Local councils and (anti) censorship

Maybe it's something that everyone else knows, but I didn't. At the tail-end of this old-ish film clip about Shane Meadows 'This is England' film from a few years ago .....




... (now being sequeled with a TV series), Mark Kermode raises the question of why a film that incorporates an educational message should be given an '18' classification by the BBFC - on the grounds that it includes a bit of racist language and a few violent scenes.

Meadows makes the point that there are plenty of all-action flicks that qualify for a '15' cert while involving slaughter on a vast scale, and I'm sure I don't need to rehearse all sides of this argument for you again.

But for me, the interesting revelation is that a lot of local authorities chose to overturn the BBFC decision and instead apply a '15' certificate for local showings.

It's news to me that this can happen - and I think that it opens up all kinds of possibilities in terms of cultural autonomy. What I'd like to know (and I'll look into it if I get time - unless someone wants to explain it to me) is this: What is the process by which a local authority reviews the BBFC's classification, changes it and then communicates it to local cinemas?

Pretty fundamental

Bill Thompson isn't keen on the idea of broadcasting levies because...

"They want to keep us all in a world where vast numbers of people spend most of their precious leisure time watching a flat-screen television on which the limits of interactivity are set by an electronic programming guide and, if you're very lucky, a red button that lets you vote on your most-disliked Big Brother housemate.

Of course the unions want to protect the jobs of their members, and they cannot be criticised for this, but sometimes bad things happen to good people. Many fine writers, including my partner, are suffering because book publishing is going through enormous turmoil, but there is no subsidy on offer to them.

In broadcasting actors are out of work while directors and production crews see budgets cut and funding dry up, and journalists are living with uncertainty.

This is happening because the age of television is ending, just as the age of printed textbooks and user manuals is ending, as the age of the hand loom and the wheelwright and the scribe ended before them. It is a hard change to live through, and those who are only skilled to work in the world of television will inevitably fear it, just as print-only journalists fear the online future.

But this is not a reason to distort the growth of online services in order to give television a few more years."

And that's all fine if there is a genuine universal hunger for full-on interactivity all of the time. If - when the dust settles - it turns out that lean-back media has no audience and that there isn't a sizable slice of the population that doesn't wish for passive consumption as opposed to engaging with everyone they can reach in a collaboratively-filtered reputation-managed world.

Either way, there's a significant burden of proof to justify killing the most attractive industry in the UK and depriving us of it's products.

But what if (as I strongly suspect) a large percentage of the population just want to be entertained in their living rooms. In the absence of effective collective action, this demand will suck content in from where it can get it. It will suck it in from markets that are structurally protected. The end result will be screens dominated only by quality US content and crappy US content.

I'm OK about yielding to Asia's comparative advantage in rice production. But if the sections of the population that are least interested in interactivity (and I suspect that there are social classes that are more represented in this group than others) then the consequences are quite serious, aren't they?

It will be a disaster for a sector that is comparable to financial services in it's contribution to the economy. It will choke off thousands of hidden subsidies to local arts and performance projects.

And what does ..."distort the growth of online services" mean? It seems to assume that there is such a thing as a working undistorted market in anything?

I thought we'd buried that idea finally over the last year?

Digital Britain has advocated a massive handout to hardware and connectivity suppliers in order to help them distort the market away from people who used to create valuable content and sell it, because the spending on connectivity and hardware has rocketed while revenues for creators has tumbled.

And why do people pay for connectivity, set-top boxes, flat screens and iPods? To watch things that they can get for free - that's why. Programme-makers have been subsidising Apple and Humax for years!

Hardware and connectivity levies would have provided a tiny bit of compensation for these losses - and I do mean tiny.

And another thing: The Labour Representation Committee was founded all of those years ago to ensure that time/cash rich people didn't have a monopoly on political representation.

With this fetishisation of interactivity, it looks like we're going to turn the clock back to the time when 'active citizens' - those Dickensian busybodies - are the ones who step in to speak for working people who are too busy or preoccupied to 'engage'. Public service broadcasting - and PSB journalism - has always kept these people informed and helped them to be represented.

That, and representative democracy....

It seems that all of this has to be swept aside because the lobbyists who have dominated the Digital Britain response have collectively ensured that HMG will cast all caution aside in order to subsidise a genuinely expensive unwanted 'demand' for connectivity and interactivity.

This is not just about panhandling Unions demanding that their jobs should be be preserved. It's about democracy, culture, equality and representation.

It's pretty damn fundamental.

So who pays for 'content' then?

Here's a really good post by Will Davies about paying for content, copyright and the urge to use some form of 'protectionism.'

"I wonder too if those on the other side of the argument, represented by the Open Rights Group, are also a little inconsistent in their politics. Defending the public domain is all very well, but may be increasingly incompatible with defending the public sphere. ORG tend to be opposed to alternative ways of funding media content, such as Phorm, which is admirable. But this only means that paying for stuff becomes more important for upholding our 'digital rights', not less."

Concluding...

"But how might industrial-knowledge models develop/survive which are neither pig-headedly state-protected nor built on the commodification of 'free' (consumer-tracking, advertising etc)? That to me is the highest priority. I have a curmudgeonly hunch that, for those of us committed to financially viable, culturally unpolluted artefacts and events in the future, we may have to side-step both the state and Google and simply pay a fair price for stuff."

This is not 'other people's problem' - it seems to be the big issue, and all I ever see is a list of what most lobbies are against.

VoD & filtering

The BBC Labs are road-testing an extension to their iPlayer that allows for collaborative filtering. This means that you can not only watch 'video on demand' (VoD) programmes that you want to - when you want to- you won't even need to think about what you want to watch, because they will make recommendations based on your known preferences and those of like-minded people. And the lack of thought will actually make the viewing experience better.

It has the potential to change the way that everyone talks about 'choice'. There's nothing new about collaborative filtering of course, but applied to web-TV, it has the potential to dramatically downgrade the importance of TV channels.

And it may work better than most attempts at this kind of thing, because the BBC may be less tempted to interfere with the collaborative filtering. Amazon simply use it in a very risk-averse way - to push stuff to me that they're *certain* that I like so as to maximise the short-term profit.

I'd pay attention to what they pushed at me if there were any danger of a bit of serendipitous uplift -but there isn't, so I don't.

This may mean that different types of TV will be commissioned - aimed significantly higher than at the consumer reflex.

These are interesting times.

(ta Nico)

Activist state, protectionism and the cultural exception

Here's Andreas on the Activist State/Protectionism.

A good time to point to previous posts here advocating the cultural exception - and one about how now would be a good time to start pressing the case for this with some vigour.

A disproportionate economic argument that threatens the BBC

As conservatives everywhere are deserting the old free-market standard, one of the last facets of it that they will abandon (because it’s so useful in their culture wars) is their hatred of public service broadcasting in general, and the BBC in particular.

They hate the BBC because it has concrete standards. Or, perhaps, it may be increasingly accurate to say that it had them.

Even the slightly tarnished reputation though, the BBC is beyond compare – and this is why the press – those who see themselves as the BBC’s rivals – are at their most poisonous and demagogic when they attack the Beeb.

The BBC represents the thinking of metropolitan elites – smartass folks who think we are descended from Monkeys. It is antithetical to the politics of its most vocal critics, not on the grounds that it’s taken sides in an intellectual argument, but that it fetishises the application of reason and intellect to a problem over the prejudices of angry losers.

However, the most dangerous line of attack is always a market-based one – one that has a superficial logic to it. A logic that often attracts people who would otherwise be sympathetic to the BEEB. It has two key elements;

1. It is illiberal to compel people to pay a licence fee
2. The BBC distort the workings of the market that would otherwise be benign.

The first point is absolutely correct – in the same way that it would be correct to say that it is illiberal to compel people to pay a tax. But today, only ultra-conservative fanatics would argue this – and politically, ultra-conservative fanatics no longer even need to be included in discussions any more.

The second point is both wrong and irrelevant. Let us first look at why it’s irrelevant before showing why it is wrong as well – just to be sure:

When you get this kind of ultra-economic analysis, you know that its authors are long on logic and very short on context and their assumptions.

I can understand the argument that the motor industry (to take an example at random) should not be subsidised. Why protectionism is not in the interests of humanity as a whole. That it is inefficient and unjust. I’d even agree with it more than the tossers who flew in to Washington in their Lear Jets to beg for a handout yesterday do.

On an even more clear-cut case, there is no rational objection to Europeans importing 100% of their rice from Asia (if indeed they do). But importing 100% - or even the majority of their TV content from the United States would be a different matter, surely?

To some extent, you can see what TV schedules would look like by scanning the offering of your local multiplex cinema tonight. Nearly all films that are either US-oriented or some transatlantic fudge at best.

Also, look at the importance of the industry. In human terms, TV and radio alone are absolutely vast. On average, the UK citizen spends six hours a day consuming radio and TV’s output.

The importance to our democracy is huge. The importance to our culture is huge – UK produced content is a glue that holds the country together in many ways. And I’ve already outlined why it is politically important that we have a broadcasting ecology that has to meet agreed standards. Compare Sky News in the UK and Fox News in the US if you don’t believe me about the benefits of UK regulation.

They may be vastly important in human terms, but as an industry, it is fairly small. Patrick Barwise of the London Business School points out that it is a £12bn industry – a mid-sized one that is dwarfed by the telecoms sector that OfCOM also regulates.

We have a debate on broadcasting and radio that the government has allowed to be dominated by economists who think that TV can be reguated in the same way that telephones are. These people should only be a sideshow. The systemic damage to the UK of running a broadcasting industry that is tainted by protectionism is minimal – while the consequences of not doing so would be to threaten an industry upon which so much hangs.

The question of how much of our disposable income we spend on the licence fee – the supposed injustice of a non-progressive ‘tax’ is fairly irrelevant given the relatively small amount concerned, and the relative importance of the product. And nine-out-of-ten of the people who bleat about this will never complain about regressive taxation at any other time!

The words ‘relatively’ and ‘relative’ are bearing a lot of weight in that last paragraph. We are talking about the relative difference between a dormouse and an elephant here. But seeing as the BBC’s critics wouldn’t acknowledge a point unless it was nailed through the middle of their forehead, let’s do just that now in the forlorn hope that it'll register:

The presence of the BBC – and to a lesser extent Channel 4 – does not distort a 'benign' market equilibrium. This is because economics of broadcasting are very unusual. In most spheres of industry there is (or perhaps, there was?) an assumption that 'public' is inefficient and expensive, while ‘private’ is bustling, busy, and lean. In broadcasting, the absolute opposite is the case.

The cost-per-viewer-hour of BBC content is very significantly less than that of pay TV. This problem is compounded by the fact that the only way that pay-TV can bring money into the industry is through advertising or subscription.

In the absence of the BBC and C4, if you have to pay more for more expensive TV, you will have to increase the subscription significantly because TV advertising is not only in slow decline, it also can’t be increased (in revenue terms) by making more time available to it across the board.

More channels = less revenue for most of them (particularly ITV and C4 in the UK’s case). So advertising funded TV is in long term systemic decline. And does lightly regulated Pay-TV defy the gravitational pull and actually make programmes? Hard-hitting documentaries? Drama? Kids TV? No. It doesn’t.

It doesn’t at the moment, and it is an ideological fantasy that it ever will. Sure, Pay-TV generates significant revenues. But they go largely to a few football clubs, players and agents (many of whom are not UK based, if we’re arguing about whether the cash goes into indigenous content).

Any profit maximising pay-TV operator in their right mind will much prefer to source imported content because it's a great deal cheaper, massively less risky, and usually of quite a high quality in itself. US-originated content is also designed to create a more attractive context for advertisers, so it delivers the consumers to those who are prepared to pay to reach them.

It will never generate revenue for UK-based producers. Neither will it provide a universal service. If the BBC were scrapped, a profit-maximising Sky would have a highly expensive ‘premium’ service for a small wealthy minority, and a standard service that would be out of the financial reach of the poorest sections of the population.

So here it is. Get rid of the BBC and you can say goodbye to any noticeable level of locally produced programmes – drama, documentary, kids TV and news programming. The democratic damage will be incalculable in a state where public service broadcasting has filled the gap left by our lack of bicameralism. You also increase the vocal range of a bunch of very thick seedy right-wing blokes that wouldn’t know news or comment standards if they were to bite their knackers off.

The BBC has enemies. It's time that this was acknowledged. And it's time that the majority of people who wouldn't want these demogogic sad-sacks to increase their influence to take sides.

An cúpla focal in your ear

It seems that an Irish Language Act is to introduced in Northern Ireland shortly. What 'introduced' means, exactly, I don't know as the ways and means of Stormont are something of a closed book to me.

Either way, I'd find it hard to be against such a thing as I'm generally keen on structural rules that disrupt the flexibility of cultural markets. The protection and enhancement of languages provides for the kind of cultural interventionism that I'd like to see more - not less - of.

Yet I can't help thinking that they may end up being just another peg to hang the ubiquitous sectarian needle that lurks in every corner of Northern Irish political discourse.

How long before an Ulster Scots Language Act is introduced as well?