Postscript: *Northern Ireland only: Why is the BBC ghettoising the Troubles?

Over at Slugger O'Toole, Mick Fealty promoted my post asking whether the BBC was ghettoising films about the Troubles by only showing them in Northern Ireland.

*Link to Mick's post with warning that Google is saying 'site compromised' of Slugger as of writing.

This attracted some interesting comments, as you'd expect from the leading website devoted to Northern Irish politics and life.

One piece of interesting pushback came from Brian Walker, a former BBC journalist, Political Editor and manager in Belfast.

Walker said that BBC Northern Ireland (NI) are not to blame.

The national networks are commissioned by a team under their own controllers. I’m sure the local BBC do their best to get network showcases. For one thing it spreads the costs. I wouldn’t rule out versioning and airing on BBC4.

Possibly, though my survey could only turn up one example of that transfer to British BBC TV.

Another commentator, Nevin, added this nugget of evidence:

Not just NI, it seems:

Q673 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury: You have mentioned Scotland and Wales. In England you hardly get a Scottish story. On Newsnight you have the opt out and there is a real sense that with devolution bits of the country have been cut off from each other. 2005 source [pdf file]

This is a news related comment but it has wider relevance. One of those giving evidence was Pat Loughrey, the then BBC Director of Nations and Regions and former BBC NI Controller.

I haven't watched much Scottish or Welsh regional output because, frankly, it hasn't appealed. But this complaint sounds like one to do with the BBC's structure being 'ghettoised'.

Walker also commented on one show I pointed at as, I thought, suitable for such a transfer, the history of Ulster Presbyterians, 'An Independent People':

This was an ambitious series but in concept definitely NI/Irish, I’d say, and well worth doing in those terms. It could be probably aired in its present form in Scotland without much of a remake but I think it would need subtantially reversioning for the networks.

This is not a criticism by any means. NI’s audience is distinct and not all ambitous programme ideas should be made on the condition that they are only worth funding if they get network airings.

I'm not so sure about that on revisioning. For one thing, BBC4 has vast amounts of time to fill, which it generally does with repeats (not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that), so why not repeat that show there. For another, check the schedule, there are some remarkably esoteric shows on. Plus that show had a fascinating middle episode on the role of Ulster Presbyterians in the American revolution.

I take the unfashionable view that the NI audience needs its owns share of high quality expensive programming. And not all of it should be made for networks in mind. Great if you can co-commission or export some of it but not always essential and not always appropriate.

No, but that wasn't my point. Film and television is replete with examples of shows which were made for very specific audiences yet found much wider appeal. I don't think this is 'either/or'. What seems to be happening -- one region's shows being blocked out, perhaps because of the way the BBC is structured --  is a deprivation for the British audience if we rarely if ever get the chance to see something from that perspective, something not made with 'us' in mind. Or put it this way, we still watch American shows which have no consideration, are not revised, for 'us' -- or Danish ones for that matter.

Australia is fortunate in having what I think is a unique in the world TV channel, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), which was set up by a Liberal (conservative) government in the 1970s to cater for an increasingly multicultural Australia. That channel shows TV and films from literally all around the world and is full of gems which audiences for whom the programming wasn't done (i.e not the minority from the relevant country of origin) are grateful to get an opportunity to see.

Walker does point out that the TV landscape is rapidly changing, shown by the fact that I am able to watch '*Northern Ireland only' shows at all on iPlayer. However, again, I beg to disagree as, from my web experience for one, the looming era of thousands if not millions of 'channels' does not really mean that the masses will find something. We will probably always have someone, whether a public or a private corporation, to whom we hand over the remote control and say 'I've had a hard day at work, here, you curate for me'. Most people, after all, only regularly visit, what is it, seven web sites? What shows, after all, does iPlayer, more specifically the Editors there, promote? Not BBC NI ones, or other regional output, as far as I can see, ever.

*Northern Ireland only: Why is the BBC ghettoising the Troubles?

Why is excellent TV about the Troubles, the war in Northern Ireland and Britain, only shown in Northern Ireland?

This month the BBC broadcast a fascinating and moving documentary, from which the above image comes. It is one of the most famous photographs of the whole war. It shows the priest Fr Alec Reid administering the last rites to a dying soldier, who had strayed into the wrong place and been beaten to death and shot by the IRA.

The documentary was '14 Days' and covers a fortnight during which the British state shot three IRA members in cold blood in Gibraltar, then their funeral was attacked by a Loyalist gunman and then two soldiers were killed. When he was administering to the soldier Fr Reid had in his pocket a letter which he was carrying in his capacity as a go between. Reid was one of the earliest actors to attempt to bring together key parties to try to get a ceasefire, that letter was from Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams to the leader of the 'moderate Catholic' SDLP, John Hume.

The film uses the device of those two weeks and the focus on one man to try to tell a bigger story of how individuals can have great impacts during momentous times, times when all hope appears lost. It's cinematic and has many powerful images like the one above, the capturing of which itself forms part of the narrative.

'14 Days' is not without its problems.

Professor John D Brewer writes that Reid's pain as he relives this time is seen in his face but it isn't properly explained in the film:

I am certain that what peaceful future Northern Ireland has is down in no small measure to the courageous individuals like Father Reid in the churches who brought paramilitaries, politicians, civil society and others together in sacred spaces.They were not all Catholic clerics. Many were Protestants. We glimpsed in 14 Days the equally seismic role of clergy like Harold Good, Ken Newell and others, working alongside or in parallel to Father Reid.

But there was one thing we didn’t get from this otherwise excellent programme. The Catholic and Protestant clergy more or less acted on their own authority, outside the conservative, cautious institutional church. They were mavericks, independents, easily left out on a limb when the secret back-channel dialogue they were facilitating became public and the institutional church disowned them.

Father Reid was pilloried by the Catholic Church – as was Ken Newell by some of his fellow Presbyterians. Only the Methodist Church gave its peacemakers something approaching official backing. And that is why Father Reid paid such an emotional price for his compassionate commitment to peacemaking.

....

The institutional churches did not perform with honour in trying to establish peace and relegated themselves to burying the dead and comforting the widows. The job of getting their hands dirty was left to a select brave few and it is appropriate to echo that never before was so much owed by so many to so few.

Mick Fealty, aka the blogger Slugger O'Toole, spoke with me about the film and echoed Brewer's criticism. Fealty said that a "more penetrating documentary would have looked in more depth at the context and the deaths of the three on Gibraltar to see where the political story was."

In that famous photo, Reid was carrying, says Brewer, "the first draft of the eventual blueprint that evolved later into the Downing Street Declaration and thence the Belfast Agreement." The 1998 Belfast Agreement, also known as the Good Friday Agreement, reestablished devolved government on the basis of power sharing.

But this version of history leads on to another problem, says Fealty, and one which comes back to the problem of British TV viewers not hearing about Northern Ireland. "I think it ['14 Days'] suffers from 'Peace Processism'", says Fealty. "This place is in a sustained state of cold war."

Brits don't want to know