altogether about 6.30 in the evening so that mothers could put their children to bed without the competition of television. Now I don't know whether that was good for childcare, whether the great psychological you know good works were created because of that, but I do know that actually parents should perhaps be able to do that for themselves without television disappearing and I think that there is - so I think once you limit choice in that way you of course push people to things that they wouldn't otherwise go to. For example for years in Britain ITV and BBC put on their weekly current affairs programme at the same time so that people were forced to watch current affairs. Of course the logic, the result of that was that The High Chaparral on BBC-2 became BBC-2's most successful programme. And -
IF: Some of us see that as current affairs.
MJ: Exactly. And I would argue for trying to and what I think we were trying to do, Tim and myself, in our time at Channel Four was to work out ways of doing the things that we were meant to be doing as part of our remit, but doing it in a way that which genuinely reached out to people, and people genuinely wanted to watch. They weren't forced to watch because of scheduling practice or whatever. And I think, so in other words, trying to do these things but integrating them into the heart of the schedule and that meant changing the kinds of programmes, changing the kinds of address, changing the kinds of marketing. I think that's what - so in other words you need to change your whole approach in a competitive multi-channel world. And that's, you know, difficult.
IF: Toddler's Truce still exists of course. It's what Brent Impey and I have been attempting to work towards over the last eighteen months or so, with some success I have to say. I mean it's a commonplace to say this, which is no reason not to say it again, that there's been a huge change in where the balance of power lies between the broadcaster and the audience since the days of Reith. You pointed that out yourself very eloquently in that lecture that you gave in 2001 where you talked about the pointless juju stick of British broadcasting. So who should define public broadcasting in 2003, the viewers or the broadcasters or the commentariat, who? Who takes control of the definitions?, because there's some incredible power in that.
MJ: Well I think one of the main things you need, and that's why this whole conference is such a great idea, is you need some kind of passionate debate about it. And I think one of my particular bugbears is that the debate on television, both the creative debate but also the intellectual debate about, you know, the purposes and the structures is so limited and I think one of the things that has always annoyed me is that you know a newspaper would never dream of getting somebody who had never been to the opera to review an opera. You have to be steeped in it. But television - any old idiot can review television because television is like water, it's not valued in the way that it ought to be. And I would argue that the achievements of television over the past thirty years probably make it, you know, the great art from of the last few decades. Sorry, I went off the beaten track there. To come back to your question: I think it's for government broadcasters to actually involve viewers in some kind of debate, and I don't think that means pathetic kind of access programmes on the television where people can complain about programmes. It's about actually having intelligent thinking about the purposes of broadcasting, going out into communities, discussing them. It's about doing sophisticated audience research which isn't just about adding up numbers but actually speaking to, you know, to intelligent focus groups. It's about using all of the apparatus that can be used by, that can be used actually to control people and to spoonfeed them but liberating those so that you are actually listening to people. And I think the good thing about the competitive environment that we're in now is that you really do have to sort of reach out to people to encourage them to watch. It's no longer a question as it was in the two or three or four channel world of people, of people turning up for anything. People - one of the most striking things about the marketplace in America at the moment is that every - this new broadcast season that began in the fall - every new programme on American television pretty much has failed, because the audience is longer interested in what I call default television. It's on, the television's on, I'll watch this. You know it's fine. They don't need to watch it's just fine any more because there's so much going on in their lives and because - and cable is full of programmes which are aimed at discrete groups of people and sucking those people towards cable and away from broadcasting. And that's a challenge for broadcasting, and the challenge will only be met by programme that has a real need to watch that.
IF: You said when you were taking your leave of Channel Four that you were stimulated when you were there by leading an organisation "that constantly seeks to reinvent itself and to innovate". Is it, is the characteristic of public service broadcasting, or not-for-profit broadcasting, that it's good at revitalising itself?
MJ: Could be good. Could be bad. I think there are many examples of completely ossified public service broadcasting.
IF: Can we have one or two?
MJ: Well you know when ITV started in Britain in the middle 1950s the BBC lost 90 per cent of its audience overnight and it was only you know extraordinary figure, Hugh Green, who went out and competed but competed with quality and with imagination that was able to make it a 60/40 race in the early ‘60s. So I don't think there's any - and I think if you talk to minorities in the ‘60s and ‘70s about BBC they'd tell you that the BBC certainly didn't reflect their world. So no I don't think there's any particular good, as it were, in the structure. It's all to do with the dynamism of the culture and of the leadership of those institutions.
IF: I know from conversations we had the other day, and you have an intimate knowledge from within of both what happens in the United States and what happens in Britain, you've been able to look both at performance of the BBC, Channel Four, ITV and you've been able to watch PBS in the States, and you said to me when we were talking the other day that you'd like to make a comment on why it is or how it is that the BBC has succeeded in terms of the model of public broadcaster that it is but PBS hasn't.
MJ: PBS is a very sad story. And I think it's failed because for a number of reasons, one is that it hasn't, you know, the programmes on PBS - and there are some good programmes and some successful programmes - but they're not, the people, the day after they've gone out, you don't ever really meet people who are discussing them, who are debating them and that's because the programmes are too stereotypical, too old, too ossified. And those programmes come about because the structure is so much of a compromise between local stations and the Washington bureaucracy that controls the channel. And actually I suspect that in this day and age you've got to be careful about having power too diffuse throughout the system. When you're competing against people like Rupert Murdoch you need very clear objectives and very clear leadership that is empowered to actually lead and I think that's one lesson for PBS. I think another clear lesson from PBS is that it's not getting enough money from the government. You know you need secure and full funding to make, you know to make not-for-profit broadcasting really effective and it's too reliant on donations from viewers, from corporate sponsorship. And the other issue is that the system has not - it's not changed, it's not developed. A revolution has occurred in broadcasting in the last ten years. Now the BBC or Channel Four, for example, have all launched a digital channel. They've all completely transformed the nature of their scheduling. They've competed. At certain times it has to be said both institutions have been guilty of over-competing, of getting dragged into the competition and losing sight of some of the values. But the net result of this period is that we've launched a successful digital strategy as viewers have become interested in multi-channel television so the public service broadcasters in Britain have gone with them. We've changed the nature of some of the programming that we do. We used to do X number of hours of religion, X number hours of arts programmes, X number of hours of this and that. And tick lots of boxes for the regulator. And we're very much moving towards a system which values outcomes rather than box ticking. So that, for example, it's very interesting - I was just reading a piece about religion on television in Britain - and for years as many of you will know there was a church service on the BBC on a Sunday early evening called Songs of Praise and, you know, nice people in hats and coats, you know sang hymns and prayed etc etc and millions of people used to watch of course when it started because there were only two television channels in Britain so you had to watch. And also there was a more deferential society, religion was more organised, state religion, organised state religion was more popular. And I just read this statistic that in multi-channel homes now where Sky is available Songs of Praise and programmes like that is 95%, 95% of that audience.
So what is a public service broadcaster to do about that? Well one thing I think you have to do is recognise that Songs of Praise isn't popular. No-one's home, so ticking a box saying we did 50 hours of Songs of Praise is a complete waste of time. So first of all you need to change the programming and then you need to understand something about society. Organised religion is less popular but the search for spiritual, you know, for answers to spiritual questions, to religious questions, is as popular as ever. So therefore you need to reflect your scheduling and the kinds of programming you make. I mean, for example one of the most successful things, religious shows that we did in the past few years is that we took the Indian religious festival Kumbh Mela, and we showed a three minute section of what had happened that day live after the news live from India or recorded that day I suppose from India, and we showed it after the 7 o'clock news every day and then we streamed it on our website. And that had, it was only three minutes so in regular box ticking terms it didn't really count. It was only three minutes, why bother. But it was a great intervention because it took something that people wouldn't otherwise bump into and put it in a place where people who didn't even know that they wanted to watch it would find it and enjoy it. And I think that's a good example of how you need to, you know, change and shift in order to sort of win an audience.
IF: You also said that you enjoyed the challenge in Channel Four of balancing the cultural and creative imperatives that drove the channel against its commercial needs. I was going to use the phrase, public/private partnership to describe Channel Four but I was just mindful of the fact that the last time I used the phrase we mislaid a chairman. You scheduled Queer as Folk but you also scheduled Big Brother. Was that to serve your commercial needs or the channel's creative and cultural imperatives?
MJ: Well for a long time there's been a rather deadly phrase in the UK and it was the idea of ends and means programming, and just to explain that: Ends programmes as such were good for you, but means programmes paid for the programmes that were good for you. So an ends programme was an opera and a means programme was The Beverley Hillbillies, right.
IF: Yep
MJ: And that, and Channel Four when it started had you know quite a lot of The Beverley Hillbillies and quite a lot of opera. And I think that's the kind of outdated and cynical view of the audience. I think the audience spots the cynicism of the means programmes a mile off.
IF: That goes back to Reith doesn't it?
MJ: It does. It does exactly with the idea of a sort of Radio 3 on the one hand, a classical music service, and a popular music channel on the other. And I think we would, what we tried to be at our best was to try to collapse that idea and to bring ends and means together, so for me Big Brother is not the polar opposite of Queer as Folk. It's part of a strategy that came from a view that our audience was young, therefore we needed in particular to inflect our audience [programming?] to appeal to a younger audience and that in the context of public service broadcasting in the UK was something that I think was Channel Four's particular mission. And then I think we had a view that the audience was much more interested in self-actualisation, was much more interested in putting on different identities and much less class-bound than in the past. And I think both Big Brother, Queer as Folk, many other programmes that we did turned out to be about self-actualisation and about people searching for kind of new identities.
And we could talk a lot about Big Brother, because many people in the UK and many previous chief executives in Channel Four hate it and think it's perhaps one of the most despicable programmes ever made but actually I think it's one of the most interesting programmes, both as a programme because of the way that it's united the internet, digital television and analogue broadcasting, and both because it was the real window into the world of young people you've just never seen on television. Queer as Folk - again I think the great thing about Queer Folk is that it was part of the debate about how minorities are perceived on television - makes it worth for instance telling that story briefly. So in the ‘50s there would be no gay people on television in the UK at all. In the ‘60s gay people would either be a kind of caricature in a comedy programme or a Social Problem. In the ‘70s I think more of an anthropological approach was taken. Who are these strange people? I mean, they're going to explain their lifestyle to without somebody saying it's good or bad but just, you know, almost like a nature study programme. And the great thing about Queer as Folk is it's written by a gay man and it also, it had the courage to reflect on gay lifestyle and to be a critique of certain kinds of gay lifestyle.
And I think in that progression - also by the way it was in the prime time schedule and was successful and heavily marketed - but in that progression I think, you know, to your point, you just made a point there, when was the golden age? Well, I actually think one of the things you want from a golden age is the ability to make programmes like Queer as Folk that really do reflect the world around you. That are sophisticated, that counts critical and supportive of, say, minorities and I think that shows a certain maturity in broadcasting in the UK, that we could do that and that no one, there were no complaints. One of the most interesting things in my lifetime in television is that you know when I began in the duty log from all of the people who phoned to complain the night before there were many, many complaints about bad language or nudity. By the time that I left the BBC for example when we were still rigorously cutting out every “fuck” from every film on BBC-1 more people complaining about the fact that we'd done that and that tells you that the world has become, you know, a looser and more sophisticated place.
IF: The self-appointed and some other appointed guardians of the spirit of public broadcasting would, I imagine, - and they will have phoned you in their hundreds of thousands probably - would see the scheduling of Big Brother as a breach of any proper account of the public broadcasting ethic. Could you have scheduled it do you think when you were at BBC-1 or Director of Television for the BBC?
MJ: Ah, no. And it wouldn't have been done on the BBC because it had a kind of a frankness and a sort of embarrassment quality that I think the BBC finds very difficult. You know, the BBC is still about a kind of authority which actually is a very important brand attribute for the BBC, and Channel Four's brand is all about, is all about the reverse of that - your sort of antiestablishment quality - so it's a perfect example. It was a great show for us because it did reinforce what we purport to be about.
IF: There's also, isn't there, this extraordinary conviction among many people that you, you can try to be popular or you can try to be good but you can't be both together?
MJ: Yep, and there's that famous dictum of Green's. Make the popular good and good popular, which is one of the best shorthand expressions of what good broadcasting is about.
IF: Is there still a mass audience available on a regular basis any more?
MJ: Yep. And I -
IF: Where do you go to find it?
MJ: There's a weird thing happening, which is, as we become more differentiated and minorities are better expressed, not interested [?], better expressed, you know there's an angling channel and a hunting channel and this channel and that channel. So you crave those moments when you come together with other viewers or citizens and you certainly see that from 9/11. You certainly see that for great sporting occasions like the one at the moment. And I think you see that with some common garden television programmes - dramas, comedies - when they're really good, when they break through, when they resonate with people. It's just that years ago everything was watched by 60 million people no matter how bad it was. And now some programmes are watched by 16 and some programmes are watched by 600 and it's like there's no safety net for broadcasters any more. You can really get an audience of zero very easily now. And the audience is, as I like to say, I think the audience is incredibly promiscuous now. Very uninterested in staying anywhere for very long, and I think that is a great thing about television because it's worrying for a traditional broadcaster, but it's great news for a new broadcaster, and you see these shifts in audience flow and that's something that we should be very excited about I think.
IF: You can be excited about it or if you're the Chief Executive of TVNZ you look at the possibility with a certain amount of horror. You know we're in the situation where we typically enjoy a round 65/75 per cent of the free-to-air audience and we scare ourselves that if we drop any of that the commercial consequences could and probably will be dire.
MJ: Well two things on that. I think firstly, and I plead guilty to this myself on occasion, you know, if you're a broadcaster you come from a world where we used to have 50 per cent of the audience or 40 per cent of the audience, a vast figure of people came to you every week. That's not possible any more and rather than sort of looking back on that as a halcyon age we should say, public service broadcasters should say, okay it's not about the total number of viewers every week. It's about the outcome, it's about have we touched you who really values this or is really engaged by that and we touched you twelve times a year, six times a year. And I think the more that you can argue that as opposed to getting involved in a sort of turf fight with the commercial broadcaster over seconds and minutes of share the better. And there's a good analogy for this. HBO in America which has a subscription model is mostly unwatched by people who subscribe to it but every so often they have a Sopranos or Sex and the City, something galvanising for their audience and it might only be one series a year and people are happy to pay for that and that tells me that if you can in a sense think of broadcasting, think of a broadcaster as a sort of community club, an affinity group and you can somehow make people feel like members of that, so that it's not just about any other programme, watch it, goodbye. It's more of a sort of two-way street, where people really do value what you're giving them. I think that's a better model than adding up, you know, the total share of each programme.
That's one thing. And the second thing I'd say is that the one is more competitive, it's more competitive for the BBC as it is for Sky and I think we've all got to be very - so therefore there is and you have to work hard to get an audience to anything, to bring an audience to everything. So you've also got to be sure that you have moments in the schedule where you completely don't care about how many people watch it. So we, when we were at Channel Four, found a couple of slots, 7.30 on a Friday evening for example, and we decided just to do twenty half-hours called Unreported World. And the twenty half-hours were all about international stories, often made by, sometimes made by international filmmakers that wouldn't otherwise get in the schedule and otherwise be seen, and out of that we found one or two filmmakers who'd been able to do say a three-part series about the civil war in the Congo that were able to go at 9 o'clock.
So I think you - and another strategy is to find moments in your schedule when you can give people what they used to have twenty years ago, an awful lot of space with which to try things because there is inexorably now a big premium on success, on impact, and I think not - and the fact is that not everything can be impact, force - so therefore you've got to create and sustain these quiet moments in the schedule where no one cares too much about the immediate success of the programme.
IF: So from your point of view - I mean, I take it from what you've been saying the most important characteristics for a successful public broadcaster will be around propositions like innovation and creative risk, because within a public broadcaster there is that sort of room to manoeuvre?
MJ: Yes and a genuine common[?] activity. John Birt, when he was, you know, Greg's predecessor, the Director-General of the BBC, who is something of a mad scientist figure who liked to count everything countable. But one of the things, the projects that he put together with the BBC was something that I thought was rather brilliant, it was called the Tribes of Britain and the idea was to try to sort of break down the tribes of Britain. They might be the gender, race, really big ones but also all the ways in which people spent their time. The psychographic groups as well. And then tried to think about all of the BBC services by comparison with those tribes, which of those tribes have been well served, which weren't well served. I mean, for example over the years we've found it incredibly difficult to make good programmes about folk music and jazz so after a while we stopped. A project like that says, well, actually there are, there's a very significant minority of people who really care about that subject. We've got to think imaginatively about how we serve them and it, you know - going back to your point about accountability earlier, it was a good device for accountability because it forced to people think: are we spending too much money on classical music, for example? Why is, you know, why are we spending £17 million per year on Radio Three which, despite Reith's pyramid, is always listened to by exactly the same number of people. Usually about 80,000. So it forces you to ask some questions about resource, and about the achievement and about what your objectives ought to be. And I think one of the things, if I wanted to leave one thing behind I'd say make sure that your definition of society and your objectives, make sure that's sophisticated because you know that's an old sore. You get what you measure. And if you measure, if you take your competitor's definition of measurement, you'll end up with the wrong outcome.
IF: My last question to you before I throw you on the mercy of the audience here is about funding. And in discussing it obviously I have to try avoid self-pleading. There are people who are anxious that TVNZ won't be able to achieve all the aims of the Charter if we continue to be dependent on the revenue from commercials. They want the kind of public funding for TVNZ that the BBC gets or even the ABC across the Tasman gets. We currently have a small, it's welcome but it's comparatively small direct contribution from the government for Charter purposes. We get a higher proportion from New Zealand on Air but that's in the form of contestable funding, it's there in a pool. Can you comment on that model?
MJ: You know the BBC for example comes under a lot of attack with being, with trying to do analogue and digital radio and television, the internet. I think the most important thing about the BBC is that it's big. It's powerful and the other really big and powerful force in British television is Rupert Murdoch. And it's one of the great achievements of both John Birt and Greg Dyke's era - is that the BBC is as competitive and as good at fighting its corner as Rupert Murdoch, who's pretty good at that. And that is I think very, if you want to talk about democratic purposes or citizenship, that - the fact that the BBC is right up there is incredibly important. And actually politicians quite like it because politicians don't want, as they are with the press, to be completely in the pocket of a major publisher. So I think it's very, very important to be big, to be well funded. I mean for example Channel Four is completely funded by advertising revenue. It doesn't get a penny from the government, it's all advertising revenue but we keep it. But Channel Four keeps the money, it doesn't go back to the State. And once you have a well funded and secure primary not-for-profit broadcaster you then find that that reflects the entire, infects the entire broadcasting system. It helps independence, it helps other broadcasters, it raises the standard. So if - you know, from where I look at it and if I was asked the question what advice would you give it would be have -
IF: What advice would you give?
MJ: - have a strong core not-for-profit broadcaster which is adequately funded and you'll find that from that comes political good and, interestingly, economic good. And I think that's an underrated thing in this whole argument. It's not about making, it's not about market failure, it's not about doing all sorts of things that no one wants, it's about investment, and good investment actually grows things of real value for the future. Things which turn out to be of real economic value in terms of employment. In terms of generating an international idea of New Zealand's culture, etc. etc. So I think, you know, in terms of public good it's that strength of the core that's important.
IF: Thank you for that. You've got the job.
Chair: It's a pity to break that particular spell I think, but never mind, let's go to questions. Have we any questions? There's one.
David Jacobs (Connected Media): Michael can I just press you slightly further on the question of funding. You've been responsible for channels that have been funded by broadcasting licence fee and those that haven't and in both cases not public service, public broadcasting channels like ?? and we in New Zealand, our recent heritage is we scrapped the licence fee four years ago and I would, I just want to put to you, do you think there would be any point in reinstating it? Do you think it's of value or do you think we can do what we are now aspiring to do successfully without it?
MJ: Well, the Channel Four model is, as I say, all about advertising. I think it's worked partly because the BBC is there ahead of time, so it - in other words we're incredibly fortunate in the UK to have competition between public service broadcasters, that's an incredible luxury and there's no doubt that the competition between BBC-2 and Channel Four ratchets up quality. But you know - so I think the licence fee has definitely been, especially because this Labour government has been, was incredibly statesmanlike when it came in and it gave the BBC like a five-year settlement, plus it funded their digital aspirations. So really the government haven't been able to say things to the BBC about anything, which actually has presented quite a certain arrogance in the BBC perhaps, but nonetheless the licence fee has definitely been a very successful funding formula. Channel Four has been very successful, although as I say as caveat, partly because the BBC is there before it. But on the other hand I have to say as far as chief executive of Channel Four there was a particular half hour comedy programme which was a sort of fake current affairs programme called Brass Eye. I don't know if it was shown over here, about paedophilia and they came in as a bit of a moral panic about this programme and I remember you know the Minister for Culture ringing me up and complaining about it. And it was very easy to say no we're not doing anything about it, because essentially the Minister for Culture couldn't really affect what we did because she didn't control our funding. So there was a certain autonomy, a useful autonomy, that came from that funding. But I mean if it was to say anything, either would be better than what you have, i.e. keeping all of the advertising revenue or a licence fee. Either would be great because either is a substantial kitty that I think would have an immeasurable effect on the quality and range of television.
Brownyn Haywood (Children's Television Foundation / Canterbury University): Just building on that question about the substantial kitty, from your experience then in Britain, if we were to go down a route where the state broadcaster gets a substantial slice of the funding pie, how do we, even more so, how do we avoid the big friendly elephant feet effect that Tim talked about last night for the little fledging regional channels we talked about?
MJ: You know yes I've thought about it and I think the answer to that is leadership. It's about accountability of the broadcaster. So in other words if that's the only game in town you know TVNZ sure has to be, you know has to work effectively with independence. It has to be very engaged with questions of diversity. So you have to build that, you have build that into the system, but that's definitely the case and your success or failure in this entire venture will partly depend on how successfully you do build those features into the system. You might want to say for example we're going to adequately fund TVNZ but it won't make any programmes. Everything will be made by independents. You know in other words you can, I think at that point you say there's going to be a greater, a greater stability to funding but quid pro quo for that will be the following things. But I think there's a certain danger in lots of diffuse forms of public funding so that the public isn't even aware of the value that they're receiving for the public investment in television. So because one thing we've all got to be aware of is that everybody in television had got to win consent for this public funding, therefore it's got to be noticeable, therefore it's got to be seen and understood by the electorate, a very important point I think.
Paul Reynolds McGovern Associates: My name is Paul Reynolds. I am one of these Aucklanders who has English as a second language. My question is this notion that we have, if we accept what I hear your proposition that I've yet to confirm that probably broadcasting is a good thing and the future of public broadcasting is a good thing and that one of the key things that you're offering this afternoon to remember this concept of relevance, it has to completely reinvent itself for the culture we have at the moment as opposed to this golden age. Then I'm curious round this, and some people maybe, this is a question I . . . [change of tape] incredible investment in online media and the whole internet division. How much of that is a key part of that equation to remain relevant?
MJ: I think it is important, and you know the BBC in the 1930s could have said we're the greatest radio broadcaster in the world. What if we should just stick to the knitting and not involved itself in television. Of course the BBC now would be, you know, a husk. So I really have been a supporter of the BBC changing with the landscape of broadcasting and the fact that we don't really know what the internet or interactivity is going to be - and I think a few years ago everyone, including myself, rashly invested a lot of money in a fantasy of what the internet might be. I think we're just beginning to see - I think we're just on the cusp, this is partly instinct and partly evidential, of the real internet age. Somebody was telling me the other day that a new Danny Boyle film about the end of the world, I can't remember what it was called now, 28 Days Later, thank you. Fox spent 80 per cent of their marketing money on popup ads and it's probably going to be, because its low cost, the most profitable film that Hollywood makes this year. I think you're - you're beginning to see with what the AOL is doing to integrate pictures and text. You're beginning to see that model of content and interactivity coming together. The voting for Big Brother and all of that was very interesting because people voting on cellular phones and things.
So that's a long-winded way of saying we don't yet know. The internet is not a separate thing on its own. It will talk to cellphones, to radio, to television, to all of these experiences and I think the future is very much about bringing together broadcasting and narrowcasting and the broadcaster needs to think of itself as the kind of barker channel for the narrow casting behind the broadcasting. So, you know, to use a programme-making analogy, in the old days the BBC would have broadcast the film about the wonders of Italian cinema and then on BBC-2 twenty-six Italian films from the classic days of Italian cinema. I don't know if you'd do that today. But you do a great sort of Martin Scorsese-presented documentary, well funded etc. etc., about Italian cinema and BBC-2 and then you'd say go now to BBC-4 where we will show you all these films, or to our website. So I think there's a real value in connecting the power of mass broadcasting to the ability to reach people in, in smaller more directed ways via the internet digital television, etc.
Gresham Bradley e-Net Limited: I'm wondering if you can just comment on the other programming side of public broadcasting that both the BBC and Channel Four have been very successful in and that's educational programming. How does that fit into the scope of activities and the ongoing role of public television?
MJ: I think a lot of educational television has been very much box ticking. You know, how many hours of school programmes you do a year - and I was always very, very sceptical about how much hard-pressed secondary school or primary school teachers actually used these programmes. But nonetheless there was a huge history of manufacturing these programmes and no one ever really challenged it because out of sight out of mind. And I think in the recent past there's been a, I think, a much more imaginative sense of, of educational, of again asking what are the educational outcomes of this investment? Should we be spending more on interactive approaches as opposed to straightforward 20-30 minute linear television programmes? How can we take the engagement the audience have with something like the Blue Planet that Greg mentioned yesterday. And make that a real learning exercise beyond the glossy one-hour David Attenborough programmes. So and - but at the same time it has to be said in a system which is undoubtedly more commercial, you know probably there's less of it than there used to be. So I think it's, there's no doubt that something's been lost in this competitive world, but on the positive side there's been more questioning, and the light has been shone on something. That all too often in the past was kind of allowed to get on with it in its own little world.
Chair: Well regrettably I'm afraid we have to draw this session to close. I'd like to thank Ian and Michael particularly for that very illuminating series of insights and to put his offers of policy advice which I am sure will be listened to appropriately.
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