Oxford Inspires' Cultural Platform

Oxford Inspires has initiated a twice-yearly Cultural Platform, the main purposes of which are to attract a well-known speaker to Oxford to discuss a major cultural issue and to help situate the work of Oxford Inspires in a national and regional context.

The second Cultural Platform was held on 21 October 2005. The main presentation was by Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC. His speech was introduced by the Chief Executive of Oxford Inspires, Robert Hutchison, who also gave a brief overview of the Evolving City programme, which Oxford Inspires has been coordinating this year.

Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC

One of the many advantages of my job is the letters you get. I don't suppose there are many people, no matter what they do, who get quite so many passionate, well-argued letters. Or quite so many downright strange letters either.

Take this one I got a couple of months ago about that weighty BBC drama, Bob the Builder. This particular correspondent had been profoundly irritated by a particular storyline which had our hero endeavouring to build an entire new town on his own.

'Dear Sir', the letter ran, 'to imply that Bob is able not only to carry out building work but that he is capable of producing architectural, structural and services drawings for buildings and urban development plans when he does not have any training, skills or qualifications in these professions, is a flagrant distortion of reality and should not be perpetuated'.

Children's programmes, of course, are a notorious death-trap. A few years ago when I was Controller of BBC2, I was lucky enough to commission another of our enduring masterpieces: Tellytubbies. It went on to be a big success for us both here and around the world and over time both parents and teachers came to value the contribution it could make to developing language skills among the very young. But not at first. Oh no, when it was first launched, there was a barrage of letters, not to mention a full-blown press campaign, accusing us of using the Tellytubbies to dumb down the entire English language.

Now, as you know, at the BBC we are always on the look-out for new and inventive ways of lowering standards, but you have to admit it takes a pretty sick organisation to dumb down a programme which was only ever aimed at two-year-olds in the first place....

* * *

I want to talk about two things this morning. First about the way in which changes in my world—the world of electronic media—are transforming the way in which we think about the BBC's cultural mission; and, in particular, about how they're enabling us to integrate individual and community participation and engagement much more fully into the broadcast offer. And second, to look at what these themes might mean for the cultural, educational and social ambitions of Oxford and Oxfordshire.

A different kind of broadcasting.

The organisation that employs me is called the British Broadcasting Corporation. For most of the BBC's life that middle 'B' has served us pretty well.

Broadcasting was what we did and everyone knew what broadcasting was. It was tall masts on hills beaming out radio and TV programmes to mass audiences. It was one-to-many. It was—to all intents and purposes—universal with, by the 1980s, comparable receiving equipment in virtually every home. It was public.

And broadcasting was also obviously different from what everyone else did. The phone company. The record company. The newspaper company. Different devices, different business models, different consumer behaviours.

People sometimes talk as if these distinctions will soon disappear as convergence gathers pace. In many areas they've largely gone already. Younger audiences search and navigate as seamlessly across media as the technology will allow. More than two-thirds of the young people who took GCSE exams this summer used a BBC revision service called GCSE Bitesize. You can find Bitesize on interactive TV, on the web, or on your mobile phone. We offer it on all these platforms because that's what the UK's teenagers told us they needed to get the most out of it, but I doubt many of them think for more than a second about which device they're using to access it at any one time.

Our web reach is now more than half of all internet-enabled homes and offices in the UK. In broadband, it's 60%. All of our digital services—TV, interactive TV, radio, the web—are growing fast. Page impressions on the web, for instance, which currently stand at three and a half billion a month are continuing to grow at around 12% per month.

As choice expands, it's inevitable that share and reach to some of our traditional TV and radio services will come under pressure. But the success of our new digital services suggests that public demand for the core BBC content proposition—news, music and the arts, drama and comedy, documentary, education—is as strong as it's ever been. It's just that audiences expect to be able to access and use all of these things whenever and wherever they want to.

But we think the real action is ahead. The cost of storage is collapsing. So too the costs of at least some forms of distribution. As a result, choice for many audio-visual consumers will become in effect limitless.

Traditionally one of the weaknesses of broadcasting was the waste inherent in the linear, real-time transmission model. If you didn't happen to have the TV or radio on at the time, you'd miss the programme no matter how great the potential value to you. Our newspapers helpfully print reviews of TV and radio programmes the day after transmission so you have a chance to read about our most brilliant dramas and documentaries just after your first and last chance of seeing them. The truth is that most of the time most people miss nearly all of the content they would most enjoy.

In this new world, we can fix that. A couple of weeks ago, we launched a five-thousand household trial of a project called MyBBCPlayer, an on-demand window through which licence-payers can catch up on the past seven days worth of TV and radio programmes, explore the BBC archive, create their own news bulletin based on the stories that interest them. If the trial is successful, we'll be proposing MyBBCPlayer to our Board of Governors. If it receives their approval and all other necessary consents, we'd aim to launch it in 2006.

MyBBCPlayer points up another important theme. It's not a separate service alongside BBC Television and Radio. It is Television and Radio delivered by other means. BBC News is now a service which transcends any one platform. On 7 July, 30 million people in the UK watched BBC News on television and tens of millions listened on radio. But it was also our biggest ever day on the news website, and the biggest day for rich broadband news content. Much of the rich audio-visual content the public wanted to see, by the way, was user-generated: stills and videos of the London bombings uploaded to the BBC by members of the public and then used across all our services.

Broadcasting is morphing, in other words, and the boundaries between it and other parts of the media universe are becoming indistinct. It's happening much, much faster than we thought it would—our predictions of even three years ago on the take-up of broadband in the UK look hopelessly conservative in retrospect.

People often focus on the dangers of what's happening. The danger that broadcasters—even public service broadcasters like the BBC—will abandon their traditional cultural ambition, their commit to inform and educate as well as to entertain, in an attempt to reach an ever more fragmentary and fugitive audience. The danger that the public—and especially the young public—will increasingly use broadcasting not as a source of information and knowledge but as a kind of musak: transitory, on-all-the-time but without any real direction or purpose.

And yet this is potentially a very good revolution. A revolution in choice and relevance, perhaps even a revolution in quality. So the stakes are high.

Culture: a changing mission

But let's turn now to its implications for the way the BBC thinks about its cultural mission.

The first stage of the digital revolution was mainly about new linear channels and about text-based services on the web. It meant the launch, for example, of BBC4, a new TV channel with music and the arts as a central part of its mission. It's hard to deny that BBC4 has significantly widened the range of arts available to the more than 60% of households who have access to digital television. We screen dozens of Proms rather than a handful. Chamber music—once a regular pleasure on BBC2—is back on TV. So too is a significant commitment to foreign-language films and, especially through Storyville, a rich seam of British and international documentary. And BBC4 has begun to commission some interesting and challenging drama and comedy, from The Alan Clark Diaries to Armando Ianucci's brilliant The Thick of It.

Tellingly, early reaction to BBC4 among opinion-formers was rather mixed. Yes, it might well represent more investment in and a wider choice of content across the arts, but wasn't the BBC in effect creating a digital ghetto? What about the arts on BBC2 and BBC1? The arts, in other words, not for the confirmed arts-lover but for the newcomer, for the public at large. Because one of the BBC's greatest strengths in culture has been the power of serendipity, the potential for a general audience to bump into something unexpected or intriguing, something which could be the start of a journey, a new discovery.

I think that point of view is right. I do think BBC4 plays an important role—a role equivalent in some ways to the role Radio 3 plays within our radio portfolio—but it must always be accompanied by a significant presence for the arts on our mass audience channels.

But I want to go further. Over the past few years, we've come to realise that the greatest potential of all comes from ideas and projects which work across media, which use TV, interactive TV, radio, the web and broadband in concert with each service or platform doing what it does best. Moreover—and this is where it becomes really interesting—we've learned that an important part of any big idea is active participation by the public in the form of personalisation, feedback, debate, content creation. Not all of this is new—fact sheets and audience research are as old as broadcasting—but digital technology has not only massively increased its scope, it's democratised it. It's handed the power to the people we used to call the audience.

I want to show you two examples, one from the recent past, one which is just gathering momentum.

The first is The Beethoven Experience. The centrepiece of this was a really simple idea—which was to spend a week on Radio 3 broadcasting every single note that Beethoven composed. Amazing actually—and a revelation even to those who thought before that they knew Beethoven. But alongside that was not only some high-profile television but extensive use of digital media both for two-way dialogue with the audience and, as you'll see, for a rather interesting experiment in downloading.

[Plays Beethoven DVD]

The Beethoven Experience illustrates a number of points about the future. First: uptake of the new media has moved far beyond the pioneers and the enthusiasts. Increasingly we have to race to keep up with the public. And that seems to be true not just of teenage-gamers but of supposedly 'conservative' groups like classical music-lovers.

Second: the public are only too happy to follow a big content idea—Beethoven, our recent Africa season or a major news story like the London bombings—across media, knowing that different media are good at different things, TV for visual and emotional impact, the web for in-depth information and so on.

But third: it's the big ideas, the ideas big enough to infiltrate and occupy every bit of the BBC, that really punch through. This new multi-platform digital environment offers extraordinary potential both for learning in all its forms, but also for the kind of content that spurs people to action and to participation.

I hope that's going to be true of my second example—one which has a more overt ambition to deliver tangible outcomes in terms of cultural education and involvement.

This summer and autumn, we're running a major Shakespeare event across all of our UK services. New productions of Troilus and Cressida and Pericles join a whole season of new and existing performances of the plays on BBC Radio. On BBC4, a new drama by William Boyd, Waste of Shame, explores the psychological world of the sonnets while Patrick Barlow celebrates some of the heroic attempts to improve on the Bard in Shakespeare's Happy Endings.

On BBC1, right in the middle of peak time, four new Tales From Shakespeare written by four of our best contemporary writers—I saw David Nicholls' Much Ado About Nothing the other evening: it's set in a regional TV news studio with Beatrice and Benedict as the warring presenters. And behind those pieces, on interactive TV, the texts, interviews with Shakespeare experts, the producers and the writers. The BBC1 pieces especially are intended to introduce an entirely new audience to Shakespeare and perhaps start them on a journey towards the texts and towards the theatre.

But the BBC's Shakespeare project began in the summer when we teamed up with the Shakespeare Schools Festival and 400 hundred schools across the country to create One Night of Shakespeare. 10,000 students took part, performing their own interpretations of Shakespeare plays in the original text. Now BBC Learning are challenging young people across the country to take part in a national competition to shoot their own video interpretation of one of the Bard's works in Sixty Second Shakespeare.

We made a short film, not for broadcast but for internal use, about one school's experience of One Night of Shakespeare, so let's take a look at that. As you'll see, it's a shade schmaltzy and Sir in particular has seen one reality show too many, but it does give you a flavour of the project.

[Plays Shakespeare DVD]

Now these big events are only one part of the complete cultural offer from the BBC. They join a core provision of programmes of topical arts review and record, Imagine on BBC1, Late Review, Front Row and the rest. Documentaries—the Martin Scorsese portrait of the young Bob Dylan is a recent example. Our colossal investment in music and music-making from the Proms to Zane Lowe.

But what I hope these big projects show is that we haven't lost our ambition not just to serve the committed, but to create cultural doorways, to reach out boldly to wider audiences.

Are there gaps? I'm sure there are—we're examining arts strategy as part of a wider creative review at the moment. Is there a tension between what you could call cultural high seriousness and the claims of popular culture? Of course there is—that broader cultural war continues to rage around all of us. But the BBC is a broad church: we have room for Night Waves and In Our Time as well as for Live8 and Chris Moyles.

But what gives me the most confidence in the future of the arts on the BBC is the sheer intensity with which the public respond to events like Beethoven and Shakespeare. Sometimes when I talk to other people concerned with the arts, I sense a kind of pessimism about the public themselves and their continued appetite for culture. Now, I recognise that for some art-forms there are issues about public participation and live attendance, about the age and demographics of audiences and so on. But our experience is that, while uninspired, merely dutiful output may indeed fail to reach viewers and listeners, content of real conviction works not just as well but perhaps better than it's ever done.

How can Oxford inspire?

So what clues, if any, does our experience and future plans at the BBC suggest about we could all broaden and deepen the cultural life of this city?

Well, that theme of breaking barriers and opening doors to new audiences seems highly relevant in the context of Oxford. The city has a more abundant and diverse cultural life that many of its residents realise, but that diversity can exist in a series of almost hermetically-sealed social boxes.

When Oxford's substantial Malayalee community, originally from South India but living now here in this city, when they publicised a dazzling harvest festival celebration at Oxford Community School this September, few people outside that culture had the curiosity, or perhaps felt they had the permission to cross a boundary and enjoy the rich mixture of dance, music, drama and food. By the same token, when in the middle of the summer, that great vocal ensemble, The Sixteen, performed in one of the colleges with tickets at very reasonable prices, precious few people felt they could travel west over Magdalen Bridge to enjoy the beauty, the precision and intensity of the work.

I welcome the fact that one of the key aims of Oxford Inspires, of which I'm lucky enough to be a Patron, is to heighten the sense of the cultural interdependence of the communities of Oxford and Oxfordshire. And I would say that some of the approaches I have talked about this morning—especially the use of really big, cross-platform, cross-disciplinary ideas, ideas which bring their own marketing momentum because the public understand them and get behind them in a second—these approaches are potentially very relevant.

And that's one of the things Oxford Inspires can bring to the table. This autumn's programme, for instance, has a dual emphasis on Oxford's relationship with Europe and on climate change. Again, big themes that lend themselves to multiple forms of interpretation and debate.

I would also say that our experience with digital media is also very relevant—especially with children and young people. Now of course, digital and audio-visual media are themselves an important cultural activity in Oxford, perhaps especially for younger people. Later today I'm opening the OxDox Festival at the Old Fire Station, just one example of that. But we've learned also that digital media—emails, MSN, mobile phones—are a critical way of marketing to the young and of encouraging them to respond and participate. Arts people who think that electronic media are somehow the enemy are missing the point. I would say rather: if you can't beat them, join them—exploit them. And, because of their ease of use and their economics, they are particularly useful in a city or regional context.

Oxford really does have the potential to take a great leap forward in its cultural life. It has cultural institutions of national and in some cases global importance—its great university, the Ashmolean, Modern Art Oxford, the Oxford Playhouse among them. It has a growing number of festivals and performance series. Importantly, there is also a growing awareness I think that there has been a missing synergy, too little collaboration, too little effort to make the city and county's cultural initiatives add up to more than the sum of their parts. Helping to address this gap is the purpose of Oxford Inspires.

We live in a period of breakneck change. A BBC which fails to re-define itself around the new media and a new, more open relationship with its audience will fade into irrelevance. For Oxford too—university, town, county—there is an imperative towards redefinition and a new openness. But it's hard. There always seem to be powerful arguments—or at least powerful emotional impulses—against change. Collaboration means give and take: it's difficult.

And maybe, some people say, our audience, our public don't want change. Maybe they too prefer things the way they are. Well, that's not our experience of the past few years. On the contrary, more and more the public seem to be on the side of change. Indeed, they're willing us on. All we need to do in our role helping to shape our shared cultural life is to adopt their confidence and their openness to change.

Thank you.

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