Woody Allen’s 1987 movie Radio Days is a series of vignettes about the golden age of mass media and its power to create what we would now call collective experiences. Towards the end of the film there’s a strangely unsettling scene in which a radio station broadcasts live updates on a little girl who’s fallen down a well. For a few hours millions are held completely under the spell of their wireless, carried along by the newsreader through the ups and downs of the attempted rescue, moving collectively from fear, to hope, anticipation, and then grief when the girl is found to have died.
None of the listeners have any real idea of what’s occurring on the ground, and are being carried to this high pitch of emotion purely by a voice and what it’s telling them. In this scene any idea of the liberal subject, the citizen, or, really, the American Experiment has gone out the window: the body politic here is only a tingling gelatinous mass that can be prodded into feeling things with the right stimuli. And rightly so, Allen implies. Unlike the rest of the film this scene has no narration, and the tone is one of real solemnity. People around Woody Allen’s age can cherish the golden age of network media as part of a Norman Rockwell Americana – never mind that the heyday of TV and radio meant that the lunatic variety of Tom Sawyer’s America was pasteurised away and a free people could now be made to feel anything at all. What matters is that people are ‘coming together’.
The effect was even more pronounced when it came to television. The ideal technological conditions for actual totalitarianism probably existed from around 1950 to 2000 – the peak of TV’s influence. This never came to pass, though stories of distant American relatives prone and raving before Rachel Maddow now give a slight tincture of what might have been. As others have pointed out, you can at least do something else while listening to the radio, and with a computer you are an active user. Only television renders you totally passive while demanding your complete attention. The days of three-channel television in the United States and Britain represented the most complete ‘echo chamber’ that was ever constructed, where virtually your entire knowledge of the outside world was curated by figures of charisma like Walter Cronkite.
Cronkite, as we all know, could collapse the war effort in Indochina with a few disapproving glances. That millions of people could turn on a dime at the TV’s behest is now taken as an example of a lost civic virtue, apparently. Media like TV have never sat well with liberal democracy, at least on the Jefferson pattern. That the legacy network media is now so regularly conflated with ‘liberal norms’ shows that what’s being defended by people like Kamala Harris aren’t the old liberal freedoms, but rather those 20th century institutions originally created for mass mobilisation and total war: the broadcast media, an expanded bureaucracy and fixed international obligations. To people like Mrs. Harris success means the return of these ‘collective experiences’, where news anchors can once more move millions with a look. A return of the Cronkites, in which there will always be a little girl down the well to pull you away from real life.
The only place where anything like a Cronkitean consensus exists anymore is Britain. This has exactly one cause: the privileges of the BBC. Again, the BBC is not really something that a liberal democracy would create, and it’s no coincidence that it was chartered in 1922, just a few years out from a war of total mobilisation. That a single broadcaster might be empowered as censor, entertainer, informer, custodian of the culture, and MC to all national events would strike the people of 1912 as viscerally off.
Other countries have national broadcasters. But none of them approach the numinous sway of ‘Auntie’; none of them are assigned an almost constitutional role on a level with the monarchy, Parliament and the courts. In Japan, for example, each General Election result records a handsome share of the vote for the Abolish the NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) Party; in Britain, ostensible Right-wing populists couldn’t even bring themselves to axe the licence fee.
Gripes about the BBC are de rigueur, as are calls for its abolition. But I do not think we’ve yet reckoned with its true freakish hold over national life. Take a step back and look at it from the outside. The BBC is an organisation of over 21,000 employees with the status of official purveyor of information. It takes – has taken – liberties with this position that are almost Neronic. It is a sprawling and labyrinthine body with its own internal lore, grudges and incantations – which occupy an ever-increasing share of broadcast time: Newscast, one of its newer primetime shows, is simply BBC journalists talking about their jobs, and most Saturday nights are given over to talking-head documentaries about minor episodes in the corporation’s history. The BBC offers its stars something approaching a Hollywood lifestyle, funded by the taxpayer on threat of imprisonment. Many of its alumni now make something of a parade about ‘cancel culture’ and its perils, but the organisation is essentially uncancellable. Its rolling, generational problem with paedophilia – which got another notch last week – has never threatened its privileges; it is never suggested that there is something ‘systemic’ about it. So ingrown is national life under the BBC that the corporation itself produced the audit of its own role in the Savile saga. No other organisation enjoys this kind of immunity: the CBI ostensibly represents the entire British private sector, but was completely undone by one harassment case; and the great press barons get much more stick for comparatively minor scandals.
In the 20th century, mass media ironed all distinctions flat and created the ordinary person. The converse also holds. In the United States the decline of the great networks has left Americans with few cultural experiences in common. There are now no more subjects for water cooler talk; as has often been said, the very last of these was probably Game of Thrones. The result has been the dissolution of American life into innumerable subcultures, streaming services and mystery cults. The classic American high school set-piece, with its pre-assigned archetypes of jock, nerd, loner and cheerleader, has almost completely vanished: films like The Breakfast Club now seem to belong to a lost world.
The same is not true in this country, where the BBC – through sheer gormless incumbency – has managed to maintain a standard of normality in Britain well into the 21st century. The position of the BBC means that Britain, alone in the English-speaking world, still has something like ‘appointment television’: there is simply no American analogue to Line of Duty, Gavin and Stacey or the Doctor Who Christmas specials. What this means is that 2020s Britain has much less of a counterculture than in Europe or the United States. A British equivalent of the German Reichsbürger, a parallel society of Hohenzollern loyalists, would be inconceivable; and goths are here only a minor seaside phenomenon. Whatever capacity for eccentricity the English once possessed was drummed out of them long ago by decades of Top of the Pops and charity appeal spectaculars.
All this has conspired to keep Britain firmly in the TV age, and to maintain the anachronistic social model that this implies. The BBC’s model of an ordinary person is sedate, suspicious, pious and philistine – true Brendas from Bristol. Judging by the vox populi interviews and questions in the political debates of the 2020s, this is an archetype that many members of the public, perversely, now actually try to live up to. The BBC is the last of the great Departments of Information, a relic of an age of siege and conscription, sprawled across the national psyche like a huge rusting battleship.
The final apology made for the BBC is that it is key to the country’s export economy: “Creative Britain.” This is only tautologically true: if one broadcaster is subsidised and legally privileged then it will of course suck in creative talent just by dint of incumbency. All the intelligence and creative energy of a people extruded through one stupid bureaucracy – an apt synopsis of the 20th century and so long as the BBC exists in its current form it is a century we will never leave.
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