The 2008 MacTaggart lecture will be delivered on 28th August this year by Peter Fincham, some unknown mindless nobody - a pumped up bus conductor known as ITV controller - a sort of 21st Century Davros.
 http://www.mgeitf.co.uk/home/thefestival/festival-2008/MacTaggartlecture.aspx

However back in 1993 it was a different story - Dennis Potter was arguably the best playwright ever to write for television, he was a committed libertarian and believer in fair play.

Dennis, that play of yours 'Blade on the Feather' - a meditation on loyalty and treachery - is still exactly what it's all about today.

Anyway here is the lecture on the web for the first time for those that still know and love old Dennis and his wonderful literary frankness.
 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-790841440769145720

And here is some of what he says......

"Put Rupert Murdoch on public trial, and televise every single second of it."

“…you cannot make a pair of croak-voiced Daleks appear benevolent even if you dress one of them up in an Armani suit and call the other Marmaduke.”

"I am giving the melodramatic and not at all tuneful title Occupying Powers to this year’s James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture. The title has not been chosen simply to indulge yet again in the inevitable paranoia which so afflicts writers that work in television, although I’ll give that a go too. No, I call this Occupying Powers so that I can reflect behind the barricade of metaphor about what it really feels like, for many others besides myself who sell their services and some of their passions to the strange new generations of broadcasting managements and their proprietors.

More than that, wider than that, I want to use the title to reach beyond our parochial concerns and grapple with a few thoughts about what it means to be a citizen (or do I mean a consumer) in the United Kingdom plc., where two-thirds of the population live on incomes below the national average of £250.00 a week, almost 5.75million exist on less than £100.00 a week, three million are unemployed, three million children live in poverty, one-fifth of the young are innumerate, the chasm between the highest and lowest paid is wider than at any time since 1886, and Dave Lee Travis has resigned from Radio 1. What is at the heart of such a distorted society?

“Broadcasting is at the heart of British Society. The structure and the competition of the broadcasting industry, the purpose and motivation of broadcasters and the programmes and services they offer are vital factors in reflecting and shaping that society.” I, too, would like a mirror that reflects and shapes, but these are the words of the BBC at its most ponderously anodyne as it responded to the Government’s Green Paper on the future of the Corporation. The particular quotation is certainly one which James MacTaggart would have taken for granted with as little sense of astonishment as if someone on an outside consultancy contract had told him on three identical bits of thermal paper that a walk along the corridors of Television Centre will always bring you back shaken but not stirred to where you started.

Jimmy MacTaggart and his bushy-tailed acolytes used to sit around somewhere in the Fifth Circle talking with a younger conviction about the evident iniquities of the BBC management, the tapeworm length persistence of BBC cowardice and the insufferable perversities of the BBC threat to the very existence of the single play. You can imagine how much greater our indignation would have been had we known at the time that we were sitting slap in the middle of what later observers were to call the Golden Age of television drama.

Back in those good old days there was a bureaucrat in every cupboard and smugness waiting with a practised simper on the far side of every other door. I recall these things in order to offer up at least one small strip of sticking plaster for the suppurating wounds of the poor wretch who is the present Director General, the 12th and not actually the 13th to hold such an exulted (if fully taxable) position at “the heart of British Society”.

I haven’t made this long journey in order to be kind and gentle, but I think it is only fair to tell him that the fear and loathing now swirling jugular high around those same circular corridors does have some antecedents, and it always was possible to measure the distance between so-called management and the so-called creative by the time it took for a memo to go in one direction and a half-brick to come back in the other.

I have just this week finished a co-production with the BBC, a film called, perhaps prophetically enough, Midnight Movie. But it was during its making that I came to see just how deeply and how seriously the demoralisation, the bitterness and, yes, even the hatred had bitten into the working lives of so many hitherto reasonably contented and undoubtedly talented BBC staff.

But I tell you now, it is impossible not to wonder how on earth those currently, and I hope temporarily, in charge of the BBC could have brought such things to such a miserably demeaning condition. My impression was that there is now a one-way system of communication, and that the signals being sent down the narrowed track were so laden with costive, blurb and bubble-driven didacticism that they were more than half perceived as emanating in a squeak of static from someone or, rather, something alien and hostile. And you cannot make a pair of croak-voiced Daleks appear benevolent even if you dress one of them up in an Armani suit and call the other Marmaduke. [refers to BBC Director-General John Birt and Chairman of the Board of Governors Marmaduke Hussey]

It is a wretched thing to have to say, and certain not disinterested newspapers have made it more difficult to say, but it is a fact, known by my own experience and without the faintest possibility of doubt, that there are legions of troubled and embittered employees at the BBC who can scarcely understand any of the concepts of the new “management culture” which the present and so often so unfairly abused Director General tries to enunciate.

When watching and listening to what is going on at the BBC as it trims down its staff almost as fast as it loses its viewers, I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much the shifts and turns which seem particular to any one large institution can in themselves be seen as a model for the wider society in which all of us live. Any virulently new Management Culture can be studied as scrupulously as one might examine the bacteria proliferating around a wound. Both are the response to previous damage made worse by infection picked up from the outside world. The ideas in the unclean air, so to speak.

The glories of privatisation and the brutalities of the unshackled market as unleashed by Mrs. Thatcher and her successor ideologists were always likely to rattle a few of the professions, and sometimes rightly so. This genuine radicalism, rare in British politics can more or less positively hold up the battle banners of its occasionally healthy and often vicious indifference to the old, class-ridden, status-conscious cultures of Great Britain. This iconoclasm fractured many old attitudes, many old bonds, and even many whole communities.

Marmaduke Hussey - Maggie wasn't fussyThe cry of Yuppie to Yuppie sounded in the land, as chilling as any call from the carnivores in swamp or forest. And the deep hatred of any other claim, any other way of seeing, of anything other than the forces of law and order in the public domain, was always going to be arrowed with poison-dipped barb at the slow, decent, stumbling and puzzled giant run from Broadcasting House.

And thus it is in model form that the turmoil, the distress, the dogma-driven rhetoric, the obtuseness and the spluttering aggressions at and around the BBC can also be picked up in similar shapes, cries, contortions and an almost identical bluster – from both sides – in so many other areas of our national life.

We have been at war with each other, and some of our fellow citizens have felt the bits of their very brain and fibres from their very soul are being crunched with the other, apparently all-important numbers in the computer. No wonder that, out there there is talk of Moral Panic, and a sense that our feet are scrambling about on loose scree.

At the time Rupert Murdoch was anxiously trying to guild if not renovate his image while lobbying to prevent his cable television company coming under the same rules and regulations that apply to other British television companies, he announced that his main company was going to fund a new Chair at Oxford University to the tune of £3 million. It was to be called - I do beg your pardon, but I cannot keep a straight face – it was to be called the Murdoch Chair in Language Communications. But the announcement came with cack-handed timing on the very same day that the Press Council formally and of course ineffectively censured Murdoch’s Son for calling homosexuals “poofters”. Some language. Some communication.

Murdoch did not turn up for the ceremonial meal to mark the largesse at Oxford, always a place where the gap between the cup and the lip can be measured by more than an inch of the sardonic. But Rupert has a touch of pure cruelty in his make-up. He sent Kelvin MacKenzie, the sharp little weasel that edits that daily stink they call the Sun, and the maladroit fellow had to sit and chew and probably even dribble a bit between two professors.

I would not dispute for one wayward whistle or crackle that the BBC of my childhood was not paternalistic and often stuffily pompous. It saw itself in an almost priestly role. But at a crucial period of my life it threw open the “magic casement” on great sources of mind-scape at a time when books were hard to come by, and when I had never stepped in a theatre or a concert hall, and would have been scared to do so, even if given the chance.

Of course, the characteristic media ploy of separating the “popular” from the “serious” – which often means the distinction between the Solemn and Lively and not just the truncheon-like measuring rod of class and educational status – of course, yes, that process had already begun with the split between the Home Service and the Light Programme. But such a parting of the ways was nothing like a s rigidly mapped out as it is nowadays, where listeners are presumed to be walking about with one of the digits One to Five tattooed like cattle brands on their high, middling, low, lower and yet lower brows.

On the old Light Programme you could suddenly, maybe reluctantly, collide with a play or a discussion or an embryonic drama-documentary. The now totally pervasive assumptions of the marketplace, which have stiffened into something close to Natural Law, had not by then removed the chance of being surprised by something you didn’t know or – better still – by something that you didn’t know that you knew.

But the dangers of the older view of how to run radio and television are, unless faced and redefined, sufficiently troubling to leave enough space for someone such as Rupert Murdoch to drive a golden coach and a team of wild-eyed horses straight through the gap. His James MacTaggart lecture here a few years ago was little short of a masterpiece of apparently libertarian rhetoric. Indeed, it was the kind of peroration I would like to hear him deliver from the scaffold.

The insecurities and contradictions of the BBC’s only half-digested and half-shamefaced self-definitions lay like rubble spread in inviting heaps in front of the supercharged, savage-toothed JCB of his unslaked appetite. The Corporation has already been driven onto the back foot by the ideology-driven malice of the ruling politicians, and its response has been to take several more steps backwards, with hands thrown up, and to whimper an alleged defence of all it has stood for in the very language and concepts of its opponents.

This palpable ambivalence and doubt, where you pretend to be the commercial business that you cannot be, has led to the present, near-fatal crisis where it seems to be thought that the wounds (often self-afflicted) can only be staunched by shuffling about word-processed words about a new “Management Culture”.

Management of what? Management for what? Management. Management.

Management. The word sticks in one’s interface. Please excuse me if I dare to laugh, but I know that each age, even each decade, has its little cant word coiled up inside real discourse like a tiny grub in the middle of an apple. Each age, even each decade, is overly impressed for a little while by half-way bright youngish men on the make who adeptly manipulate the current terminology at precisely the right moment to make precisely the right impression on those who are a little older, a little less intelligent, and considerably less alert.

As a writer who needs to clutch his pen as though it were a lifebelt, I have to admit that I have nevertheless improved many a shining hour with a probably untransmittable little playlet about one of the more intriguing encounters of our time. I was not there when Fortnum met Mason, Laurel met Hardy, or Murdoch met Mephistopheles but I would have given my old Thesaurus or my new sequence of Readers Digest Prize Draw Numbers to have been a hornet on the wall at that surely entrancing fascination and maybe even comical occasion when dear old Marmaduke first met dear young John and each of them sort of half-discussed what was sort of half-wrong with the greatest broadcasting organisation the world has ever seen.

Where, I wonder, did they meet? Who was the first to smile – lethally? Who said, um, “structural walk-through” as he ordered the mineral water? And did the waiter say “Pardon?” Was the table well laden and did it groan when the un-advertised post of the twelfth and not thirteenth Director Generalship was finally settled?

And were the Ageing Governors at the British Broadcasting Corporation waiting and twitching and nodding amongst themselves in some cramped little area decently set aside at the front of the room where you deposit your hats, coats, tightly furled umbrellas, and maybe, in the case of one of them, your spare Honk If You Love Jesus car stickers?

Only connect, said E. M. Forster, that great novelist who Murdoch’s nasty little rag would presumably dismiss as an artsy-fartsy old poofter. But, yes, what a good word: connect. The verb which far better than the merely technical “transmit” is, if not actually, certainly what should be the defining activity of all television, especially that threatened and peculiarly self-threatened section which has no need, and indeed no remit, to package up A, B or C – defined groups of the allegedly passive on behalf of predatory advertisers.

The section of broadcasting which above all else, and quite separately from any temporarily dominant political language or so-called “management culture”, must continually remind itself that it is not a business trying to distribute dosh to its shareholders, not owned by its current administrators, no a company entitled to build Chinese Walls around its momentary practices, but something held in trust and in law for every citizen of this misgoverned and too long abused group of nations we for probably a few decades more call Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Television could scarcely resist calling itself “a window on the world”, as it did in its early days, even using the subtitle on Panorama. But windows have frames, and the frames are part of a structure that has already been built. So-called Naturalism is by far and away the dominant mode. But one of the troubles of supposedly showing things-as-they-really-are (the Window problem) is how difficult it then becomes not to make people feel deep in their souls that this is also more or less the way things have to be.

Hence the shock-horror-probe patterns, the inflated status of those bus conductors called News Readers, the odd and only temporarily effective splashes of sensational indignation, the random violence, the unmediated sexuality, and the presence of critics who almost uniformly perceive their function to be joke-makers and snide-mongers. Who can blame them?
I fear the time is near when we must not save the BBC from itself, but public service broadcasting from the BBC.

Our television has been ripped apart and falteringly re-assembled by politicians who believe that value is a monetary term only, and that a cost-accountant is thereby the most suitable adjudicator of what we can and cannot see on our screens. And these accountants or their near clones are employed by new kinds of Media Owners who try to gobble up everything in their path.

We must protect ourselves and our democracy, first by properly exercising the cross-ownership provisions currently in place, and then by erecting further checks and balances against dangerous concentrations of the media power which plays such a large part in our lives. No individual, group or company should be allowed to own more than one daily, one evening and one weekly newspaper. No newspaper should be allowed to own a television station, and vice-versa. A simple act of public hygiene, tempering abuse, widening choice, and maybe even returning broadcasting to its makers.

The political pressures from market-obsessed radicals, and the huckster atmosphere that follows has, by degrees, and in confused self-defence, drawn the BBC so heavily into the dogma-coated discourses of so-called “market efficiency” that in the end it might lose clear sight of why it, the BBC, is there in the first place.

I fear the time is near when we must not save the BBC from itself, but public service broadcasting from the BBC. The old Titan should spawn smaller and more nimble offspring if its present controllers cannot be removed. Why not think about it anyway?

Why not separate Radio from Television? Why not let BBC2 be a separate public service broadcaster? Let us begin to consider afresh how the thousands of millions of pounds of licence money could be apportioned between two, three or four successors to the currently misled Corporation. One of the successors could certainly be a publishing or commissioning authority on the model of Channel 4.

Indeed, Channel 4, if freed from its advertisements, could continue to evolve out of its original, ever precious remit into a passably good model of the kinds of television some of us seek. Michael Grade is becoming, by default, the new Director General, and the ironies if not the comedy of such an unexpected grace remind me that it is time to wind down before I exhaust myself with my own restraint.
Put Rupert Murdoch on public trial, and televise every single second of it.

Thirty years ago, under the personal pressures of whatever guilt, whatever shame and whatever remaining shard of idealism, I found or I made up what I may unwisely have termed a sense of vocation. I have it still. It was born, of course, from the already aborted dream of a common culture, which has long since been zapped into glistening fragments by those who are now the real if not always recognised Occupying Powers of our culture. Look in the pink pages and see their mesh of connections. Open The Sun and measure their aspirations. Put Rupert Murdoch on public trial, and televise every single second of it. Show us who is abusing us, and why. Ask your public library – if there is one left – to file the Television Franchise Applications on the shelf hitherto kept for Fantasy, Astrology and Crime Bizarre.

I was exceptionally fortunate to begin my career in television at a time when the BBC was so infuriatingly confident about what public service broadcasting meant that the question itself was not even on what would now be called the agenda. The then ITV companies shared much more of this ethos than they were then willing to acknowledge. Our profession was then mostly filled with men and women who mostly cared about the programmes rather than the dividend.

But the world has turned upside down. The BBC is under governors who seem incapable of performing the public trust that is invested in them, under a chairman who seems to believe he is heading a private fiefdom, and under a chief executive who must somehow or other have swallowed whole and unsalted the kind of humbug-punctuated pre-privatisation manual which is forced on British Rail or British Coal.

But I do not want to end on a malediction. Let me remind myself of how to paint the clouds with sunshine. I first saw television when I was in my late teens. It made my heart pound. Here was a medium of great power, of potentially wondrous delights that could slice through all the tedious hierarchies of the printed word, and help to emancipate us from many of the stifling tyrannies of class and status and gutter press ignorance. We are privileged if we can work in this, the most entrancing of all the many palaces of variety. Switch on, tune in, and grow.

I hope it is clear by now that I happen to care very much about the medium that has both allowed and shaped the bulk of my life’s work, and even my life’s meaning.

However, I do have the odd hour or two in each day in which to pretend to be a St. George rather than a St. Sebastian. I therefore hereby formally apply in front of witnesses of substance, here at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, for the post of Chairman of the Governors of the British Broadcasting Corporation."

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These extracts are from Dennis Potter’s James MacTaggart Lecture, delivered last night [Friday August 27th 1993] at the Edinburgh International Television Festival.