The BBC’s ‘Irish Troubles’: Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland
by Robert Savage
(Manchester University Press, £70)
This illuminating survey shows that BBC Northern Ireland largely ignored the ills besetting the North in the years before the outbreak of violence. Its programme-makers largely avoided issues such as discrimination and partition, until it proved impossible to do so. The station identified itself with the majority: for years it covered the Twelfth of July celebrations for example, but did not broadcast GAA results.
Meanwhile, a censorious attitude to the media on the part of the North’s insecure rulers ensured that the region remained a ‘no-go’ area for television reporters from Britain at a time of rising discontent. Politicians wanted to keep the cameras well away from the deprivation and overcrowding in the cities; they did not want investigations into, or discussion of, discrimination. They were quick to suppress dangerous reporting.
Graffiti
When Alan Whicker featured bookmaker’s shops, unemployed people and sectarian graffiti in the first in a planned series of television features on the North in 1959, pressure from Belfast forced the BBC to cancel the rest of the features.
Savage offers many more examples of Unionist politicians’ heavy-handedness; these even included objections to the broadcast of ‘Irish’ music. The cumulative effect of these interventions was to keep British people largely uninformed about the realities of Northern Ireland.
An RTÉ crew recorded the violent suppression of a civil rights march in Derry in October 1968, an event which brought Northern Ireland to the world’s attention, and increased international, and particularly American, pressure on Britain to improve conditions for the minority in the North.
The BBC crews beginning to show up in Belfast and Derry, and their managers in London were not inclined to defer to Stormont or the security forces.
They produced some memorable television programmes of which the most outstanding was a searing 13-minute report on Bloody Sunday that included film recorded during the massacre. Investigative reports into RUC brutality contributed to the downfall of the Labour government in 1979.
The BBC’s journalism – and in particular interviews with representatives of ‘terrorist’ organisations – provoked ferocious public debate in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. An imaginative feature called On the Edge of the Union about the domestic lives of IRA commander Martin McGuinness and Gregory Campbell of the DUP – church-going, teetotal, family men the two — ushered in a most difficult period for the BBC, and the introduction of a ban on the broadcast of interviews with member of ‘proscribed’ organisations.
One of Savage’s themes is the vulnerability of the BBC – and publicly-funded broadcasters in general – to pressure from state and government: “remember the licence fee, get sharp son”, former Northern secretary Roy Mason once told a BBC reporter by way of warning him off interviewing paramilitaries. Savage offers many accounts of occasions when the BBC has succumbed to pressure, and tinkered with, cancelled, or withdrawn programmes to placate the authorities (the commercial broadcasters are no less concerned to avoid trouble).
This book is a follow up in some ways to the same author’s 2010 book Loss of Innocence; Television and Irish Society 1960-1972 (Manchester University Press, £65.00), which dealt with the first 12 years of RTÉ from 1960 to 1972, and the earlier history of BBC Northern Ireland and UTV as well.
Savage argued there that television at that time was not a passive actor, it was an active agent, often times aggressively testing the limits of the medium and the patience of governments. Television helped facilitate the modernisation that slowly transformed Irish society during the 1960s.
As this admirable new book demonstrates, broadcasters and the government of the day often have different concerns and interests, especially in times of conflict, or when the ruling politicians are ideologically averse to publicly-funded enterprises: is it not time to find a funding model that lessens the financial dependence of a free press on state funding?