HOW much? - theMediaNet mailing 25th September

Dear MediaNet members

Earlier this month an enquiry by the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee of the House of Commons made BBC officials squirm.  Representatives of the BBC Trust tried to explain that they hadn’t been told about the huge pay-offs to some senior staff leaving the corporation.  BBC Executives past and present tried to argue that they had told everyone who was meant to know.  But no-one could escape eye-watering scale of the money that was regularly handed out to some BBC Execs when they left the Corporation.  £500 000, £600 000, almost £1 million pounds in one case.  Yes, the individuals may have been paid less than they would have earned in the public sector.  And yes, their contracts had stipulated huge redundancy payments.  But a million pounds?  Really?  

An awful lot of MediaNet members work in contexts where the budgets are tiny and the demands huge.  Even those who work in high profile networks know that you sometimes have to trim the editorial ambitions of a programme because the budget won’t stretch to a taxi for a guest, or a broadcast line to a remote location.  Against that background, Premiership footballer-style payouts to senior managers are not only unjustifiable, but unjust.  Full stop.  

Lots of people in the industry – like lots of football fans – are asking themselves how things got so far out of proportion.  The answer, I think, lies in the strange relationship between media as business and media as art.  The very phrase “creative industry,” which is sometimes used to describe the world we work in, conceals a deep tension.  At root it exposes a spiritual dichotomy.  

Whether you are making a radio documentary, writing a newspaper article or painting a picture you are doing something creative.  I know it may not feel like it on a wet Wednesday in September, but when you sit in an edit suite or at your computer or contribute to a team meeting you are being creative.  The creativity at the core of your work is an essentially human process, implanted by God, and it’s impossible to put a price on it.  Grace is the oxygen that fuels creativity, and it can’t be bought or sold.  

But enough of this fluffy talk.  Even artists have to pay the rent.  And whilst you might be able to write a poem by yourself you can’t make TV or publish a newspaper without some structures around you.  So we do our creating within an industry, with all the necessary (and sometimes unnecessary) layers of management that demands.

Where it goes wrong is when the industry becomes an end in itself.  A football club that worries more about its profits than its results on the pitch will soon find it is failing at both.  A production company that exists only to make money and doesn’t care what it produces will quickly become cynical.  Instead of focussing on the quality of what it makes, it will focus on the money that can be extracted from its customers.  Creative people will become just cogs in a machine, and the people who have most power will be distant from the people who make creative decisions.  Content will be the first casualty.  That’s what has happened in some of the “big” parts of the TV industry, including the BBC.  And don’t be deceived…it can happen in “Christian” companies too.

Anyone who has read the gospel stories wouldn’t be surprised.  Time and again Jesus indicates that not only does excessive money fail to make people happy – it tends to make them lose the plot.  And on the flip side, people who don’t have money are often the ones who can see the world as it really is and do amazing things on the strength of it.  They may even experience God in ways that make them feel rich. The most valuable commodity in the media is creativity and - lo and behold - it’s free.  Creativity can’t be bought or traded, even for hundreds of thousands of pounds.  But it is available in bucket-loads, even (or perhaps especially) in the most obscure and humble corners of the industry.

It’s what happens on the pitch that matters, not what happens in the boardroom. What’s needed in the “creative industries” is not just an overhaul of the management, but a recovery of the vision to create content that is good and valuable and beautiful and truthful. And that’s where we come in.  Most of us can’t have much influence on the reform of management in the BBC or elsewhere.  But within the constraints of my job I can make sure that the stuff that I film or record or edit or write or broadcast has real creative quality.

Your film on the BBC
BBC Fresh is an initiative from BBC3 that enables film-makers to get their films critiqued by professionals and published by the BBC.  Films between 2 and 10 minutes can be submitted between now and the end of January 2014, and will be hosted on the BBC website.  The best of them will be aired in a compilation on BBC3 during 2014.  It sounds like a great opportunity to get a wider audience for your project, and perhaps to get your directorial skills noticed.  For more details visit www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p019xhm0

Greenbelt @ 40
We love to hear about what MediaNet members are doing. Using wonderful archive footage and fresh interviews Pip Piper and Rob Taylor have recently premiered their 70 minute documentary telling the story of 40 years of the Greenbelt festival.  Pip has written about the process in an article for theMediaNet website.  You can read it here.  

If you have a project you’d like to share with other MediaNet members please tell us about it.  

Presenter/producer vacancy
Premeir Radio is looking for a presenter/producer for its daily drive-time show.  More details are available at www.premier.org.uk/jobs.  But be quick – the closing date is soon.

 
That’s all for now.
Andrew Graystone
andrew a_t themedianet d_o_t org