Remembering the Falklands War by Sarah Maltby

Author:Sarah Maltby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Remembering With Media: Imagined Identities

In this first section then I consider how the BBC crew remembered with media by drawing on the ethnographic fieldwork I conducted with them on the Islands, especially the television crew with whom I spent most of time (see Chap. 1). During this fieldwork, the BBC crew were relatively candid about both their orientation to and decision-making processes around their forthcoming (at the time) coverage of the 30th anniversary, but also about their experiences of the BBC more generally. Here they discussed, for example, BBC outputs, changes in organisational structure, internal politics, fellow BBC colleagues and wider BBC activities. Indeed, it was rare for the conversation to be about anything other than the BBC and although there may have been many reasons for this, I note it here to acknowledge that it may have been—in part –influenced by my own presence as a willing and interested party and as such as performance of an institutional identity itself. Either way, or indeed perhaps because of it, the discursive content of these conversations was suggestive of their allegiance to and collective performance of a particular ideal and imagined BBC identity expressed not only in relation what they think the BBC are (or should be), but also in relation to what they believe others think the BBC is, or want the BBC to be, particularly the UK public. It was here that their understanding and negotiation of an imagined ideal BBC identity as both relational and institutional came to the fore.

There were two key sites through which the BBC remembered with the media, the choice of which appeared to resonate most with their sense and negotiation of an ideal BBC identity in divergent and complex ways. The first was the Wootton Bassett repatriation ceremonies and the second was the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. It is through their enactments with the media coverage about these events that we not only see an articulation of what, for them, constituted an ideal BBC identity, but also how they attempted to substantiate and legitimate it.

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