Erika Balsom on “People Make TV”

ANYONE INTERESTED in the history of experimental television in the UK will inevitably collide with a familiar narrative: it begins in 1982 with the advent of Channel 4, founded with a commitment to innovation and a mandate to reach an underprivileged audience. represented. In its first decade, the station’s independent film and video department spent fifty million pounds on work that editor Rod Stoneman described in 1992 as “a range of political and personal documentaries, experimentation, access and community programming, low-budget fiction and third-world cinema. For this he became legendary. Forget all the talk about “quality television” today; it’s Channel 4’s early years that really deserve the label.

But even here, the old rule still applies: the beginning of something is rarely its true beginning. London’s prestigious non-profit gallery Raven Row resumed public activities last January after a five-year hiatus with an exhibition that shines a light on a lesser-known moment in the history of radical broadcasting in the UK. Kingdom, which predated the celebrated era. of Channel 4 and foreshadowed something of his philosophy. Curated by Lori E. Allen, William Fowler, Matthew Harle and Alex Sainsbury, “People Make Television” revisited the country’s first forays into public access in the 1970s. mind the everyday television experience, with the townhouse space featuring numerous living room configurations and viewing stations that allowed visitors to browse nearly ninety hours of material in a variety of ways. Nothing, fortunately, was shown anachronistically as a projection.

The heart of “People Make Television” was the presentation of more than one hundred of the 243 episodes of the television show open door, a program produced between 1973 and 1983 by the Community Program Unit of the British Broadcasting Corporation. In the words of BBC program director David Attenborough, open door aimed to be a place for “stylistic innovations” and would welcome “voices, attitudes and opinions which, for one reason or another, have been ignored or seriously overlooked by mainstream programming”. Against the usual function of television as a tool of consensus, it gave way to antagonism and idiosyncrasy. At a time when there were only three hertzian channels, it opened a breach in the programming grid through which another repertoire of images and voices could slip through.

Unlike the American public-access television that inspired it, which was broadcast in a targeted fashion on local cable channels, open door was broadcast nationwide on a channel with a directive to act in the interest of the country. Anyone could submit an episode as long as they weren’t promoting a political party. Those selected were paired with a producer and technical support team, but apparently retained full editorial control. Prison abolitionists, sex educators, foxhunting saboteurs, creators of punk fanzines, single parents, vegans, community theatergoers, trans advocates, supporters of Palestinian liberation, women with cystitis: they’ve all reached the millions. (The latter group, the U&I Club, received thousands of letters from viewers.) Not all of the causes presented were progressive. While individual episodes of open door were free from the “balance” requirement imposed by the BBC’s charter, taken as a whole the series was meant to include a wide range of opinions. Missing from “People Make Television” was a 1976 episode of the British Campaign to Stop Immigration, a group linked to the far-right National Front party. Included was one by the campaign for the feminine woman warning of the dangers of “unisex culture,” something “more threatening and damaging. . . than communism or fascism.

“People Make Television” felt like a companion piece to Raven Row’s 2015-2016 exhibition “The Inoperative Community,” which featured more than fifty hours of experimental moving-image practices tied to the so-called long 1970s (that’s i.e. 1968-1984). Both shows had similar length requirements and returned at the same time, but while “The Inoperative Community” dealt specifically with political modernist aesthetics, “People Make Television” departed from the realm of art to offer a different idea of image policy. With the round table as the dominant format, open door embraces the immediacy of direct address and is exemplary of a realist aesthetic attacked at the time by eminent film theorists and practitioners such as Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. For example, while the Cleaners’ Action Group episode includes lengthy studio conversations, the Berwick Street Film Collective episode night cleaners (1972-1975) – a film about the same union organizing campaign, made by a group featured in “The Inoperative Community” – deploys avant-garde techniques like optical printing and the insertion of a black leader to insist on the opacity of mediation, advance a policy of form alongside a policy of content.

That said, it would be too simple to draw a clear line between open door and the independent film industry. Several film groups contributed to the episodes, including the London Women’s Film Group, which nested excerpts from their The Incredible Equal Pay Show (1975) as part of a studio discussion featuring member Claire Johnston, a theorist noted for her opposition to realism. Additionally, a critical reflection on television is woven through the series. Several episodes playfully appropriate the conventions of news and advertising; others attack the medium squarely. One produced in support of L’Autre Cinéma, an alternative exhibition space threatened with closure at the time, begins by declaring: “The space of the cinema is overshadowed by the presence of television”, decrying the function of that as an “instrument of cohesion”. .” (Filmmakers Stephen Dwoskin and Marc Karlin, the latter member of the Berwick Street Film Collective, were responsible for this gripping work – although uncredited.) A 1973 episode directed by a group of black teachers takes the BBC itself to part. which had aired a few weeks prior, pointing out that although these conversations were ostensibly conducted to document the problem of racism in schools, they were in fact subjecting black children to the same thing.

Such cannibalistic gestures point to a fundamental tension at play in open door: To sting on television, groups agreed to be on television. To reach the public, they entered an institution that had historically excluded them and which, during all other hours of the schedule, continued to do so. Was open door a co-option of dissent, thus eroding the counter-public sphere forged by independent filmmakers like the Berwick Street Film Collective and places like The Other Cinema? Or was it a Trojan horse of the airwaves, providing an unprecedented vehicle for smuggling criticism? The second option seems to be the best way to describe “It Ain’t Half Racist Mum” (1979), directed by the Campaign Against Racism Media and co-hosted by Stuart Hall and Maggie Steed. This piercing analysis takes inventory of racist television stereotypes and challenges the BBC’s portrayal of minority communities, dismantling the broadcaster’s claim to balance. His account of presenter Robin Day’s conduct was inflammatory enough to prompt an apology on behalf of the BBC to the BBC – a remarkable event that sums up how open door confused distinctions between inside and outside. More than fifty years later, this experience insistently poses contemporary questions: is it better to change institutions from the inside or from the outside? What are the stakes of the refusal of mass visibility and what are the compromises to achieve it? Is it enough to communicate political content to the widest possible audience, or is it also necessary to intervene at the level of aesthetics, to forge oppositional languages ​​of representation?

“It Ain’t Half Racist Mum” has had a significant life beyond its initial airing; worn by Hall’s celebrity, it has become an educational tool. The same cannot be said for most others. open door episodes. “People Make Television” marked the first time many have been shown publicly since their initial broadcast, but that should come as no surprise: Writing about television’s status as a medium of transmission rather than storage, Mary Ann Doane observed that television “thrives on its own oblivion. By creating an audience media library, the exhibition pushed back on that transience and did so in a way that an online database never could. Instead of the fleeting “now” typically associated with broadcasting and the atomized immediacy of the internet, it activated another sense of liveliness, which could best be described as an untimely collective event. liveliness. Debates over gender norms and immigration, grassroots opposition to extractivism, concerns over cinema closures: are we in 1973 or 2023? Encountering these archives engendered no nostalgic feeling of delving into bygone glory days – something that tends to color discussions on Channel 4. But there was also not sufficient assurance of historical improvement. . In an essay accompanying the presentation, “The Furthest Edge of the BBC: Watching Open Door”, curators Fowler and Harle nicely describe open door as a “visual history from below that frustrates our teleological drives and our sense of political and cultural time”. One of those urges is to assume that things have gotten better; another is to assume they got worse. As one delves into “People Make Television,” the inadequacy of both narratives becomes apparent. Crowds gathered around viewing stations and huddled on sofas, caught in a tangle of time from which discussion could emerge.

Erika Balsom is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London.