Recommendations of the Puttnam Report1

This chapter presents the recommendations of the Puttnam Report. It covers recommendations for the BBC, Channel 4, ITV, and Channel 5. It proposes the establishment of a new fund for public service content. It also discusses the dissatisfaction with the performance of public service television from ethnic, regional, national and faith-based minorities; the failure of the public service television system to reflect the changing constitutional shape of the UK such that audiences in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the English regions; the decline in investment in some of the genres traditionally associated with public service television: arts, current affairs and children's programming; and the need for a more consolidated approach to maximising entry-level opportunities and increasing investment in training and professional development at all levels of the industry.

Securing the Future for Arts Broadcasting

Research commissioned by Ofcom categorises arts television as a genre ‘at risk’ of disappearing as relatively small audiences are unable to offset increased production costs. A decline is also evident in Ofcom's own research which finds that in the five years to 2011, spending on arts programming by the five main terrestrial broadcasters fell by 39 per cent. This decline is the confluence of a number of factors. Decreases in commissioning and production budgets mean fewer resources for producers. Within specialist factual genres such as arts, this can have a limiting effect on the coverage of the subject, access to expertise, and the aesthetics of the final programme. Without a deliberate strategy to save it, the downward trajectory of arts content on British public service broadcasting is unlikely to be reversed.

Skills and Training Investment Vital to the Success of Public Service Broadcasting

This chapter discusses the skill challenges in the creative industries. The public service broadcasting (PSB) system is the driving force behind the UK's vibrant TV production sector. The PSBs are responsible for some 80 per cent of total investment in UK original non-news content. Independent producers are responsible for around 60 per cent of total commissioned hours on the five main PSB channels. As new platforms and formats emerge and old divides are blurred, there is a need for a holistic and collaborative approach across not just PSBs but all screen-based industries to ensure that the creative industries' talent base can compete globally. This requires upskilling and re-skilling with an integrated view and a systematic approach to tackling barriers to entry and enabling progression within an ever more casualized workforce.

Are You Being Heard?

A Skillset census revealed that between 2006 and 2012, the number of BAMEs (Black, Asian and minority ethnic people) working in the UK TV Industry declined by 30.9 per cent. Many of the big TV companies and broadcasters seemed to think that more training initiatives were the easy fix. They set up several BAME training schemes, management training, youth training, even trainee commissioners. This chapter suggests that when the only tangible solution on the table to create significant and sustainable change is training, it can be argued that, inadvertently, the perception being perpetuated of the BAME creative community — the reason why BAME people are leaving the industry and why their numbers are at their lowest in years — is because they are not good enough.

‘Public Service’ in a Globalised Digital Landscape

This chapter calls for the need to begin the debate on the requirements of national public service media in the new discursive scopes of public ‘civic’ communication. In other words, it is necessary to begin to assess public service as no longer being only in the normative national parameter of territorial ‘boundedness’, but as a much needed civic space within today's sphere of globalised public communication. The BBC's public remit is still embedded in a bounded conception of the nation. For example, one aim of the BBC's remit is to sustain citizenship and civil society. However, given today's networked structures of communication, citizenship is also perceived as global citizenship, and relates not only to national responsibilities but rather to new responsibilities in a global civil society.

The Social and Cultural Purposes of Television Today

This chapter details the activities and beliefs of Equity. Equity believes that all UK broadcasters should have an obligation to contribute to the UK's cultural diversity through investing in original content production. It has lobbied Ofcom to increase quotas for original and regional drama, comedy, entertainment, and children's programmes made in and about the UK, particularly with respect to Channel 3 and 5 licencees. Equity has also worked with all of the major UK broadcasters towards developing new platforms for content delivery and has consistently sought to ensure that content can be made available for use on these platforms when made under Equity collective agreements. Most recently, Equity achieved the first agreement outside of the US for the engagement of its members and the reuse of their performances by Netflix.

The Purposes of Broadcasting – Revisited

This chapter focuses on a report on the future of broadcasting in the UK commissioned in 1960 by the then Conservative government. It suggests that the most significant part of the report for current debates about the future of the BBC in particular, and of public service broadcasting in general, is its robust and combative dismissal of the populist approach to television — an approach which thoroughly infused many of the attacks on the report and which has become a hallmark of the many onslaughts on public service broadcasting in the intervening years. Today, we desperately need an analysis of both the strengths and weaknesses of public service broadcasting as it currently exists, as well as a blueprint for its future, which is as profound, challenging, well-informed, and intellectually self-confident as was the report when it was published in 1962.

The Future of Television in the US

This chapter examines the issues that are most significant to the developing digital landscape of television in the US, particularly as the industry attempts to navigate the new rules and protocols of digital distribution and ‘connected viewing’. In an environment of ubiquitous mobile screens, third party providers, the fragmentation of the mass audience, increased demands on creative workers, and enhanced surveillance of the digital audience, the television industry is experiencing a host of previously unimagined pressures, even in the multi-channel universe of cable in the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, debates on the future of television in the US are proliferating, as are the complications involved as content providers are forced to look in multiple directions to deliver programming.

Reflection on A Future for Public Service Television

This chapter argues that public service broadcasting (PSB) will become more important to British audiences over the next decade despite the fact that political support for PSB is weaker today than at any time in its history. For decades, regulators developed policies in the belief that PSB would become steadily less justified as technology and deregulation opened up new commercial content for British audiences. If PSB had any continued relevance, it would be in meeting market failure ‘gaps’, i.e. the continued provision of genres which are not attractive to audiences such as arts programmes and religious output. However, this assumption is false. While digital technology has increased the range of content available to consumers, it is also undermining the economics of commercial content providers. Market failure in the provision of high quality British content is more likely to increase than decrease over the next ten years.

Introduction: The Long Revolution

This introduction begins with a brief discussion on the staying power of television, given the fact that it is no longer supposed to exist with the rise of the Internet and digital platforms. In fact, the Internet has not killed television but actually extended its appeal — liberating it from the confines of the living room where it sat unchallenged for half a century and propelling it, via new screens, into our bedrooms, kitchens, offices, buses, trains and streets. The chapter then describes the Puttnam Inquiry into the Future of Public Service Television and sets out the book's purpose, which is to contribute to the discussion about what kind of public service media people want and to provide some blueprints for future policy action. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.