Public service TV must stay top of the pops

MEDIA & MARKETING: GROWING UP on the border of Donegal and Fermanagh, the family home of Riverdance producer Moya Doherty had the BBC “beamed in” through its glorious overspill signal. “I was the one charged with scaring the crows off the aerial, so we could watch Top of the Pops,” she recalled at the UCC TV50 industry conference last weekend.

“Would that it were so easy now to get those pictures into hearts and minds as to just scare the crows off the aerials,” she lamented. “There are too many crows for us to handle.”

The analogy is close to perfect. Irish television has done a pretty good job over the decades at fending off the crows of the multi-channel universe. Viewers still tune in to flagship Irish programmes in their hundreds of thousands. But there are new wings flapping their shadows at the edge of our field of vision and, from the broadcasters’ perch, they’re beginning to look less like crows and more like birds of prey.

That wasn’t quite what I was thinking at the UCC TV50 event when Doherty was pointing out that Irish television has always faced competition from the more richly resourced.

Instead her mention of Top of the Pops sent me, as the merest mentions of Top of the Pops are wont to do, on an instant nostalgia trip for the days when the BBC still broadcast it. This is ironic, as Top of the Pops, unlike its many repeats and archive compilations, was 30 minutes of anti-nostalgia that made a virtue of novelty, revelled in it, and recorded it for posterity. You might even call its producers the musical curators of their day.

Top of the Pops now manifests as The X Factor, a franchise unsubtly overlaid with the fragile ego of today’s television industry. The brighter lights, bigger sets and more elaborate back-stories proffered each season all say one thing: we’re not leaving anything to chance.

While Top of the Pops was, without making a fuss about it, the ultimate exercise in viewer control – buy the record, send the artists Elstree-bound, do it all again next week – The X Factor wraps its interactivity up in the puffery of desperation. For all its voting lines, it offers viewers less say.

Kitchen-sink commercialism works, though, which is why Simon Cowell’s baby still commands its place in the ITV schedule and the in-house produced Top of the Pops was languishing in a BBC 2 Sunday teatime slot with just one million viewers when it was cancelled in 2006. Its cost-per-ratings ratio was a harsher number than any performed on the show.

The crunch did not come from the challenge of reality television like The X Factor – the two shows enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. In fact, the BBC cited “increasing competition from multi-media and niche musical outlets”. Doherty’s crows got to Top of the Pops early.

Musicians old enough to remember the hearts-and-minds days insist the crows could have been frightened off. Failing that, the BBC should have looked to its public service role and carried on. Damon Albarn says he “never understood” the decision to axe it; Noel Gallagher says he would “bring it back in a heartbeat”; Neil Tennant summed it up best, though, when he branded its disappearance from the schedules “defeatist”.

Who knows what would have happened if it had lived to see the hashtag days of #totp. Six years after its demise, broadcasters are forever talking up the fact that rumours of the death of “linear” television are exaggerated – even the app-endowed fraternity is drawn back to the schedule by Twitter chatter.

And yet eyeballs are steadily migrating to platforms new. It’s not just the mightily profitable Sky, feasting on creative talent and consumer entertainment budgets. In the US, online newbies like Netflix and Hulu are pulling viewers away from pricey cable providers and commissioning content too.

This leaves traditional broadcasters with an identity crisis: if they don’t control the platform and they’re not actually making the programmes, what are they doing?

For public service broadcasters (PSBs), the obvious solution is to pour licence fee cash into producing its own content, then set out to make friends with the crows. Indeed, the Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci advised this week that the BBC, “with a brand recognition up there with Apple and Google” should “go abroad and prostitute itself to blue-buggery if need be in how it sells and makes money from its content”.

Really, the last thing PSBs should do is be defeatist. And the message coming from both RTÉ and the Minister for Communications at the UCC TV50 event was that they wouldn’t be. “Critical mass” was Pat Rabbitte’s term of choice. We need a national broadcaster that can produce a stable source of media content, he insisted – “not just news and current affairs, but the full range of public service broadcasting”. On this, RTÉ director general Noel Curran was unequivocal: “Some argue that escapism and entertainment have no place on a public service station, but I believe that argument is elitist.”

No one wants to follow the US model of marginalised public service media. Nobody wants to be NPR. Public service broadcasting is not a ghetto for the worthy; it must justify its public funding by both catering for niches, such as arts programming, and offering shows with mass appeal, such as arts programming.

Top of the Pops is – bizarrely, in my opinion – regarded as an anomaly that fits into neither category. Someone will bring the format back eventually, and not for sentimental reasons.