Beckett on Screen by Jonathan Bignell;

Author:Jonathan Bignell;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2009-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Posthumous reverence

The iconic role of photographs of Beckett has already been discussed (Voigts-Virchow, 2000–1) and has been a persistent feature of television broadcasts of Beckett’s work and in documentary features about him, as in the photographic montages in the introductory commentary by Melvyn Bragg and Martin Esslin in The Lively Arts: Shades, and in the BBC’s tribute documentaries Beckett at 80 (1986) and A Wake for Sam (1990). Most recently, the presentation box and booklet supplied with the Beckett on Film productions on DVD are notable for their many images of Beckett. The iconic status of Beckett, signified in part by these pictures, raises interesting paradoxes in relation to the Beckett on Film productions as regards the relative significance of author, directors and production institutions.

Channel 4’s investment in the Beckett season is to some extent consistent with the channel’s original remit yet marks an interesting difference from the terms of its foundation in the early 1980s (Greenhalgh, 1998). Channel 4 was devised with a large and guaranteed income provided by the advertising revenues of ITV companies, yet with an injunction from government not to pursue the large audiences that gained ITV that money but, in contrast, to be distinctively different from mainstream television, to be innovative, to provide programmes for minorities and to articulate the concerns of those whose interests were rarely represented on television. This set-up was clearly based on the post-war consensus that had established Public Service Broadcasting throughout the twentieth century, and it represented an enterprising yet troubled yoking together of commercial funding and the values of subsidised public service. There are several ways to regard the position of Channel 4 in the broadcasting landscape. First, it can be regarded as a strategy of repressive tolerance, in which marginal and potentially radical broadcasting can be contained yet expressed without posing a threat to the established duopoly of BBC and ITV. Second, it can be regarded as a safe haven for television producers and creators whose work is amenable neither to the broad middlebrow audiences sought increasingly by a BBC anxious to defend its licence fee by drawing audiences of substantial size, nor to an ITV increasingly threatened in its address to downmarket mass audiences. These threats consist of audience fragmentation created by a multichannel environment, advertisers’ increasing interest in valuable niche markets and decreasing interest in masses, and an audience profile of increasing age and diminishing income. Third, the fact that Channel 4 is a publisher broadcaster rather than a programme maker means that it is able to respond quickly to the rapidly changing fortunes of the television industry, as an enterprise business driven by market forces. These three very different ways of understanding the cultural role of Channel 4 fit in different ways into the seemingly hesitant and unplanned attitude of the channel to the Beckett season.

Michael Kustow, the first Commissioning Editor for the Arts on Channel 4, came to the channel from the National Theatre, and before that from a post as Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

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