Mediaopoly (1987)

From the August 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imagine a business where the less that is produced and the fewer customers there are, the more money is made. Impossible, you might say, even within a system like capitalism. But this is precisely what is happening in some regional ITV Companies.

Unlike any other business. ITV companies make one thing (programmes) but sell another — advertising. So it is in their financial interests to cut costs (programme making) and expand revenue (advertising).

So as the quality/quantity of programmes are reduced, audiences have dropped and advertising revenues have soared because advertisers have to spend more to try and attract their target audience. A regional TV station has the monopoly on TV advertising in its area. Advertisers have no option but to go to it. As there is only a finite amount of airtime available, its price gets driven up.

In the case of TVS, for example, which has viewer ratings forty per cent lower than average for an ITV network, this has meant that its share price has been boosted from 25 pence in 1981 to the current 380 pence. Profits have exceeded forecasts in each year of operation, rising to 14 million on a turnover of 140 million pounds last year.

Even the IBA felt moved to say of TVS:

   . . . [it] has undoubtedly enjoyed considerable success in expanding the business side of its operation and attaining high levels of profitability; but the same energy and purpose have not always been fully matched on the programme side. . . .

The mechanism by which this form of decay operates is one of commercial television's best kept secrets — the Network Agreement. The five largest ITV Companies (Central. Granada. Thames. LWT and Yorkshire) dominate the system. They produce programmes for the entire network. The remaining ten regional companies — for example. TVS — have no such commitment. This assures the big five of a market, while at the same time reducing the outlay of the smaller regional companies on programme making. This cartel has made the ITV Companies very profitable indeed.

It is all the more ludicrous that this situation is administered by the IBA. the very body charged with the statutory duty (sic) under the 1981 Broadcasting Act to secure "Adequate Competition".

Legal opinion on the Network Agreement varies, but it is probably illegal under UK law. and certainly illegal under EEC law, which would mean that the 15 ITV Companies would be liable to fines of between four and ten per cent of last year's turnover (£4-10 million). It remains to be seen if the IBA will take such action.

But then, as Margaret Thatcher has assured us, private enterprise means freedom of choice. You have been given an On/ Off switch and you are free to use it. What more choice could you possibly want?

Harvey Harwood

Open heart surgery (1986)

Theatre Review from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

What would it be like to be black, in the British army, accused of shooting your commanding officer while serving in Northern Ireland and left at the mercy of a sadistic bigot of a sergeant for a gaoler, an upper-class twit of a defence lawyer, and a guilt ridden psychiatrist, as you await the prospect of the court martial?

A new play by Les Smith — Some Kind of Hero — will tell you. This is not satire. I would not demean it by calling it that. No glib leftish parodies here or amusing latex puppets to render the subject matter palatable to a bourgeois audience. The play is witty and amusing yes. but not at the expense of an intimate, head-on treatment of the subject. It is open heart surgery on institutionalised racism and it had the audience on a scalpel edge. If you think theatre should be about more than just entertainment, this play is for you.

Harvey Harwood

Murder on the High Seas (1986)

Theatre Review from the December 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you are looking for a contemporary indictment of super-exploited jingoism, Sink the Belgrano, a play by Steven Berkoff (Mermaid Theatre) is a devastating exposé of this ferocious and lethal cancer.

Britain 1982, demoralised by the effects of economic recession, looks to its leaders for guidance. They could provide none. Conveniently and for not dissimilar reasons, the Argentine Junta decided to raise the international stakes. This allowed "Maggot Scratcher" (Margaret Thatcher) to play the patriotic card and so manufacture a badly needed consensus around which the bourgeois political opportunists in Westminster could cluster, like flies on dung.

From these heaving decks of collective insanity the play ignites into a searing attack on one of the most obscene episodes of the Falklands Campaign, targeting the manipulations of power politicians with such precision that they are contemptuously blown out of the water. Gotcha!

Harvey Harwood

Prick Up Your Ears (1987)

Film Review from the August 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Prick Up Your Ears (Stephen Frears)

This film charts the meteoric rise and gruesomely spectacular end to the careers of two of the most influential dramatists of the late sixties—Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell.

Both men were homosexuals. They lived in a tiny Islington bedsit, wrote plays, decorated the walls of their cage with cuttings from magazines, defaced library books with suitably lewd amendments to their dust jackets and returned them to the shelves (for which they were imprisoned for six months). They also spent a good deal of time cottaging (the pursuit of sex in public toilets) from which the pair built up the Orton Gazetteer of Convivial Conveniences.

But this lifestyle could not last. After they came out of prison the two men grew apart. Orton was writing with confidence and becoming successful while Halliwell became increasingly disconsolate and insecure. The Orton diaries, covering the last eight months of his life, catalogue the descending spiral of Halliwell's decay. Orton's own promiscuous marathons and the eruption of his career, culminating in an Evening Standard Drama Award and the offer to script a Beatles film. Halliwell, ignored uncredited, and left alone with his growing sense of failure, could take no more and, on 9 August 1967 took  a hammer and splattered his lover's brains over the walls of 25 Noel Road, N1, then overdosed on barbiturates.

The intensity and frustration of their existence is conveyed well by the leading actors, in particular by Alfred Molina who plays Halliwell. There are also good cameo performances from Julie Walters as Orton's mother and Vanessa Redgrave as Orton's predatory agent (parallels here with her real-life political activity?).

The laughter, mockery and absurdity with which the characters in Orton's plays could transcend intolerable situations Orton could not match in real life. He, quite literally, lost his head.

Harvey Harwood