Valete

Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, 29 August 1983¹⁹⁶

For the eighth Edinburgh International Television Festival, Jonathan Miller was invited to deliver the keynote MacTaggart Lecture. His talk reflected on the prospect of multi-channel television and the current boom in home video, as well as broader observations informed by two decades of working in television.

I would like to say first of all that it is a great privilege to be allowed to lecture in memory of James MacTaggart, my distinguished late colleague in the BBC. I want to say also what a pleasure it has been working in this industry, although some of the remarks which will follow may in fact seem to undercut that claim.

I would like to begin by saying that I think it is extremely hard to identify any professional group which is more prone to parochial and pontifical introspection than the one which is assembled here this afternoon. I am not saying that this means that other groups fail to meet in order to discuss their shared interests. At the same time there is something quite peculiar and distinctive about the conventions which are attended by people in this particular media, if only because of the large amount of conjectural rhetoric that one hears on such occasions.

Now the problem I think is that, as the technology improves and multiplies, it creates, as in no other enterprise, an anxious sense of opportunities which might have been missed or abused.

What we have is a peculiar and in some ways quite unaccountable situation in which the credibility and self-confidence of the broadcaster is somehow related to his or her ability to fill stretches of time, as opposed to providing items of service. Now this doesn’t mean of course that the attractiveness or worth of the items themselves is unimportant, but in the end the mere fact that an allotted time has to be filled begins to have an all-pervading influence on the service which is actually provided, and I think that it is this rather than any intrinsic feature of the medium which confers upon it most of its recognisable characteristics.

Moreover, I believe it is because the technology of the manufacture of images grew up within an industry and within a technology which in fact had also developed instantaneous radio transmission and got locked onto a news broadcasting device, that we actually got ourselves into the irreversible situation in which time had to be filled rather than items of service provided. I think the most obvious result of this linkage between the transmission and the manufacture of images is that we are now in a situation where we tend to manufacture material whose viability would be very hard to imagine if it had to be marketed item for item.

For example, I think it is quite unlikely that any of the quiz shows which fill up television would have survived if anyone had to go out and hire them in the form of cassettes or actually had to visit a cinema on an item for item visit. And I think that the same thing also goes for the serials which characterize television. I am thinking of things like Coronation Street. The unspeakable triviality of these shows, which seem negligible when the programmes are effortlessly available in the household setting, would, I think, become glaringly apparent and intolerable if someone had to make an explicit decision to fork out cash for them item by item.

You have to bear in mind, however, that over and above the effortless availability there is an added attraction of the transmission in this form, and that is due to the peculiar reward of knowing that one’s experience of these items, trivia or otherwise, happens to be synchronized with that of innumerable and anonymous others. The ‘did you see…?’ phenomenon after which of course a television programme has been named.197 I suspect that this is the main factor which makes the medium curiously, and I suggest irreversibly resistant to most of the efforts which have been made and will be made to market programmes that can be viewed as and when the individual requires it, either in the form of dialable cable, or in the form of purchasable cassettes.

Some people would say this is one of the more regrettable aspects of television. But I would also like to say that I believe that this also in some ways acts as a benevolent social consolidant. While in fact these things are trivial, their chronic availability and above all their synchronized availability in some way provides a medium through which in fact we feel ourselves part of a common community in modern industrial society. Those who regard it as a technique which will guarantee the consolidated idiocy of the society, believing that it is somehow emptied into a passive and unresisting nervous system of the great British public, I think overlook and underestimate the extent to which, when television is watched and experienced, it is actively being talked about, insulted, having things thrown at it. It is then discussed the next day so that it actually is itself subject to the scrutiny and criticism of those who have experienced it. So that the occasions which are broadcasts provide one of the media through which in fact we entertain social relationship with one another.

Trivial though Dallas might be, trivial though Coronation Street might be – and I am not entirely certain how trivial Coronation Street is, incidentally – trivial as they might be, they actually provide some sort of moral tale about which discussion might be convened, and therefore I think they represent an important part of social life. And this would not in fact be there if people had to purchase these programmes one by one and go out and get them. It is the chronic domestic availability of them which actually confers upon them this strangely benevolent, cohesive effect upon modern society.

I also think one has to consider the so-called serious programmes. I think the synchronized and chronic availability of serious programmes works to their advantage in a way which would not happen if they were not available in the way that they were. It would be very nice to think that if arts, science and documentary programmes were made for cassettes alone then their intrinsic worth, their intrinsic interest – whatever that means – would guarantee them a market, item for item. Again, I suspect that they wouldn’t survive on the scale which would make it worthwhile anyone making them in the first place, and that much of their appeal lies in the very fact that they can be almost accidentally encountered, or they can be engaged without anyone having to consult an inventory of his or her previous interests. I think that those who look forward to the utopian freedom of choice, which is supposed to be ushered in by the development of cables and cassettes, again underestimate how hard it is for any one individual to identify all of his or her interests in advance and forget the extent one’s interests themselves arise often as the result of being exposed to unsolicited experience.

In some paradoxical way it is the very triviality of what is made on television – the fact that you really don’t have to care too much, that you do not have to consult something as painful as choice – that actually renders it so attractive. When, for example, the channels multiply, that in itself imposes a terrible burden of choice upon the viewer, who then has to think about what sort of person they are such that they might like this or that. The wonderful thing is to find one’s interests developed by the absolutely unsolicited experience which you engage in, actually bumping up against the set and finding that that seems to be one which attracts your attention.

I would like now to talk a little bit about the so-called serious programmes and about what in fact happens as a result of their being on television. I believe amongst these unsolicited experiences which might or might not engage the interests of an audience, there are certain ones which seem to work intrinsically better than others. There is something intrinsic about the medium which somehow makes them work inevitably, and they are the ones which in fact exploit television for what it really is, which is a periscope.

Television can reach to places that no person can normally expect to get to in their lifetime, either for reasons of distance, inaccessibility, risk, scale, privacy, propriety or whatever. What television does is it acts as a periscope, as an endoscope, as a microscope and a telescope. It enlarges, it goes to smaller places than the eye can see, it goes into more distant places than normal people with normal finances can expect to get to. It goes to places that are riskier and more dangerous than any normal person can expect to get to. In that sense it provides us with an enormous enlargement of our personal experience.

But there are places where I think television falters. Although in fact very, very worthy efforts are made in this area and often extremely substantial achievements, television still falters. This is in the area which involves the promulgation and explanation of complex and abstract ideas. There are impressive achievements in scientific broadcasting and arts broadcasting, even historical broadcasting on television. But I believe there is a curiously unhappy and as yet unresolved relationship between imagery and words in these, which actually overlooks some sort of cognitive machinery that we don’t yet quite understand about the relationship between words and pictures.

I believe that one of the moments when words and pictures seem to be happiest together is when in fact they are directly related to conversation and synchronized speaking faces or talking heads. These are much disparaged figures on television, but it is when talk is related to facial movement that it is in fact readily intelligible; in fact, that’s what talk and vision were invented for. That’s how we evolved. We evolved an increasing sensitivity to facial movement, to intonation and to lexical streams, and for that reason I think there are moments in scientific and in artistic broadcasting in which there are often strange sorts of slippage of understanding, precisely because I believe it is often not understood the extent to which these two modalities are addressing separate parts of the human brain – in fact, so separate that they are on opposite sides of the head. The right side of the brain is almost exclusively associated with the understanding and the decoding of instantaneous imagery, whereas the left side of the brain is more or less consistently and exclusively preoccupied with the decoding of sequential and particularly linguistic signals, and these two halves of the brain are not necessarily synchronized to one another. They operate at different rates because they are dealing with different cognitive modes. And there are moments, I believe, when there is a slippage between these two, when in fact you are probably alternating between the left hand side of the brain and the right hand side and actually nothing is coming across except a vague understanding, and then as you switch to the right side of the brain – as the imagery starts to work – you are actually failing to be decoding what is going on on the left side of the brain.

I believe that until there is much more sophisticated research about the way in which imagery and words can be used together, television will continue to falter at this, and even at the very best, the documentary, science and arts features will approximate to the conditions of articles in ‘high life’ magazines, at a fairly high level. And as one who has participated in programmes of this sort, I know this to my own embarrassment.

This brings me back to another point before I wind up. There are, I think, two areas in which television not merely falters but fails and also perhaps misses its aim altogether. There is, as I say, a curious insatiability of an image-making industry which is related to a transmission industry. When you actually have to fill allotted spaces of time, all material is potentially put-able on to the box. And as time goes on it becomes omnivorous and it casts around for material which was made for another genre altogether and I believe often disfigures it. Now, I would like to make the extremely debatable claim that the most conspicuous example of this is the one which in fact the BBC in particular preens itself on as being one of its highest achievements – and that is the making of the classic serial; the transformation of the novel into the dramatized serial.

I think that we will have to admit most of these represent major achievements in broadcasting, major achievements of acting, of directing and of art-historical accuracy. As time goes on they improve in almost every one of these respects, but I would suggest that paradoxically, as they improve, the failure, the inevitable failure of them becomes more apparent, and that becomes apparent for one very fundamental reason, which is to do with the distinction of genre. Novels are an absolutely untranslatable art form, except that is in the case of the trivial and the second-rate, when it doesn’t matter what happens to them, and in fact being digested into the belly of television is probably the best thing that could happen to them. But in the case of what we would regard as the ‘classic,’ actually to identify it as such is to state the dilemma.

Once you have identified something as a classic, you have paradoxically identified it as the one thing which actually does not belong on television at all. Nor does it belong on film. That is because I believe somewhere in the back of the television programme-makers’ mind there is a belief that novels are in fact plays unfortunately buried in a magma of unnecessary prose, and if only they could be chipped away and extracted from this material they would actually rise to their finest hour in the form of a television serial. This often involves, for example, not merely eliminating the descriptive prose with which the speeches are surrounded, but supplying supplementary prose or supplementary speeches which were never spoken by the characters in question. Now, the reason why I think this is an absolutely broken-backed enterprise – one which in fact has misidentified the nature of the genre – is that novels are in fact works of art which cannot progress beyond the perspectives in which the genre itself exists. And this is something to do with the visibility of characters in novels and also about the nature of speech in novels.

It is an extremely interesting fact that when Flaubert was asked by one of his friends whether an illustrator could be provided for Madame Bovary (1856), he wrote to them fairly plainly that on no account must Madame Bovary ever be visualized by any one particular person, because if you had her in the form of an illustration, there you would have her fixed and unremittingly visual form which would forever fasten your image in that mode. It is part of the nature of the fictional character that they have this sort of provisional visibility which is never sustained, and the same also goes for the visibility of the décor – what is actually described around the character. I think, for example, of Jane Austen, where there are extremely perfunctory descriptions of scenery amongst which the characters move, and yet one is never conscious as one reads the novel that in fact they are not moving in the countryside at all and nor is this deficit made up by a series of images supplied by the reader. There are of course readers who in fact provide a florid supplementary series of images on their own, but there are just as many who live in the left hand side of their own brains rather than the right hand side, who do not in fact supply such images and are perfectly capable of extracting from the novel what the novelist intended by it.

Now, you might want to say, ‘Ah…apart from the fact these things represent enjoyable achievements in their own right, this introduces people to the classics and that they are in fact invented for the people to go back to the book.’ To which I will say the following: I believe first of all that aerosol versions of great works – in which is extracted what is believed to be the essence of George Eliot – these may persuade people to go back to the book, but they persuade people to go back to the book in a frame of mind which is not necessarily friendly to the reading of the book, because the book is now actually fraught with imagery which in fact was not originally provided. And it is not that you are surprised to find that Mr Knightley looks that way but more importantly that you are surprised to find that Mr Knightley has an appearance at all, and the fact that he has an unremitting appearance and goes on looking that way and on until the last titles start to roll. What is so wonderful about Dickens, for instance, is that quite suddenly one curious epithetic instance will be used; a detail will be plucked out of the air. For example, the rancid, molten fat stained with soot runs down the windows in Bleak House when the internal combustion has gone on in the room above.198 First of all, that can never be realized on television, and if it was it would be absurd. Also, it would only be realized on television if you had to have the dreary rest of the window and the window frame and doors which would then have to be unremittingly present throughout the rest of the ghastly production.

Now let me say also that I am not trying to legislate and say, ‘Let us make no more classic serials.’ Rather, let’s be quite clear what we are doing. We’re making other forms of art which have got some sort of relationship to the original but should not be seen as faithful versions of them. In some paradoxical way, the more faithful they are, the more pedantically accurate they are, actually the less faithful they are in restoring the novel to its original form. It can only be restored by reading it. I believe that no matter what happens with television, one thing which will survive through all times is the book, precisely because of the peculiar unvisualized privacy of the experience. And this goes back to something which I have also raised when it comes to the science and the arts programmes. I believe that the difficulties of synchronizing argument and imagery are overcome in the book. In fact, when the illustrated book was introduced at the introduction of engraving – which could be set in the same form as the movable type – it actually introduced perhaps the ideal and unimprovable version of the transmission of audio-visual knowledge.

I would like to just briefly end by saying that there is one problem. It is less clear what the answer ought to be than the one which I rather arrogantly claim with regard to the novel. That is the problem of another form of art which was not intended for the box, and it is one in which I have been currently engaged in the last two years: do you take classic plays which were intended for another mode and put them on the box? After two years of having done it, I confess to a sort of embarrassed impotence about the possibility of doing Shakespeare on television. All right, as with a novel there is a sort of care-package missionary function – bails of literature to snowbound, distant people who otherwise wouldn’t gain access to it. Nevertheless, I believe that in doing it some curious injury is done to the work in question. Not an irreversible injury, because in fact it is always possible to see them in the original context or to see them on the stage; but I believe doing works, particularly works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on television, actually has got insoluble problems associated with it. Some of which may be offset by the immediacy of speaking quietly to a camera immediately in front of you, but nevertheless it raises problems and it is again to do with visualization, particularly visualization of setting. It is well known Shakespeare wrote for an unfurnished stage, and he then lapsed after his death into 200 years of deplorable, picturey productions. The Georgian and the Victorian theatre swamped his works in visualization until the discovery of the drawing of the Globe playhouse and the work on the early quartos by William Poel. Until then, Shakespeare was in fact lost as a literary work. Poel identified them as essentially literary works, where in fact the visual setting was irrelevant to the play and in fact it would actually be unfriendly to the play; not merely because of difficulty changing cumbersome scenes, but also because it rendered visible what was not intended to be visible in precisely the same way as the novelist. I felt myself, in the course of the two years, that television inched irresistibly further and further towards increased pictorialization of these works on the box.

The reasons for which I will briefly outline. People say why would it not have been possible to have done all of the Shakespeare plays on television in this mammoth series – which in itself is a sign of the insatiability of television – why would it not have been possible to have mounted these in an abstract space, comparable to the abstract space in which Shakespeare set it upon the stage? And there has I think been only one instance, and I am thinking of Trevor Nunn’s Macbeth, which has peculiarly come off, and I think that is probably unique to both Macbeth and possibly King Lear that they take place nowhere and nowhen.199 But characters do not have to enter, they only have to appear. Almost every other one of Shakespeare’s plays’ entrances cannot be supplied merely by entering from the edge of a television screen; you have got to provide a setting. Now, on the bare unfurnished stage, entrances are understood – even on an unfurnished setting, because in fact you the audience are in a room which is actually geometrically related to the setting in which the action takes place. Someone arriving on the stage is framed by the proscenium arch which separates the audience from the playing space, so that entrance is quite clearly understood to be a walking entrance from off-frame/on-frame. Whereas if you were to set up something of that sort on the screen it would be complicated by the situation. If you were to try and realize for example the stage setting of Shakespeare – a comparable, bare stage-setting, which Poel rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century for the theatre – you would have a double-framing device: you would have the framing device of the screen, which would be including a framing device which actually was known by the audience to be not including space in which they sat. There is no way of realising on a screen an abstract theatrical setting without creating this totally puzzling double setting of the screen frame and a theatrical frame, so that you find yourself therefore falling more and more towards the condition of the ordinary run of television drama.

So that you find gradually, as you start to put these kinds of plays on television, that you start to produce a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century mode which actually starts to work against the play in precisely the same way that Poel identified the pictorial hostility of the work of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century producers. So I believe that there is perhaps no viable solution with Shakespeare. The only final virtue to be identified in doing these things for television is that it introduces a larger number of people to these plays than would otherwise happen, but it also I believe does exactly the same as the dramatization of the novel does. It introduces people once again to the regrettable belief that the works fall below par if they are not seen in the visual mode, so that they return to the theatre now disappointed by the fact that the theatre does not live up to the pictorial glamour that television provided. In other words, it produces once again a disjunction, a failure of understanding of the genre of the work. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I am finally leaving television altogether, along with the theatre.200 And that is the point at which I would like to end, except that I would like, as I say, to give thanks to the people who allowed me to work in this medium for 20 years, and in particular, though he is not here tonight, to Huw Wheldon, who unwisely and very generously offered me the opportunity of editing Monitor, when I really came to him to ask if I could be allowed to make documentary films.