Too many TV bosses think viewers are stupid

We need diversity of class and outlook if we are to get television that does justice to the problems of the day

Few outside of the world of television had heard of Dorothy Byrne before last week. She doesn’t use social media and has never cultivated a public profile. As head of news and current affairs at Channel 4, though, she is among the UK’S most powerful media executives, and last week, giving the annual Mactaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival, this self-confessed “old lady” of factual television launched a volley of rhetorical barbs at both our political and media class.

Reactions to the stinging speech have, depressingly, split along party lines. Many on the Right slammed her for calling Boris Johnson a “known liar”, as well as “a coward” for failing to appear on Channel 4’s recent Tory leadership debate. Downing Street has since retaliated, apparently refusing Channel 4 News a planned interview with the Prime Minister at the G7 summit.

Left-leaning commentators have

meanwhile praised Byrne for her staunch feminism. Recounting 40 years in TV journalism, she reported how she was “sexually assaulted” as a young researcher at Granada. And referring to previous Mactaggart lectures, she “spotted one name among my predecessors who hasn’t yet had the comeuppance he deserves for his assaults on women”.

While these comments grabbed the headlines, the speech was actually full of important ideas and nuance, including criticisms that went across the board. Among the victims was Labour’s leadership, for avoiding media scrutiny – “Jeremy Corbyn sometimes permits only one question, and then doesn’t answer it!” – while praise was lavished on Margaret Thatcher for the “lengthy television interviews” she routinely gave.

She rightly called out sexual abuse against women, but backed older male presenters, too, saying: “We must resist the idea we don’t need older white men any more and they should be crushed out of the way.” This may sound like basic good manners, but many of Byrne’s industry colleagues don’t agree. And while condemning the attitudes towards women of many men she encountered in the 1970s and 1980s, at programmes like World in Action and Man Alive, she also pointed to their “astonishing achievements” and “great attributes we have lost”.

This was the important part of her speech, overlooked amidst the political squabbling. “Those men at Granada were passionate believers in the power of television,” she said. “They believed television was there to say and do big things”.

Recalling investigations like the one into the Birmingham Six (which overturned a series of wrongful convictions) and landmark series like End of Empire, she explained how TV journalists in the early years of her career set out to expose corruption and miscarriages of justice.

“They challenged the authority not just of those who ran the UK’S institutions but also their own TV bosses,” said Byrne. “How many people in TV today would say out loud they want to use TV to make Britain a better place?” The answer to her rhetorical question is surely: not many.

Terrestrial television still accounts for 69 per cent of all UK viewing, according to Ofcom, and 71 per cent of the public trust TV news. Byrne was right to argue that broadcasters should stop fretting about Netflix and build on that trust. “If we’re worried about becoming irrelevant… let’s start making big controversial programmes about the UK which put us back at the heart of public debate,” she told her fellow TV insiders.

Broadcasters, she believes, need to make programmes that engage the “millions of young people who are now politically aware and active”. They’re watching TED talks and listening to current affairs podcasts, but not being offered much on television. “We must stop being afraid of serious analysis authored by big, brainy people,” she said. “We have the ability and the airtime – so let’s make some really clever and difficult programmes”.

I spent the best part of a decade covering economics on Channel 4 News and have since made a string of films for Dispatches, the channel’s leading current affairs programme. I’ve known Byrne for over 20 years. We don’t always agree. I wouldn’t dub authority figures as liars, for example, because I think it’s far better to expose lies and let viewers decide. And it’s undeniable that the teams who make our terrestrial news bulletins are, to an astonishing extent, urban-centric and pro-remain in their outlook, failing to reflect the country as a whole.

Yet her instincts are right. There are indeed “seismic shifts” in British society, and mainstream TV news and current affairs does need to “reinvent itself ”. Audiences are much smarter than most TV executives believe them to be. More on- and off-screen diversity is needed – not just of gender and race (where we’ve made welcome progress), but of opinions, outlook and, above all, class (where diversity has, in my experience, gone backwards).

“Whatever happens about Brexit, we need big new ideas to take us forward – but I don’t see big ideas on TV now,” says Byrne. And who can say she’s not right?