Examination of Witnesses
(Questions 80 - 99)
THURSDAY 22 OCTOBER 1998
MR LESLIE
HILL, MR
RICHARD EYRE
AND MS
KATE STROSS
80. Well, you are losing audience.
(Mr Eyre) We are, but we attribute that not to the
programme but to its scheduling.
81. I am asking you what qualitative research
you have done to disprove what I have told you.
(Mr Eyre) I think our qualitative research would suggest
that News at Ten remains enormously popular as a programme,
that it is presented by the most popular presenter, and that actually
it is doing an extremely good job against the criteria that you
describe.
82. If there was no change you would leave it
as it is and it would go on declining? If the ITC rules that News
at Ten will stay as it is, you would leave it as it is and
it will go on declining?
(Mr Eyre) We have a single proposal in front of the
ITC. If they say no to it then we will have to think again. I
doubt very much whether we will just shuffle away disconsolately
and hang our heads. We will try and come up with something that
addresses the problem in a different way.
83. How do you define your public service remit
with regard to the news?
(Mr Eyre) It is to broadcast a 30-minute simultaneous
bulletin in peak time and at intervals throughout the day.
84. How would you express that in your regional
commitment where news is very low down the schedule except, I
have to say, I applaud Meridian currently?
(Mr Eyre) We have a commitment to regional programming
as a whole and regional news within that, which remains actually
quite an important part of what we do. I acknowledge that the
move of eight minutes or so of regional news 50 minutes later
in the evening taken on its own might suggest that I am not being
sincere about this but when you look at the regional programming
across ITV it is ITV's USP. It has something unique about that.
That will be continued and we will continue to have regional programmes
in peak time and important shoulder peak slots as well as, as
I have described, that inversion of the news in the early evening
so that the regional news now will precede the national news.
85. A cynic—and there may be some in this
room—would say that one of the reasons why you have gone
to the ITC now is that within Parliament there is no controversy
left at 10 o'clock or 10.15 or 10.30 because of the Labour majority;
therefore this is a soft touch.
(Mr Eyre) I think a cynic would be being overly cynical.
What we have made clear in the document that you have got and
that the ITC has got is that our commitment to the news and the
news as it happens remains very firmly intact and that where there
are major events occurring in this House or anywhere else in the
world we will interrupt programmes in order to take coverage of
those. I have cited in our defence on that score that so far this
year alone we have either news-flashed or extended news bulletins
24 times, which signals a change of approach in news because that
is more than in the total of the four years of the licence period
running up to the start of this year. News is important. News
gets people talking. There is nothing uncommercial about great
news bulletins and news bulletins occurring when they happen are
an important, exciting part of contemporary television. There
is no way that we would retreat from that as an important component
of ITV's overall offering.
86. The British seem to have invented the word
"compromise". What did your research say when you said,
"Why do we not do the News at Ten at 10.30?"?
What made you choose 11.00 and not 10.30? You can change all the
start-offs because you have a say in the rights. You can use 90-minute
films from nine o'clock to 10.30. What did it show that made you
say 11.00 and not 10.30?
(Mr Eyre) One of the major factors in our lives, and
it is an important one; we have not mentioned it today, is the
watershed, where we kind of have a compact with parents that we
will show if you like more challenging contemporary material after
nine o'clock and not before it. Lady Howe has said in her view
that this should be a watershed, not a waterfall, that is that
the flag should not drop at nine o'clock on difficult material
for children. We rather agree with that. However, when we invest
quite large sums of money in programmes like Cracker for
example, which I hope members of the Committee would agree was
a remarkable example of its genre, and show that at nine o'clock,
it is too expensive a programme to show late at night. We need
to have a full run for that kind of programme. Under the proposals
that we have got we could move that kind of thing to 9.30 or 10
o'clock rather than waterfall it out at nine o'clock. We can run
films and long form drama such as we are running more and more
these days with a nine o'clock start time now, running into a
news at 11 o'clock. Our fear was that if we moved a news to 10.30
we would find ourselves in a similar position to that which we
find ourselves in now, especially with stronger forms of drama
and films where we would be needing to push the news back or interrupt
the programme and all those things which are very unpopular with
viewers.
Chairman
87. I would like to ask you two questions arising
out of answers you have given to Mr Wyatt. I am not one of those
people who believe that one of the great values of News at
Ten is the results of divisions. Nevertheless you put forward
a statement in your document about that. You say that the 11 o'clock
bulletin allows more considered coverage of late votes in Parliament,
90 per cent of which have taken place by 11.00 pm compared to
68 per cent at 10.00 pm, which is scarcely modern in view of the
fact that the 10 o'clock vote in the House of Commons is something
that has been happening for 50 years if not more. That is not
the statistic that is relevant, is it? It is not 68 per cent at
10 o'clock compared with 90 per cent by 11 o'clock. It is what
happens by 10.30, is it not? It is not 10 o'clock, because if
you are making a point about your ability to cover House of Commons
divisions, you are able with a 10.00 to 10.30 bulletin to cover
divisions which are taking place during your bulletin, as you
have been able to do on a number of important issues. Have you
got the statistic, since you say 68 per cent at 10, 90 per cent
by 11? Can you tell us what proportion of divisions take place
by 10.30?
(Mr Eyre) Yes, I can, Chairman. It is one of the few
pieces of paper I have not got with me though, so I will send
that back to you. The import of that though is that by 11 o'clock
we can have looked and analysed the results of the division. We
can have spoken to politicians from all parties, other interested
people, to present a review which contains an analysis at 11 o'clock
which we certainly cannot do in the remaining 15 minutes of a
programme at 10.30. I think it will change the quality of our
coverage.
88. At some point I saw in this room Michael
Brunson who is an extremely distinguished political correspondent.
I would have thought that with his experience and the work he
has done in this arena, Mr Brunson would be able to analyse the
result of a division when it came in. That is what they do and
that is what newspapers do because newspapers have to go to press
pretty fast.
(Mr Eyre) Yes, he can. He cannot—
89. The other point you made in your response
to Mr Wyatt was about the narrowing gap between the start of the
watershed and the start of the 10 o'clock news bulletin. It is
true that from nine o'clock to 10 o'clock there is an hour and
that was the case in 1959 when the watershed was introduced and
it was certainly the case in 1991 when eight of the ITV companies,
in making their franchise bids, offered the peak hour news bulletin
at 10 o'clock. They knew that they were only having an hour between
the start of the watershed and that, so what has changed?
(Mr Eyre) On that particular score I think a huge
amount has changed although in the area of comedy I think it is
fair to say that the performance of all British broadcasters in
producing pre-watershed comedy that works has not been particularly
electrifying in the last few years. The pre-watershed comedies
that are being hugely effective are mainly things like Fawlty
Towers and Dad's Army which were produced rather longer
ago. What we are finding in comedy is that the people who are
the new younger writers of comedy and the performers of comedy
tend to fall more into a genre which works better after nine o'clock
than before. Similarly, we are keen to encourage the careers of
new talent in drama and it is a fact that there is a tougher edge
to the work of younger writers than to that of their more traditional
older counterparts. I think there is a trend that in the writing
and the talent that is producing material a lot of that is better
sited later in the evening rather than trying to invade this deal
we have with parents about what occurs pre-nine o'clock.
90. When we had the previous arrangements it
did not stop ITV dramatists from producing some of the greatest
material that has ever been produced in the entire history of
ITV, such as, say, Jewel in the Crown. The arrangements
we have got now did not stop that for example. If what you are
saying is that there is a change in trend, a change in trend presumably
is that there is now a greater tendency to violence, foul language
and sexually explicit material. Are you saying that that has changed
very considerably indeed since 1991?
(Mr Hill) I think this is not an easy question to
answer. There clearly are more what we would call challenging
programmes after nine o'clock and we ourselves have to react to
that. There are of course far more channels with programmes after
that time. That is one of the reasons why people switch off News
at Ten as we have said. There probably is more sex and violence
available for example and we have discussed this before and that
is not something that we particularly want to engage in but we
have to recognise that people often want challenging themes, themes
that we would not be able to do before nine o'clock. I would not
like it to be thought that somehow we want to get a lot more into
sex and violence. That is not the point, although obviously those
sorts of themes are dealt with and are dealt with properly after
nine o'clock. Obviously there have been these changes. People
do apparently, according to research produced by the Broadcasting
Standards Commission, want these sorts of themes dealt with on
television. I hesitate to get into this and say these things because
I do not want it to be thought that ITV is going to go the way
that some of the other channels have done already. We have strict
programme codes which we believe in and which we follow, and in
a recent study we were the one channel that actually produced
less violence over a period of time than the other channels. There
is a balance here but we do have to recognise that there are themes
which people want to see on television which are not suitable
before nine o'clock.
91. You do talk about taking your family viewing
requirements very seriously.
(Mr Hill) Yes.
Chairman: The kind of stuff you are talking
about, and I have no objection to it at all; it does not trouble
me—if you believe that you can have a bigger audience by
moving into what we might call Channel Four territory, I think
that newspapers like The Daily Mail are going to be fairly critical
of you.
Mr Faber
92. I will try and get us through before the
watershed if I can. Chairman, you mentioned yourself earlier the
striking similarities between Lord Bragg's article this morning
and the letter and the briefings which you, Mr Eyre, sent out.
I was rather struck by the striking similarities between your
briefing and the article that effectively broke this news on 2
September by the media editor of The Times, Ray Snoddy. Had you
briefed Mr Snoddy about this before you issued a press release?
(Mr Eyre) No, we had not. We were contacted by Mr
Snoddy after he had already been briefed, so by the time his article
appeared we had spoken to him.
93. At what stage were you planning on sending
out the letter which you sent to MPs and members of this Committee
which you sent out that day?
(Mr Eyre) Our plans were to launch the process in
that week and we brought it forward by a couple of days because
of the leak.
94. So Mr Snoddy was privy to a leak of your
plans?
(Mr Eyre) I think he was.
95. Would I be correct in saying that the article
which appeared on 2nd September was the day after you personally
had briefed Number 10 Downing Street?
(Mr Eyre) In the course of that day I briefed quite
a large number of people, including the Chairman of the Committee,
who I knew had a particular interest in the subject, both those
I knew to be adamantly against our proposals from former conversations
and those whose position I did not know but who I felt deserved
the courtesy of a prior announcement. So I think the leak probably
came from one of those large number of individuals.
96. The Chairman has referred also to the Secretary
of State's letter to the Chairman of the Committee. He has already
read into the record the Secretary of State's concerns about the
obligations which you are under under Section 31 of the Broadcasting
Act and, as he said: "The ITC will have to consider whether
the proposals put forward by ITV to replace News at Ten
with bulletins at 6.30 and 11 pm are consistent with these principles
and meet the requirements of competitive high quality news at
peak viewing times. My own view is that they do not." Would
you interpret those words by the Secretary of State as him saying
that your plans are illegal?
(Mr Eyre) No, I would not. I believe the Secretary
of State has clarified to me in a subsequent telephone conversation
that neither does he.
97. In fact, when the press were briefed that
his letter meant just that he was abroad at the time?
(Mr Eyre) Yes, he was, in Japan.
98. Who do you suppose briefed the press and
put the word "illegal" into the Secretary of State's
mind?
(Mr Eyre) I do not know the answer to that.
99. It does seem rather strange, does it not,
that the Secretary of State had written a letter at that time
privately to the Chairman of the Committee, albeit one which we
now all have, that he was happy for the letter to stand on its
own but that someone felt the need to brief the press that these
plans were in some way illegal, which is not the Secretary of
State's view at all?
(Mr Eyre) That is not his view.
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