The idea that programmes on public television serving a participatory democracy should be made by a broad constituency of people, not just elite professionals working in television, first took form on regional channels in North America in the late 1960s. Then, in the climate of political and social change in Britain in the early 1970s, it found its way onto the BBC. An outlying department called the Community Programme Unit (CPU), set up in 1972, enabled groups campaigning or working for a cause, or proposing remedies to social and civic problems – as well as individuals or groups with a passion they wanted to share – to make their own programmes. The CPU’s first series, Open Door, ran on BBC2 between 1973 and 1983, broadcasting a total of 243 episodes in a weekly late slot. People Make Television features around 100 of these programmes, the majority of which have not been seen since their original broadcast. Presented within a gallery, this vast array can be browsed, or examined closely and laterally, as a kind of archive of social history.
Amongst the multitude of groups and individuals who represented themselves on Open Door were farm workers and anarchists, Black teachers, women priests, office cleaners, housing associations, trans women, ex-cons, film co-ops, freethinkers and channelers of the extra-terrestrial. Participants were provided with a studio, producer and camera crew, who could shoot on location with 16mm film (there was abiding suspicion about the quality of portable video). The independence of these individuals and groups was zealously protected by the CPU producers, whose work it was to facilitate their intentions, wherever that led. Although inevitably certain controls and means remained in the hands of the BBC.
The selection process for Open Door was initially streamlined, but in later series applications were debated by every member of the CPU, with a number of external advisors bringing further measure. Every year, around 500 applications were submitted, of which only 30 could be selected. Presumably, many political or minority groups wouldn’t have wanted to cooperate with the BBC even if they were aware of the opportunity, but for many it promised vital attention. (Copies of the films were also given to groups for their own circulation.) Frustratingly for the CPU, because applications could not be solicited, responses to contemporary events such as the 1981 uprisings in Brixton, Handsworth and Toxteth could not always be found.
Open Door attracted sufficient viewers – as many as 500,000 for the Transex Liberation Group, but with too few to register above 0 for the Science Fiction Foundation – to ensure the continuation of the Community Programme Unit after Open Door. Its follow-up series Open Space (1983– 91) was given an earlier time slot on the schedule and a correspondingly higher budget, leading to the pro- ducers and crew taking more control. Programmes were listed as being made ‘with’ rather than ‘by’ their originator and began to look more like documentaries. There was also a shift in focus from the social concerns of groups to the particular experiences of individuals. The CPU’s last and most conspicuous success before its closure in 2004 was to initiate the landmark series Video Nation (1994–2004), where cameras nearly the size of smart phones enabled intimate vignettes on individual experience. Because of Open Door’s emphasis on community activism and organised campaigns, the freedom given to its programme-makers, the raw invention of much of their lo-fi production, as well as the seismic contestations of the 1970s, this exhibition focuses on the first decade of the Community Programme Unit.
In an article originally published in the Radio Times in 1979, reproduced here, journalist and cultural historian Naseem Khan celebrates the unlikely success of Open Door, describing it as a ‘visual Hyde Park Corner’. In their keynote essay, exhibition co-curators William Fowler and Matthew Harle provide context for the emergence and output of the CPU, a story enriched in a text by former CPU producer Giles Oakley. Rosa Campbell, editorial fellow at History Workshop Online, maps a chronology of Open Door programmes onto contemporaneous social and political events, while Clive Chijioke Nwonka considers what it means to look back at the struggles concerning race described in Open Door.
When David Attenborough, the BBC’s then-Director of Programmes, embraced the idea of public-access television in 1972, he was also eyeing the competition. Print media was more responsive than the BBC to readership/ audience concerns – inviting participation through readers’ letters, etc. – while earlier that year, the Conservative government had started to allow commercial cable companies to begin providing locally produced community television. Although the relay broadcast network was in rapid development, many households still couldn’t receive a clear signal. Private compa- nies responded to this by laying underground cables in some affected areas to bring people television by alterna- tive means. In addition to the three terrestrial channels, the government offered licences for the provision of local television on a fourth. Five community cable channels were licensed between 1972 and 1974: Greenwich Cablevision, Bristol Channel, Sheffield Cablevision, Swindon Viewpoint and Wellingborough Cablevision. And in late 1976, as it was piping cable TV into all its newly built homes, Milton Keynes also began providing local content on its Channel 40.
Perhaps more than the CPU, community cable provided the opportunity to develop a truly participatory television, where volunteers could work behind as well as in front of the camera. Though as Peter Lewis explains in his vivid recollections as station manager of Bristol Channel in this publication, the opportunity to engage local communities in making their own relevant and reactive programmes was in constant tension with the interests of the stations’ corporate owners. Despite their understanding of community programming as a cost to set against the benefit of generating more subscribers, in advance of what they hoped would become pay-per-view television, cable companies remained sceptical.
Community cable stations were operated by small crews of professionals in cramped studios, enlisting the help of volunteers. Most local cable output imitated the structure of mainstream magazine-style programmes – chat shows, sports coverage, film reviews – although full of local flavour, as in quiz shows about borough spending and town history.
Invention occurred when volunteers and community activists were trained to use the simple and versatile portapak video cameras that were introduced into the UK in the early 1970s: filming street and working life, campaigns against development and labour disputes, capturing the performative quality of vox pops and occasionally being on the spot for remarkable moments, such as a bailiff’s eviction in Sheffield, or railway union action in Swindon.
Much depended on individual station managers to foreground the participatory quality of the programming. While John Brand at Sheffield Cablevision preferred popular entertainment, presenting its variety shows himself, Peter Lewis outsourced some of the production and editorial control of Bristol Channel to volunteers in the low-income neighbourhood of Knowle West, leading to the construction of a community media centre that still thrives. Richard Dunn followed by Martin Parry, in Swindon, privileged long-term community engagement, encouraging a critical approach to terrestrial media and again setting up a local media centre. After working at Swindon Viewpoint, Michael Barrett persuaded the Milton Keynes Development Corporation to set up Channel 40 with an avowedly participatory agenda. In Milton Keynes, and also in Swindon, community artists working with video actively engaged with programme-making. InterAction, the pioneering community media initiative from North London, set up a base in Milton Keynes that fed into Channel 40 through the work of artist Carry Gorney. Amongst much else, Gorney devised Things that Mother Never Told Us, where volunteers interviewed women in their own homes, and Sweet 16, where adults and young people discuss childhood experience. The Sheffield Women’s Film Co-op made a number of programmes, which are some of the only ones to survive intact from Sheffield Cablevision.
Most of these experiments in hyper-local television lasted just a few years before their corporate owners pulled the plug. Much of the television that emerged from them no longer
exists. Programmes from Greenwich and Wellingborough are presumed lost, while a producer from Sheffield Cablevision, Malcolm Waring, managed to rescue just five hours of programme excerpts from the edges of tapes otherwise recorded over. Output from Bristol, Swindon and Milton Keynes fared better. Swindon Viewpoint was the only channel to survive longer than three years – in 1976, it was sold by EMI for £1 to the people of Swindon and has carried on intermittently ever since – while material from Bristol and Milton Keynes was archived locally. This exhibition includes footage from Bristol Channel, Sheffield Cablevision, Swindon Viewpoint and Milton Keynes’s Channel 40, as well as programmes from Speak for Yourself, which ran on London Weekend Television (LWT) for a single series over a few months in 1974. Speak for Yourself was conceived and overseen by Francis Coleman, head of religious, children’s and education programmes for LWT, who hired Peter Lewis of Bristol Channel to present a magazine-style, London-focused alternative to Open Door.
Radical at the time, programmes made through the BBC’s Community Programme Unit anticipated first the birth of Channel 4 in 1982, with its openness to marginal voices, then the prolific growth of home video and finally social media’s superabundance of personal opinion. However awkward many of the constructions and assumptions of these programmes may now seem, it is remarkable that a state broadcaster invited the serious representation of overlooked and challenging opinions so close to the national news, that neighbours volunteered to make television for each other, and that these were once blueprints for a participatory and civic television