Television isn't a bad influence on society after all
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Version 0 of 1. When stories about broadcasting appear on the news pages, it’s generally for negative reasons, due to viewers having objected to the content or professional bodies accusing the medium of having a negative effect on society. So it was unusual and reassuring this week to find two headlines that were broadly positive about telly. The artistic director of English National Ballet, Tamara Rojo, observing at a press conference that audiences have become “more open-minded” about modern dance, has acknowledged that one of the causes is the popularity of Strictly Come Dancing, creating an unlikely chain of connection, across almost a century, from the vaudeville tap-dancing of Sir Bruce Forsyth to the work of a daring young choreographer such as Akram Khan. And the outgoing chief executive of Ofcom, Ed Richards, told a parliamentary committee – summarising research published by the body this summer – that viewers have become more tolerant of swearing and violence but more sensitive to racism. Both of these developments contradict the stereotypical stance of stories on these subjects. For example, in many areas of culture, the influence of television is depressingly conservative: stage comedies are encouraged to become more like sitcoms in order to attract stars from the box and The X Factor notoriously promotes the idea that talent in pop music involves singing old songs less well than the original artists rather than attempting something new and different. Strictly Come Dancing, in fact, is vulnerable to the charge of favouring classic ballroom moves – with some judges imposing strict definitions of correct execution – rather than free-style modern dance. But the physicality and sexuality that are to be found in the work of Akram Khan, Javier de Frutos or Carlos Acosta do sometimes find their way into the best routines in the later stages and, although the credit given by the ENB boss to Strictly may have been slightly hard-spun in some reports, it is true that there is less disparity between what you might see on a Saturday on BBC1 and at the Coliseum or Sadler’s Wells than, say, between Alexandra Burke’s version of Hallelujah and Leonard Cohen’s. The title of his song, though, is a tempting response to Ofcom’s latest findings. One of the many unpleasant aspects of television in the 1960s and 1970s – even before the exposure of the criminally predatory nature of several key presenters – was that there was generally more concern, among viewers and reviewers, about what was known as “bad language” than offensive attitudes. It was common – with the morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse a leading example – to seek the banning of Til Death Us Do Part (in which the writer, Johnny Speight was consciously satirising a racist bigot) on the grounds that the characters were “foul-mouthed”, while considering as good clean family entertainment the lazy and sometimes nasty racial stereotypes in sitcoms such as the BBC’s It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, and ITV’s Love Thy Neighbour and Mind Your Language. Similarly, critics of cop series such as The Sweeney would object to the skull-crunching punching and bloody shootings rather than the gratuitous semi-nudity of any woman with whom the male leads hooked up or the fact that non-white actors, if employed at all, would be cast as criminals. So a TV culture in which denigration over skin or religion is finally seen as more regrettable than people saying “bloody” or revealing blood or flesh feels like a sign of maturity. And, while some argue that those watching have merely become “desensitised” to swearing and violence because they have seen so much of it, my own viewing suggests that isn’t true. The Thick of It, the first TV show to employ a “swearing consultant”, took cursing to a level where it was the opposite of gratuitous and became instead inventive and original. And, although dramas such as this year’s Happy Valley and Line of Duty attracted objections over graphic depictions of physical damage, even the most extreme scenes seemed to me justified as depictions of the reality of violence against police in contemporary society. Some flinched because the recipients of these injuries – police officers played by Sarah Lancashire and Keeley Hawes – were female, but the suggestion that women cops are not, or should not be shown to be, at risk of brutality seems to me to be, well, sexist. There is, though, one area of televisual viciousness, where it would be worrying if viewers are no longer worried: scenes featuring female victims of sex crimes. The BBC2 drama The Fall, which returns for a second series next week, was viscerally written, acted and directed but sequences in which women were being watched, stalked or under threat of imminent attack by a serial killer demonstrated that the policing of on-screen violence is not merely a matter of what is shown but of atmosphere, implication and perspective. This might be an interesting area for Ofcom to research in detail in the future. Such subtleties, however, are hard to capture in the headlines of television coverage and, as the emphasis is generally negative, it is refreshing to find producers and viewers, for once, being credited with more thoughtful responses and the medium apparently having a progressive rather than reactionary impact. |