Public Service

Entertainment has been one of the issues on the battlefield - whether public service broadcasters should do entertainment or leave it to the commercial competitors. Watching Sweden´s SVT´s work on the Eurovision Song Contest (they call it Melody Festival) shows how an innovative public service broadcaster can turn European cooperation amongst public service broadcasters into a national megaprojects reinvigorating areas by taking the semifinals to different parts of the country. It is entertainment but entertainments with a special value. Corny, camp but brilliant. In Sweden the national finale is the main thing, not how the Swedish entry ranks in the European arena. I kind of like that.

Watching this programme and looking into the issue of commercial screens, I must conclude that I do support the idea of an independent expert body to control, set limits and open new areas for public service communications and press work. I feel this would make YLE stronger, release YLE from (unnecessary) parliamentary control and also serve the society and the license fee payers better. It might help us in really articulating in a clearer way what is actually the public service in public broadcasting. BBC says:Educate, Entertain and Inform - I would go more for something like Empower, Encourage and Represent (I wrote about this issue in this blog in September).

Art of Language

Stephen Fry
Originally uploaded by TGKW

There are some things that I absolutely love in the English. One of them is the existence of people like Stephen Fry. People who remain authentic, peculiar and unconventional and still loved by the nation. Fry is one of the leading forces in the British public eye when it comes to cherishing the English language. I highly recommend his autobiography Moab Is My Washpot, which functions as a verbal aerobics class without falling into the common trap of trying to be pretentious. The book is an extraordinary caption of the peculiarities of English public schools.

My admiration for the gentle giant Fry re-emerged yesterday evening when watching Stephen Fry in America, a wonderful BBC series where the actor/writer/presenter travels through 50 American states with a black English taxi. The journey takes him from mansions of East Coast and hippy groups of the deserts to Thanksgiving celebrations in Deep South. The programme is entertaining while respecting the people who take time to show him their daily life.

His approach is something I truly love, not laughing at the common man but really making the effort to understand what drives people. So less Borat-meets-Michael-Moore and more Sir-David-Frost-meets-Oscar-Wilde. He makes fun of phenomena, not of the people and really lives up to his promise: understanding the American soul. He finds new stories of America and with his trip writes a new narrative of the great nation with a Can Do attitude.

My next Fry project will be the podcasts of him reading short stories of, indeed, Oscar Wilde.

Dedication

There have been very few TV programmes that I remember capturing me in the same manner as BBC Two's Choir: Boys Don't Sing. The programme is a typical public broadcasting take on reality television: youth meets empowerment. The programme idea is fairly simple: Choirmaster Gareth Malone goes to an all boys' school with the goal of making sports boys love singing.

I work with young people and we often struggle with the issue of sustainability. Malone's dedication is something I see also in my work: people working on a local scale on a long-term basis making change happen. Due to its superlocal take, Malone's experiment can be duplicated: he shows how change in young people starts from believing in them, taking them seriously and getting personally and emotionally involved.

Every time I have seen the show it has made me cry. The way singing helps these boys in believing in themselves is what culture really is about. It gives recognition and blows your mind. And most importantly, Malone guaranteed that once he left the school with the camera crew, the school board had guaranteed a choirmaster for the future as well.

This is what I call public broadcasting.

Business first

deborahmeaden
Originally uploaded by amsterboy

It’s around eight on Friday evening. I can feel the sun of Lisbon on my face. I feel a bit like a Finnish friend of mine once described Finns travelling South: due to the lack of light we spend the first day lurking and squinting like prairie dogs.

Lisbon is amazing. We spent five hours walking up and down the hills, photographing the bright houses and the street art and stopping for an espresso (0,60 euros) and cake (0,80 euros) in small cafes. Now it is time for some rest before heading out for dinner.

For yesterday’s flight I bought the Guardian which is always a highly pleasurable experience. One thing that I truly miss in the Netherlands is the routine of reading daily the paper. The best quote in yesterday’s edition was in an interview with Deborah Meaden, an investor taking part in BBC’s entrepeneurship programme Dragon’s Den. The idea of the programme is a simple one: 5 investors listen to pitches of starting entrepeneurs and then decide whether they will invest their own time and money into the proposal. The dragons (the investors) are harsh, smart to a scary extent and extremely success-driven multimillionaires. Meaden is the only woman amongst them. Meaden rocks:

Hannah Pool: Are you as mean in real life as you are on Dragon’s Den?

Deborah Meaden: Stand in front of me and ask me for a quarter of a million pounds when you can’t be bothered to tell me what your turnover numbers are and I am that person. People try to let me off the hook and say I’m much nicer in real life – but if somebody is asking me for my money, my job at that moment is to establish whether or not this is a good investment, not to win friends and influence people.

H.P.: It mush bother you when the reviewers describe you as charmless.

D.M.: (Laughs) Well, I hope I’m not. My friends don’t call me charmless, people who meet me don’t say I’m humourless. People can call me what they like – fat, ugly, sour – but tell me I’m not fair, tell me I’m not ethical, those are the things that bother me.

H.P.: You are much softer in real life.

D.M.: It’s a different environment. Nobody is like the person I am on TV, surely, only Cruella de Vil, or the wicked witch from Snow White. It’s me, but it’s me in that environment. I’ve got that job to do. It would be worse if I tried to be different, if I tried to be soft. I’m a business person first and I happen to be doing television.

I really admire her. This is true equality. Her attitude reminds me of Hillary Clinton’s comment after last week’s attacks towards her by all the other candidates. She said that people are not attacking her because she is a woman, they are attacking her because she is winning.

Wider angle

Christiane Amanpour - CNN Comes Under Unprecedented Attack
Originally uploaded by Ziet O Zaa3taar

Last Sunday I got back from a working trip - having spent nearly a week watching the best of European television. I still need to watch the winning documentary of Prix Europa, a BBC documentary on alcoholism from Paul Watson. I saw people - top professionals in the TV field - coming out of the screenings with watered eyes. But even without it, I was inspired, shocked and moved.

The best thing I saw at the festival from David Okuefuna's documentary called Racism: A History. Without the need to create a happy ending, Okuefuna showed how brutal and cruel we the whites have been towards blacks in places like Congo, South Africa and the United States. The pictures of lynchings of blacks or of a young black man beaten to death with his face bloated after having spent weeks after his death in the bottom of the river do not leave my mind. I felt guilty for being white and rightly so.

So on Sunday I crashed on my sofa with a pizza delivered to my door and instead of watching the Dutch talent competition for the main role in Evita, I ended up spending two hours watching the CNN documentary God's Warriors on Christian Fundamentalism in the US. Even if in the beginning the subject sounded slightly too heavy, I was glad that I pushed myself through it. Christiane Amanpour's incredibly powerful take on the misuse of religion is part of a three-hour series and a year of work covering fundamentalist Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

Best of all, Amanpour's dedicated investigation - as well as Okuefuna's documentary - remind me how there still is a great need for journalism which is not only about speed but also about depth. All these makers were able to show something to me that I did not know. They had spent a year doing these programmes and it shows. They were able to move me and they made me talk about the issues they covered. This is something that a news bulletin or an SMS is never able to do.

On the superbness of Austen

Pride and Prejudice (1995)
Originally uploaded by scchiang

A week of holiday in a village without an Internet connection is a splendid thing. For the first time in I think in a year I actually left home without my laptop and filled the laptop pocket of my backbag with books. The first one on my list was Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice - often praised for its language, made into a classic BBC production boosting the sex appeal of Colin Firth and mentioned as one of his favourite novels by my flatmate. So reasons enough to grab it.

There's been research that men usually read books by men and women read books by men and women. I also admit that most of my favourite novelists are actually men although I read in a balanced manner - even taking notice of it. Austen - maybe do to the dramatisations (especially the one with the annoying grin of Keira Knightley) - is often branded as a women's novelist. I feel that it does not do justice to her talent. If she had been a man (well, first of all she would not have written books like Pride and Prejudice), I am 100 % certain she would be even more famoous than she is.

Austen's characters are astounding. She builds them up with wit and dialogue and not by focusing on describing their looks that much. At least Pride and Prejudice is a book of dialogue, a perfect novel for someone passionate for language and wit. Especially her female characters stand out from the novels of her time as women with opinions and self-esteem. By comparing Elizabeth Bennet to her marriage-obsessed mother, Austen shows how women like Elizabeth - without the safety of a rich family - paved way for feminism and by risking a lot showed that women can take other roles than obedience.

Pride and Prejudice made its way to my Top 10 of novels. I feel it is a book that I will be returning to when I once again wish to sharpen up my English and make it livelier, funnier and richer.