At a May Day rally in Glasgow in 1971, Tony Benn addressed the assembled crowd with a speech about television:
'The time has come when the trade union movement should demand the right to regular programmes of its own on the BBC and ITV, to allow it to speak directly to its members without having everything they say edited away by self-appointed pundits and producers who themselves are not directly concerned.'(1)
At the time, Britain’s trade union membership stood at around ten million, just under one-fifth of the country’s population. A few weeks later, Benn turned his speech into a polemic in the Sunday Mirror:
'Most of what we see and hear is filtered through someone who is an expert in communication – maybe a producer or a journalist or an editor...you don’t hear people who are actually working in industry speaking about their own lives and problems. If a shop steward in one of those car factories was given enough time to tell us, in his own words, what it was all about, or if we heard the manager talking directly about his side of the case, their words would have a special ring of truth about them.'(2)
Benn was not campaigning alone; the idea of television that featured people ‘speaking about their own lives and problems’ – what would become known as open-access programming – had been one front of a broad, multifaceted struggle to reform Britain’s media since the late 1960s. It was a diffuse movement led by activist groups connected across broadcasting, politics and academia that argued for social ownership of mass media, a fourth terrestrial channel, and new forms of radically representative and participatory programming. Among these pressure groups, there was a broad consensus that as Britain floundered under deindustrialisation and economic decline, new social formations and political struggles had emerged across race, gender, housing, class, the environment and the nation’s regions, and their demand to be represented had reached a critical mass.
The BBC had shown experimental glimpses of what this new television might look like, mostly in their highly influential and free-form discussion programme, Late Night Line-Up. In addition to previewing excerpts of North American open-access programming, in 1971, the series broadcast an unedited conversation between workers in the Guinness factory in London’s Park Royal trading estate, where a group discussed the increase of the licence fee along with their scepticism of whether these views would be presented fairly and without intervention. Presenter Tony Bilbow took note.
A year after the Guinness workers were broadcast, it was movement outside the BBC that would force the Corporation to act. In 1972, Christopher Chataway, Minister of Posts and Telecommunications under Edward Heath, announced that community television franchise licences would be made available to companies who could provide ‘specially designed content to appeal to the local communities in the areas that they served’.(3) The franchisees – based in Greenwich, Bristol, Sheffield, Swindon, Wellingborough and eventually Milton Keynes – would lead brief, imperfect lives, but remain Britain’s boldest attempt at creating self-determining regional community media [as recounted by Peter Lewis].
The BBC’s response came from their Director of Programmes, David Attenborough, who within months of Chataway’s announcement tabled a report called Community Programmes, a proposal for an experimental 13-part series to be made by independent groups subscribing to an editorial code set by the BBC. This would produce the first national open-access television in the world, in the form of a regular, 40-minute Monday night slot to be transmitted just before the channel closed. Its purpose was to broadcast the following:
(i) voices, attitudes and opinions that, for one reason or another, have been unheard, or seriously neglected, by mainstream programmes.
(ii) stylistic innovations, new ways of handling film or one-inch video-tape which professional broadcasters have either ignored or rejected; new editorial attitudes that do not derive from the assumptions of the university-educated elite who are commonly believed to dominate television production.(4)
A production team – the Community Programme Unit (CPU) – would be formed to look after the new series. The process would work differently to a normal documentary team: the BBC were not to devise the programme, instead producers would commission and then facilitate a visiting community group to realise the programme they wanted to make. The CPU were to be publishers, mediating the voices of everyday Britons. Their base was deliberately some distance from BBC Television Centre, in a terraced house owned by the BBC on Hammersmith Grove. With headquarters visibly ‘in the community’, and a space where participants wouldn’t have to go through security checks, reception desks or encounter light entertainment presenters in the lift, the CPU was conveniently off-grid.
By February 1973, 50 groups had applied to the CPU and there was enough material for the first 13 programmes of a series titled Open Door. These included programmes made with Black Teachers, the Basement Project Film Group, and the Transex Liberation Group. The programmes aired, and Open Door was swiftly recommissioned for a further 12 episodes in the autumn. A year later, ITV would also begin to make open-access programmes: London Weekend Television’s (LWT) Speak for Yourself (1974) attempted a magazine format rather than the extended studio discussions and location work of Open Door. Moreover, it emerged that the open-access boom had also become of strategic use to television executives. The government’s Annan Committee on the Future of Broadcasting (1974) set a public agenda for the use of new broadcasting technology, diversifying television’s output and the debate over a fourth channel. It had become immediately clear that open access, especially the work of the CPU, provided a testbed for the development of what would become Channel 4, a broadcaster that would be founded with the spirit of the CPU baked into its charter.
By the end of 1974, the CPU had become an inconspicuous fixture in the BBC’s late-night television schedule and would remain so for another 30 years until 2004, when it was disbanded after developing its final series, the diaristic shorts Video Nation. Known inside the BBC as the ‘Communist Programming Unit’, and to some outside it as ‘the furthest edge of the BBC one could reach without falling off’, the CPU’s continuous production of Open Door and its successor Open Space through the 1970s, 80s and 90s amassed into hundreds of hours of often remarkable programming made with and about Britain’s communities. In its own language, the CPU successfully ‘networked’ the local into the national, disrupting terrestrial television’s entrenched screen grammar by bringing new, urgent, ordinary and sometimes strange voices to mass audiences.
In particular, it is the archive of Open Door – the CPU’s most substantial contribution from 1973–83 – that has become a vast moving-image record of the political and social climate of the 1970s. It forms a ticker tape of grass-roots struggles that, at the time of broadcast, remained local and specific to communities of shared heritage or interest, but were lives that, by the next decade, the British establishment would be forced to acknowledge and confront in its formal politics.
Open Door episodes possess a texture and form unlike any broadcast media of its age. They are by the nature of their format heterogeneous, unpredictable, and defined by extended narration or studio discussion led by non-BBC voices. Part-professional and part-amateur, the result of each collaboration between community group and producer disrupts the received cadences of traditional broadcasting, giving each episode a feeling of unbounded potential. Relative to the programmes it was scheduled alongside, Open Door offered a self-conscious ‘folk’ television: the studio deliberately stripped back to reveal the workings of the programme, with uneven conversations mottled with personal stories, and very little signposting as to when each sequence was due to end. Within this editorial framing and the nervous chemistry of live broadcast, a visible struggle emerges on screen: a vacillation of power and aesthetics between the ambition of the participants and the limitations of state broadcast.
At different times the programmes would both attempt to reproduce, and diverge from, standard television formats, working from the basic model developed by programmes like its predecessor, Late Night Line-Up. Studio discussion, captured through an interlinked system of electronic video cameras, was interwoven with film inserts shot on location on 16mm. (Though Open Door worked to a one-to-four shooting-to-editing ratio, as opposed to the one-to-ten practised by the BBC documentary department.) It was typically through the film inserts – images captured in the world of the makers, with a greater depth of field, richer colour saturation and a significantly wider variety of camera placement and movement options – that notions of individual or alternative authorship were thought to more clearly emerge, with groups directing the BBC technicians in much the same way a traditional film director might realise their personal vision.
Framing authorship according to cinematic convention, however, led to limited, traditional ways of appraising the programmes. While the studio focus and formal freedom of early Open Door programmes were poorly received by broadsheet television critics, to contemporary viewers these encounters feel distinctly raw, upsetting the sanctified space of the television studio and opening it up to the interests and motivations of the group making their programme. In Cleaners’ Action Group (1973), union convener May Hobbs leads the conversation, actively and authoritatively chairing the debate, compelled by their campaign to improve worker conditions, rather than serve the BBC’s Royal Charter. It is worth repeating how unfamiliar, even peculiar, this was for British television in the early 1970s – that only two years after Tony Benn described the idea as a distant possibility, there were people on television talking about their lives and working conditions without being interviewed by a media professional. The same is true of young people – The Basement Project Film Group’s ‘East End Channel 1’ (1973) is a joyous, irreverent episode of television satire, where young Black Londoners mimic the TV presenter Alan Whicker while presenting local news, interviews and sketches. Having already burst the bubble of traditional television flow, the studio discussion that follows, discussing growing up and aspirations for the future, unfolds in a genuinely open and unpredictable fashion.
Across its 240-plus programmes, Open Door was host to a wide range of styles and approaches, moving from illustrative, lyrical moments captured on 16mm film – see the opening shots of ‘Jericho’ by Maggie Black and Lucy Willis (1974), King’s College Post- Graduate Discussion Group’s ‘People and Poetry’ (1974) and North Devon Farmworkers (1975) – to agit-prop, post-hippy street theatre and variety show performances. The use of different spaces to tell histories and explore ideas – pubs, community centres, hospitals and factories – also challenged the networked power dynamics of national broadcast television, while personal stories opened television up to new types of vulnerability, with several episodes addressing loneliness and lack of social cohesion. The programme made by Recidivists Anonymous (1973) – featuring prisoners and ex-cons talking about how they view the world and how the world sees them – saw cameras entering a working prison for the very first time in British television.
Open Door presented community groups with a remarkably open and unusual brief, and the making of scripted, fictional representations of group perspectives and interests was sometimes encouraged. ‘Black Feet in the Snow’ (1974), staged by the Radical Alliance of Poets and Players and written by Jamal Ali of the Black Theatre of Brixton, depicted the hardships of the Windrush generation in the 1950s. ‘Tribunal’ (1975), a play about part-time unemployment benefits written by James Moran, a 59-year-old semi-skilled engineer from Bradford, was performed by his colleagues on the factory floor. Elsewhere, it was discov- ered that in the process of ceding editorial control to various groups, their ideas could lead to new approaches and even technical innovations. The Society for the Rescue of Destitute Animals (1974) saw unusual lighting being used as a way of filming at night without disturbing foxes. North Devon Farmworkers powerfully illustrates the collaborative nature of the CPU’s filmmaking process – we see farmers assembled around a Steenbeck editing machine in a farmhouse, discussing and reviewing footage on location as they debate ways they can present their lives that transcend archaic rural stereotypes.
Both the idea of community television and many of the participants and producers of Open Door find their roots and political allegiances in Britain’s radical post-war movements. Yet the body of work left by the CPU remains neglected by related social and cultural histories of the period. There are a multitude of reasons for this, beginning with the complexities of accessing the films in the BBC archive, to the lack of repeat broadcasts, along with the broader issue of film and media archives rarely engaging the public with specific ‘collections’, unlike written archives, galleries and museums. The CPU’s limited visibility from any non-academic record of radical or alternative media also speaks to a dissonance that sits at the heart of the BBC’s open-access project. Watching Open Door, the same questions persist: are these films more or less ‘authentic’ to the radically democratic ideals of participatory media? To whose histories do these programmes belong? What, and whose, power dynamics are being enacted – the BBC’s or the individual programme-makers’?
To some extent, the CPU was hamstrung by its obligation to the BBC, rendering the authentic participation seen in the cable franchises in Swindon and Bristol – where roles were fluid and there was little boundary between professional and volunteer – impossible. Moreover, the BBC’s notion of ‘balance’ complicates Open Door’s history. The commissioning process of each applicant or group lay with selection committees and a number of BBC professionals, and while the CPU gave voice to a huge range of progressive causes, it was also compelled to broadcast conservative views, occasionally veering into incendiary territory. It platformed blood sport groups like the British Field Sports Society (1977), fringe Christian movements like the Campaign for the Feminine Woman (1978) and even, in 1976, the British Campaign to Stop Immi- gration – which included sections on the National Front – and whose later rebuttal programme, ‘It Ain’t Half Racist Mum’ (1979), co-presented by Stuart Hall and Maggie Steed, was refused wider distribution due to the offence it caused to star BBC newscaster Robin Day, after an on-screen analysis of Day’s interviewing style.
Commissioning decisions at the CPU were made in meetings at Hammersmith Grove, an eminent building in BBC history – both The Great War (1964) and Z Cars (1962–78) had been made there – but one that had become a grotty, decaying base by the time of the CPU’s occupancy. A chart of current applicants was pinned to the reception desk wall, where producers were able to attach their names to community groups and applicants. The selection meetings that followed were an arena where the CPU, a nascent community of its own, played out its internal politics as much as it did the merits of applicants. Unlike other departments of the BBC, in principle every staff member was invited to selection meetings in a gesture towards a flat hierarchy. It was there, passing round plates of cheap biscuits through clouds of cigarette smoke, that the next slate of CPU films was decided.
The job of the Open Door producer had an uneasy liminality: they were both insiders to the outside and outsiders to the inside. A successful programme would often render the producer invisible, where a programme effectively conveyed the values of a group and satisfied the production qualities, budget and schedule of the BBC. Inevitably, Open Door producers would regularly be received with suspicion by both applicants and the wider institution. There was also a perceived passivity to the CPU’s commissioning process as a receiving house, rather than approaching communities and movements when issues arose with urgency. Other than Southall Campaign Committee’s ‘Southall on Trial’ (1979), Open Door had no programming wholly dedicated to contemporary dissent – notably the chain of Black uprisings that occurred in 1981 across London, Birmingham and Manchester. Understandably, those involved in resistance and unrest were hardly inclined to turn to a state broadcaster as their public platform.
The compromised political centre of Open Door makes it difficult to consider it as a coherent totality. Alongside each episode’s varied tone and aesthetics, the CPU emerges as an unreliable narrator (perhaps unreliable producer) of Britain’s social issues of the 1970s. This aside, it remains a major social and cultural history collection that deserves consideration. This was clear to viewers and critics at the time, too. As the series came to an end in 1983, The Sunday Times noted:
'If you were looking for suitable material for a time capsule to represent the last ten years in Britain, you might do worse than bury a list of the 250-odd Open Door programmes that have been broad- cast by the BBC since April 1973.'(5)
Viewed as an assemblage, the Open Door archive is not a sequential collection – it is a visual history from below that frustrates our teleological urges and sense of political and cultural time. In some respects, Open Door is a drip-feed of the future a decade before it was supposed to happen – a shimmering vision of Channel 4 and independent media, the representa- tion of subcultures, and an inclusive vision of Britishness that left Middle England shifting uncomfortably from one buttock to the other. For its participants, however, it was the exact opposite, a fleeting moment of exposure of their everyday, an ephemeral platform for their interests and efforts on late-night television. Furthermore, if the people or subjects featured in the programme seem prescient or uncanny half a century on, it is because the lives of ordinary people remain neglected by histories, collections and institutional media that work in service to them.
If there is a way of thinking about the collection of several hundred films made under the Open Door banner, it should be as an affective political history of a period that bridges the unravelling of the post-war settlement to Thatcherism. It is a contested, often-contradictory narrative thread of performance through this time – redolent of Raymond Williams’s notion of a ‘structure of feeling’, albeit one mediated by gatekeepers at the fringes of state broadcasting. Williams’s paradigm serves Open Door well, illustrating a period in social and cultural flux, noting ‘the known complexities, the experienced tensions, shifts, and uncertainties, the intricate forms of unevenness and confusion’ that make themselves apparent in any new epoch trying to define itself.(6) We see these ebb and flow in the episodes of Open Door, as the lives, emotions and struggles of individuals and communities are broadcast to the nation beyond their immediate milieu for the first time in history.
As well as presenting us with a set of complex and contradictory historical threads, Open Door and its contemporaries in community television have regular points of connection with the socially engaged art and experimental film worlds of the 1970s. These overlaps position moments of community television, even with their attendant power structures, as part of the splintered histories of alternative filmmaking that are embraced by artists today and are gradually being incorporated into Britain’s post-war art history.
Several British open-access programmes took the form of combative, prankster-like critiques and interventions, appearing to channel the famous maxim of Nam June Paik that ‘television has been attacking us all our lives, now we can attack it back’. To name just two in the Open Door series: the Situationist-inspired ‘Street Farmers’ (1973) and North West Spanner Theatre Group’s ‘Born Free Trapped Ever After’ (1980). The Alternative Media Project (1974) – featured in LWT’s Speak for Yourself strand – which would go on to feature in the Serpentine Gallery’s Video Show a year later, attempted to critically engage their audience with abstract electronic patterns on screen, inviting viewers at home to change the contrast balance on their television, before prophetically speculating on the move towards insular first-person narratives in open-access ‘broadcast yourself’ media seen much later in the CPU’s Video Nation series in the 1990s (and, later still, on social media).
An overarching desire to ‘activate the audience’ and critique traditional media forms and relations in the wake of the reckoning that came with the end of the 1960s signalled there could be surprisingly strong points of shared conceptual and aesthetic aims between open-access television and experimental film. David Attenborough’s 1972 report referred to both ‘stylistic innovations ... professional broadcasters have either ignored or rejected’, later noting that the new unit might incorporate ‘new methods [of filmmaking] in use in the underground’, implying both the relatively recent use of 16mm and portapak video in alternative film, alongside radically new film aesthetics and methods of distribution. There were cross-pollinations between these very different worlds; Simon Hartog, co-founder of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC), a key space and context for complex multimedia art-making, was a modest player in these networks, first finding his feet in television before returning, post- LFMC, to receive an on-screen credit for Speak for Yourself. Further overlaps can be seen when the same participants and 16mm sequences from 1973’s Cleaners’ Action Group film for Open Door would appear later in the Berwick Street Film Collective’s intensely self-reflexive documentary Nightcleaners (1972–75). The two works are almost in dialogue with each other, albeit with the usual questions of editorial authorship and self-representation present in every Open Door episode.
Several alternative, independent filmmaking groups also made open- access programmes, including The Basement Project Film Group: ‘East End Channel 1’ (1973), Liberation Films: ‘Starting to Happen’ (1974), the London Women’s Film Group (1975), and The Other Cinema (with Marc Karlin and Stephen Dwoskin as uncredited directors, 1977). At the very least, open access significantly increased a collective’s visibility, especially for groups without their own exhibition space, as was the case with the London Women’s Film Group, enabling them to present, with no apparent compromise, their political burlesque ‘The Amazing Equal Pay Show’ (1975) to a national audience.
The points of connection between open-access television and experimental film serve to show the creative potential in participatory media rather than claim these films should be exhibited as the work of artists. The Open Door archive presents difficult histories and experiences which require them to be aired in full and presented in their original broadcast form in order to do justice to their shape, poetics and intent relative to their era. Even still this remains difficult. Such was the take-up of television sets by the early 1970s that specific interests, presented by groups typically only used to communicating directly with their peers and immediate geographical locality, were suddenly networked into a concentrated publishing model accessible to virtually the entire UK. These works remain both alternative and in a sense mainstream, creating palpable feelings of cultural dissonance for viewers today, and even a confusion of register, with the question of who ultimately holds power in the collaborative relationship between the BBC and the contributing groups being difficult to unpack in any clearly satisfying way.
This exhibition only shows the first decade of British community television. In part, this is because the shift in broadcast quality and output of the CPU changed after the end of Open Door, and the arrival of Channel 4 created a much broader, more complex landscape with which to understand the integration of community in broadcast media. With its distinct naivety and variety in shape and subject matter, Open Door belongs very clearly to the experimental phase in British open-access broadcasting, where ‘failure’, however that might be understood, was not necessarily feared, and a degree of self-reflection was embraced through anniversary programmes, such as ‘Open Door: 100 Programmes’ (1976) and ‘Opening Doors: Reviewing 140 Programmes’ (1977). Frequently slipping between genre and tonality, the work itself remains the most daring and unusual to contemporary audiences. By way of contrast, when it came to follow-up series Open Space and Grapevine, the CPU extended a much stronger guiding hand, thus stabilising the trajectory of their output and producing programmes far more in keeping with broader television. Open Space broadcast films made ‘about’ alternative groups and artists, but not so obviously ‘by’ them. Open Space also avoided studio discussion – this was left to Grapevine, who employed a recurring presenter, as if to steady the tiller (even when being deliberately irreverent) whilst guests intermingled in a studio set up as a cafe?, and individual items played in a magazine-like structure.
Launching this project in January 2023 throws the previous year in media history into relief. 2022 was supposed to be a grand year for celebrating television – seeing both the centenary of the BBC and the 40th anniversary of Channel 4. The political debates surrounding public-service broadcast- ing and public ownership, not least the debate around the privatisation of Channel 4, ensured that any celebrations were heavily scrutinised and manifestly muted. The kind of histories and potentialities that Open Door and other open-access strands represent were kept largely out of view, perhaps in part because they foreshadow so much of our contemporary political landscape and provide knotty, radically challenging moments to the BBC story. The Open Door archive, largely invisible until now, presents a myriad of elusive, uncategorisable media works that sit in oblique dialogue with each other. Were these programmes to become more visible, however, it would help us to think differently about our changing notions of community and the public’s vanishing stake in its own media.
Notes
1. As quoted in Brian Groombridge, Television and the People: A Programme for Democratic Participation (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 162
2. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, Sunday Mirror, 2 May 1971
3. Peter Lewis, Community Television and Cable in Britain (London: BFI, 1978), p. 67
4. David Attenborough, Community Programmes (1972), BBC Written Archives Centre R78/2/540/1 Access Programmes
5. D Campbell, Sunday Times Supplement, 24 July 1983, as quoted in Gavin Schaffer, ‘What’s Behind the Open Door? Talking Back on Race in Public-Access Broadcasting’, in The Vision of a Nation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 145
6. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 129
Further reading and viewing