Abstract
The values instituted by the British Broadcasting Company’s (BBC) first director, Lord John Reith, were to “inform, educate, and entertain,” but those three verbs have enjoyed nary a moment of peaceful coexistence in the nearly ninety years that they have comprised the organization’s public service mission. Conventional thinking holds that non-mercenary, beneficial-to-the-citizenry programming, and crowd-pleasing fare are mutually exclusive and that which is desirable to viewers, garners a big audience, and earns revenue is deemed antithetical to the charge of public service.
Although the public service versus entertainment dichotomy is as old as broadcast technology, Holmes trains her lens on a decade when it was in full glory. The “entertaining” in the title of her book purposefully conveys a double meaning, referring to the type of programming that aims to divert audiences as well as the consideration of the entire endeavor of television. The latter connotation gives her ample room to dissect a wide range of issues, but at the heart of her argument is the “popular” in the subtitle. Although she explores British television programs, the matter is equally relevant to U.S. television history. In fact, public service and popular sometimes take on the faces of the BBC and the American system, respectively, given their dissimilar economic and political structures, but Holmes proves that the conflict was alive within U.K. television culture itself, as evidenced by the contentious relationship with the commercial, independent ITV.
The BBC was a monopoly until the 1955 launch of ITV. Early television broadcasting was a matter of politics in the United Kingdom, far more aggressively than it was in its infancy and adolescence in the United States. British TV was essentially a pawn of the state, quite often divorced from any regard to its content. Much of it was characterized by its resistance to American TV, as if the BBC were a fortress against Americanization. Holmes makes frequent mentions of the 1962 Pilkington Report, a text that seems loosely analogous to U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Newton Minow’s 1961 “vast wasteland” speech or an ersatz set of public service commandments. Among its conclusions the eponymous committee that published the report depicted ITV programs, in contrast to the self-described fair and balanced BBC, as populist and “trivial,” indicting the United States as a bad influence. Paradoxically, the battle has been reduced to public versus popular despite the fact that in other contexts those terms might be on the same team. Popular can be quantitative, indicating that which is liked and watched by many, or it can connote vulgarity and low rent taste, depending on whom you ask.
Holmes traces the BBC’s interpretation of popularity and how judgments were challenged by the advent of ITV. She divides her study into categories of the soap opera, quiz show, “problem” show, and celebrity. The Grove Family, British TV’s first soap opera or family serial, premiering in 1954, presented a lower middle class family. Reactions to the show revealed perspectives on patterns of consumption and taste and reflected, for better or worse, the cultural values of the millions who watched. Quiz, or “give-away,” shows allowed escape and fantasy whereas a problem show revealed real-life tribulations and ostensibly an opportunity for education. Holmes explores the lineage of the modern talk show with the British problem show (e.g., Is This Your Problem?) and the U.S. advice show. Both early progenitors were criticized for invasion of privacy, peeping Tom-ism, and, ultimately, the tabloidization of TV. With their airing of laundry, problem shows also punctured the postwar bubble of purported happiness. Whereas The Grove Family intentionally presented a comforting image of suburban family life (analogous to Father Knows Best or Leave It to Beaver in the United States), the problem shows presented just what their name advertised. ITV and the problem show both debuted in 1955 and, accurate or not, the conception of privacy invasion was subsequently linked with commercial television in the minds of BBC boosters.
A gap in scholarship exists, Holmes explains, in part because there were institutional narratives in existence long before the interest in program forms (another way of saying that television studies did not become legitimized until long after TV was available), and she discusses the complexities of these interconnected pursuits. She shares the challenges of doing such research often in the absence of actual audio or visual artifacts but emphasizes the importance of paying attention to written reaction to shows that reveal a range of perspectives.
As for fame and celebrity, once more Holmes notes marked differences between the United States and the United Kingdom. Because the United States seems to have a more comfortable relationship with celebrity, there is more American scholarship on the topic. Holmes draws upon the work of her media studies colleagues, including TV historians Susan Murray and Marsha Cassidy. Moreover, she cites an early BBC director who believed that, in the postwar years at least, U.S. TV was interested in personalities whereas British TV was interested in ideas. In her final chapter, she also spends justifiable time on the concept of the “TV personality,” as other scholars have, but she pinpoints the particular character of such in the 1950s. She returns to The Grove Family and the importance of stars being perceived as ordinary, familiar, recognizable, and not too different from their supposed real selves. She covers the heated reception of This Is Your Life, criticized for its “torture, treacle, tears and trickery.”
A reader of art media and American studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, Holmes has written extensively about British TV history, genres (notably reality TV and quiz shows), and celebrity. Although she provides chronological detail of TV development and history, she assiduously ties her commentary to universal themes, including public service, popularity, taste, consumerism, education versus entertainment, ordinary people versus experts, performance, aesthetics, public versus private life, and authenticity of emotion. She folds in pertinent discussions of gender, class, and genre classification and liberally cites cultural studies scholars such as Foucault, Bourdieu, and Gramsci.
Her in-depth research revealed confirmation and surprises to her and history’s previously held assumptions about the BBC and ITV. For instance, for all the criticism of “give-away” shows—some might argue the epitome of popular and quintessentially American—viewers had the BBC to thank for their airtime in the United Kingdom, as they were developed before that troublemaker ITV was even a player. The BBC wrestled with the idea of awarding prizes, a practice many perceived as distasteful and consumerism goading. Indeed, the three U.S. networks as well as BBC and ITV were blanketed with quiz shows during the decade, with many of the British shows originating in the United States such as The $64,000 Question and Twenty-One. In addition, many of the quiz questions fell into the same knowledge categories as public service programs shown on the BBC, rendering generalizations about “idiot contestants” as false invectives. Likewise, the venerable BBC proved to be more controversial and populist than history has colorized it. By looking in depth at the particular programs Holmes has chosen, she aims to challenge the assumptions often engendered by the long-dominant institutionally oriented narratives.
The public interest versus public service polemic stirred up in early British TV is still at issue fifty years on. Holmes describes the ongoing inquiry about whether broadcasting is meant to serve the state or the people. Indeed, public service has been associated with control (enacted by a government) and popular with pleasure (desired by a mass of citizens), an analogy related to the suggestion by some scholars that reality TV may be stepping in to advise citizens where institutions fail to do so. Entertaining Television offers a deceptively rich and deep inquiry despite its claim to hone in on one decade, allowing Holmes to touch upon numerous concepts relevant to TV and cultural mores. Anyone interested in television studies, British or American and its history or present will find much here to inform and enhance their knowledge and interest.