Author Archives: markdowe1

Arts, BBC, Broadcasting, Culture, Government, Media, Society, Technology

For the BBC to survive requires answering some critical questions

UK MEDIA

WE are now overwhelmed with the number of ways in which we can view content. It can be difficult to know where to begin: Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are all just a click away.

This profound transformation of the entertainment and digital media industry has fragmented audiences and also altered the future prospects of the UK broadcasters that previously dominated our viewing experience. The BBC in particular faces profound questions as it enters discussions with the Government on charter renewal.

The BBC is not alone in facing critical questions about its future. Channel 4, too, is caught up in the complexity as the globalised entertainment industry reorders itself around a handful of gigantic platforms.

Most in Britain still like to talk about “our” broadcasters as if they are permanent fixtures of national life. In reality, they are now islands under threat in an ocean dominated by American tech companies and our addictive relationships with our smart phones.

In the United States, the industry has drawn the obvious conclusion. If you want to survive in this era, you need more scale. That is why we see major studios and platforms circling each other, exploring combinations that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. When a studio as diverse and storied as Paramount concludes that it needs to combine with a bigger partner like Warner Bros simply to flourish in the streaming age, it tells us something about the brutal economics of global entertainment today.

Yet in the UK, our public service broadcasters risk remaining stuck in old models and old ways of thinking. They are still organised around linear schedules, legacy silos, and institutional pride, rather than around the single hard question that now matters: how do we build something big and compelling enough to matter in a digital world where the viewer is always one click away from bypassing British content altogether? At precisely the moment when courageous transformation is required, we risk clinging to structures designed for a previous century.

For the BBC, this question is existential. The age profile of its audiences keeps creeping upwards. Younger viewers are drifting to platforms whose names barely existed when the last licence fee settlement was negotiated. The corporation has made great efforts to pivot to digital and to find ways of connecting with young audiences, but the time has come to acknowledge that on its own it cannot achieve what it needs to with that demographic. It would benefit immensely from a new, deep and durable relationship with younger audiences at scale.

For Channel 4, the risk is different but just as stark. It has always prided itself on being smaller, nimble, and more disruptive. But in a world of global streaming, “small and nimble” can start to look like under-capitalised and vulnerable. The advertising market is fragmenting. Production costs are rising. The channel’s ability to take creative risks depends on a financial base that is no longer guaranteed. It needs scale – not to become safe and bland, but to ensure it still exists a decade from now.

As charter renewal begins, questions on the BBC’s future are starting to revolve around the possibility of advertising and subscription-based services.

But there is a different solution: a merger between the BBC and Channel 4.

This would address both of their problems at once. The BBC would gain more of the younger, increasingly diverse audiences it desperately needs for a long-term future. Channel 4 would gain the scale and security it needs to keep commissioning the bold, distinctive work that has always been its hallmark.

Together they could build a single, world-class public service media platform that is genuinely capable of competing in a global market.

Needless to say, there would be objections. How would the advertising model work? Would Channel 4’s irreverent tone be smothered by BBC bureaucracy?

Such concerns are real but could be overcome with political and institutional courage. It is far easier for ministers to tinker at the margins than to rethink the entire architecture of public service broadcasting. It is more comfortable for executives to protect their fiefdoms than to imagine themselves as part of something larger. But comfort is not a strategy. In the absence of bold change and reform, both organisations will slowly move towards irrelevance with younger audiences slipping further away.

The question, then, is not whether a merger between the BBC and Channel 4 would be complicated. Of course it would. The most pressing question is whether we are prepared to let two British institutions wither on the margins of a global entertainment market, or whether we are willing to give them the scale and strength they need to thrive.

In an age of giants, muddling through as we are is the most dangerous option of all. That can only lead to demise.

TWO

THE terms for the decennial review of the BBC’s Royal Charter have been set. Unsurprisingly, the Government has chosen to avoid asking the difficult question of whether the licence fee continues to make sense. While raising other forms of revenue will be considered, the regressive tax on those consuming live media is going to stay.

This is a missed opportunity. The licence fee has become an embarrassing anachronism. The notion that a licence is required to watch live content produced by broadcasters charging their own independent fees to consumers is a bizarre legacy of early arguments over radio broadcasting. If it has failed to keep pace with the developments in media of the last century, it has certainly failed to keep pace with those in the new millennium.

Yet the BBC is financially reliant upon this structure, and desperate to retain it. This unique and privileged position allows the organisation of being able to charge not only their own customers, but those of their direct competitors. The results, however, are strictly negative.

The BBC is simultaneously desperate to retain public approval and also to maintain the line that it produces public services which would otherwise have no home. These objectives are in clear tension: the first drives it to produce the sort of content commercial stations would already produce; the second, a sort of Reithian public education. In practice, the former objective seems to dominate, and the latter instinct to be redirected into nakedly political exercises that promote the views of the organisation’s staff.

It is difficult if not inconceivable to argue that this activity permits the subsidies given to the BBC through the licence fee – particularly when they increasingly drag Britain into disrepute.

President Trump’s lawsuit against the broadcaster for misrepresentation – and the long, shameful list of incidents demonstrating bias on foreign policy issues – illustrate how problems for the state broadcaster can become problems for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Given this, it would have been better to rip the sticking plaster off before the Government confirmed the BBC’s autonomy over the licence fee. It should have made clear to the BBC that it must prepare for a future without it, and begin to separate the state from the broadcaster. This is, after all, the long-term direction of travel. As things stand, the inevitable has been postponed, and the adjustment will be all the harder when it eventually arrives.

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Arts, Books, History, Nuclear Weapons, Russia, Society, United States

Book Review: The Nuclear Age

LITERARY REVIEW

FOLLOWING that day in the summer of 1945 when, on a testing ground in the New Mexico desert – when the first nuclear bomb exploded – many people of that era and generation have lived their entire lives under the threat of universal extermination.

It caused Robert Oppemheiemer, the brilliant scientist heading the US’s Manhattan Project, to proclaim melodramatically (but entirely accurately) an ancient Hindu prophecy: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Just three weeks later, in early August, the bomb was used for real for the first time against an enemy – in a blinding flash, and a shockwave that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

Pavements melted, skin peeled off faces, more than 60,000 perished immediately, and in the following five months another 60,000 died from injuries and radiation.

Three days later, Nagasaki was given the same treatment. The original target had been a different city but heavy cloud cover saved it, diverting the US B29 bomber 125 miles south. Two square miles of the city centre were pulverised. Some 70,000 people died a horrible death.

And amazingly, those were the last fatalities of nuclear explosions. Eighty years on the world has somehow managed to avoid that apocalyptic and life-threatening tripwire of its own making.

So far.

This history is necessary to understand and should be imprinted on all our brains. It’s a miracle we are still here. Because in an unstable world (and increasingly so) we are all one reckless move, one miscalculation, one technical glitch, one individual’s moment of madness, away from Doomsday.

How the lid has been kept on nuclear Armageddon is plotted by acclaimed historian Serhii Plokhy in this chilling and bewildering book.

Bewildering because all we have ever done is make the threat greater, while posturing about the importance of containing it, claiming nonsensically that massive overkill is making the world a safer place.

In 1962, Soviet Union ships carrying nuclear weapons headed for a clash with an American blockade of Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was the nuclear confrontation between US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that came toe to toe.

If no one blinked, it was inevitable that those red buttons would have been pushed, missiles would’ve been fired, and the world would have been a goner. The end of history itself had beckoned.

Other than being flippant towards the world ending, how else could you deal with the apocalypse being hours, minutes, or just seconds away? Because the very idea is impossible to grasp. Do you hide under a desk as a civilisation built up over millennia is blown apart and a world of abundance is reduced to ashes?

With Cuba, the moment passed. The world survived. Plokhy argues that neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev was ready to push the button. They both pulled back.

And next time? Can we rely on the same calculated response from today’s leaders, from the likes of Putin, Trump, Kim Jong-un, Xi?

Since that’s the threat we live under, and yet we not only get on with our lives and look the other way, but we up the arsenal – increasing the destructive power to the point of absurdity.

Only recently, Putin boasted of a new Russian super-submarine with “unstoppable” weaponry that can fire nuclear drones at Western coastlines from thousands of miles away. In direct response, Trump ordered the US to restart nuclear testing.

Escalation and proliferation like this are the underlying narratives of the nuclear age: the powerful few believing they can keep the weapons to themselves, but finding all they have done is to provide an incentive to other nations to follow suit as quick as possible for fear of being left behind. The cat- and- mouse of the nuclear age; history is littered with such examples. The US threw its scientists into nuclear research for fear of Hitler getting there first and the Nazis snatching a late victory in the Second World War.

Then Stalin had to have his, Britain, too, then France, China, Israel, India. The club just got bigger; containment became harder and much more problematic. World leaders talked non-proliferation, but that’s easier said than done once the genie is firmly out of the bottle.

That genie is now ubiquitous. Officially there are nine fully fledged nuclear-armed states in the world. Yet, the most worrying assertion of all in this deeply disturbing book is that around 40 more states have access to the requisite technology, raw material and capability to produce nuclear weaponry, in some cases at very short notice.

That’s the size and extent of the timebomb each and every global citizen is sitting on.

Those scientists – the Einsteins, Bohrs, and so on – who first developed the principle and then the practicality of releasing unimaginable amounts of energy through nuclear fission and fusion, begged their political and military leaders to concentrate on the massive peaceful benefits of their discoveries.

Presidents and generals agreed; but first, they said, there is the enemy to defeat, this opponent and adversary to match, this military threat to see off.

Eight decades on, that’s where we still are. Plokhy’s account of the nuclear age hardly inspires optimism for the future.

He concludes that fundamentally it is the fear of annihilation that has kept us from the brink – the general agreement that it is in no one’s interest to perish in a global nuclear apocalypse. That held true in the Cuba crisis. He writes: “We must enhance the instinct of self-preservation shared by friends and foes alike to save the world once again.”

And keep our collective fingers crossed.

– The Nuclear Age by Serhii Plokhy is published by Allen Lane, 432pp

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Arts, Books, History, Nature, Science

Book Review: The Origin of Language

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: According to an evolutionary biologist, it takes a village to raise a child. And that’s why we started talking to each other

THE story of human evolution has undergone a distinct feminisation in recent decades. Or, rather, an equalisation: a much-needed rebalancing after 150 years during which, we were told, everything was driven by strutting and brawling males, with females tagging along for the ride. This reckoning has finally arrived at language.

The origins of our species’ exceptional communication skills constitute one of the more nebulous zones of the larger evolutionary narrative, because many of the bits of the human anatomy that allow us to communicate – notably the brain and the vocal tract – are soft and don’t fossilise. The linguistic societies of Paris and London even banned talk of evolution around 1870, and the subject only made a timid comeback about a century later. Plenty of theories have been thrown into the evidentiary void since then, mainly by men, but now evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman, of the University of Sydney, has turned her female gaze on the problem. Unlike a baby chimp that can cling to its mother, a human infant is entirely helpless for years.

Her theory, which she describes as having been hiding in plain sight, is compelling: language evolved in parallel with caring for our “underbaked” newborns, because looking after and caring for a helpless human baby on the danger-filled plains of the African savannah required more than one pair of hands (and feet). It needed a group among whom the tasks of food-gathering, childcare, and defence could be divided. A group means social life, which means communication. Social bonding meant language evolved to negotiate help, share information about infant safety, and for those bonds to be necessarily strengthened to keep “helpless” infants alive.

The evidence to support Beekman’s theory isn’t entirely lacking, but a lot of it is, as a matter of course, circumstantial. We know that the compromise that natural selection hit upon to balance the competing anatomical demands of bipedalism (walking upright and narrowing pelvises) and an ever-expanding brain was to have babies born early (before that brain and its bony casing were fully formed).

One of the discoveries of the newly feminised wave of evolutionary science has been that alloparents – individuals other than the biological parents who contribute parenting services – played a critical role in ensuring the survival of those half-developed human children. Another is that stone-age women hunted alongside men. In the past it was assumed that hunting bands were exclusively male, and one theory held that language arose to allow them to cooperate. But childcare was another chore that called for cooperation, probably also between genders, and over years, not just hours or days.

Fortuitously, the reconfiguration of the head and neck required to accommodate the ballooning brain had a side-effect of remoulding the throat, giving our ancestors more control and precision over their utterances. With the capacity to generate a large range of sounds came the ability to convey a large range of meanings. To begin with, this was useful for coordinating childcare, but as speech became more complex and sophisticated, alloparents – particularly grandmothers – used it to transmit their accumulated knowledge. This nurtured infants who were even better equipped to survive. The result of this positive feedback loop was Homo sapiens, the sole survivor of a once diverse lineage.

Regrettably, critics are likely to highlight that Beekman takes a very long time to get to this exciting idea. She does spend about half the book laying the groundwork, padding it out with superfluous vignettes as if she is worried the centre won’t hold. Once she gets there, she makes some thought-provoking observations. Full-blown language probably emerged about 100,000 years ago, she says, but only in our line – not in those of our closest relatives. “We may have made babies with Neanderthals and Denisovans,” she writes, “but I don’t think we had much to talk about.”

And whereas others have argued that language must have predated Homo sapiens, because without it the older species Homo erectus couldn’t have crossed the forbidding Wallace Line – the deep-water channel that separates Asia and Australasia – she draws on her deep knowledge of social insects to show that communication as relatively unsophisticated as that of bees or ants could have done the job. Having made a persuasive case for the role of alloparents in the evolution of language, Beekman concludes that we did ourselves a disservice when we shrank our basic unit of organisation down from the extended to the nuclear family. Perhaps, but historians including Peter Laslett have dated this important shift to the middle ages, long before the Industrial Revolution where she places it, and the damage isn’t obvious yet. Language is still being soaked up by young children, and is still a vehicle for intergenerational learning. It may take a village to raise a child, but as Beekman herself hints, a village can be constituted in different ways.

Beekman presents a radical shift in how we understand the birth of human speech. While traditional theories often credit hunting, toolmaking, or warfare as the primary drivers of complex communication, the author argues that the true catalyst was the inescapable need for cooperative childcare.

– The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why by Madeleine Beekman is published by Simon & Schuster, 320pp

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