Cable here has demonstrated that cheap and cheerful television can draw large audiences, particularly if its cheerfulness is sauced with sexual titillation. Even in the US, cable channels can make a fair claim to have lifted the standards of terrestrial broadcasters: with The Simpsons, the best sitcom of the last two decades, Fox demonstrated that intelligence was not incompatible with mass popularity; with The Larry Sanders Show, HBO showed that there was an audience for a darker, more edgy kind of comedy.In this country, though, the example and demands of cable are more likely to drive standards down than up. If you live in Turkey or Australia there's a fair chance that the Discovery Channel will provide your best port of call for serious documentaries. The benchmark of quality they represent will often exceed that to be found from domestic broadcasters. And again our local circumstances make Britain a special case in global television culture. Even Channel 4 has increasingly pursued the route of imitation rather than innovation.Some of this is due to what you might call the cabling of terrestrial television - the intrusion of a homogenising instinct into a culture that previously had plenty of room for idiosyncratic demographics. In the United States, where public service broadcasting was an afterthought, it has always struggled in the shadow of the big commercial networks.Now competition in this country is more likely to provoke sameness than freshness - if you doubt that, look at the wall-to-wall makeover programmes, or the endless copy-cat soap docs.
This wasn't always the case - the arrival of ITV saved the BBC from itself - but that dynamic tension obeyed specific local conditions. Because a public service broadcaster had been first on the scene in Britain and had been allowed to flourish unhampered until its roots were deep, the arrival of competing flora could not kill it off. Good television is better but there's less of it; bad television is less incompetent but far more extensive.This is partly a simple truism - five networks broadcast 24 hours a day, and that doesn't even begin to take account of the vast proliferation of cable and satellite channels. Despite the best efforts of media studies courses, the talent available to broadcasters has not expanded at anything like the same rate. Something odd has happened to competition too - which has increasingly become a debilitating rather than invigorating force. In its infancy television offered a kind of romantic ruggedness - the peaks were high but rarely smooth, and the gulfs were often precipitous. Now the undoubted high points that remain rise from great alluvial plains of mediocrity - smooth and well-cultivated mediocrity, it's true, but mediocrity none the less.
To use a geographical metaphor, you might see this as the difference between a young volcanic landscape and one that bears the impression of long years of weather. However, it doesn't mean that there is nothing to be anxious about in current television culture. The truth is slightly more complicated than either formulation - television today is both better and worse than that of the past, more practised and polished in its means but frequently less ambitious and enterprising in its ends. It is an astonishing cultural resource and only long familiarity can have bred our contempt for it. Only the truly dumb could watch it and learn nothing. This isn't to imply that the past constitutes a golden age. All golden ages are tricks of the light, an era seen as it dips below the horizon, so that high points are gilded with sunlight and low points disappear into a forgiving obscurity. That needs stating bluntly, given the prevailing current of opinion: the general population in 1999 is better informed and educated than it was in 1947 and that is in large part due to television.
Television opened this country up to itself in a way that had never been possible before. Coronation Street remained the favourite viewing of Sir John Betjeman until his death, and you could take that regular rendezvous between a Poet Laureate of the suburban upper crust and the inhabitants of a working class Manchester street as emblematic of television's powers of social miscegenation. The education could take odd forms because television was such a universal and indiscriminate culture - with no strict conditions of entry. Television could easily appear banal and lowering, it was true, but it also offered a dramatic enlargement of most people's horizons, socially and intellectually. It had already been fingered as the assassin of conversation, as cheap gin for the unlettered, as a one-eyed hypnotist that would brainwash your children and blue-rinse your judgement. Its hostile nick-names ("boob tube", "idiot box") cemented the association between the machine and moronism. Like most received opinions, this one wrapped a core of error in a coating of truth.
