When Armando Iannucci delivers the 40th MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh on Wednesday evening, he will be joining a long list of UK broadcasting luminaries given an agenda-setting platform. Dennis Potter, John Birt, Jeremy Paxman and no less than three members of the Murdoch family are among those who have used the speech to set out their views on the future of TV in search of headlines and influence.
It is why the Guardian Edinburgh International TV Festival, which grew up around the lecture, retains its place as UK broadcasting’s leading annual event. It offers the festival’s 1,700 delegates something different from more mundane industry conferences, despite its growing appeal to commission-hunting independent producers and, increasingly, international delegates.
The migration from the venue for the first MacTaggart, held in the Royal College of Surgeons (audience 200), followed by austere churches and the cathedral-like McEwan Hall, to a huge new subterranean space in its current location at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC) is a graphic illustration of its evolution.
Although a writer will again be behind the lectern, Wednesday’s proceedings will offer a marked contrast to the makeshift but high-minded backdrop to the inaugural James MacTaggart lecture on 25 August, 1976. Radical playwright and director John McGrath delivered the talk as part of a film festival retrospective celebrating the work of the recently deceased Scottish television producer and director James MacTaggart.
McGrath asked why there was so much critical debate about film but so little about what the medium of television could do. He called TV drama “impotent - [its] style a matter of pretty pictures”, and provoked an immediate protest. The following year an advisory committee chaired by the once radical broadcaster Gus (now Lord) Macdonald, with the heads of Scottish Television and BBC Scotland, organised the first Edinburgh Television festival. Macdonald identified the reasons it was needed. “Britain had the best television in the world but no television festival. What better place than Edinburgh,” he said at the time.
In an era of the BBC/ITV duopoly, the first festival’s leisurely “discussion programme” ran for five days from Monday 29 August to Friday 2 September.
Melvyn Bragg chaired a session on television drama, framed by a paper from Dennis Potter, with panellists David Hare, James Cellan-Jones and McGrath.
“I vividly remember the atmosphere of that first festival, exciting, vivid and argumentative, and we did feel that at last those of us in the engine room could drive the ship,” says Bragg. “We were very determined to make it the place where producers and programme-makers had their public say.
“The panel is a very good representative of what we wanted to do. We firmly believed producers who made programmes should have a determining voice in the content and direction of those programmes. “We were also, looking back, idealists … I have no doubt we thought television could change society for the better and bring people outside the various tight circles of British culture into the ring.”
David Elstein gave the 1991 MacTaggart lecture on Margaret Thatcher’s market-oriented legacy. “The debates in the 70s and 80s were hot and heavy, despite wandering between strange venues,” he recalls. “Really big issues were argued – much more intimate than the current set pieces with minimal audience participation.
“Discussion continued well into the night at the George Hotel bar [the central meeting point of the early festival] or invitation-only dinners.”
Jeremy Isaacs launched his vision for Channel 4 in his 1979 MacTaggart, offering to cater for minorities and proclaiming that “everyone will watch some of the time”. During the 1980s the nascent independent sector harried old guard executives for guaranteed access to BBC and ITV airtime. Their success fuelled the festival.
The 1982 MacTaggart marked the introduction of corporate movers and shakers as speakers, when Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, rambled his way through an off-the-cuff speech. Rupert Murdoch in 1989 was different. In the year he had launched Sky Television and the multichannel revolution, he tore into the ethos of public service broadcasting, denouncing the narrow television elite at his feet.
His son James Murdoch followed much the same line in 2009, opining that “the only reliable and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit”, only to be followed by a conciliatory Elisabeth Murdoch three years later in 2012. “Profit without purpose is a recipe for disaster,” she reproved.
The BBC has often been centre-stage. In 1992 Michael Grade, then the chief executive of Channel 4, used his MacTaggart to address the future and importance of the corporation. “It’s the BBC that keeps us honest,” he said. Greg Dyke in 1994 attacked the culture of broadcasting’s dependency on government decisions. In his second speech in 2000, as newly appointed director general, he outlined a vision for the BBC in the digital age which included shifting the main BBC1 news to 10pm. In between, in 1996, John Birt argued successfully as director general for a generous increase in the licence fee to counter subscription TV.
Looking back, there are obvious MacTaggart blind spots, a failure to select more women while completely ignoring ethnic-minority achievers. Only four women have given the lectures, including Elisabeth Murdoch, Christine Ockrent, head of French network TF1 (in 1988), and Verity Lambert (1990). The last before Murdoch was Janet Street-Porter, who in her 1995 MacTaggart attacked the “male, middle-class, middle-aged and mediocre” cadre running television and managed to infuriate and hit a nerve.
So did Dennis Potter, who, though in eccentric decline in 1993, landed a few blows by describing Birt and governors’ chairman Marmaduke Hussey as a pair of “croak-faced Daleks” for their stewardship of the BBC.
The modern GEITF markets itself as an accessible “must-attend event for producers who want to meet UK commissioners”. But the atmosphere is always heightened when a groundbreaking MacTaggart blazes out of the conference hall and on to the wider public agenda. Call it Iannucci’s challenge.
