Phil Redmond: Same old, same old

Oct 10 2008 by Phil Redmond, Liverpool Daily Post

REGURGITATION. Bureaucracies, like birds, seem to feed their young by it. Over my years in television, I must have taken part in over a thousand conferences called to look at the future of the broadcasting.

There seemed to be at least one a month. Why not? It was one of those questions conference organisers could keep regurgitating and the punters, often funded through the public purse in one way or another, would turn up like young chicks to be fed. Kept a lot of folk in work. And a lot of other folk out of the way for a few days a month.

Despite being three years off that circuit, my cultural skirmishes with the broadcasters this year have let me know that regurgitation is still the favoured form. The attack dogs of ITV and Channel 4 are yet again circling the BBC, trying to tear a chunk out of the sleeping giant.

Yes, the regurgitation is the old line that “in a rapidly changing digital world, ITV and Channel 4 can’t possibly survive in a competitive market, so they should get a piece of the BBC licence fee, as, after all, in a highly competitive multi-channel environment when everything will be delivered by the internet, the BBC itself won’t be able to cope so why not spread the £4bn Licence Fee around a bit?”. If you go back and read that bit again, then say it really fast, it almost makes sense.

It took me about 10 of the thousand regurgitation conferences to realise that not only is that nonsense, but that dinosaurs procreate, too. Like all bureaucracies, broadcasting will never deconstruct itself because it repopulates with its own kind. The parents spawn the young. The young inherit their parents’ values, which are reinforced through the regurgitation.

The truth about the future of broadcasting lies in those seven words “everything will be delivered by the internet”. In other words, why should any of the broadcasters survive? That is the new question and the answer must lie in what cultural contribution do they actually make to all our lives? Seeking an answer to that will no doubt spawn another thousand conferences but the answer, from the perspective of trying to engage them in our Capital of Culture year, is that same old, same old will not do.

So it is with regeneration and the intensifying hunt for the 2008 legacy. The official count has gone from five to six strategy groups now in the game, but most have a similar central theme. Regurgitation. Put more bluntly: as we already have groups that don’t seem to have done much in the past, why not bring them all together to see how little else they can achieve in the future?

Cynical? Just a cultural perspective. Yet, like the broadcasters, perhaps the real question is about whether some groupings and organisations are simply past their sell by date? We have tried macro (regional) and micro (local) regeneration; perhaps it’s time for nano regeneration, at neighbourhood level? More next week, but this is a time for regeneration through inspiration, not regurgitation.