Abstract
If you're a freelance journalist, home carer or retired and like to work to the background hum of educated talk radio, there's a good chance you spend more time listening to Matthew Parris than you do to anyone else in your life.
If you're an early riser, then John Humphrys and Evan Davis might wake you up with hard news and then, with Mastermind and Dragons' Den, ease you into the night with brainy trivia and pithy platitudes. Davies may also pop up in one medium or another on The Bottom Line.
If you're an opinion addict, perhaps you bounce around from newspaper column to Question Time to Any Questions to Jeremy Vine's Radio 2 show in the company of Peter Hitchens, Will Self, Kelvin Mackenzie, Charles Moore, Shami Chakrabarti, Claire Fox, Matthew Parris again – oh, and the two Dimblebys of course. And if travel is your thing, you will know full well the opinion of Simon Calder – and only the opinion of Simon Calder – on everything from airplane wing design to the rights of the stranded package tourist.
There's something about journalism and, in particular, the lucrative top-end of the established mass media, that encourages moonlighting. Producers fall back on the same voices because they are lazy and it's easier to work in this way. Some freelances – the kind who like to think of themselves as a “brand” – exploit the system, making themselves available, usually through agents, to all and sundry, whatever the hour, whatever the subject. Professional opiners such as Parris, Calder, Hitchens and also Michael Portillo, John Prescott, Peter Oborne, Liz Jones and Toby Young, run tight operations, spewing forth semi-expert, quasiinsider commentary on demand – and no doubt follow up their brief appearances with swiftly emailed invoices.
Within the staffs of organisations there's a tendency to recycle, which is why Chris Evans, having squealed to at least his own delight for three hours on his Radio 2 breakfast show and presented The One Show on Fridays, often resurfaces elsewhere; and why Phillip Schofield, having haunted so many childhoods from his BBC broom cupboard during the 1980s, has at least four full-time jobs at ITV. What low-brow presenters offer is soft opinion, but it's still their own, and their audiences are huge.
Sometimes you feel as if broadcasters, and newspapers, are in the business of constructing national treasures. Viewers and readers surely must see that there's a gravy train for a handful of names, which seem always to be not only in full employment, but in multiple employment. Given the vast numbers of unpaid and unemployed journalists right now, does no one consider the possibility of freeing up some of the moonlit posts? A young, NTCJ-trained, aspiring producer is not going to walk into a job presenting The Cube, of course, but everything – in an ideal world – trickles down.
The indolent approach to employing talent and sourcing commentary in print media and broadcasting is long established and rarely challenged. Consequently, it seems too fundamental and enshrined to be altered. The media seem to be dominated by a small gang of opinion-formers who all know each other and who all sound the same.
Of course not everyone with a full-time job wants to be on the phone at 7am giving a spiel on something they have never thought about. But, equally importantly, not all clever or relevant people have televisual or radiophonic shazam. A slight stammer, a too-posh or not-posh-enough voice, shyness, humility, academic hesitancy and a lack of training and experience keeps most genuine experts out of the media, while those already well practised in delivering their two penn'orth are always going to get the fee-paying phone calls from the underpaid runners and deputy assistant (intern) producers who have to cobble together “content” at short notice.
Opinionatedness – the fabrication of a robust opinion without genuine passion – can be a sure route to fame. When his next new book is out, you can bet Niall Ferguson will be back on our TVs and radios as the right-wing but not too right-wing reputable professor. At the popular, multi-millionaire end of the industry, Jeremy Clarkson has built a whole career out of a surely manufactured bigotry and a bluffness of tone that would have seemed crude and grotesque to Charles Dickens. Owen Jones, having written a well-publicised book on chavs and shown himself to be mouthy on interview, is now doling out wisdom on Libya, Syria, banking, Edwina Currie.
But Jones, in a way, exemplifies the punditry racket. Because he has shown not inconsiderable intelligence as well as a gift for communicating – simplifying, generalising, sermonising – he has been pushed forward as the newest member of the opinion club. And, at risk of sounding like David Icke, it really is a club, one fed mainly, though not exclusively, via Oxbridge and the public schools. It is white, middle-class, mainly male, mainly southern, mainly London based – just like the commissioning editors – and it sees words not as potential calls to action but, actually, as defusers of argument and debate.
This parallel Establishment, which controls the quantity and character of most of the opinion that British viewers, listeners and readers consume, effectively reduces all commentary to the same insignificant blandness by insisting on tonal parity, journalistic syntax and a rhetorical shape that ensures everything printed and aired has a light, throwaway quality.
The problem with being talked to all the time by about 50 people who all sound the same is not only to do with the lack of variety and democracy, the mis-spending of the licence fee, the maintenance of the status quo, the keeping of new talent out of the media – though all those are worth our keen attention. What is also depressing is that we can't talk back. The internet, we are repeatedly told, is the big new forum in the sky, where everyone has a voice. But each online voice, while undeniably part of a diverse array, has low volume and minimum resonance. On the blogs, after all, everyone is opining. The mainstream media dominate all debate and the only significant arriviste, AOL's The Huffington Post, is hardly a bastion of iconoclasm and radical opinion.
So for now we're stuck with the usual suspects, competing as they do for the title of Most Overexposed Generalist. At the top of the pile currently is Clare Balding, omnipresent thanks to BBC1's Britain's Brightest, BBC 2's Good Morning Sunday, her Channel 4 racing programmes, her dog walks on Radio 4's Ramblings, her Lord Mayor's Shows, her spouting – and how she can spout – her opinions in columns, in interviews, on Twitter, on rugby league, on feminism, on her relationship with the former BBC continuity announcer Alice Arnold, on her new book. And soon we can have even more of her, interviewing and hosting a magazine show on BT's new sports service.
But the competition is fierce and, just as we have seen the rise and fall of wall-to-wall Stephen Fry, 24-hour Jonathan Ross and streaming Ricky Gervais, so we shall soon see multi-tasking Clare knocked off the number one spot.
But that manner, that accent, that Beebishness, that degree – it's equally certain she'll be allowed back into the little, elite club.