Category Archives: Media

An End to the Centre-Periphery Game? Arts and the Media in Wales

Blog, Industry, Media

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David Anderson , Director General of Amgueddfa Cymru takes the BBC to task for its poor coverage of arts and culture in Wales. In a hard-hitting article in the latest edition of the IWA’s ‘The Welsh Agenda’ magazine he analyses how what he calls ‘The Centre-Periphery Game’ has encouraged this shortcoming, exacerbating a failure of perception on the part of the BBC centrally but also a failure of the arts community in Wales to challenge the status quo.

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Is the BBC Trust getting the message from Wales?

Blog, Industry, Media, PortfolioTelevision, Television

The BBC Trust held a seminar in Cardiff ‘as part of the Charter review process’ on 20th October. It was open to the public but the majority of those present were media workers, academics or correspondents. The Western Mail report on it is accurate but conveys nothing of the atmosphere among the attendees which was, at times, mutinous and, finally, outspokenly critical. These sore spots have to be examined or they will go on festering to no good purpose.

BBC-building

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IWA Media Audit – Dialogue and Debate

Blog, Industry, Media, Uncategorized

 

mediaonline

Throughout the past week the Media Policy Group of the Institute of Welsh Affairs has been publishing its draft analysis of the state of main media sectors in Wales. This approach has allowed us to receive valuable feedback on our chapters on the radio industry and the press that will be incorporated into the final report. This will be launched at the Cardiff Media Summit on November 11th. We have also had the benefit of expert comment pieces carried on the IWA site and look forward to more. It is proving to be a good experience of dialogue around these important issues and of the kind of debate about them that has long been called for in Wales.

The analysis we have laid out is sobering. Continue reading IWA Media Audit – Dialogue and Debate →

British, Bold, Creative – for all of us in Wales?

Blog, Industry, Television, Uncategorized

British, Bold, Creative: a catchy, punchy title for the BBC’s statement of its plans for the next decade and beyond but, read from the point of view of the Welsh bit of ‘British’, the contents are something of a curate’s egg.

Lord Hall

One sees the effort to engage with the Nations and Regions. There are suggestions about reconfiguring the delivery of news and about opening up platforms for a wider sharing of materials. The aspirations are right, as in section 7.3 Entertaining the whole UK:

Firstly, we will improve how we portray and represent the different Nations of the UK on our pan-UK network services. Secondly, we will strengthen the services for each Nation.

Then comes a very big ‘but’:

But significant new investment in a broader range of programming, such as drama, comedy and entertainment, cannot be delivered within the current Budget agreement with the Government… funding these ambitions would require additional income. Continue reading British, Bold, Creative – for all of us in Wales? →

Beyond Rhetoric – IWA Media Policy for Wales

Blog, Industry, Media, PortfolioTelevision

 

“as slow to be set on fire as a stomach”

I wondered, while listening to Rhodri Talfan Davies speak this week on two occasions at the National Eisteddfod, if some version of that sentiment ever entered his mind. It certainly entered mine. It’s a striking phrase coined by George Eliot to express her frustration at her contemporaries’ failure to grasp the spirit of the times. How slow we are – those of us not touched by genius such as hers   ̶   to see the writing on the cultural wall in front of us. A new dispensation is coming and we need the ideas to meet it.

National Eisteddfod - Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Cymru Llanelli 2014

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Scampi and the Meaning of Life – TV and Culture in Wales

Blog, Industry, Television

I don’t know if anyone ever addresses Lord Hall of Birkenhead, Director General of the BBC, as ‘butt’. I suppose I’m unlikely to find out as he probably has more pressing questions to answer in these days of Charter Renewal debate. Nonetheless the question came to me as I reflected on a blog I wrote yesterday attempting to unpack what Tony Hall meant when he used the word ‘culture’ in a speech in Cardiff in 2014.

there are some aspects of national life in Wales that are not sufficiently captured by the BBC’s own television services in Wales, and I would include comedy, entertainment and culture in those categories

Tony Hall

I don’t want to treat that speech as some gospel to be mined for esoteric meanings and yet light did dawn, and the clue was an in example of one of the genres whose erosion he lamented in that text. He named comedy, entertainment and culture as genres whose production has been eroded, in the last decade, on English language television in Wales. I found myself thinking about a comedy series which, in my view, is one of the best BBC Wales has ever made. Continue reading Scampi and the Meaning of Life – TV and Culture in Wales →

Hungry Wales in an Age of TV Plenty

Blog, Industry, Media, Portfolio, Television, Uncategorized

If a thing is repeated often enough it begins to be as persuasive as though it were true.

We’ve never had it so good, apparently. We live in a televisual Age of Plenty with digital wares piled high in the marketplace and so it’s time for the BBC to withdraw from universality and to stop disadvantaging the commercial sector by its scale and success; the level of public funding gives the BBC an unfair advantage over its competitors and the BBC should become more ‘distinctive’, confining itself to things the market can’t or won’t provide.

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