Open and Shut Cases
Naseem Khan

The wall of the Community Programme Unit’s office in Shepherd’s Bush must be one of the most poignant walls in London. It is covered with filing cards – hundreds and hundreds of them. Each one is an application to make one of the Unit’s Open Door programmes. With a mere 30 or so slots a year, it takes no great skill to work out that demand vastly outruns supply.


Open Door has been a quiet success story. It began six years ago with trepidation on some sides and open cynicism on others. (‘Once the novelty has worn off, it will become as boring as the “phone-in”’, opined The Times.) The programme would seem to have had everything stacked against it – a low budget, horrible viewing hours (the new series appears at 5.20pm on Saturday, and is repeated at 11.10pm the following Thursday), less than universal support from the mainstream BBC a mile or so away. But perhaps enthusiastic backing is neither desirable nor to be expected. Both the then-Director of Programmes, David Attenborough, and the Unit’s first Editor, Rowan Ayers, conceived the programme as a healthy fringe irritant.


The aim of Open Door (and the two other programmes – Grapevine and Something Else – the Unit has since spawned) is access. Access to the airwaves to put over a scheme, a point of view, a cause. The group whose application is accepted is given a producer, a unit and purely technical advice. Editorial control remains wholly with the group (apart from legal restrictions). The result has been over 200 programmes that have ranged from the tedious to the controversial – play groups, youth schemes, vegetarians, ethnic theatre, medical pressure groups, a critique of racism in the media, the British Campaign to Stop Immigration. A thousand applications are still waiting.

 

Viewing figures are not high; but what is high is audience response. The ‘deadest’ of programmes – which the Unit kindly refused to name – attracted 10,000 letters.


Open Door is a visual Hyde Park Corner, with hundreds of speakers jostling to find a platform. With such demand, how on earth does the Unit fix its priorities? Does it try for balance? Present Editor Mike Fentiman quickly hid a wince. ‘No,’ he said. ‘What we’re into is representation – not balance.’ In theory, he went on, if 75 per cent of applications came from ‘reactionary organisations’, Open Door would reflect that fact. But the Unit is, despite that, more than a mere mathematical calculator. There is a philosophy. ‘Crudely, we look for the unrepresented, the under-represented, the misrepresented.’


It was that philosophy that led to this week’s programme, made by the Southall Campaign Committee. The group grew out of the events last April with the National Front’s march through the Asian area of Southall, Blair Peach’s death and the arrest of 342 local people. ‘We felt’, said a Campaign member, ‘that the media distorted the events, and we wanted to put forward the community’s viewpoint.’


The programme is in itself an indication that the Unit can be fast on its feet. A Campaign member phoned in, to be told a selection meeting was due the following day.


Fentiman himself dropped a form by. Next morning the group drove up to Shepherd’s Bush adding ideas as they went. ‘The form was a bit tatty by the time we arrived’, they admitted. Tatty or not, it went through instantly. Yes, the group admitted, they had been surprised at the lack of bureaucracy.

Relations between the Unit and group are, said Fentiman, overwhelmingly happy. ‘After all, we have to create a relationship of mutual trust. There are probably only three or four instances in a couple of hundred in which in the end the producer is not regarded as a friend.’


That, of course, carries its own hazards. ‘The trouble is in getting a detailed critique of our own operation. People are so bloody grateful in the main. And gratitude – like power – can corrupt.


 


 

First published in Radio Times, 20 September 1979