On Thursday, 25th September an astonishing event took place in Knightsbridge just opposite Harrods. Some forty television employees the Independent Television Authority slogans and banners read - ITA: WATCHDOG LAPDOG? PROGRAMMES PROFITS: WHERE HAS ONE MILLION POUNDS PROFIT GONE? The grand lady shoppers looked amazed: as well they might.
been unthinkable.
The demonstration was in support of a petition handed in that morning containing the names of nearly one thousand television workers of all grades of employment from cleaner to cameraman to programme executive.
It read.
We, the undersigned, workers in Independent Television, believe that our industry is in a state of severe crisis. The fight Television is not a commodity but a public service and a vital part of a democratic society.
The I.T.A. have the power to protect the programme makers against the profit makers. It must use these powers immediately. The time has come for the I.T.A. to exert its statutory authority. It must act now or its members must The signatures had been collected in the three working days that had elapsed since the LWT resignations. They came from all over the country collected by Union shop stewards and other militants. It was handed into the ITA by Stuart Hood who had himself been fired from strangely similar to Michael Peacock. It is not a Rediffusion four years ago in circumstance particularly inflammatory document DUT nothing like it has ever happened before in television and things can never be quite the sallic arale.
Why this wave of militancy? It can't all be the London Weekend Television board. What is the crisis about!
Anyone who doubts that there is one should be sat down in front of a set for two weeks and made to watch it. Standards have slid miserably in the last eighteen months and not only in commercial television. An awful fungoid blandness is creeping over the BBC.
The base reason is money, although another and a bit metaphysical and hard-to-prove reason is tea. une good old middle-class tear of any interference with a nice orderly life. Television was beginning to get too rementin Heads too controversial. Careerist Department would applaud the successes but secretly they vondered: things could be getting out of hanc There was a dynamic breathlessness which has now gone. There are still some virtues around in television but they are of a worthier, weightier kind.
But back to money. For years the commercial companies made millions. A motlev gang of showbiz agents, journalists, admen, and energetic hustlers swaggered in for the biggest killing of the mid-twentieth century. After a hesitant start the money showered over them like an exploding sewer. God knows where it all went, it certainly wasn't into the programmes, but it is a fact although it may not be a relevant fact, that over half the boats in Cannes are owned by Englishmen. Most of it went into the few shareholders' pockets. A lot of it was simply stolen from television and put to work in other quite unrelated industries. One modest estimate of the amount diversified like this is 110 million pounds. A feeling of outrage over this insensate profiteering from a public service began to make Government. The public feeling was of course felt to une supported by the Unfree Press jealous of the success of a rival medium. And it is a typical example of the Unfree Press that it should more permanent feature of London lite than LWT. Anyway, the government felt that it had to do something, or at least seem to do something, so it fell back on the good old temporizing device of the Royal Commission. The Pilkington Committee sat for two years But there were some changes. The 1964 Television Act increased the powers of the ITA giving it more control over content: powers it has hardly ever used. Pilkington also gave the green light to the Government that was dying to grab its share of the profits. It instituted a levy on advertising taking a heavy slice out of the companies income. And, as always, when one set of hoods robs another, the public haven't benefited at all.
The Pilkington influence had one last backlash. In 1967 all the companies contracts came up for renewal. Two of them, TWW belief that they are only a magazine.
There is an opportunity for FCG or some other group to create inside television an active conditions and expect the Union in turn to support its fight for the revolutionising of the structure and content of television. Television is too important and too beautiful to be left in the hands of either paternalist beaurocrats or profit crazy businessmen. In one week Arnold WO new records this Weinstock ( a Director of LWT) put down the threatened takeover of his Liverpool factories by workers with one hand and swatted outburst of a tiny band of television intellectuals with the other. But until we organize and fight from a position of power winning. Television must be liberated the struggle must begin today.
Clive Goodwin
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to secure profits against falling income is being waged at the expense of good programmes.
attack TV so often and yet remain totally uncritical of other equally shocking areas of bonanza business dealings such as property. Centrepoint is as significant and certainly a achievement of the LWT group resignation was
radicalising organization which would support the Union (the ACTT) in its fight for wages and
which can only come from the strength. of our ideas and numbers the Weinstocks will go on