This collection of essays was inspired by a desire to bring together some of the arguments that have, in recent years and all over Europe, shaped the debate about the future of television. It is undeniable that the commotion came from a certain anxiety and sense of crisis, although in some quarters (not represented in the pages that follow), the crisis was perceived and seized as an opportunity: to dismantle regulations and state controls, to discredit television’s civic accountability, and above all, to make lots of money. Those, however, who felt that public service television – in its old, government-monopoly form and in its advertising-funded, commercial manifestations – was something worth defending also seized the crisis as an opportunity. It made it possible to reflect on what television had come to mean for audiences and television makers, for our sense of democracy, of community, and of the contemporary nation-state: the last in Europe paradoxically at one and the same time on the verge of disappearing into a Federal Europe, and of reasserting itself in the confused search for nationalism, regional autonomy and ethnic identity.
At this juncture, it seemed imperative to limit the topic somewhat and start by studying the fault-lines along a more traditional fissure: the high-culture/popular culture opposition, for example, or more precisely, the divide which is supposed to separate writers – men and women of letters – from such a stridently populist, easily demagogic and inherently ephemeral medium such as television. Under the title of ‘Writing and Filming’, an international weekend conference was organized by the Institute of Film and Television Studies at the University of Amsterdam and held at the Nederlands Filmmuseum on May 15th-17th, 1992. The event was itself something of a follow-up to a seminar organized under the title ‘Television: Questions of Quality’ by the Centre for Creative and Performing Arts at the University of East Anglia in Norwich two years earlier. The presence of speakers who attended both conferences (Cook, Bradbury, Hachmeister, Elsaesser) gave the discussions some continuity, understated by the fact that only the revised version of one paper – Jon Cook and Thomas Elsaesser’s closing report from the Norwich meeting – is included here.
The Amsterdam meeting wanted to be a forum for writers and television programme makers and to extend the boundaries by including factual writing, alongside the views of historians and scholars of television. A number of filmmakers were also invited, well aware that they might open up an intriguing double front: wary of television lest it swallow them, filmmakers sometimes feel they have to keep at arm’s length the writers whose work they are suspected of betraying to the image and spectacle.
Yet their thoughts on the topics we proposed – ‘the unwritable film’ and ‘the unfilmable text’ - were key elements of the conference: the disputes writers have always had with directors and which both have had with producers, as well as the changing status of the director as author, give a much-needed historical dimension to the current controversies over how these roles are distributed in television. Writing and filming have always been perceived as sharing some fundamentals. Not only do film directors expect their unique stylistic and thematic ‘signature’ to be recognized by an audience, similar to the way writers are recognized by their readers, but films are often called ‘texts’, a sign, beyond the jargon, that they are beginning to receive the kind of close attention traditionally reserved for works of literature. More generally, filming presupposes writing: a film is usually produced on the basis of a script, a form of writing which has a complex but absolutely crucial status in the commercial film industry, while its need to exist at all is often challenged by personal, independent or avant-garde filmmaking. Finally, once a film has encountered a public, it becomes the subject of other kinds of writing: articles by journalists, critics and academics.
Writing, furthermore, is crucial for television. While one tends to think that the unique quality of television derives from its ‘liveness’, it is in fact a medium dependent on ‘writing’. Yet much writing for television – and not always the worst – remains more or less anonymous: for factual programmes, news and political commentary, science programmes, children’s television, game shows. Little attention is usually paid to the kinds and qualities of this writing. For all its visual impact, television remains very much a medium of speech and sound, historically derived from radio and currently competing not, in the first instance, with the cinema but with the press and newspapers.
In order to keep this perspective in the foreground, Writing for the Medium has been divided into three sections. The first is devoted to an analysis of what is at issue in the fight over the future(s) of television, singling out the slippery term ‘quality television’ in order to probe what is meant by quality in a popular medium, and how it can be defined or defended.
The second section focuses on literature and television. With wit and passion, the authors discuss some of the ways television and the written text have influenced and changed each other in the past decades. Going beyond the question of literary adaptation, writers with experience in several media and genres, such as Malcolm Bradbury, Fay Weldon and Alan Plater voice their concern, but also their continuing engagement for a tradition of quality television writing, which they see under siege in the new world of deregulation and international co-productions. In Great Britain, the writer on television seems, for the time being, to have maintained a certain authority, not least thanks to the independence enjoyed by producers and commissioning editors. The situation is more precarious on the Continent, where authors feel that their craft often goes unrecognized. And yet, the skills required for television writing need to be more widely understood, if television is to retain the loyalty of national audiences.
The final section examines ‘science on television’, with series editors from Britain and Germany giving first-hand accounts of the scope for serious science reporting on television, but also considering the entertainment expectations of audiences when watching wildlife programmes or learning about current controversies in the sciences. A comparative study points out the different traditions and cultural debates which shape programming in this area across Europe.
Writing for the Medium will, it is hoped, stimulate the debate about the future of quality television and the place of writing, not least by suggesting that this place need not be confined to drama and fiction. The essays also document the readiness with which writers accept television as an important medium in its own right, instead of expecting it to derive its importance merely from the message it may be made to deliver. Given the tendency towards deregulation and the so-called ‘market orientation’ of broadcasting in Europe, it is important to understand more clearly, and across the whole spectrum of programming, which aspects of the public service remit in television - and, by extension, what sort of national film culture - are in need of support or need to be given a new purpose. As we notice, information and entertainment – two key elements of public service broadcasting as well as of the cinema – becoming increasingly intermingled and ‘global’, the meaning of a national audiovisual culture for the survival of democracy has to be much more widely discussed than it is at present. The prospects of a healthy media culture are important not just from the point of view of economics. An ‘ecological’ perspective is necessary to understand film and TV’s relation to national literature, to developments in science, to concerns about the environment and to technological change. It may even remind us of the basic political arguments for maintaining a nationally specific, but nevertheless international audiovisual culture, in the face of what some see as the increasing dominance of one or two nations’ cultures over every other on the globe.
Another outlook one might take away from the following essays is that, predictions of many cultural pessimists notwithstanding, the future of literature and print culture is not threatened by the rise of film and television, just as film and the cinema are not threatened by the dominance of television. On the contrary, a new understanding of the function of writing in all its audiovisual combinations may well offer insights into why both writing and filming will maintain their importance as languages: as means of expression and of memory, as modes of communication and argument in an increasingly complex ‘information society’, in which the real danger is not scarcity and threat of extinction, but overabundance and overload. It is here that quality will have to prove itself against sheer quantity.
The essays thus discuss writing and television across quite a broad range of high-culture and mass-culture definitions. If in the past, it was the independent filmmakers who traditionally represented the high culture ground of the audiovisual media, a generation of writers has emerged whose very ways of thinking about literature includes the audio-visual media and their powers of representation. When these writers come to write for the medium, they are nonetheless caught in a paradox, namely that in looking for the expression of a personal vision, the script is particularly problematic, since it may blur what is distinctive and specific about working creatively with images and sounds as opposed to working with the written and printed word. On the other hand, there may be qualities of writing, distinctive features of literature and the print media which, when all is said and done, nevertheless refuse to yield to the audiovisual as the dominant form of cultural memory and human interchange.
Not all the contributions of the three-day conference could be included. This is in part a tribute to the ‘live’ nature of the event and in part a reflection of precisely the fact that discursive prose is not always the medium through which film and television makers wish to manifest themselves. Their spirited interventions, as well as the many video extracts shown to an appreciative public, remained very much in the editors' minds during the months they put together this collection. Special thanks are due to those who did respond and who now stand, in some sense, as the representatives of film- and televisionmakers, a role that does not detract from the distinctly personal and particular case they make. They are joined by two authors, Fay Weldon and Alan Plater, who were present in spirit though not in person, and whose permission to publish their addresses to the Dutch Screenwriters’ Network in 1991 and the LIRA Foundation in 1993 we gratefully acknowledge. Thanks are also due to the LIRA Foundation for a generous publication grant, as well as to the Media department of the Netherlands Ministry of Culture, The British Council and the Foundation for Public Information on Science, Technology and the Humanities for their financial support. The editors are pleased to acknowledge the support they received from many other quarters: they hope the volume may serve as a token of their appreciation.