Envisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of Television

Envisioning Media Power

Envisioning Media Power On Capital and Geographies of Television

Brett Christophers

LEXINGTON BOOKS

A division of ROW M A N & L I T T L E F I E L D P U B L I S H E R S , I N C .

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Christophers, Brett, 1971Envisioning media power : on capital and geographies of television / Brett Christophers. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2344-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391-2344-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3310-1 (electronic : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391-3310-1 (electronic : alk. paper) 1. Television broadcasting—Economic aspects. I. Title. HE8700.4.C47 2009 384.55’1—dc22 2008053737 Printed in the United States of America

@ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.

Contents

List of Figures

vii

List of Abbreviations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

Reflections on Method

27

Part I: Knowing the Television Economy

37

Chapter 1: Enframing Creativity

39

Chapter 2: Television’s Economy and the Power of the Geographical Imagination

61

Chapter 3: Knowledge Travels

87

Conclusion to Part I

123

Part II: Capitalizing and Circulating Power

125

Chapter 4: Power, Scarcity, and a ‘Spatial Fix’

127

Chapter 5: Television’s Local Power Relations

171

Chapter 6: Power and Program Pricing in International Markets

201

Chapter 7: Circuits of Capital

241

Chapter 8: Mirrors, Meters, and Media Power

289

Conclusion to Part II

315 v

vi

Contents

Part III: From Space to Place

319

Chapter 9: Geopolitics

321

Chapter 10: Putting Television in its Place

349

Chapter 11: The Political Economy of Place in Programming

377

Conclusion to Part III

407

Coda: Into the Home of Media Power

411

Closing Remarks

425

References

431

Index

457

About the Author

467

List of Figures

Figure 1.1: “Publishing” and related sectors, in the First Creative Industries Mapping Document Figure 4.1: International theatrical release schedule for Unbreakable Figure 4.2: Typical platform windowing sequence for a studio feature film Figure 4.3: Approximate footprint of the Astra 2A south beam (based on 90 cm dish) Figure 5.1: Cumulative commercial impact and advertising revenue shares for the UK terrestrial broadcasters, 2001–2006 Figure 7.1: Marx’s three circuits of capital Figure 7.2: The circuit of money capital for television broadcasters and producers Figure 7.3: Internationalization of television’s capital circuits Figure 8.1: UK television advertising—average spot prices by demographic (2005) Figure 9.1: Local/regional bodies involved in Salford bid and mediacity proposals Figure C.1: Two hypothetical scenarios for the distribution of Millionaire fees, costs and profits between key stakeholders

vii

43 140 141 150

189 245 251 273 297 328

420

List of Abbreviations

ABC ABC (variant) AMPTP BARB BBC BSA BSkyB CBA CBC CroC CTAM DCMS DTI DTV DVD DVR EC EPG FAPL FCC FRAPA GMCC HRT IP ITC KBC

American Broadcasting Company Australian Broadcasting Corporation Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (UK) British Broadcasting Corporation Broadcasting Standards Authority (New Zealand) British Sky Broadcasting Cost-benefit analysis Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Crown Company (New Zealand) Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (US) Department for Culture, Media and Sport (UK) Department of Trade and Industry (UK) Digital television Digital Versatile Disc Digital Video Recorder European Commission Electronic Programme Guide Football Association Premier League (UK) Federal Communications Commission (US) Format Recognition and Protection Association Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce Hrvatska radiotelevizija (Croatia) Internet Protocol Independent Television Commission (UK) Kaun Banega Crorepati ix

x

MCH MIDAS NABET NBC NHU NRK NWDA NZIER Ofcom Oftel PACT PBS PRI PSB PVR PwC RAJAR RCA RNZ RTE RUV SCC SPADA TVNZ URC USAID VHS WGA WoCC YLE

List of Abbreviations

Ministry for Culture and Heritage (New Zealand) Manchester Investment and Development Agency Service National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians (US) National Broadcasting Company (US) (BBC) Natural History Unit Norsk Rikskringkasting (Norway) Northwest Regional Development Agency (UK) Zealand Institute of Economic Research Office of Communications (UK) Office of Telecommunications (UK) Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television (UK) Public Broadcasting Service (US) Population Research Institute Public Service Broadcasting or Broadcaster (UK) Personal Video Recorder PricewaterhouseCoopers Radio Joint Audience Research Limited (UK) Revealed Competitive Advantage Radio New Zealand Radio Telefís Éireann (Ireland) Ríkisútvarpið (Iceland) Salford City Council Screen Producers and Directors Association (New Zealand) Television New Zealand (Central Salford) Urban Regeneration Company US Agency for International Development Video Home System Writers Guild of America Window of Creative Competition Yleisradio (Finland)

Acknowledgments

It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge the people and institutions whose support has been critical to the development and completion of this book. At Lexington Books, Joseph Parry, Melissa Wilks, Matt McAdam, and Ryan Quick have provided all the support I have needed. I am particularly grateful to Joseph for believing in the book’s potential from the time when I first wrote to him to explain and pitch its premise. The foundation for the book was the PhD thesis that I researched and wrote while based in the School of Geography, Geology & Environmental Science at the University of Auckland from 2005 through to 2008. My time as a PhD student in Auckland was made possible in the first place by the award of a Commonwealth Scholarship, and for this I am grateful to both the University of Auckland and the New Zealand Vice-Chancellors’ Committee. At the University, the guidance and assistance of a number of dedicated non-academic staff made my working life considerably easier than it would otherwise have been. In Geography, I would especially like to thank Beryl Jack and Anna-Marie Simcock; at the Scholarships Office, many thanks to Angela Pearse. Although the book came to life in Auckland, a number of people from my past geographical lives in Oxford and Vancouver have continued to offer valuable and much-appreciated encouragement and support, sustaining me on my journey. For this, I thank Trevor Barnes, Alison Blunt, Noel Castree, Dan Clayton, Cole Harris, Phil Kelly and Ali Rogers. In particular, a big thank you to David Demeritt for kindly but firmly redirecting me in the very early stages of my PhD candidacy, when I came dangerously close to straying off course. I have also been greatly helped by the ongoing advice and assistance offered by friends and ex-colleagues or clients from in and around the xi

xii

Acknowledgments

television business. Steve Browning, Jim Egan, Jon James, Alastair Roberts, Andrew Starling, Jonathan Thompson and Pascal Volle have contributed substantively to what follows, through a mixture of sourcing data, introducing me to potential interviewees, and disabusing me of numerous misconceptions about industry dynamics. Above all, in this respect, I thank Julian Dickens, a wonderful friend and a constant source of support, enlightenment and inspiration. I owe an obvious and considerable debt to the individuals who agreed to be interviewed for my research. All carved out precious time from invariably hectic working schedules; all were patient in the face of my persistent and sometimes naïve questioning; and all offered illuminating and valuable insights into the workings of their professional worlds. A large number of people read and commented on one or more chapters of the thesis turned book, at varying stages of those chapters’ respective gestation. Some I know and can thank, again, by name: Lila Abu-Lughod, Ven Balakrishnan, Trevor Barnes, Noel Castree, Phil Crang, Brett Day, Julian Dickens, Stephen Lacy, Roger Lee, David O’Sullivan, Paul Robbins, Matt Sparke, Kevin Ward and Steve Wildman. Many others, however, were and remain anonymous: namely, the referees of the various manuscripts I submitted to journals during the course of the evolution of the book. Almost without exception, these anonymous reviews were fulsome, careful, informed and thoughtful, and it is no exaggeration to say that they have significantly shaped and, I believe, improved the book as a whole. I am extremely grateful for the time and effort expended by all these readers. The journal articles that resulted from these various submissions account for approximately a third of the material ultimately contained here. There are six such articles. All have been updated to reflect, as far as practically possible, notable events or developments between the time of original publication and the present reiteration. And all the arguments they contain have been revised or expanded – substantially so in some cases. I want to thank the publishers and editors of the journals in question for giving me permission to reproduce here the arguments I first developed in their publications. An abridged version of Chapter 1 appeared as “Enframing Creativity: Power, Geographical Knowledges and the Media Economy” in 2007 in Volume 32 of the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers; Chapter 2 was published in the same year, again in a more circumscribed form, as “Underpopulation, Television Economies, and the Power of the Geographical Imagination,” in Volume 89 of Geografiska Annaler Series B; the UK-focused sections of Chapter 5 are taken from “Television’s Power Relations in the Transition to Digital: The Case of the United Kingdom”, in Volume 9 of Television & New Media, 2008; Antipode, Volume 38, published in 2006 a much shorter version of Chapter 7, under the title “Circuits of Capital, Genealogy, and Geographies of Television”; Chapter 9 is based on the article “The BBC, the Creative Class, and Neolib-

Acknowledgments

xiii

eral Urbanism in the North of England,” published in 2008 in Volume 40 of Environment & Planning A; last of all, Chapter 10 was published in 2006 as “Visions of Nature, Spaces of Empire: Framing Natural History Programming within Geometries of Power”, in Volume 37 of Geoforum. Five people read the whole of the book in draft form, albeit in some cases more “draft” than others, and in some cases with the immediate subject of appraisal being the thesis from which the book emerged rather than “book” itself. One was yet another anonymous reviewer, this time for Lexington Books, in the capacity of referee of the formal book manuscript. Two were the external examiners of my thesis: Neil Coe and Warwick Murray. The other two readers were at the University of Auckland: my primary PhD thesis supervisor, Gordon Winder, and my secondary supervisor, Richard Le Heron. I am enormously grateful to all five for slogging through my manuscript and engaging with it fully and constructively. I would also like to thank Gordon for all the other work on my behalf that goes with being a PhD supervisor. It goes without saying, but I will say it anyway, that none of the abovementioned bears any responsibility for any factual errors or dubious interpretations that the book may still contain. During the course of the research and writing enterprise, over the past three to four years, the support I have received at a more personal level has been at least as important to the completion of the book as the more specifically work-related help noted above. In fact many of the people I have already mentioned by name are close friends, and I thank them for their personal as well as “professional” support. But many others have also provided critical, ongoing backing. First, my friends in the Geography department in Auckland, who made that department a fun and lively place to work: Glenn Banks, Corina Buckenberger, Francis Collins, Amy Dougherty, Joe Fagan, Murray Ford, Nick Lewis, Pippa Mitchell, Sam Morgan, David O’Sullivan, Eugene Rees, Tom Stephens and Steffen Wetzstein. I particularly want to thank Steve Kelly, Eric LaFary and Nat Wilson for their good and reliable company—especially over morning coffee. In Auckland more widely (i.e. outside of the university), I offer heartfelt thanks to Michelle Holt and Gavriel Philip. Second, I thank my close friends back in England, who I have barely seen in the last few years, but who have never been anything less than steadfast: Matt Angel, Ed Corbett, Richard Flint, Gideon Hyams, David Magliocco and Ben Watkins. Third, and for the same unconditional, unqualified support, I thank my parents and siblings. All were simply brilliant while I was in New Zealand, particularly at those times when they were needed most. The above debts, however, pale beside the one I want to acknowledge last of all. This is to my wife, Agneta, and to our two young children, Elliot and Oliver. To Elliot and Oliver: thank you, quite simply, for being you, and for

xiv

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immeasurably enriching my life. To Agneta: for your wisdom, courage, love, and, perhaps above all else, your patience, I am eternally grateful. This book is dedicated to you and to our two beloved sons.

Introduction

It is all about power, of course. The power the media have to set an agenda. The power they have to destroy one. . . . The power to enable, to inform. The power to deceive. The power to shift the balance of power: between state and citizen; between country and country; between producer and consumer. And the power that they are denied: by the state, by the market, by the resistant or resisting audience, citizen, consumer. It is all about ownership and control: the who and the what and the how of it. . . . It is about the media’s power to create and sustain meanings; to persuade, endorse and reinforce. . . . We study the media because we are concerned about their power: we fear it, we decry it, we adore it. Roger Silverstone, Why Study the Media?1

One Market Under God, Thomas Frank’s relentless indictment of the popular gospel of free-market capitalism, opens with a pertinent example of what Frank describes more widely as “free-market faith” and the “rollback of ‘big government.’”2 The example is America’s 1996 Telecommunications Act. Drawing on the work of the influential media and communications political economist Robert McChesney, Frank notes how this piece of deregulatory legislation opened the way to a massive consolidation of corporate power in the US media in general and television industry in particular through the removal of certain longstanding media ownership restrictions, “simply giving away $70 billion worth of digital frequencies to existing broadcasters.”3 Envisioning Media Power, baldly stated, is concerned with the accumulation of capital in this same world—the world of television. The book examines multiple aspects of the processes through which participants in this world invest capital with a view, typically, to generating increased sums of capital. But my principal object of analysis is power—power’s configuration, 1

2

Introduction

exercise and effects within the television economy. And my starting point is the question that has long dominated the political economy tradition of mediated communications scholarship: namely, how and why, in Gerald Sussman’s words, “organized power prevails.”4 I begin with Frank, McChesney and the Telecommunications Act, then, because here we find, I would argue, a quintessential incarnation of the idea of the media industry’s “organized power.” Power, in the shape of the “existing broadcasters” signalled by Frank, is manifest; it is also monolithic; and it is undeniable. But the question I ask in this book is not how and why such power prevails. Instead, I take a step back to ask, among other things, how media power is organized in the first place; indeed, is it always so? I follow this particular line of enquiry in the belief that the very idea of organized power is a reification. It imbues this power with an agency without always giving it a form. Rather than presuming this power and charting its progress, therefore, I ask the following: where, in the media industry, is power concentrated; what politics, processes and representations are involved in its materialization; and how, exactly, is it exercised?5 In my attempt to answer these questions, I suggest that power is not always as organized as we would be led to believe. But more importantly, I argue that if we indeed want to understand how and why power prevails, we must focus not on its organization—its avowed coherence, singularity, and rigid equivalence with capital—so much as on its complex intertwining with two entities frequently marginalized by the political economy approach: knowledge and geography. The central thesis presented is that power, knowledge and geography are inseparable not only from one another,6 but, more pointedly, from the process of accumulation of media capital. To deepen our understanding of this process of accumulation, therefore, we need to ground television’s economy firmly, simultaneously and conjointly in all three. As such, what follows is situated explicitly as the type of “political economic analysis of mass media and culture” that Clayton Rosati has recently claimed to be “conspicuously absent in geography.”7 It is very much a geographical political economy, designed to elucidate, in Andrew Sayer’s words, “the difference that space makes.”8 Approaching television’s economy from the perspective of its underlying constellations of power, knowledge and geography allows me to make three central sets of claims, these broadly aligning with Parts I, II and III of the book respectively. The first concerns the role of knowledge in the making and management of industries, markets and companies, and is that knowledge geographies of various forms are constitutively implicated in the television economy and in the fabric of the power relations that cut across it. The second concerns the spatial organization of media capital. My argument is that economic outcomes in the world of television are fundamentally shaped by relations of power, and that both these relations

Introduction

3

of power and the television economy itself are not only arranged but also variously accommodated and contested in materially geographic ways. The third claim is that television’s place matters in a very concrete sense. Here, however, “place” does not mean merely where, on the map, television as a living industry—its assemblage of institutional actors—is located; the argument extends to the question of how programming itself materializes in place, and indeed how “place” materializes in programming. I have already hinted, but must emphasize, that in thinking and writing about the media and power, I am only tangentially concerned here with the power of the media, which is where much of the existing political-economic tradition has, understandably, been focused, and which is essentially the subject of the epigraph to this introduction. As Nick Couldry and James Curran have pointed out, we can conceptualize this power “of” the media in two different ways: firstly in terms of how other powerful forces (government, corporations, and so on) use the media “to wage their battles;” and, secondly, in terms of the “media combine” itself (its bundled institutions, people, practices and properties) as “one of society’s main forces in its own right.”9 The power of the media, as I say, has been widely researched and debated.10 Less frequently analyzed, it seems to me, are the two aspects of media power that I consider here. One is power in the media: where it is located, how it is distributed, how it is exercised. The other, perhaps less tangible, is the role of power relations in the very constitution and reproduction of what we understand today as the media. These arguments are developed and advanced in two main empirical settings: the UK and New Zealand. But the book is not a comprehensive study—”economic geography” would be my favoured label—of UK television and New Zealand television. For reasons that lie at the heart of the study, such a rigid spatial framing makes little a priori sense. The idea of national television economies may be seductive, but it is also highly problematic. Such coherent objects—discrete, bounded and readily discernible—are not simply out there, comprising an innate geographical integrity that scholars can neatly re-present and interrogate. To the extent that they exist at all (and where they do, they are subject, as we will see, to all manner of disruptions), they are, rather, constructed, either by the governments, regulators and corporations that make an economy of the media, or by the cultural and economic commentators who seek to describe and understand that economy.11 To write an economic geography of “television UK” or “television New Zealand,” one would first have to envision and demarcate such an entity. This book is as much about the real-world powers and knowledges implicated in the constitution of such economic spaces, as it is about capturing the latter’s ongoing political-economic dynamics. As writers on the historical geographies of capitalism have made abundantly clear, the nation-state is not a natural space for the circulation of capital.12

4

Introduction

The title Envisioning Media Power, therefore, as well as overtly coupling the (audio)visual media to concepts of power, is intended to speak to two distinct but related themes. The first is the idea that power can be productive and constitutive, that domains of representability and controllability—“spaces,” for John Rajchman, “of constructed visibility”—need to be envisioned before they can be known and managed, and that the process of envisioning is always circumscribed by relations of power.13 The second theme concerns the headline objective of the book itself, which is to critically envision—or make visible—power (in its various forms) in the world of television. I also like and use the title for its proximity to Eric Wolf’s Envisioning Power, and Wolf’s powerful demonstration in that book that it is not possible to understand the production of culture unless one comes to terms with issues of power relations.14 In writing, however, about power, culture and economy, the book does not head in the same direction as the burgeoning cultural economy literature of the last decade, even if the subject of the book—television—is, precisely, a cultural economy. That literature has repeatedly demonstrated that all economies are culturally constituted; that the economic is always, inherently, cultural.15 While I do not dispute this, I am unconvinced by the merits of continuing to pursue this particular line of argument. I am minded, rather, to agree with Timothy Mitchell. “To rethink economy,” Mitchell writes, “we will not get far by posing questions about the relationship between economy and culture—as if . . . our task were to identify their changing relationship, the differing degrees of embeddedness, and so on.” His inference is that the interpenetration of economy and culture is a given, and that instead of probing this ‘relationship’ we can more productively interrogate power, culture and economy from a different angle. Mitchell’s proposed optic, then, is the one I favor. “The economy is better seen as a project, or a series of competing projects,” he says, “based upon new technologies of organization, measurement, calculation, and representation.”16 Such technologies, and their role in the envisioning of television economies, are found at the very heart of this book. But if the book seeks to render visible productive or constitutive power, it is also concerned to understand substantively the myriad socio-economic processes that make the idea of a discrete, national television sector—”television UK,” say—so problematic in the first place. What do such processes consist of? Ultimately, they consist of flows: flows of money, flows of commodities, flows of knowledge, and flows of people. If, for instance, we were to try to define “television New Zealand” by the nationality of its participants, how would we categorize NHNZ, a production company headquartered in Dunedin but owned by Fox Television (News Corp) of the US? Ascribing nationality on the basis of program geography, meanwhile, would be equally awkward, since most programs aired

Introduction

5

in New Zealand are imports, and many of the programs produced domestically—including most of those which originate at NHNZ—are produced explicitly for international audiences. Moreover, an increasing number of programs are co-produced out of two or more different territories. What, then, actually constitutes a New Zealand program, a local program? These questions and observations may seem trivial, but the implication remains an important one: New Zealand, and similarly the UK, does not have a national television economy as such, but is instead inscribed in a variety of ways in a proliferating array of multi-scalar (and sometimes global) constellations of media capital. Understanding the nature and terms of such inscriptions is a core element of this study. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the study’s main findings is that of all other countries, it is the US and its leading media corporations which feature most prominently in the international constellations of media capital in which television in New Zealand and television in the UK are, in turn, inscribed. I stress this final observation—before moving on to discuss my overall approach and the structure of the book as a whole—for good reason, which is that the book ends up, necessarily, being almost as much about the US as about those two other countries, even if it was not originally conceived as such (and it was not). My point here is merely that the US cannot be avoided. For the most part it (or, better, its corporate media) figures mainly as a supplier of television programming into markets such as New Zealand and the UK. Towards the end of the book, however, we have occasion to look more closely at television in America itself. The two pieces of the jigsaw ultimately fit together to demonstrate that even if McChesney and Frank’s envisioning of the US media as a form of organized power is an unhelpful abstraction, it nonetheless helpfully situates media power firmly in its principal place.

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE MEDIA “The particular economic nature of the cultural industries,” wrote Nicholas Garnham in 1987, “can be explained in terms of the general tendencies of commodity production within the capitalist mode of production as modified by the special characteristics of the cultural commodity.”17 This conviction lies at the heart of the current study, and, moreover, inspires it, as it does much of the wider literature on the political economy of mediated communications. The belief has two elements, each of which merits a degree of expansion in this introduction, as together they underpin much of what follows. The first element of Garnham’s assertion is that the most incisive and productive approach to analyzing the economics of television remains

6

Introduction

the application of broader critiques of capitalism as a mode of production—meaning classical political economy in general, and (for Garnham) Marxism in particular. Another influential writer from the same stable, Ronald Bettig, puts it like this: “the logic of the [cultural] commodity must be situated within the larger context of the logic of capital.”18 Thus, where this book tries to untangle the economic dynamics of accumulation in television, Marx is its primary, if often translated, resource: Marx on value, on the social relations of production, and on, most particularly, the circulation of capital. But Garnham’s second contention is equally important: namely, that it cannot be an unqualified Marx, for we must factor into our analysis “the special characteristics of the cultural commodity.” To Garnham’s qualification, which I flesh out below, I would, and will, add three more. First, however, I want to try to sketch briefly what such a “Marxist political economy of media” might actually look like in itself, or at least to identify its key components. Key components of the approach Peter Golding and Graham Murdock have usefully identified some of the most important distinguishing features of a critical political economic approach to the media.19 First, they argue, such an approach considers both the symbolic and economic dimensions of the media, showing “how different ways of financing and organizing cultural production have traceable consequences for the range of discourses and representations in the public domain and for audiences’ access to them.” Interested, thus, in “the interplay between economic organization and political, cultural and social life,” this approach, for Golding and Murdock, is markedly different from mainstream (or neoclassical) economic perspectives on the media, which tend to see the (media) economy as a separate domain. Moreover, the economic focus of the political economy approach is less on resource allocation, exchange in the market and models of supply and demand (the emphases of mainstream economics) than—after Marx—on the organization of property and production. And finally, it is emphasized by this approach that attention needs to be paid to the state, which has so often assumed a central role in managing communicative activity in capitalist societies, but which rarely figures centrally in economists’ models.20 What will likely strike readers about this summary picture is that we are describing a political economic approach here largely in terms of how it differs from a mainstream economics approach. This is important. These differences recur at various points throughout the book, and I deal in more detail with the nature and extent of such differences in each of those respective contexts. That said, however, my own view is that in some areas there is significantly more common ground between political economists’ and

Introduction

7

mainstream economists’ approaches than either of those camps ordinarily allows; I do not, for instance, agree with the political economists’ claim that neoclassical economics is particularly unsuited to a consideration of the media industries.21 Thus, while this book is aligned more closely with one camp (political economy), it does not entirely discount the insights of the other; if at points it seeks to make fairly robust criticisms of mainstream economic media analysis (most notably in chapter 6), at others it consciously draws on the contributions that have been made in this area.22 One final point merits emphasis before moving on. Golding and Murdock warn that in trying to understand some of the complex relationships between economic dynamics and “cultural expression,” political economists risk being ensnared by two common traps. I have tried to avoid both of these in this book. The first is instrumentalism, or the assumption that capitalists ensure flows of public information are always consonant with their class interests; this is mistaken, say Golding and Murdock, because capitalists cannot always do as they wish, but rather are impacted by structural constraints. The second trap is structuralism, which is to assume that structures are solid, permanent and immovable constraints on action; this, too, is mistaken, because structures are in fact “dynamic formations constantly reproduced and altered through practical action.”23 Qualifications For Garnham, as we have seen, a generic political economic approach needs to be customized to the media or cultural industries in view of “the special characteristics of the cultural commodity.” In the next section (“Cultural Commodities and the Distribution of Power”), I investigate what Garnham means by this qualifier, and what its implications are. Before doing so, I want to introduce, here, three other qualifications. The first of these is that the current study is focused on accumulation in and across space—and on, moreover, the spatial constitution of processes of accumulation. Yet as a generation of Marxist geographers has shown, Marx himself did not discuss the geographies of capitalist political economy in any great depth. As such, this book draws not only on Marx, but more directly on the achievements of Marxist geographers, most notably David Harvey, in giving Marx’s critique of capitalism greater geographical resonance and purchase. Second, this book also investigates an area of the economy in which public-sector enterprises have frequently played a critical role. How relevant is the critique of capitalism, one must ask, to institutions and economies not avowedly structured around profit maximization? I address this question only very obliquely in the current study, mainly because it is largely now immaterial in the UK and New Zealand contexts. All four of the UK’s

8

Introduction

analogue terrestrial broadcasters have public service obligations, but in two cases (ITV and Channel Five) these are minimal and the broadcaster is (or is owned by) a listed company committed to growing shareholder value; and in a third case, while the broadcaster in question (Channel 4) is state owned, it is commercially funded (mainly through advertising) and is hence beholden to the market. Only the BBC is, in principle at least, a true non-commercial broadcaster. And yet this entire organization has been demonstrably corporatized in recent decades.24 It has, too, an explicitly commercial arm (BBC Worldwide) generating annual revenues of nearly £1bn. As for New Zealand, only the very small Mäori Television can currently be considered a genuine not-for-profit broadcaster—it alone combines public service obligations, state ownership and majority public funding; the main state-owned broadcaster (TVNZ), by contrast, derives over 90 percent of its revenue from commercial sources (again, primarily advertising). In both New Zealand and the UK, in other words, mass-consumption television is today rooted in the marketplace. One could in fact make a convincing case that it has never really been rooted anywhere else, particularly, I suggest in chapter 2, in the case of New Zealand; but this book is not the place for that decidedly thorny argument. The third qualification picks up on my earlier, preliminary discussion around the nature of power. The qualification is necessary because this study seeks to demonstrate that power needs to be understood in different ways than that allowed by classical Marxism. Marx did not offer a theory of power as such, but his critique of capitalism was of course about power as much as it was about economics. For Marx, as Jeffrey Isaac has shown, power was essentially an inscribed capacity that was intrinsically linked to the social relations of production.25 Thus, the basis of power—and the source of an actor’s capacity to exercise such power—was the enduring social relationship of class.26 Power, therefore, in the Marxist tradition, is seen as a causal property and is aligned squarely with capital. This view of power permeates the critical political economy of mediated communications, where it is clearly evinced in the epithet of “organized power.” The argument in this study is not that this view of power is wrong. On the contrary, the study considers several moments or contexts within the world of television where such a perspective on power seems highly appropriate—where a descending analysis of power clearly helps to capture the primary structural dynamics of capital accumulation. The argument, rather, is twofold. It is, first, that such a view of power is not always appropriate; in many instances, most obviously in Part I of the book, it fails to illuminate the complex social, political and economic relations framing processes of accumulation, and we need to bring other concepts to bear. The second argument is that even where such a view of power does fit, it does not necessarily tell the whole story. Power may helpfully be conceived as a capacity

Introduction

9

(or pouvoir, in French), but this explains only why power is available to be exercised—because of the nature of capitalist relations of production—and not how. As Michel Foucault famously said of Marxist social and historical critique: “The way power was exercised—concretely and in detail—with its specificity, its techniques and tactics, was something that no one attempted to ascertain.”27 The study as a whole, then, draws centrally on Marx and the idea that power is inherently tied to capital; but it insists that power cannot always be reduced to capital, and that even where it can, we need a microanalysis of power (the French puissance) to complement Marx’s macroanalysis. My book does not, therefore, assume or advance a singular concept of power (or of its relation to knowledge and geography). It accepts and argues that power comes in many forms and is exercised in many ways. And while it does not remotely seek to synthesize the ideas of Marx on the one hand and (most pertinently) Foucault on the other,28 it does posit that the two are not necessarily incompatible, and that we should not be obliged to yoke ourselves to one theory alone. As Andrew Sayer has argued, “The notion of powers possessed by things as capacities . . . need not be at odds with conceptions of power as networked, as dependent on mobilization;” in fact the former may actually be “necessary for understanding how networked and immanent power works.”29 To the degree that it argues for such compatibility of conceptions of power, the study is inspired by—and perhaps bears some parallels to—scholarship in the social sciences that works selectively, carefully, unobtrusively and critically with both Marx and more contemporary social theory. The thinking and writing of Timothy Mitchell is, for me, a model in this regard, and features at more than one juncture in what follows. The last qualification in regard to examining television through the lens of Marxist political economy is the one raised by Garnham: namely, that while framing and analyzing the television economy as, essentially, a capitalist economy, we must accept that cultural commodities have special characteristics and that we need to customize our analysis accordingly. Eileen Meehan has made much the same case, stating that “while we recognize that economics set the parameters, we must also recognize that television is a very peculiar sort of industry.”30 I now turn to this peculiarity.

CULTURAL COMMODITIES AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF POWER In writing of cultural commodities, Garnham means commodities (capitalist products) whose defining feature is their symbolic meaning rather than their utility value. One could argue endlessly (and scholars have) about

10

Introduction

what products the moniker “cultural” should and should not include, but for the purposes of this study such a debate is immaterial—television programs are invariably included. What is it, then, about cultural commodities such as television programs that makes them different, in degree if not entirely in kind, from other commodities? When political economists (and indeed, mainstream economists) tackle this question, the answer they give usually refers to the concept of “public goods.” We therefore need to clarify this concept at the outset of the current study. Pure public goods have two unusual attributes: they are both nonrival in consumption and nonexcludable. Nonrivalry means simply that consumption by one person does not limit or detract from consumption by another person. Compare a film, for instance, with an apple or a pair of jeans. If I watch a film, it does not prevent others from doing so; if I eat an apple or wear a pair of jeans, it does. Nonexcludability, meanwhile, means that it is either impossible or impractical to exclude people from consuming. Thus the signals emitted by a lighthouse (in perhaps the most famous example of a public good) are both nonrival and nonexcludable: one ship’s consumption activity does not limit or prohibit another’s, and it is impossible to withhold the benefits of such signals from specific ships. Television programs are generally regarded as public goods, but we should be aware that some are a good deal more public than others. Freeto-air, unencrypted, terrestrial broadcasts are classic public goods as they are both nonrival and nonexcludable—the same program can be viewed by one or one million people, and nobody (within coverage) can be excluded from watching. Programs distributed by satellite or cable, by contrast, are nonrival but are frequently excludable: encrypted broadcasts can only be picked up by those with the correct reception equipment and conditional access technology (the latter often predicated on a periodic subscription payment). Thus, all television programs are public goods in the sense of nonrivalry, but only some are nonexcludable. As we will see, the geographical economics of the world of television are fundamentally shaped by the fact that television’s most obvious commodity—the program—is, to one extent or another, a public good. This public good status has several consequences that surface repeatedly in the current study: not least, pronounced economies of scale in distribution and a pressure on industry participants to pursue strategies that generate economic scarcity by circumscribing product access. But the concept of public goods is foregrounded here specifically in view of its implications for my politicaleconomic approach to processes of capital accumulation. These particular implications concern the structure of the industries that produce and distribute television programs. Because television programs are public goods, it has been argued (including, though not only, by Garnham himself) that the primary locus of power in the world of television resides

Introduction

11

not in production but in distribution, since it is here, and only here, that scarcity can be generated and economies of scale can be realized. I directly consider this proposition in chapter 5. At the present juncture, the critical observation is this: that integral to the world of television is the matter of the vertical distribution of power—the nature and balance, that is, of the relations of power between entities differentially positioned in the value chain, from concept development and content production, through processing and packaging, to final, consumer-facing distribution. These relations of power constitute, in my study, a far more central theme than they might do in a political economic analysis of another economic world. Indeed, Garnham, in contemplating the implications of the cultural industries’ specificity for a Marxist reading, has recently gone so far as to claim that in these industries, labor is exploited “not, as in the classic Marxist analysis of surplus value, through the wage bargain, but through contracts determining the distribution of profits to various rights holders negotiated between parties with highly unequal power.”31 If we want to understand the creation and capture of surplus value in the world of television, Garnham appears to be saying, we should focus not on the capital-labor wage relation, but on the contracts that structure relations, effectively, between capitals—between those who have claims on such surplus value, whose relative power can be described in reference to their vertical distribution. My own somewhat protracted response to this proposition is both no and yes. At the heart of the division of labor in the cultural industries, as Mike Wayne reiterates, is the distinction between intellectual or creative labor and more manual or technical labor.32 Garnham, it strikes me, is talking about the former and about the potential for such (privileged) labor to capture surplus value through retaining and exploiting the intellectual property rights attached to its products. As it happens, it has been persuasively argued that even in the case of this intellectual minority, the capture of surplus typically remains a pipe dream: only a small number of creative laborers, says Bernard Miège, “are in a position to claim a part of the surplus value produced. For the majority of artists this autonomy is a pure façade: it allows them to be paid at a rate markedly lower than the value of their labor power.”33 This assertion remains as relevant today as it was when Miège offered it (1989). It is for instance in precisely these terms, it strikes me, that we should understand the November 2007 decision of the television and film Writers Guild of America (WGA) to go on strike.34 The guild’s primary beef with the studios (film) and broadcast networks (television)—these respective entities typically owned, we should note (and will see in chapter 4), by the same corporations, and represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP)—was the share of residuals (royalties) that the latter would pay out on home video and new media exploitation.35 The issue was explicitly value and the contracts drawn up to determine its ap-

12

Introduction

portionment or capture. As the writers chanted on the picket lines: “Who’s got more money than they can count? Paramount.”36 But more importantly in the present context, we must not forget that the creation of surplus value is surely predicated in any event on all labor; and for manual and technical labor (if not most intellectual laborers, too, Miège suggests), the wage bargain remains central. At the same time as the WGA was fronting up to the AMPTP over royalty levels for writers, a considerably lower-profile dispute, also in the US, was unfolding between ABC (Disney’s broadcast network) and the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians (NABET).37 Engineers, publicists, desk assistants, plant maintenance workers and traffic coordinators may not capture the public attention in the same way as script writers, but they, too, were fighting for an improved deal, NABET arguing that ABC’s decision to reconfigure the extant seniority system amounted to a means of getting rid of higher-paid, more senior workers in favor of younger, lower-paid ones.38 Moreover, in the wings of the WGA-AMPTP stand-off was the Teamsters union, whose leaders advised the 4,000-strong membership of Hollywood drivers, location managers, scouts and others yoked to the wage bargain to honor WGA picket lines.39 And finally, lest we forget, big media capital has always been just as partial to good old-fashioned labor rationalization strategies as industrial capital more widely; NBC Universal acquired the US cable television channel operator Oxygen Media for $925m in November 2007, for instance, and then proceeded to lay off 25-percent of its employees just two weeks later.40 Returning to Garnham’s thesis concerning the modus of exploitation of labor in the cultural industries, then, my no is simply an insistence that wage relations are far from immaterial and thus cannot be ignored. Nevertheless (and hence the yes), Garnham’s statement is extremely pertinent—and largely accurate—if one is concerned primarily with the capture of surplus value. Understanding who realizes this value, and why, demands precisely an understanding of the distribution of power along the value chain, and of the ways in which such power relations are enshrined in economic relations (such as contracts). This recognition brings me directly to the last observation of this section, which is that the capture of surplus value is, indeed, the primary focus of the current study. It does not center on the exploitation of labor underlying the creation of surplus in the world of television. It centers on the power relations framing both the distribution of such surplus and the regulation of the sites at which it is extracted. Its emphasis is capital, not labor; and circulation rather than production. And in examining the relationships between parties in different vertical places, it adds an explicitly spatial dimension to this picture—how, it asks, are these vertical relations of power structured, experienced and negotiated geographically as one moves between the US, the UK, and New Zealand?

Introduction

13

VALUE, PRICE AND PROFIT Value, price and profit: each of these words features in the preliminary discussion above, frequently (as, for instance, with “value”) with notable qualifiers or descriptors attached (“surplus,” “utility,” “shareholder,” and so on). But these, we must accept, are complex, elusive words, perhaps especially so when one is dealing with a tradition of Marxian political economy. Thus George Henderson describes “value,” in this particular tradition, as a “many-headed hydra,” and proceeds to identify (at least) eight different iterations or variations on the concept.41 Given the centrality of the lexicon of value, price and profit to everyday life in a modern capitalist society, it is inevitable that these words are sometimes used loosely and perhaps even unreflexively by social scientists. No doubt, in what follows, there are places where I do the same; this can hardly be avoided. I do try, nonetheless, to be as deliberate as possible about the terminology I use and the meanings I intend to confer thereby, and as such I believe it is a valuable exercise to reflect briefly and explicitly on such meanings at the outset. As already indicated, the production of what Marx labels value and surplus value is not the focus of this book; I deal more with their capture, or distribution. Even so, if one relies, as I do, on these concepts, one must attempt to offer at least a high-level enumeration of them. Again, I have already gestured in this direction, insisting in the previous section that we cannot ignore cultural capitalism’s wage bargain, and the grounding of economic value in labor. In my account, then, as in most if not all other political economies of the media, the value of commodities is seen to be generated and determined by “the labour time required to produce them.”42 And where workers produce more value than is attached by capital to their own labor power, they can be said to contribute to the generation of surplus value; this particular surplus is, effectively, the unpaid part of the working day. But from this starting point, Marx went on to make two critical distinctions that are at least as important in my account as the question of the measure of value or of the source of surplus. These were to distinguish value from price, and surplus value from profit.43 The importance of these distinctions resides in the fact that while my argument is rooted in Marxian political economy (and hence the concepts of value and surplus value), I also deal directly and extensively with issues of price and profitability. But where do these respective differences lie? Let us take value and price first, for the line that Marx draws between them is particularly clear—and, to my mind, tremendously important—in the television industry.44 If, for Marx, the value of a sellable television program would be determined by the cumulative labor time required to produce it, would we in turn expect that program’s price, denominated in labor-time money, to equal its value? No is the unequivocal answer, and this

14

Introduction

is because the “value of commodities as determined by labour time is only their average value.”45 What is Marx getting at here? What he is saying is that market value—or price—will rarely, if ever, match underlying value. Consider the case of a bundle of television programs being sold by production companies to broadcasters. Marx would say that the average value of, say, a hundred such programs would amount to the average labor time invested in them. But the programs’ respective market values will likely vary widely—some will perhaps sell for millions of dollars, while others will remain unsold and hence value-less. How can one place any credence in Marx’s labor theory of value, it is often asked, in the cultural industries, when those industries throw up commodities such as the film The Blair Witch Project, which cost a pittance to make but which has grossed approximately a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office worldwide?46 Was the labor invested in this film really worth anything like $250m, even if one allows for a substantial chunk of surplus? Clearly not. But the point, says Marx, is to assess labor-based value as an average, and when one does that the cultural industries’ anomalies can be seen to balance out: for every Blair Witch there are dozens of abject commercial failures, each also bearing significant levels of invested labor time. (Forty-six new television shows were on the block at the annual LA Screenings for international buyers in 2006; 85 percent of them failed.47) In fact, scholars such as Garnham have argued that the extreme unpredictability of an individual cultural commodity’s market value is one of the defining features of the cultural industries.48 Price, therefore, is merely the value that the market places on a product, and on an individual basis this price will likely bear no relation to value as defined by Marx. “The market value is always different,” says Marx, “is always below or above [the] average value of a commodity.” But over the long run, or across a large portfolio of comparable products (such as television programs), price will converge on value. The two are related. Marx makes this crystal clear in the observation that value, while something of an “external abstraction,” is nevertheless “the driving force and the moving principle of the oscillations which commodity prices run through during a given epoch.” Or: “Market value equates itself with real value by means of its constant oscillations.” In short, we can best think of value and price as, respectively, “the average price and the prices of which it is the average.”49 Marx’s analysis may ultimately lack an adequate way of mathematically transforming values into prices, but a theory of price determination is not what I am after here, and what the theory of value does do, as Robert Albritton argues, is “map out the structure of socio-economic relations that provide the conditions of possibility for a system of prices.”50 This, therefore, is the understanding I attempt to mobilize in this book. I am certainly interested, for instance in chapter 6, in the prices for which

Introduction

15

individual programs change hands; but I am also interested in the average price or revenue potential of television programming, and the structural drivers thereof in particular markets and particular time periods, and this is what I typically mean when invoking the concept of “value,” its creation, and its capture. What, secondly, of surplus value and profit? Profit is certainly the more familiar concept of the two, which is one of the reasons I favor it in this book. Another reason is profit’s tangibility: it is, of course, a well-known and readily calculable accounting measure, representing the excess of revenues over costs or, in Marx’s words, “the excess of the price of the product over the price of the production costs.”51 But if we place any stock in the labor theory of value, it is critical to recognize that all profit derives, for Marx, from surplus value.52 The exploitation of labor thus underpins the generation of profit. As to their exact analytical relation, we can be relatively brief since surplus value does not feature in this book as a quantified phenomenon. Perhaps the simplest way to conceptualize the pairing is in terms of absolutes and relatives. Profit is a relative or relational concept: surplus value expressed as a proportion of the total value of the presupposed (invested) capital.53 Surplus value, meanwhile, is an absolute: profit articulated “not as a proportion but rather as a simple magnitude of value without connection with any other.”54 Where profit and profitability surface in this book, they should be read not just for what they are but also very much as siblings of their absolute, if often unmentioned, twin.

WINDOWS ON THE WORLD OF TELEVISION The Marxian idea of the circulation of capital is central to this study. By “circulation,” Marx meant the repeated transformations of money into commodities and vice versa, and the routing of these transformations through wage-labor-based production. In a subsequent chapter (chapter 7), I tackle capital circulation in international television head-on. Here, however, I want to take the idea in another direction, signalled specifically by Marx’s “disaggregation” of capital’s circulation into three interlinked circuits or sequences of the overall process. These are the circuit of money capital, starting and ending with capital in money form; the circuit of commodity capital, starting and ending with capital in commodity form; and the circuit of productive capital, starting and ending in the productive function itself. Why look at three circuits when, ultimately, all are part of a larger, unified process of circulation; indeed, when each is simply an alternate window on that single, larger process? Precisely because, as David Harvey says, “we see something different” through each of these windows.55

16

Introduction

For money, commodities and production, read—indirectly, and purely relationally—power, knowledge and geography. For these three, this study contends, underpin, frame and shape all aspects of the accumulation of capital in the world of television. But like Marx’s circuits of money, commodity and productive capital, power, knowledge and geography are not discrete, separable entities; they inhere, rather, in one another, and cannot be conceived in isolation from one another. Nevertheless, in studying their interpenetration in respect of the media economy, I argue that we can usefully disaggregate power, knowledge and geography in exactly the way that Marx disaggregates capital circuits. This is not, I emphasize, a matter of carving them off from one another. It is simply a matter of seeing each one as a unique window on a larger, integrated whole; a matter of rotating our conceptual lens to achieve a different, complementary perspective on our larger, unified subject. When Marx thinks and writes about money capital, he does not discard commodities and production; he merely gives his analysis a different inflection, or an adjusted focus, in order to enrich his understanding of capital in toto. This, then, is the way the current study proceeds. It examines the accumulation of media capital through three separate—but inseparable—lenses. The first lens is the lens of knowledge. Knowing the television economy Part I of the book is a study in knowledge, power and geography. Its central thread develops essentially as follows. The production and circulation of knowledge lies at the heart of the production and reproduction of the television economy. We can demonstrate this in several regards—in the way such an economy is defined; in the terms in which it is debated; in the strategies employed to govern and regulate it. In all such regards, knowledge is implicated in the production and reproduction of the economy specifically through its coupling with relations of power. Such knowledge, moreover, has a range of geographies: it travels across space; it varies between places; it mobilizes geographical images and assumptions; and it harnesses the power of the geographical imagination. By focusing, first, on knowledge, we can begin therefore to piece together its wider imbrication with relations of power and geography in the economic world of television. Given that I have deliberately pitched my overall account as a political economy, albeit an expressly geographical one and one attuned to other theoretical insights, the content and direction of Part I may come as something of a surprise to some readers. For it is not, nor even close to being, political economy as typically understood. Political economy insists on examining the material interests, actions and value implications of institutions and other economic agents. In chapters 1 through 3, this world of economic materiality is present, and certainly relevant, but not at the forefront of the analysis,

Introduction

17

which focuses instead on knowledge in various forms: policies, debates, discourses, representations, even rhetoric. My belief is that a political economy approach asks for the integration of these two types of analysis—of analysis of representational devices and claims on the one hand, and of the production and distribution of economic value on the other. But this integration does not occur in Part I. Rather, the book as a whole is an attempted exercise in such integration, and to the extent that it offers up classic political economy, it does so in Part III and, in particular, in Part II. The analysis in Part I begins in chapter 1 in the UK, where television has, over the course of the past two decades, gone from being considered a cultural to a creative industry. This chapter asks not so much why the language was changed (an issue others have amply discussed), but why the Labour government that came to power in 1997 set such store by measuring the creative industries’ economic contribution. More pointedly, it ponders the fact that the measurement exercise—a very high-profile one—was presented explicitly as a “mapping.” What is it about geographical knowledges in general, and cartographic knowledges in particular, that makes them so central to the envisioning of economies? The chapter makes two main arguments. First, it suggests that invoking the language of mapping called on popular understandings of cartography—its objectivity, its rigor, its detachment—to invoke truth claims in a way that has been shown to be typical of the workings of power in modern Western societies. Second, it argues that the mapping of the creative industries can be seen as a process of enframing that effectively ordered those industries up and made them available to enlarged and enhanced powers of discipline. This observation opens the way in the latter part of the chapter for a more specific focus on television, since the most obvious and important example of this intensification of regulatory powers came with Labour’s establishment in 2003 of a new media and communications super-regulator, Ofcom. The nature of the powers now assembled around the television economy is explored in detail. Chapter 2 shifts the focus to New Zealand—to a very different television economy and, it is shown, to a very different set of knowledge geographies. New Zealand, like many other countries, is home to considerable debate about the right and wrong models for its leading broadcasters. Much of this debate swirls around TVNZ, which, as mentioned earlier, is state owned but largely commercially funded. Many commentators in New Zealand have argued (and continue to argue) for TVNZ to be a true public broadcaster, fully funded out of the public purse and hence freed from commercials (and commercialism). Chapter 2 traces the terms of that debate. It does so because the rebuttal to the public broadcaster position invariably mobilizes an explicitly geographical imaginary: the notion that New Zealand is, in this respect, underpopulated, simply too small to support such a broadcaster. The chapter argues that like other popular geographical imaginations (includ-

18

Introduction

ing overpopulation), this one assumes its power and influence by virtue of its simplicity. Yet it is a misleading imagery—based, it is shown, on an erroneous understanding of the geographical economics of television. As such, this chapter demonstrates not only the embedding of geographical knowledges in grids of power, but also some of the key spatial dimensions of television economics, which underpin in turn much of the succeeding analysis. Chapter 3, the last in Part I, moves back and forth between New Zealand and the UK, analyzing knowledges generated in each one and, in some cases, traveling between them. Its specific interest is in the derivation and flow of governance theories and policies—the places in which such knowledges take shape, the degree to which one place adopts knowledges derived from another, and the ways in which such knowledges are reformulated if and when they travel. The field of governance in question is governance of the broadcast television economy, which has undergone significant changes in recent years in both territories. The chapter contains two main arguments. The first is that, contrary to the popular imagery of globalization, governance theory and policy does not always travel: often it is domestically formulated, even in territories (such as New Zealand) typically considered peripheral in the global economy. The second argument is that in instances where policy does flow internationally, its geographical sources and routes, and the forms in which it is reproduced, are subject to a high degree of circumscription by relatively small networks of political and economic actors; and that these networks are framed by historical geographies that clearly reflect entrenched relations of power. Capitalizing and circulating power The lens of power is the main window of analysis in Part II; this section of the book consistently emphasizes the power in power, knowledge and geography. Chapter 4 picks up directly on the earlier discussion of public goods and the core characteristics of cultural commodities, and considers television’s economy explicitly at the global scale. It argues that historically, the television industry has adopted a series of strategies to limit access to programming in order to generate the scarcity value that public goods ordinarily lack. Realizing scarcity has been central to the leading (US) distributors’ imperative of retaining and exercising their economic power. Strategies to produce scarcity, I show, have centred on the carving up of the world into controllable, bounded economic spaces, typically coterminous with the nation-state—spaces such as the UK and New Zealand, in other words. The chapter describes such spatial segmentation, and the windowing practices that buttress it, as a “spatial fix” to the fundamental contradictions of media capital. It concludes by considering some of the key, ongoing challenges to

Introduction

19

that spatial fix (and hence to US studio power), which inhere mainly in new distribution technologies. In chapter 5, I argue that in considering relations of media power transnationally, we must at the same time ground that wider analysis in an understanding of power in local worlds; of power in place. Here, I look at power structures in UK and New Zealand television. My hook is the argument, introduced above, that those who control the distribution of media content, and not the original production of that content, are typically the industry’s main power brokers. The question I ask in this chapter is therefore a simple one: in the UK and New Zealand television sectors, is this generalization correct? My answer, in short, is in the affirmative, but that short answer hides a great many critical complexities that are elucidated in the course of arriving at it. Chapter 6 focuses on international trade in television programming, looking mainly, though not exclusively, at trade into the UK and New Zealand markets. (Trade in the other direction is considered only briefly, before being taken up more fully in Part III and in the Coda to the book.) Following media economists, I argue that program pricing is a key metric in helping us understand relations of power between exporters and importers in different territories. However, I also insist, against the grain of media economics, that price is only one manifestation of power, and that if we limit our analysis of power relations to the terrain of price, we inevitably end up with a partial and potentially misleading account of power’s disposition. This, I suggest, is particularly clear in the case of international television trade, where until recently the US studios that continue to dominate such trade actually enjoyed relatively little power specifically in pricing terms. Chapter 7 progresses the themes of circulation and internationalization of television, but it roots the concept of circulation firmly in Marxist political economy. It argues that in the world of television, it is not only the circuit of commodity capital that has been internationalized (although this was certainly the first to do so). The circuits of money capital and, latterly, productive capital, have also become progressively more global, if to lesser extents. This is demonstrated first in relation to New Zealand and UK television in general. The argument is then fleshed out in the context of one particular program, co-produced and co-financed out of the US and the UK. This example is pursued in order to take the discussion of power in two different directions. First, it is taken back to the issue of relations of power between countries, using the geographical political economy of this program to reflect further on the findings of chapter 6. Second, the matter of power is taken forward and inward—namely, into the UK and its internal television economy. To this end, the chapter repeatedly returns to the consumption of this individual program by one (hypothetical) UK viewer. It does so both to frame and situate its argument—which amounts to a ge-

20

Introduction

nealogy of an historically and geographically specific moment in the capital accumulation process—and to keep the issue of power relations (and the individual’s implication in such power relations) front and center. Chapter 8, the last in Part II, follows up where chapter 7 leaves off, with the individual viewer and the nature of power relations in the world of contemporary television. It has become a powerful tenet that television serves merely as a mirror on our society—that the television we consume is the television we want because broadcasters are ultimately beholden to, and respond to, consumer demand. The viewer, then, has power. This chapter unpacks such a view in the UK context, showing in the first place that programming decisions are only partly linked to audience demand metrics. More pointedly, it demonstrates that the degree to which audience demand is material depends heavily on the identity of said audience. In short, and largely in view of the advertising economy that underpins most contemporary television broadcasting, certain UK consumers are considered far more valuable—and hence have significantly more power—than others. To the extent that such power exists, moreover, it is realized only through the production of quantitative knowledge of audiences by a research entity that is itself deeply embedded in the networks of UK media power, and using methods that unsettle any comprehensive notion of mirroring. Again, therefore, power in the television world is seen to be intimately tied to the production and codification of knowledge. From space to place In Part III, geography takes center stage, but never in isolation from issues of power and knowledge. Geography is understood and approached here from several related vantage points: geography, perhaps most familiarly, simply as location on a political, economic and cultural map (where, in my chosen example, and in both absolute and relative terms, the television industry’s leading institutions are based); geography as material local context (the place-bound conditions in and through which, for instance, television programs are shot, edited, and distributed); and geography as content (how place itself appears within—but also occasionally disappears from—the programming we consume). In all three cases, we are concerned now less with geography as space, which was the primary incarnation of geography in Part II of the book, than with geography as place. The first of these three versions of place (location) is the focus of chapter 9. This chapter is framed against the main extant economic-geographical literature on the media, which emphasizes the tendency for media industry activities to cluster together in powerful local agglomerations, of which Hollywood is the archetypal example. I aim to make a modest contribution to that debate, demonstrating simply that the relentless agglomerative logic

Introduction

21

of capital does not always win out. There are numerous examples of this (and the chapter cites instances from both the UK and New Zealand), but I focus on one in particular: the BBC’s decision to move some of its core operating activities to the northwest of England in 2011. The chapter develops a critique not so much of the plan to move, but of the specific proposals for that move (which, it is argued, reproduce an entrenched neoliberal urban development agenda) and of the economic-geographical claims assembled around them (specifically the premise that the move will create regional economic value more broadly). At the heart of the chapter is the argument that the BBC’s proposals, while locally situated, are demonstrably rooted in the exercise of national political power. Chapter 10 shifts the focus from the location of the television industry’s institutional power to its sites of content origination and dissemination. (There is frequently, of course, a degree of overlap between the two.) The chapter insists not only that we can learn a great deal about programming by exploring the material context of the places, from field to screen, where it progressively materializes; it claims, more specifically, that the economic geographies of program production and distribution are particularly important. It makes this case through a consideration of the natural history genre, and of two of the world’s largest non-US producers of such programming in NHNZ (previously Natural History New Zealand) and the BBC’s Natural History Unit. It argues, first, that the televized natures generated by these entities can be productively understood and interpreted in the context of the three linked economic geographies in and through which they are created: sites of capture, spaces of production, and networks of distribution. Second, it demonstrates that these geographies are in many respects geographies of empire, variously constituted and constrained by the residual inscriptions of the formal British Empire, and by the power relations of the contemporary global empire of the US media. The final substantive chapter of the book (chapter 11) is concerned with place in programming, and with the politics and economics of its etchings and (sometimes) erasures. The chapter first considers programming in which the place of origin is explicit. In this regard, it questions the recent drive within both New Zealand and, especially, the UK, to increase exports of such programming. These initiatives (their rationale, their articulation, their substance, and their eventual degree of success) say a great deal, the chapter claims, about the ways in which geography is embedded in programming, and why this embedding matters both culturally and economically. The chapter then addresses exports of programming where the place of origin is effectively hidden. Such erasure, in recent years, has been most notable in the development and trade of so-called formats—program skeletons with a fixed structure and shape, but which allow each individual purchaser to add local meat to those bare bones. Export patterns and performances have been markedly different

22

Introduction

in the format business than in the finished program business, and I argue that the differential inscription of place has been integral to this variance. Before closing with some brief summary remarks, the book includes what I have called a “coda.” This is not a conclusion as such. But nor is it merely another chapter along the same lines as those that precede it, for where those chapters consider the critical US market, it is typically in terms of the influence of US media institutions in the UK and New Zealand. The coda explicitly reverses this geographical relationship: its focus is the US market itself, and the impact there of, in particular, UK television companies. Hence the subtitle: “Into the Home of Media Power.” I return here to the theme of global relations of power in the world of television, while remaining, as in Chapter 2, with the empirics of format trade. Analyzing the economics of trade in US-bound formats, especially formats emanating from the UK, I suggest that these economics strongly reinforce arguments developed in the course of the book concerning the continuing American grip on global media power.

NOTES 1. R. Silverstone, Why study the media? Sage, London, 1999, p. 143. 2. T. Frank, One market under God: Extreme capitalism, market populism, and the end of economic democracy, Doubleday, New York, 2000, pp. ix–x. 3. Ibid., p. x. See R. McChesney, Rich media, poor democracy, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1999. 4. G. Sussman, “Special Issue on the Political Economy of Communication,” Journal of Media Economics, 12, 1999, 85–89, at p. 85. 5. As Sussman observes, political economists have of course directly considered the question of “the constitution of [media] power” (“Special Issue,” p. 86); but they have done so, it seems to me, without seriously contesting either the applicability of the sobriquet of “organized power,” or, more importantly, the terms of debate and parameters of critical inquiry that an investment in that sobriquet—whether affirmatory or dissenting—allows. It is the second of these two limitations that I particularly seek to pressurize and move beyond in this book. 6. D. Gregory, Power, knowledge and geography: An introduction to geographic thought and practice, Blackwell, Oxford, forthcoming. 7. C. Rosati, “MTV: 360° of the industrial production of culture,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32, 2007, 556–75, at p. 556. I actually think Rosati is not quite right here—Clive Barnett’s Culture and Democracy: Media, Space and Representation (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2003), is an excellent example of precisely the type of analysis that Rosati claims is absent from geography, and much of Neil Coe’s work on the television industry arguably falls into the same category. I also think Rosati is wrong when he argues that political economists of the mass media have “all but” ignored “space and geography” (p. 562), even if he is right that their analyses have often been largely time-centric. To claim that space and geography have been ignored overlooks the hugely influential, spatially grounded work of, among others (but perhaps most notably), Harold Innis, Marshall McLu-

Introduction

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han, John Thompson and Vincent Mosco (and indeed, none of these is cited by Rosati). On Innis, see especially J. Carey, “Space, Time and Communications: A tribute to Harold Innis,” in his Communications as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Routledge, New York, 1988, 142–72); and on McLuhan, see R. Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2002. Thompson and Mosco’s most explicitly geographical pieces are, respectively: J. Thompson, “The reordering of space and time,” in his Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995, 31–37); and V. Mosco, “Spatialization,” in his The Political Economy of Communication: Rethinking and Renewal (Sage, London, 1996). (Rosati, incidentally, repeats many of the same arguments for a geographical political economy of media in his “Media geographies: Uncovering the spatial politics of images,” Geography Compass, 1, 2007, 995–1014.) 8. A. Sayer, “The difference that space makes,” in D. Gregory and J. Urry (eds.), Social relations and spatial structures (Macmillan, London, 1985, 49–67). 9. N. Couldry and J. Curran, “The paradox of media power,” in their Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World (Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2003, 3–15), at pp. 3–4 (original emphasis). 10. See especially early generalist works such as H. Schiller, Who Knows: Information in the Age of the Fortune 500, Ablex, Norwood, NJ, 1981, and D. Smythe, Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness and Canada, Ablex, Norwood, NJ, 1981; this genre of generalist work has been revived in recent years by the likes of R. Bettig and J. Hall, Big Media, Big Money: Cultural Texts and Political Economics, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2002; J. Curran, Media and Power, Routledge, London, 2002; and A. Calabrese and C. Sparks (eds.), Toward a Political Economy of Culture: Capitalism and Communication in the Twenty-First Century, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2003. There have also been excellent studies of “media power” in specific media sectors, most notably broadcasting (e.g. D. Kellner, Television and the Crisis of Democracy, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1990) and print media (e.g. E. Herman and N. Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon, New York, 1988). 11. C.f. in a very different context, but for a not dissimilar argument, the excellent M. Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2004. 12. See especially R. Bryan, “The state and the internationalization of capital: An approach to analysis,” Journal of Contemporary Asia, 17, 1987, 253–75; N. Brenner, “Between fixity and motion: Accumulation, territorial organization and the historical geography of spatial scales,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 16, 1998, 459–81; R. Fagan and R. Le Heron, “Reinterpreting the geography of accumulation: The global shift and local restructuring,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 16, 1994, 265–85. 13. J. Rajchman, “Foucault’s Art of Seeing,” October, 44, 1988, 88–117, at pp. 102–13. 14. E. Wolf, Envisioning power: Ideologies of dominance and crisis, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999. 15. See especially, within human geography, P. Crang, “Cultural turns and the (re)constitution of economic geography,” in R. Lee and J. Wills (eds.), Geographies of economies (Arnold, London, 1997, 3–15); T. Barnes, “Retheorising economic geogra-

24

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phy: From the quantitative revolution to the ‘cultural turn,’” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92, 2001, 546–65; and A. Amin and N. Thrift (eds.), The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader, Blackwell, Oxford, 2003. 16. T. Mitchell, “Rethinking economy,” Geoforum, 39, 2008, 1116–21, at p. 1121. See also in this regard Mitchell’s “Culture and Economy,” in T. Bennett and J. Frow (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis (Sage, London, 2008). 17. N. Garnham, “Concepts of culture: Public Policy and the Cultural Industries,” Cultural Studies, 1, 1987, 23–37, at p. 30. 18. R. Bettig, Copyrighting culture: The political economy of intellectual property, Westview, Boulder, CO, 1996, p. 3. 19. P. Golding and G. Murdock, “Culture, communications, and political economy,” in Golding and Murdock (eds.), The Political Economy of the Media (Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, 1997). See also Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication, and R. McChesney, “Making a Molehill Out of a Mountain: The Sad State of Political Economy in U.S. Media Studies,” in Calabrese and Sparks, Toward a Political Economy of Culture (41–64). 20. Golding and Murdock, “Culture, communications, and political economy,” pp. 11, 14 (my emphasis). 21. Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication, p. 77. 22. C.f. A Sayer, Radical Political Economy: Critique and Reformulation, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995, especially pp. 214–18. 23. Golding and Murdock, “Culture, communications, and political economy.” The quotations are from pp. 14–15. 24. M. Tracey, The Decline and Fall of Public Service Broadcasting, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998; G. Born, Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC, Secker & Warburg, London, 2004. 25. J. Isaac, Power and Marxist theory: A realist view, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1987. 26 See also J. Allen, Lost geographies of power, Blackwell, Oxford, 2003, at pp. 21–22. 27. M. Foucault, “Truth and power,” in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977 (Pantheon, New York, 1980, 109–33), at pp. 115–16. 28. C.f. R. Marsden, The Nature of Capital: Marx After Foucault, Routledge, London, 1999. 29. A. Sayer, “Seeking the geographies of power,” Economy and Society, 33, 2004, 255–70, at p. 261 (original emphasis). 30. E. Meehan, “Conceptualizing culture as commodity: The problem of television,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 3, 1986, 448–57, at p. 449. 31. N. Garnham, “From cultural to creative industries: An analysis of the implications of the ‘creative industries’ approach to arts and media policymaking in the UK,” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11, 2005, 15–30, at p. 20. 32. M. Wayne, Marxism and Media Studies: Key Concepts and Contemporary Trends, Pluto Press, London, 2003, at p. 18. 33. B. Miège, The capitalization of cultural production, International General, New York, 1989, p. 29. 34. The strike lasted a little over three months, ending on February 12, 2008. “It’s official: WGA strike is over,” Variety, February 12, 2008.

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35. E.g. “WGA may delay strike,” Variety, October 30, 2007. 36. “WGA strike hits the streets,” Variety, November 5, 2007. 37. NABET is the Broadcasting and Cable Television Workers sector of the larger Communications Workers of America (CWA). 38. “ABC submits “final” proposal to unions,” Broadcasting & Cable, October 24, 2007. 39. “Teamsters support WGA picket lines,” Variety, October 29, 2007. 40. “NBC Universal lays off 25 percent of Oxygen,” Variety, December 3, 2007. At around the same time, in the UK, the BBC found itself in a lengthy spat with three separate unions—the National Union of Journalists, Bectu (the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre Union) and Unite (the product of a 2007 merger between the Transport and General Workers’ Union and Amicus, the latter itself formed from the combination of the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union and Manufacturing Science and Finance)—over its plans to cut 1,800 staff over the course of the following two years. See especially “BBC rejects union talks after ballot,” Broadcast, December 5, 2007; and, on the ultimate aversion of the strike threat, “Union staff approve BBC deal,” Broadcast, March 28, 2008. 41. G. Henderson, “Value: The many-headed hydra,” Antipode, 36, 2004, 445–60. 42. K. Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 137. 43. See especially the 1865 speech, first published posthumously in 1898, K. Marx, Value, price and profit, edited by Eleanor Marx Aveling, C. H. Kerr, Chicago, 1979. 44. The issue of the relationship between value and price in the cultural industries more broadly is the subject of a fascinating and multi-facetted recent collection of essays: M. Hutter and D. Throsby (eds.), Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics, and the Arts, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007. 45. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 137 (original emphasis). 46. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=blairwitchproject.htm. 47. “Are you sitting comfortably?” The Observer, July 1, 2007. 48. Garnham, “Concepts of culture.” 49. Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 137–38 (original emphasis). 50. R. Albritton, Economics Transformed: Discovering the Brilliance of Marx, Pluto Press, London, 2007, p. 67 (my emphasis). 51. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 760. 52. Albritton, Economics Transformed, p. 63. 53. Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 746–47, 767. 54. Ibid., p. 748. 55. D. Harvey, The limits to capital, University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL, 1982, p. 70.

Reflections on Method

In their introduction to the recent edited collection Politics and Practice in Economic Geography, Adam Tickell, Eric Sheppard, Jamie Peck and Trevor Barnes, four of the pre-eminent economic geographers of the last two decades, present a strong critique of the discipline’s existing track record on methodological reflexivity. Their argument is not that economic geographers have necessarily been using the wrong methodologies. It is, rather, that in many if not most cases of published economic-geographical research, we would actually be hard pressed to pass judgement or comment on methodological choice because so little is actually said about the methodology that has been used and the reason for its mobilization. “Sustained methodological reflection is,” they say, “exceptionally rare.”1 As an economic geographer, writing what I regard as an economic-geographical book, I am quite struck by this allegation. (It certainly rings true if I pause to reflect on my own reading of the economic geography literature, although I should say that in originally working through that literature, the absences in question—and the importance of these absences—had signally failed to dawn on me.) And the reason I am struck, I think, is the simple fact that, as Tickell et al observe, methods matter. They matter because they provide “a crucial ‘hinge’ between empirical evidence and theoretical claims”; they matter because the methods deployed by researchers inevitably “influence their knowledge claims”; and they matter, last but not least, because “methodological choices generally have strong political, personal and serendipitous aspects.”2 In formulating their critique of this dearth of subdisciplinary methods talk, Tickell et al make, in my reading, four critical component observations. The first is that economic geographers very seldom provide a rationale, 27

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analytical or otherwise, for their selection of case study materials. The case study too often simply appears, as if for all the world no other place, people or event could have been analyzed in its stead. Second, and arguably most importantly, too little is said about what, methodologically, the research process actually—physically and cognitively—entailed, why this particular choice or set of choices was made, and what its consequences might have been. Third, few researchers reflect at all on the implications of the fact that they, not somebody else, have carried out and written up the research: does the researcher’s unique positionality (to use the favored word) bear in any way on what research was carried out, what was learned, and how it was interpreted? Fourth, and lastly, how has the researcher managed the complicated process of mediating between relevant theoretical scholarly literatures and the primary sources marshalled in the research? In this chapter, in the four separate sections that follow, I explicitly address each of these four questions or issues in the context of my own research. I do so simply because, in reflecting upon each of them, I agree with the argument that they are all material—to one extent or another. However, I would also emphasize that I have endeavoured to not go overboard in this exercise in methodological reflexivity. Honesty and necessary disclosure are one thing; self-indulgence is another. As such, and like Tickell et al, what I seek here is effectively a happy medium between the “covering up” that is characteristic of traditional economic geography (and, I would add, of much of conventional political economy), and what they regard at the other extreme as the “exhibitionism” apparent in some contemporary scholars’ impulse to “reveal all.”3

RATIONALE FOR CASE-STUDY SELECTION Why the UK, and why New Zealand? The decision to fix my sights on these two markets was partly pragmatic and partly analytical. Firstly, I have always been a firm believer in the value and benefits of local research. When I studied for my masters degree at the University of British Columbia in Canada, my thesis research and the resulting research monograph were firmly rooted in the historical and cultural geography of the province.4 In undertaking my doctoral studies in Auckland, it was important for me to pursue research that was similarly grounded in the local world. Combining research into New Zealand television with a comparative assessment of the UK, meanwhile, was less about what I wanted to know, and more about what I already knew (or, more accurately, what I thought I already knew): as I discuss in more detail below, I arrived in Auckland having worked for several years in the UK television space. With a foundation of knowledge concerning UK television, it simply made practical sense to me to try to leverage that knowledge in my doctoral research.

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If all of this sounds purely pragmatic, however, a dual focus on the UK and New Zealand also seemed to me to make analytical sense for two key reasons, both of which have been more or less confirmed in the process of actually carrying out my research. The first reason relates to the respective positioning of the UK and New Zealand markets in the global television economy. I was vaguely aware, from my background of work in the television industry, that there existed something of a hierarchy of nations in regard to international television in general and program trade in particular. At the top of the hierarchy was the US, singular powerhouse of global television and far and away the dominant exporter in both value and volume terms. (Far) behind the US were, I understood, a small number of secondtier markets—markets where there were, to be sure, considerable program import businesses, but also with significant indigenous production sectors and related export activities. The UK was one of these; others include Brazil, the Netherlands, China. Meanwhile, at the bottom of the hierarchy were a large number of typically small territories, sometimes with meaningful domestic production businesses, but in all cases relying on imports for the majority of their programming. New Zealand, I figured, belonged here; and it seemed to me that analyzing the economic-geographical dynamics of two national television markets differentially positioned in this global market hierarchy might shed interesting light not only on each of those markets themselves, but also on the workings of the global television economy more broadly. So, I believe, it has proved. The second reason for thinking that New Zealand and the UK would make a propitious research pairing concerned their direct relationships with one another. This would not, I conjectured, be like studying television in, say, Brazil and in Belgium. For one thing, I knew that New Zealand was a heavy importer of programming from the UK as well as from the US, and that there was a trickle of content passing in the other direction. But perhaps more intriguingly, it was also obvious that these contemporary trading relationships could not be divorced from the wider political, economic and cultural ties that have bound the two nations together through the history first of formal empire and, since 1947, of the British Commonwealth. Exploring the UK and New Zealand markets not only in their own right, on strictly comparative grounds, but also in terms of their mutual interaction, would, I believed, allow for a richer economic-geographical understanding of television to materialize.

METHODOLOGIES AND SOURCES EMPLOYED In carrying out the research described in this book, the one thing I did more than anything else was, quite simply, to read. The vast bulk of the written

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materials that I relied upon are publicly available; the majority of these, in turn, can be readily accessed online. They fall into seven main categories: private and public company press releases and operational and financial disclosures (e.g. annual reports); reports, reviews and consultations issued by regulatory authorities, competition authorities, and government departments; acts of parliament (and related bills); published speeches; trade association reports; private consultancy reports (often government or regulator-commissioned); and press articles, including trade press, national press, and regional and local press. Amongst the wide range of published datasets and documents that I draw upon, a small number of items are not publicly available. These include certain private company accounts and financial and legal disclosures; a handful of consultancy reports; and various datasets that are available only on a paid-for basis, most notably viewing share (or ratings) data in the UK, which is produced and sold by the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (BARB). Where I use such information, I cite the precise source and acknowledge any individuals or organizations that helped me to access it. I also indicate whether I have available, and can share, a copy of the relevant materials. Aside from published information, the second main source of my primary research was a series of face-to-face and phone-based interviews (with the former in the majority). In most cases, the person interviewed indicated that they were happy to be identified as my source, and I cite them as such in the text. There were, however, a small number of interviewees who requested anonymity, and where this was the case that anonymity has of course been respected. My interviews were mainly with individuals working in the UK or New Zealand, although I also met and talked at length with a smaller group of US executives. The institutional affiliation of my interviewees ran the full gamut of pertinent television industry stakeholders: civil servants; regulators; trade association officials; consultants; and, first and foremost (and in greatest number), company managers—at production companies, channel broadcasters and pay-television platform operators. The more I reflect on the nuts and bolts of the research that went into writing this book, however, the more the word “research” itself begins to blur, and the more I see a need to complicate this simplistic picture of reading and interviewing outlined above. As mentioned, I worked in and around the UK television industry for five years prior to commencing my doctoral studies—for some of that time as an employee of a broadcaster, but mostly as an external adviser to a range of clients on a variety of largely strategic affairs. For every one explicit research interview carried out as a doctoral student, it is clear to me now that I had also carried out a larger number of interviews—both explicit and implicit—in my varying professional capacities. Much of what I have learned about the world explored in these

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pages, I learned before formally beginning my doctoral research. I hasten to add that such learning, to the degree that it is articulated here, consists exclusively of generic learning about commercial organizations, markets and industry dynamics rather than confidential company- or individual-specific information. Another important observation flows directly from this first one. In the complex process of collecting my thoughts and writing up my research, I frequently realized that I was taking for granted something that would not strike readers as a given—the way the television advertising market worked, for instance, or the basic history of development of multichannel television. After several years of operating within the television world on a daily basis, knowledges such as this had become, I recognized, part of my basic cognitive furniture. In writing this book, therefore, I have tried to be as alive as possible to the dangers of presumption. What this has meant in practice is working hard to substantiate anything resembling a given, both through secondary literatures and indeed through my own primary research. Perhaps not surprisingly, but absolutely critically, I sometimes discovered in doing so that the way I thought things were—the way I had learned them to be—was not in fact quite right. Finally, it is also clear to me now that to reduce my flesh-and-blood engagement with the world of television to a mere string of interviews simply does not hold water. When I look back at some of the most influential ethnographic or participant observation-based research monographs within economic geography—perhaps most notably AnnaLee Saxenian’s Regional Advantage and Meric Gertler’s Manufacturing Culture—it occurs to me that the immersive research methods employed by those writers are in many ways comparable to the methods I myself deployed in the formative five years of this research project.5 That I came to see those five years as a period of research only retroactively is, to my mind, neither here nor there. Indeed, one could possibly make an argument that the research process in question was richer, less diluted, and more open precisely for being, at the time, unwitting. That I was for a time immersed in the world of television seems to me important, for I agree with Elizabeth Dunn that interviews—qua interviews—are limited and potentially problematic. As she says, “The stories [interviewees] tell about how they make decisions are often radically different from the way those decisions were actually made.” It follows from this that we need to find ways “to see what people do, as well as what they say they do.” For Dunn, the only satisfactory means for doing so “is through work. Not talk about work, but work itself. We have actually to do the job.”6 This, for a time, is precisely what I did. As I have indicated, I also spent a considerable amount of working time as an external adviser, and in that capacity I was obviously prey to many of the same potential

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distortions—between representation (what I was told) and reality (how things actually worked)—as I later confronted as an academic researcher. Nevertheless, the intensity and closeness of relationship I often enjoyed as an adviser—working at client offices, in mixed client-adviser teams, and so on—was a far cry from the formal, sporadic interview technique of typical economic-geographical research. It was, rather, deeply ethnographic, and as Gertler argues, “There is really no substitute for ‘being there.’”7 One of the key things that being there allows, I think, is triangulation or sanity-checking: specifically, the capacity to sense-check what one is told by interviewees against what one has learned through immersion. I found this exercise valuable across the spectrum of my research, but especially so where I relied heavily on interviews to disinter the course of hazy historical events, with chapter 3 being the most emphatic instance of this. Before moving on, I want to make one final point about interviews and their perceived worth. For, while I agree with Dunn that we need to be careful to remember that interview findings are always representations of reality rather than reality itself, I remain more optimistic than she is about the value we can derive from interviews. Yes, “we are limited by our informants’ understandings.” In the case of the large majority of my own respondents, however, I found the understandings in question to be extremely sound, and I believed the relaying of those understandings to be almost wholly ingenuous. Thus, if Dunn believes that interviews frequently “tell us very little about how things really do work,” I must say that my own experience leads me to lean towards a much more charitable diagnosis.8

POSITIONALITY AND ITS EFFECTS Perhaps, however, I was just plain lucky with the quality of my interviewees and interviews. I certainly think this is a possibility, and should explain what I mean. There is little doubt that having worked in and around the television industry, and having thus developed a meaningful network of contacts, some doors opened for me far more readily and rapidly than might otherwise have been the case. As anybody who has endured the souldestroying experience of soliciting and being refused interviews will know, it can make an enormous difference to one’s prospects of securing a hearing simply to invoke a stamp of approval from a mutual friend or colleague. In my case, knowing people in positions of influence helped me to access not just other people in positions of authority, but also data that might otherwise have remained out of reach. Maybe “lucky,” then, is the wrong word; a more honest word might be “privileged.” But the specific positionality I refer to here—studying a world that I had previously worked in and around in a professional capacity—has had ramifi-

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cations that extend well beyond issues of access. For me, the most important and difficult of these have been epistemological: that is, have concerned questions of knowledge and the purpose and means of its production. Most pointedly, I often found myself grappling with the methodological and cognitive confusions and challenges of moving from one world (business) to another (critical scholarship). I will offer some brief reflections here on what this transition entailed in my own case, for again, I believe these are material to what follows. To my mind, the key has been to (re)learn a particular way of thinking; I say relearn since I had a background in the lower reaches of the academy (as an undergraduate and then masters student) before working with television. By “way of thinking,” I should emphasize that I do not mean a specific theory or even analytical method, still less a politics. I mean, rather, a different way of asking myself different questions. The business world I emerged from ultimately asked a fairly basic set of questions, for a simple set of reasons, and in a relatively straightforward way. The issue, typically, was whether one could change how things were being done so as to generate more revenue and/or cut costs—even if the objective was often dressed up as something much less vulgar than that. In researching and writing this book, I have had to unlearn this way of looking at things and replace it with another. The first part of this challenge was easy; the second part was not. While I am still centrally concerned with the basic economics of revenues and costs, the questions I have tried to pose of these categories are now different. Why, I ask in this book, are things done as they currently are? How and why did the world become like that? I also fixate on who realizes revenues and incurs costs, and what power relations are implicated in these respective apportionments. Another new issue for me has been how the world beyond the firm and the market influences—and is in turn influenced by—those entities. This list is by no means exhaustive; I offer it simply as an indication of the epistemological shift embodied in this research, the struggle with which is, I suspect, apparent to varying degrees in what I have written.

ACTIVATING THEORY The fourth and final issue raised by Tickell et al that I deem important to address here is that of theory—that is, the question of where “theory,” broadly defined, enters into one’s methodological armory and research practice. In my research, I have taken a comparatively simple and pragmatic (and perhaps hopelessly naïve) approach to theory. In short, on (re)entering academia and beginning to ask new questions of (in part) familiar empirical terrain, I have turned to those literatures or theories

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that in my view helped provide the most leverage in satisfactorily unpacking those questions. It appears to me to be very important to stress two things about this approach. One is that this book is assuredly not a case of theory first. What I have not done is taken a theory and sought to challenge it, extend it, or pressure-test it against the empirical world. Theory, if not exactly secondary, is certainly, for me, a tool, marshalled not for its own sake but to illuminate, situate and contextualize often complex empirical findings. In practice, as I have already begun to explain in the introduction to the book, this has meant looking to a number of different theoretical traditions. Certainly, Marxist political economy is vital; but Marx makes only a very fleeting appearance in, for instance, Part I of the book, where I rely on different, more contemporary schools of thought to try to refine and draw out my arguments. My overall theoretical approach might then be characterized as what other economic geographers have termed a “post-structural [geographical] political economy.”9 For my part, I see no need for such a label. I would simply say, instead, that I have tried to fashion a political economy that is indebted to Marx but equally alive to more recent theoretical developments that do not fall under the political economy heading, but which do not seriously contest either its central economic assertions (philosophy, history and culture would be different matters altogether) or its spirit of inquiry.10 I am well aware, I should say, of the potential pitfalls of such an approach. Very early on in my research, an eminent economic geographer sought gently to warn me away from the path I have ultimately taken, arguing that the best doctoral theses were, in his view, those which took “a theory” and really knuckled down to think it through and interrogate it in a particular empirical context or contexts. (It will of course be for readers to judge whether I should have taken his advice!) But the second thing I am keen to stress about the approach I have taken is that while it is not theory first, nor, to my way of thinking, is it a casual theoretical or methodological relativism. David Rigby, among others, argues that the work of economic geographers is now less relevant than it used to be, and that “a peculiar relativism of method” is partly to blame.11 This may be the case, but I hope and believe that my work constitutes something different. Relativism, I think, means a real agnosticism, a denial that some methods or theories do have more objective purchase than others. That is not my view at all. I prefer to think of my approach as what Eric Sheppard and Paul Plummer call an “engaged pluralism”; and of myself as what Amy Glasmeier calls a “methodological [and theoretical] pluralist.”12 I should add at this point, for it speaks directly to this commitment to plurality, that I do not come down on one side or the other in the often crude, caricatured debate between advocates of qualitative and quantitative

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methodologies.13 The research and analysis contained in this book is, for the most part, qualitative in nature, or certainly what those using formal modelling approaches would consider qualitative. Moreover, I do, at points, develop critical arguments about the latter types of modelling tools, most directly in chapter 6. However, I am by no means opposed to quantitative modelling approaches per se. The specific critique I make, it is vital to stress, is not of the inherent worth or viability of such models, but, most particularly, of the explanatory claims sometimes made for them. Equally, and finally, I adopt, in relation to certain key quantitative data collection and reporting systems in the television industry, a stance which some might consider schizophrenic. As noted above, I draw at several points on the UK television viewing share (ratings) data compiled and provided by BARB—perhaps most heavily in chapter 5. But I also outline, in chapter 8, a fairly robust critique of these same data and of their mobilization by the television industry. I make, specifically, two main claims in that chapter: first, that the data offered by BARB do not and indeed cannot live up to the levels of transparency and accuracy typically expected of and invested in them; and second, that while such data may be somewhat lacking in a purely mathematical sense, they nonetheless perform a role in the very constitution and reproduction of contemporary media economies that is frequently overlooked and almost invariably understated. To my mind, these two standpoints vis-à-vis data such as BARB’s—mobilizing them with the left hand, as it were, while critiquing them with the right –are not contradictory, or at least not necessarily so. My view is that it is acceptable to use data such as these so long as one is reflexive and upfront about their potential limitations, which is what I endeavour to be. I would be highly uncomfortable, for example, basing an entire argument upon the significance of two television channels achieving BARB-reported annual viewing shares one percentage point apart—shares, say, of 10 percent and 11 percent. Where BARB’s data are helpful for understanding audience viewing patterns, I think, is in their headline indications. BARB can tell us if a channel secures a very large share of audience, a very small share of audience, or somewhere in between; and, considered over a significant period of time, it can tell us if substantive changes appear to be occurring in a channel’s performance. But it can do little more.

NOTES 1. T. Barnes, J. Peck, E. Sheppard and A. Tickell, “Methods matter: Transformations in economic geography,” in Tickell, Sheppard, Peck and Barnes (eds.), Politics and practice in economic geography (Sage, London, 2007, 1–24), at p. 21. Nevertheless, for my money, talk of a “conspiracy of methodological silence” (p. 13) is probably excessive.

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2. Ibid., pp. 23, xiii, xiv. 3. Ibid., p. 13. 4. B. Christophers, Positioning the missionary: John Booth Good and the confluence of cultures in nineteenth-century British Columbia, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver, BC, 1998. 5. A. Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1994; M Gertler, Manufacturing Culture: The institutional geography of industrial practice, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004. 6. E. Dunn, “Of pufferfish and ethnography: Plumbing new depths in economic geography,” in Tickell, Sheppard, Peck and Barnes (eds.), Politics and practice in economic geography (82–92), at pp. 82 (my emphasis), 84. 7. Gertler, Manufacturing Culture, p. x. 8. Dunn, “Of pufferfish,” pp. 83, 84 (original emphasis). 9. See especially R. LeHeron, “Globalisation, governance and post-structural political economy: Perspectives from Australasia,” Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 48, 2007, 26–40; and (with N. Lewis and W. Larner), “The New Zealand designer fashion industry: Making industries and co-constituting political projects,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33, 2008, 42–59. 10. In this respect I am influenced by the position set out by Noel Castree in his “Envisioning Capitalism: Geography and the Renewal of Marxian Political Economy,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24, 1999, 137–58. The similarity in “project” titles is, I think, telling. 11. D. Rigby, “Evolution in economic geography?” in Tickell, Sheppard, Peck and Barnes (eds.), Politics and practice in economic geography (176–86), at p. 186. 12. E. Sheppard and P. Plummer, “Toward engaged pluralism in geographical debate,” Environment and Planning A, 39, 2007, 2545–48; A. Glasmeier, “Methodologies, epistemologies, audiences,” in Tickell, Sheppard, Peck and Barnes (eds.), Politics and practice in economic geography (210–20), at p. 212. 13. This debate has been particularly stark in recent years among economic geographers. The forthright critique of quantitative approaches which sparked much of this ongoing debate was A. Amin and N. Thrift, “What kind of economic theory for what kind of economic geography?” Antipode, 32, 2000, 4–9.

I KNOWING THE TELEVISION ECONOMY

1 Enframing Creativity

One of the landmark actions of the Labour government that came to power in the UK in 1997 was its more or less immediate identification of the “creative industries” as a critical area of economic growth, as an area in which the UK enjoyed substantive competitive advantage in international markets, and as a focal point for policy development. Much has been written about the rise of the UK creative industries under Labour’s benefaction, starting with what is actually meant by the term “creative”: numerous potential definitions abound, there never has been (and never will be) consensus as to which activities are included and which are excluded, and while many academics have sought to argue one case or the other, perhaps the more revealing work has questioned why, politically, certain classifications have typically been favored.1 Beyond the question of definition, analysis has also been presented on why the creative industries came to assume such a prominence during this period in the UK,2 why the label “creative” was now preferred to “cultural,”3 the ways in which developments in other countries have mirrored—and in many cases, actively borrowed from—the UK example,4 how the new script of “creativity” reflected and reproduced wider discourses and practices of neoliberalism,5 and the question of who benefits from the policy initiatives associated with this shift.6 But there is, I suggest here, a particularly striking feature of the state emphasis on the creative industries that has not been critically examined: the preoccupation with measurement. This preoccupation has been evident both in the UK (the focus of this chapter) and elsewhere. Thus, the UK Labour government’s first significant act in relation to the creative industries was to commission the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to produce a study quantifying the size and scope of these industries. This, the first 39

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“Creative Industries Mapping Document” (a second was published in 2001), was described as “the first ever attempt to measure the economic contribution of these industries to the UK.”7 It identified 13 different creative industry “sub-sectors,” ranging in size and substance from the “crafts” industries (turning over £400m annually) at one extreme to the “software and computer services” industries (£21bn) at the other.8 Similar quantification initiatives, frequently deploying the same methodology as in the UK (the so-called “Creative Industries Production System”), have since taken place in many other countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong.9 In view of the definitional complexities and disagreements alluded to above, “sizing” the creative industries has never been a straightforward, transparent exercise, and commentators have been quick to seize on perceived sleights of hand. “The more the [UK] Government promotes the special role of the creative industries,” observed The Guardian in 1999, for instance, “the more vague the definition of what a creative industry is. At the start of last year Chris Smith [then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport] had them earning more than £50 billion. By the end of the year the estimate, for the same period, was ‘approaching £60 billion.’”10 If the accuracy and consistency of measurement have been disputed, however, what has not been questioned is the underlying imperative of measurement (why measure?) or the effects of measurement. The argument in this chapter is that the measurement exercise and the way it was framed both reflected and in turn enabled the operation of a peculiarly modern form of power. This argument comes in two parts. First, I suggest that the use of the label “map” was anything but neutral. That the document should be regarded as “a map” was consistently stressed by the government: “This is,” said Smith, “really a ‘map’—it covers territory never systematically charted by government.”11 Invoking the language of mapping, I argue, called on popular understandings of cartography—its objectivity, its rigor, its detachment—to invoke truth claims in a way that has been shown to be typical of the workings of power in modern Western societies. Second, following the work of Timothy Mitchell, I argue that the mapping or measurement of the creative industries can be seen as a process of “enframing” that effectively ordered those industries up and made them available to enlarged and enhanced powers of discipline. That another key component of Labour’s intervention in the creative industries was the establishment of a new media and communications “super-regulator” (Ofcom) was not, in other words, coincidental; and Ofcom and its powers are the explicit focus of the final part of the chapter. Positioned as an empirical examination of forms of power in one sector of the modern economy, the chapter is equally, in this respect, a reflection on and application of wider theories of power, most particularly Mitchell’s ongoing theorization of power in relation to the experience of modernity.

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The overall theme of the chapter, then, concerns the links between power and knowledge in UK state policy on the creative industries. More specifically, I consider the ways in which the exercise of modern power is grounded in the formulation and circulation of geographical knowledges. For, I argue, it was in “geo-graphing” knowledge of the creative industries—in imparting to this knowledge the veracity and immanence associated with cartographic “fact”—that some of the principal disciplinary powers arrayed around these industries could be reordered and reinforced. It should be emphasized at the outset that this geography was, in the most immediate sense, “merely” metaphorical: the “Mapping Document,” as we will see in the first section, was assuredly not a “map” in the popular sense of the word, where objects are ordered primarily by relative geographic location. Rather, it was the very designation “map,” and all its associated connotations, that mattered. But a key part of my argument is that because the designation “map” so mattered, this automatically and simultaneously makes the metaphor material. And yet it is important to recognize that there were and are more obviously material geographies at stake here as well. While the DCMS sought to map the UK creative industries specifically at the national level, most of the detailed policy thinking around these industries—and certainly the effects flowing from such policies—have to be understood at a regional or local level precisely because it is at the local level that the policy has been worked out. That the “UK creative industries” represent a lattice of expressly local phenomena is reflected in the fact that most academic discussion of these industries has been focused on the local scale.12 One objective of this chapter, however, is to demonstrate that despite demonstrable regional variance in creative industry agendas and outcomes, “national institutions” and the knowledges they produce do—as Norma Rantisi and co-authors put it—“still matter.”13 More specifically, I suggest, the metaphorical geography represented by the “Mapping Document” is interesting and important not only for what it allows (the mobilization and operationalization of power) but for what it potentially disguises or (to use the word favored by Matthew Sparke) “dissembles”: the consequential local geographies that shape and make creativity and its content in the first place.14

MAPPING THE CREATIVE INDUSTRIES Wherever the creative industries have been prioritized by the state, a key element of the process of capturing, consolidating and illuminating them has been to quantify them—a hazardous task in an area with a long history of definitional slippage and a paucity of robust, comparable data.15 Far and away the preferred approach and terminology, following the UK example,

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has been that of statistical “mapping” of these industries. Thus, in the UK, the British Council described the 1998 “mapping exercise” as “the first genuine analysis of the economic impact of the creative sector on the UK economy”; New Zealand’s mapping document, similarly, was designed “to generate soundly based estimates of contributions to GDP for individual creative industries and then for the creative sector . . . as a whole”; and perhaps most optimistically of all, Australia’s National Mapping Project for the Creative Digital Industries was described as nothing less than an attempt to “map the size, scope and structure of creative industries in Australia through quantitative mapping and statistical definitional collection processes.”16 If the language was grandiose, however, the reality—at least in the case of the 1998 UK prototype—was somewhat more prosaic. Certainly, the “map” included no (spatial) maps per se; the only geography comprised scattered references to the locations of key industry employers and, more substantively, data (where available) on imports and exports and their principal sources and destinations. Moreover, there was, in actual fact, no singular “map” at all: the final output was (and remains) 13 discrete documents, one dedicated to each sub-sector, making the headline appellation “Mapping Document” a highly misleading one. (Misleading but, as I argue below, revealingly so: conferring comparability on extremely diverse areas of the economy, and thus constituting a single identifiable “creative economy” at large, was a critical element of the project.) And any pretensions to comprehensiveness were belied by the threadbare nature of some of the individual sections. Thus, if the analysis of “Television and radio” could claim a moderate degree of depth and breadth, only two pages could be mustered on “Advertising,” while only a smidgen over one was offered on “Crafts.” For each individual sub-sector, the report authors endeavored to provide information on six main fronts. First, market size, segmentation and historic growth data were presented, with the market segmented in some cases along multiple axes (for example, commercial versus non-commercial revenues, and domestic versus internationally generated revenues). Second, the report tried to estimate how many people were employed in the area in question, and identified any notable patterns in respect of employee gender and employment type (e.g. permanent versus freelance). Third, there was a description of the types of companies operating in the sector, how they varied by size, and how they were distributed across the supply chain. Fourth, the report documented any important industry trends, of which consolidation was a common example. Fifth, there was a prognosis for growth. Sixth and finally, and perhaps most important in terms of the limited effort to link the 13 individual documents together, the sub-sector in question was pictured graphically alongside those areas of the economy considered “related” and “peripheral”—only some of which belonged among the other 12 “creative” sub-sectors. Thus, in many cases, the graphic made it patently

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clear that even if the industry under analysis was itself considered “creative,” its connections to other “creative” industries were minimal. Indeed, two sub-sectors (“Architecture” and “Software”) were pictured as having no “creative” relations at all, even peripheral ones. Moreover, Figure 1.1, which reproduces the relational map for “Publishing,” exemplifies the further fact that if some sub-sectors were integrated into the putative “creative” whole, they also had manifold links to various other, “non-creative” economic realms.17

MAPPING AS “ENFRAMING” The creative industry inventories commissioned and produced in the UK and elsewhere consistently invoked the practices of both statistics and mapping. We therefore have here a dual appeal to entrenched languages and practices of objectivity and truth. There is now an extensive literature demonstrating that the influence and durability of each of these traditions—one numerical, one visual—has been tied to the presumed neutrality and accuracy of the artifacts they generate (maps on the one hand; samples, deviations, regressions, correlations and so forth on the other). This literature has amply demonstrated the mythical nature of such “neutrality,” yet without minimizing or underplaying the material implications of those ingrained assumptions. Cartography and statistics, it has been shown, are both thoroughly social

Figure 1.1: “Publishing” and related sectors, in the First Creative Industries Mapping Document Source: Author, after DCMS, “Creative Industries Mapping Document 1998”

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practices, but ones deriving their authority precisely from the active disavowal of such sociality. The work of Brian Harley, Denis Wood and John Pickles has been central to the “deconstructive” historiography of mapping,18 while Ian Hacking, Ted Porter and Alain Desrosières, among others, have played a similarly influential role in critical writing on statistics and society.19 A key lesson of these critical literatures has been that in generating such authoritative and almost transcendental “truth effects” (an often used and highly suggestive term that is heavily influenced by readings of Foucault), cartography and statistics together play a central role in the operation of modern regimes of power: they lubricate and fortify power dynamics by yoking the exercise of power to the production and validation of truth. This argument has been advanced in numerous different contexts, from Timothy Mitchell’s influential work on the intricate links between power and knowledge in the colonization of Egypt, to Matthew Hannah’s analysis of “governmental” power in late-nineteenth-century America.20 That statistics and cartography and their actual and metaphorical deployment are linked to the exercise of power is, it seems to me, now widely accepted. Yet Mitchell’s work, in particular, goes a step further, by thinking through and elucidating the specific mechanics of this coupling. And it is this aspect of Mitchell’s work—his argument that these representative conventions essentially make subjects and objects available to power by “enframing” them, by rendering them separable, visible, discrete and calculable—that I draw on here. My objective is not just to link representation to the exercise of power, then, but to say something tangible about the actual fabric and flow of such power. But it bears explaining first of all why I use the specific notion of enframing. As for Mitchell, the concept underscores, for me, two critical dimensions of the processes and effects in question. These are now explored in turn. Reality and representation, certainty and constitution In Mitchell’s terms, enframing refers to a set of practices that have the effect of forging a seemingly absolute distinction between a “real,” objective world and the representations that seek to capture it. His account of the emergence of this separation is a sophisticated and expansive one, but for my purposes Mitchell’s key point is this: that in producing objects (maps, data, and so on) in such a way as to emphasize both their accurate mirroring of, but also their ontological distance from, a prior material reality (which they merely represent), enframing practices such as cartography and statistics acquire an extraordinary sense of certainty. We can discern such a certainty, I argue, in the way the findings of the DCMS “Mapping Documents”—their “original” representations of creative economic activity—have subsequently been re-presented. As Kate Oakley

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has observed, the UK has long since “reached a stage of almost uncritical acceptance of these arguments.”21 Hence, while dissenting voices such as The Guardian may quibble about trifles such as reporting consistency, the central argument about the UK creative industries has been widely and uncritically accepted: namely, that these industries are important, dynamic, growing, and, of course, creative.22 Thus, in one typical example at the national level, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts confidently reports that the creative industries sector “offers major growth opportunities for the UK economy.”23 Many other examples of such conviction could be cited at the national level, but it is perhaps more revealing still to look to the regional level. Once again, the seeming certainty about the importance and dynamism of the creative industries is clear. The Northwest Regional Development Agency describes the sector as “dynamic and subject to rapid growth and change”; Scottish Development International says “Scottish companies in the creative media sector are facing a massive potential for growth”; and the South West of England Regional Development Agency sees the creative industries as an “emerging sector” with great “capacity to contribute to the region’s competitiveness.”24 What is most surprising and instructive about such declarations of faith is the fact that, as Mark Jayne has shown, the actual achievements of the regional development agencies in the creative industry field have been patchy at best, and certainly provide little evidence for these extravagant assertions.25 Thus, as Jayne concludes, to claim that the creative industries are important contributors to UK regional economic development “is at best misleading.”26 My argument is that the misplaced certainty, reproduced locally as well as nationally, derives from the distinctive nature of the enframing practices that first mapped such industries in toto. Such certainty is a measure of the extent to which powerful metaphorical geographies can dissemble the material geographies that they purportedly represent. But Mitchell’s thesis that the separation of representation from reality is an effect of power has a wider pertinence here. If it helps to frame the relationship between the DCMS “map” and the industries it describes, and if it helps to explain the apparent certainty of that representation, then it also makes us think about the very idea of the “creative industries” per se. Mitchell says that enframing serves to distinguish “individuals and activities” from “an inert structure” that “preexists them, and contains and gives a framework to their lives”—it distinguishes men in the Egyptian army, in one of his examples, from the military apparatus or “machine” they inhabited and whose structure “orders, contains, and controls them.”27 Mitchell reminds us that this apparatus, of course, “has no independent existence,” that its appearance of independence is simply an effect of the way its components are represented, ordered, arrayed. In his more recent work, Mitchell has put this same idea to absorbing use in arguing that as we understand it, the modern “economy,”

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too, derives from such an effect: it is produced through the imagination and organization of a space of pre-existing economic processes, which puts in place a new politics of calculation.28 I think we can argue that much the same is going on with the state’s identification, demarcation and population of the UK’s “creative industries.” Mapping these industries creates them—as a discrete sector to be endorsed, managed and exploited—in the sense that it gives them form, boundaries and equivalences, and endows them with quantities and performances that can be measured and regulated.29 It also, as Susan Buck-Morss has argued (again of the “economy”), gives them agency. By differentiating the “creative industries” sector from the myriad participants in that sector, the sector itself can be “seen to act in the world”: it grows, it is dynamic, and it contributes to local, regional, national competitiveness. For this to occur, Buck-Morss reminds us, a process of what she calls “representational mapping” is typically required.30 The “Mapping Document” did not, then, merely provide a description of an already existing, coherent economic sector; more accurately, it constituted that sector by enframing it, or (literally) putting a frame around it—deciding what belonged in the frame, and what did not. This process of constitution bears close resemblance to the one described by Wendy Larner and Richard Le Heron in their discussion of business practices such as benchmarking and audit, calculative technologies which can be seen to constitute the objects (in their examples, the economic geographies) on which governance operates.31 A key effect of this constitutive process, where the UK creative industries are concerned, is to give the resulting objects internal equivalence: the industries belong together because they all share the central, defining feature of creativity. And this “bundling” matters precisely because the “fact” of equivalence or homogeneity can subsequently be mobilized to powerful effect in policy arguments. One example amply demonstrates this. If the creative industries in general increasingly came under the spotlight with Labour taking power in 1997, it is television, of all the industries labelled “creative,” that has been the focus of the most intense political debate and policy attention during the decade of Labour administration. This concentration has taken various forms, but it was manifested first of all in a critical consideration of UK television’s export trade, specifically within the context of the DCMS’s Creative Industries Programme, of which the Mapping Document was the linchpin project. Thus, in mid-1997, the DCMS and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), in conjunction with a consortium of “private sector investors” (primarily UK television exporters such as BBC Worldwide), commissioned “expert” advisers David Graham and Associates to analyze and report on the UK’s television export performance. The David Graham report, which I discuss in more detail in chapter 11, was, ultimately, an indictment of such performance, predicated primarily on a comparison of export data across economic sectors.32

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“Experts who study overseas trade,” the David Graham report announced, “have identified that the UK has a competitive advantage in Creative and Media Industries.” The specific work cited by David Graham was an “Export Strategy Review” (unavailable publicly) written by the DTI in conjunction with the British Overseas Trade Board, which, based in turn on International Monetary Fund and United Nations data, estimated that at 3.04, the UK had a higher “Revealed Competitive Advantage” (RCA) in the Creative and Media Industries than in any other economic sector. What did this actually mean? Across all sectors, the data suggested, the UK had a 5.3 percent share of world exports; its world share in the Creative and Media Industries, meanwhile, was an impressive 16 percent, meaning that the UK was three times more competitive in this “sector” than across the economy in general. And while of course the Creative and Media Industries included television, David Graham and his team calculated that the UK’s global share specifically of television export trade was “only” 9 percent (by volume). In other words, the argument went, “judging by our success in other creative fields, the UK should have the capacity to be equally successful in television”: in relative terms, television was materially underperforming.33 This argument carried a great deal of weight in government circles at that time, but it relied precisely on the process of enframing, labelling and “fixing”—the power of representation—that I described above. We can demonstrate this by asking the following question: why compare television’s 9 percent share with the 16 percent share of the Creative and Media Industries, and not with the 5.3 percent share of the UK economy as a whole? For, if the comparison with 16 percent suggests underperformance, a comparison with 5.3 percent would clearly suggest an exceptionally strong performance. To justify the direct benchmarking only against other Creative and Media Industries (which range, we should remind ourselves, from software to fashion and from arts and antiques to architecture, and within which the UK’s strongest individual export performance is in music), surely one should demonstrate first that the sources of relative competitive advantage, not to mention international trade dynamics, are closely comparable across all of these areas. But the David Graham report offers nothing of the kind (presumably because it would not be remotely possible to do so).34 Rather, the authoritative, homogenizing and final ascription “Creative and Media Industries” is deemed sufficient grounds for comparison. Enframing these industries—creating their autonomous being—not only gives them collective agency but makes them a singularly calculable entity. From representation to power The second critical dimension of “enframing” flows directly on from this, and it is the one I develop at greater length here. The “representational map-

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ping” processes that Mitchell and Buck-Morss describe, and which the DCMS mapping project exemplifies, create a space that is not only measurable but controllable.35 And by “control,” Mitchell means specifically the modern techniques of discipline—“continuous, meticulous and uniform” mechanisms that “infiltrate, re-order, and colonise”—that, for Foucault, constituted “the characteristic power of the modern state,” an “entire politics . . . that Foucault characterizes as governmentality.”36 Discipline and representation, emphasizes Mitchell, “are two aspects of the same novel strategies of power, linked by the notion of enframing.” He goes on: “Disciplinary powers acquire their unprecedented hold . . . by methods of distributing or dividing that create an order or structure . . . that seems to precede and exist apart from the actual individuals or object ordered.”37 Ordering up the creative industries, I argue, made them—in David Demeritt’s words—“intelligible to and available for new forms of governmental calculation” and discipline.38 What forms has such governmental discipline taken in the UK’s creative industries? It is, it seems to me, revealing and important that at the same time as it had the DCMS mapping these industries, the Government also had the DCMS (in combination with the DTI) working on devising a wholesale overhaul of regulation of the UK media and communications sectors. The proposals for this overhaul were developed in detail between 1998 and 2000, when they were presented to Parliament in the shape of the white paper “A New Future for Communications.”39 The rest of this chapter explores the powers of regulation initiated by that overhaul.40 In addressing “the media,” this regulatory overhaul covered what is, by some margin, the most heavily regulated and controlled area of the UK creative economy (which is partly what makes those changes so interesting).41 As in many other countries, the government has always been closely implicated in the operation of the UK television and radio broadcasting industries—not least in view of the overwhelming historical importance of national public broadcasters such as the BBC. Two key points must therefore be made at this juncture. First, with the focus here strictly on the media, it is important to remember that the Creative Industries Mapping exercise did not lead to a commensurate revamp of governance in other “creative” sub-sectors. Second, while I describe the changes in media regulation as an intensification of powers, and do so in terms indebted (largely indirectly, and deliberately lightly) to Foucault, we should not imagine that power and regulation were “new” to this sector of the economy: regulation of UK broadcasting, as noted, has always been extensive.42 Hence, what I describe here is very much a shift in regulation rather than an introduction of regulation. My argument, then, is that the Government’s mapping of the creative industries, and of the media industries in particular, was fundamental to the institution of revised disciplinary powers under the auspices of the new regulator, Ofcom (Office of Communications), which assumed its duties in

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December 2003.43 Indeed, the white paper that set out the government’s vision for Ofcom was quite explicit about this link. “The media and communications industries are growing 11 percent faster than the rest of the economy,” it noted, drawing directly on the findings of the mapping project. Conjuring a discrete, independent economic body that was growing rapidly and (the fear was raised) possibly even uncontrollably, the argument continued: “It is vital that government has a clear policy framework for this rapidly developing sector, which will be so central to our economy, democratic life, culture, entertainment and education.” The objective of the white paper, in other words, was to set out “how the UK should chart its way through this uncertain but exciting environment.”44 “Charting” a way through “uncertainty”: the language could not have been any clearer, and it bespoke a wider desire to both map and discipline a potentially undisciplined network of economic actors.45 This is not meant to suggest that there were no other reasons for the conception and establishment of Ofcom. Anyone even remotely familiar with the UK media and communications industries would be able to pinpoint what was, perhaps, the main rationale: convergence. Prior to the formation of Ofcom, UK media and communications regulation was administered by five separate bodies (six if one includes the BBC Board of Governors): two for radio, one for television, one for both radio and television (the Broadcasting Standards Commission) and one for telecommunications. In a world of “converging” communications (where digital radio can be used to transmit data, telephone networks can be used to broadcast video, and so on), the argument went, a “converged” regulator made a lot more sense than the jumble of fragmented and often overlapping governance that characterized the legacy regulatory regime. That Ofcom was driven by convergence is self-evident. My argument, to be clear, is not that the impetus lay elsewhere, but that convergence alone was arguably not enough: it was a necessary but not sufficient argument. Convergence by itself may or may not have justified the time, effort and money expended on disbanding the five existing regulators and replacing them with a new one; what it was insufficient to warrant was the endowment, in and through Ofcom, of a raft of new and enhanced powers. Ultimately, the government needed to show that the media and communications sector was not only converging but complex, large and growing, and thus in need of greater control. The white paper’s appeal to the Creative Industries Mapping Document provided just such an argument.

OFCOM AND DISCIPLINE: EVIDENCE AND EXPERTS The white paper made it quite clear that power and Ofcom would go handin-hand: “It is important that Ofcom has sufficient powers to carry out its

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duties,” it stressed. “It has to be able to take tough action when necessary and to ensure that regulated companies take the action which is required of them.”46 And yet getting to grips with the types of power relations and degrees of regulation associated with Ofcom’s arrival on the UK media scene is by no means a straightforward matter.47 Some, such as David Hesmondhalgh, have intimated that Ofcom’s stance is in fact deregulatory, demonstrating a shift, if anything, towards self-regulation.48 Ofcom itself would doubtless concur: among its founding “Regulatory Principles” one finds its commitment to “operate with a bias against intervention” and, where intervention is required, to administer “the least intrusive regulatory mechanisms.”49 And certainly in particular areas, Ofcom can indeed be seen to be actively deregulating the market (for example, in releasing more spectrum and removing specific content obligations). But it would, I believe, be wrong to conclude that such individual deregulatory gestures amount to a loosening of the controls and powers ranged around the UK media. For one thing, most industry participants would argue that despite its purported “bias against intervention,” Ofcom actually remains highly and consistently engaged and directive. Jonathan Thompson, until recently the Head of Strategy & Research at Channel 4, is broadly representative in his assertion that “Ofcom still feels like a very interventionist regulator.”50 For another thing, interpreting the removal of specific regulatory ordinances as a sign of a moderation of power would, I argue, be to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the power relations in play here. This latter suggestion requires careful amplification. Often power is not just, or not even mainly, about handing down dictates and expecting and enforcing observance. Instead power inheres—as Mitchell would say (after Foucault), but here articulated in the words of Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller—in “the complex of mundane programmes, calculations, techniques, apparatuses, documents and procedures through which authorities seek to embody and give effect to governmental ambitions.”51 Power is capillary, continuous, dispersed; in short, it is disciplinary. The field of power in which Ofcom is implicated and itself operates consists, to my mind, precisely of such “programmes, calculations, techniques” and so on. Hence Thompson’s revealing speculation that Ofcom feels interventionist “partly because they are reviewing absolutely everything,” referring here to the multitude of market reviews and consultations that Ofcom continually initiates and to which industry participants are required to continually respond. Indeed, we would do well to note in this regard that the white paper’s promise—“Ofcom will have a duty to keep markets or sectors under review”—has since escalated into the more overwhelming, and demonstrably more accurate, “Ofcom will research markets constantly.”52 There is, I therefore want to suggest, an apparent incongruence between the rhetoric and reality of recent UK media regulatory reform. On the one

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hand we are confronted by terminology such as “least intrusive,” “a bias against intervention,” and all sorts of other free-market patois. But I have suggested, and will go on to demonstrate in more detail, that if we are prepared to conceptualize power in its disciplinary guise, then the government, through Ofcom, can actually be shown to have increased the level and intensity of regulation to which broadcasting industry participants are subject. At the same time, it is important to emphasise that in reality the incongruence I refer to here is only a superficial one. That this is the case is apparent when one reviews the key findings of the burgeoning literature on mutations in late-twentieth-century neoliberalism. To be sure, neoliberalism is typically associated with strident free-market policy and the removal of regulatory institutions. But neoliberalism has been shown to wear different faces at different times and in different places. So-called “roll-back” liberalism is certainly one such face (and perhaps the most immediately recognizable). Another, however, is what Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell have described in an influential essay as “roll-out neoliberalism.” This, in short, often means more regulation. And it is within this neoliberal “tradition,” I think, that we can better situate Ofcom. Peck and Tickell identify this tradition as comprising “the purposeful construction and consolidation of neoliberalized state forms, modes of governance, and regulatory relations.”53 The exaggerated disciplinary nature of the powers now exercised in the UK media sector is especially clear, to my mind, in Ofcom’s twinned emphasis on expertise and “evidence-based” arguments, which sharply distinguishes it from the legacy regulators. For such an emphasis, as has been widely documented, is a typical feature of regimes of modern governmental power. Reviews, reports, appraisals and benchmarking studies: all are avowedly “evidence-based,” and all are pivotal to powers of discipline; they are not “the outcome of a neutral recording function,” but rather methods “to make the domain in question susceptible to evaluation, calculation and intervention.”54 And the marshalling of “expertise” has become a basic prerequisite of, and handmaiden to, such methods. Not only does expert knowledge make government possible, but it depoliticizes it. “Experts,” as Rose and Miller argue, “hold out the hope that problems of regulation can remove themselves from the disputed terrain of politics and relocate onto the tranquil yet seductive territory of truth.”55 Since its very inception, Ofcom has made a central play of its reliance on these two shibboleths of expertise and data-based evidence. We can start with the latter, and, once again, Ofcom’s “Regulatory Principles” are unequivocal, stating that Ofcom “will strive to ensure its interventions will be evidence-based, proportionate, consistent, accountable and transparent.”56 The emphasis on “evidence” does indeed mark a distinct break from the past: Ofcom is, says Channel 4’s Thompson, “definitely more wedded to using evidence and data than its predecessors.”57 And its quantitative bent

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is apparent throughout the full succession of market reviews that Ofcom has launched and acted upon in the last five years. A good example is the far-reaching and high-profile first Review of UK Public Service Broadcasting (PSB), carried out in three phases from early 2004 through to mid-2005, in which Ofcom sought to assess the effectiveness of the UK’s public service broadcasters (BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Five, S4C and Teletext), taken together, in delivering the public service purposes set out in the 2003 Communications Act.58 (No sooner had the results and recommendations of this review been digested than the second review began: Parliament had originally asked Ofcom to report on PSB every five years, but the pace of change in the media and telecommunications market prompted Ofcom to bring forward its follow-up review by approximately two years.59) Ofcom’s heavily quantitative approach was signalled in the foreword to the Phase 1 report, where it stressed its consistent appeal to “comprehensive” and “hard” data.60 This approach was then carried through into Phase 2, which moved from historic to forward-looking analysis and from “propositions” to “proposals,”61 and in which the statistical and mathematical grounding of the work was taken to a new level with, in particular, a highly complex econometric model for forecasting advertising demand, built primarily by expert advisors PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).62 It would be easy to overlook the significance of this reliance on “evidence-based” regulation and, in particular, on mathematical analysis. But this Ofcom proclivity attests, I would argue, to the indissoluble nature of the relationship between power and truth which, as Foucault repeatedly argued, underpins disciplinary power.63 Power presupposes truth, truth is power; and “truth” is predicated, in this instance, on quantitative evidence. Thus we have the example of the PwC model for forecasting advertising demand, which was central to the work undertaken within Phase 2 of the first PSB Review. It matters not, it seems, that most industry insiders—and especially those at the coalface of advertising sales—would agree that advertising demand is utterly unpredictable just one or even two years into the future, let alone ten (as in the PwC model). What matters is that Ofcom’s proposals are backed by a model: a model framed by an expert advisory panel and, in its level of methodological sophistication, entirely unintelligible to (not to mention contestable by) almost everybody concerned with the review. The content and assumptions of the model are less significant than the fact that there is a model that can be used for reference, support, justification—and even comfort. This, it strikes me, is precisely what Ted Porter so fittingly calls “trust in numbers.”64 Power in a disciplinary guise is less about coercion than about persuasion and (arguably) evasion through “evidence-based” truth claims and “truth effects.” Meanwhile, Ofcom’s enthusiasm for appeal to “experts” and “expert knowledge” has been equally apparent since its earliest days, and remains

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central to its operating practices. “Experts” give its reviews and decisions an authenticity and objectivity that might otherwise be more keenly questioned. Thus, for instance, the original task of creating Ofcom out of five legacy regulators was handled by a consortium of management consultants led by Towers Perrin (supported by Ernst and Young and Differentis). The Ofcom Chairman David Currie specifically praised this work in a 2002 speech to London’s somewhat chillingly named Worshipful Company of Management Consultants—essentially a consultancy trade association, aptly styled by Currie as “a body of expertise”—and he was keen to emphasize that Towers and its collaborators had been “well paid for it.”65 Currie did not provide much insight into the degree of influence enjoyed by Ofcom’s advisers both then and now; but Peter Kilgour, who led the Towers team, himself admitted in a recent interview that the distinction between advisors and clients can often blur, and that during the Ofcom set-up work consultants frequently experienced what he revealingly describes as “a loss of role between expert advisers and Godfather.”66 Expert advisers—typically management and economic consultants—have retained this Godfather-like role all though Ofcom’s early years of operation. Barely a review, consultation or research exercise goes by that does not include external, expert input at some point in the process. To one extent this is inevitable—Ofcom is a surprisingly lean operation, with only in the region of 800 full-time employees, and inevitably it possesses in-house only a limited quantum of labor power and a certain breadth and depth of industry-specific knowledge and technical capability.67 Dig beneath the surface, however, and it becomes clear that experts fulfil a role that extends far beyond mere horsepower. Take, for instance, the Channel 4 Financial Review that Ofcom commissioned from LEK Consulting in the Autumn of 2006. Ofcom itself had already concluded the year before, from its own PSB Review, that “the transition to digital television would create a number of challenges for commercially funded public service broadcasters,” and none more so than Channel 4.68 Why, then, did Ofcom ask LEK to do further analysis of the challenges to Channel 4 that the transition to digital would entail? My argument is that Ofcom clearly felt that its own findings would only be taken seriously once ratified by “independent” experts.69 And, indeed, they were: a whole series of apocalyptic headlines (“Channel 4 could collapse after 2012, according to research for regulator”) appeared in the media immediately after Ofcom released LEK’s conclusions in April 2007.70 But why, one is minded to ask, was the original opinion of Ofcom itself not to be considered “expert” enough? And perhaps even more interestingly, there is also the question of why Ofcom placed such stock in LEK’s “independence” when explaining the commissioning of the analysis. For what is Ofcom, relative to the broadcast industry it regulates, if not independent? “Ofcom,” its

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homepage tells us, “is the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries.”71 The term “disciplinary,” I suggest, is a particularly helpful way of conceptualizing Ofcom and its powers—not only because of that organization’s dual investment in “expertise” and “evidence,” and not only because the word “disciplinary” is so closely associated with the concept of governmentality and the battery of calculations, technologies and procedures that the latter, in turn, invokes. For there are, perhaps more fundamentally, important parameters of timing and scale that clearly distinguish power in this guise from power operating according to other modalities. By promising to review markets “constantly” (and fulfilling that promise), Ofcom is not offering episodic and intense manifestations of its power in the way a “sovereign” (in Foucault’s terms) might. It is spinning, rather, a modest but continuous web of supervision, which requires industry participants to be cautious, correct and vigilant. True, there remains a place in this scheme of things for manifestations of power that are more episodic or intense. Indeed, it is probably correct to say that one of the most compelling characteristics of a disciplinary regime of power is that through its ongoing operation it establishes the conditions for just such manifestations—for, in the words of the white paper that gave us Ofcom, “tough action when necessary.” Industry participants are required and expected to be cautious and correct, and no doubt Ofcom’s arsenal of reviews and consultations raises the prospect that they will be; but deviations from acceptable practice inevitably will still occur, and Ofcom can fall back on “tough action” in just such circumstances. Recent years have seen plenty of opportunities to take action of this form, especially with the emergence in 2007 of an extraordinary spate of cases of alleged deception and abuse of consumer trust in connection with broadcasters’ premiumrate phone-in competitions. Thus ITV was handed Ofcom’s largest ever fine against a broadcaster in May 2008, £5.7m, for “serious breaches of its code regarding misconduct in viewer competitions and votings.”72 And more severe measures are certainly within Ofcom’s jurisdiction: a growing number of broadcasters have had their licences revoked.73 Moreover, if Ofcom can periodically resort to these more tangible manifestations of power, it is also the case that it is itself the creation of one such “sovereign” (government) intervention. Thus Ofcom does not in any way stand “apart” from and separate to sovereign power, even if it is nominally “independent” of government as well as of industry. Ofcom is fully accountable to Parliament through various Parliamentary Committees and the National Audit Office.74 Indeed if Ofcom, as a disciplinary regime, fails to deliver adequate “performance” and demonstrate acceptable standards against its various duties and regulatory principles, then it is quite feasible for the government to intervene and to establish a new disciplinary

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regime—with, undoubtedly, its own alternative experts and truths. Hence Richard Collins’s pertinent observation that where the UK media sector is concerned, “much power still resides with government.”75 Nevertheless, if our goal is to try to understand the nature of the power relations that structure the relationships between Ofcom and the bodies it regulates, “disciplinary” seems to me the best available moniker. Ofcom is an ever-present supervisor. Its presence and background procedures lessen the likelihood of the need for conspicuous intervention precisely because those being reviewed, monitored and analyzed know that they are, and are therefore inclined to act accordingly. It is of course this self-knowledge that allows Ofcom to govern, to the public eye at any rate, with, to use Collins’s word, “discretion.”76 Hesmondhalgh is clearly right to speak of Ofcom and greater industry self-regulation; and the extent of such self-regulation is in fact likely to further increase in the years ahead, with Ofcom actively exploring opportunities to broaden the application of this modality of governance.77 But Hesmondhalgh’s intimation that such self-regulation represents a form of deregulation, or a relaxing of powers, seems wrong. It is in fact just a different (and arguably magnified) form of regulation, in which the disciplinary nature of power further shifts the burden of control and supervision from the regulator to those being regulated. My argument is that the materialization of this type of power can and should be coupled to the mapping of the creative industries and to the ways in which this enframing has made those industries available to knowledge and discipline.

NOTES 1. For suggested delimitations, see, for instance, J. Howkins, “The Mayor’s Commission on the Creative Industries,” in J. Hartley (ed.) Creative Industries (Blackwell, Oxford, 2004, 117–25), at pp. 118–20; A Pratt, “Cultural industries and cultural policy: An oxymoron?” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11, 2005, 31–44. For interrogation of classificatory approaches, see especially N. Garnham, “From cultural to creative industries: An analysis of the implications of the ‘creative industries’ approach to arts and media policymaking in the UK,” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11, 2005, 15–30. 2. N. Thrift, “‘It’s the romance, not the finance, that makes the business worth pursuing’: Disclosing a new market culture,” Economy and Society, 30, 2001, 412–32; D. Hesmondhalgh, “Media and cultural policy as public policy: The case of the British Labour government,” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11, 2005, 95–109; D. Hesmondhalgh and A. Pratt, “Cultural industries and cultural policy,” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11, 2005, 1–13. 3. Garnham, “From cultural to creative.” 4. J. Hartley (ed.) Creative Industries, Blackwell, Oxford, 2004; J. O’Connor, “Creative exports: Taking cultural industries to St. Petersburg,” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11, 2005, 45–60.

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5. J. Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29, 2005, 740–70. 6. A. McRobbie, “Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded Up Creative Worlds,” Cultural Studies, 16, 2002, 516–31. 7. The first (“Creative Industries Mapping Document 1998”) is available from the DCMS website, http://www.culture.gov.uk/Reference_library/Publications/archive_1998/Creative_Industries_Mapping_Document_1998.htm (retrieved May 2007); the quotation is from the second (“Creative Industries Mapping Document 2001”), also available at http://www.culture.gov.uk/Reference_library/Publications/ archive_2001/ci_mapping_doc_2001.htm (retrieved May 2007). 8. The 11 other sub-sectors were advertising, antiques, architecture, design, fashion, film, leisure software, music, performing arts, publishing, TV and radio. 9. See UNESCO, “Understanding Creative Industries—Cultural statistics for public-policy making,” n/d, available at http://portal.unesco.org/culture/admin/ file_download.php/cultural_stat.pdf?URL_ID=30297&filename=11419233433cult ural_stat.pdf&filetype=application percent2Fpdf&filesize=96994&name=cultural_ stat.pdf&location=user-S/ (retrieved April 2006); M. Jayne, “Creative industries: The regional dimension?,” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 23, 2005, 537–56, at pp. 540–41. 10. “Smith’s task force for a spot of creative accounting,” The Guardian, March 8, 1999. 11. Writing for BBC News: “Britain’s creative industries booming,” November 11, 1998. 12. N. Rantisi, D. Leslie and S. Christopherson, “Placing the creative economy: Scale, politics, and the material,” Environment and Planning A, 38, 2006, 1789–97. 13. Ibid., p. 1793. 14. M. Sparke, In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the NationState, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2005. 15. E.g. J. O’Connor, “The Definition of ‘Cultural Industries,” n.p., 1999, available at http://www.mipc.mmu.ac.uk/iciss/reports/defin.pdf (retrieved April 2006). 16. See, respectively: http://www.britishcouncil.org/arts-creative-industries-mapping-and-research.htm (retrieved May 2006); http://www.nzte.govt.nz/common/ files/nzier-mapping-ci.pdf (retrieved June 2006); http://wiki.cci.edu.au/confluence/ display/NMP/NMP+Home;jsessionid=BD84843E74B38CD16906CDB807C80896 (retrieved May 2006; my emphasis). 17. And as critics have pointed out, there are plenty of industries that do not remotely figure in the DCMS’s map of the UK’s creative industries, even in the most peripheral way, but which can still be shown to have very real creative dimensions—only not the sort that allow for membership among the select few. See, for instance, J. Bryson, M. Taylor and R. Cooper, “Competing by design, specialisation and customization: Manufacturing locks in the West Midlands (UK),” Geografiska Annaler Series B, 90, 2008, 173–86. 18. See especially J. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 2001; D. Wood, The Power of Maps, Guilford Press, New York, 1992; J. Pickles A. History of Space: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World, Routledge, New York, 2003.

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19. See especially I. Hacking, The Taming of Chance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990; T. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1986 and Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1995; A. Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, trans C. Naish, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998. 20. T. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1991; M. Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. 21. K. Oakley, “Not so cool Britannia: The role of the creative industries in economic development,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7, 2004, 67–77, at p. 70. 22. The only real exception has been a small pool of sceptical academics such as Oakley herself. See also Garnham, “From cultural to creative.” 23. See http://www.nesta.org.uk/insidenesta/research_creativeindustries.html (retrieved April 2006). 24. See, respectively: http://www.nwda.co.uk/RelatedContent.aspx?area=133& subarea=260&item=20029252101387883 (retrieved June 2006); http://www.scottishdevelopmentinternational.com/pages/STN/STNFeb06/Creative/Industries.asp (retrieved June 2006); http://www.southwestrda.org.uk/sectors/creative/index.shtm (retrieved June 2006). 25. Jayne, “Creative industries,” pp. 542–48. 26. Ibid., p. 543. 27. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, p. xii. 28. T. Mitchell, “Fixing the Economy,” Cultural Studies, 12, 1998, 82–101 and Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2002, at pp. 80–119. 29. As Mitchell stresses, this is very different from arguing that the creative industries (or the economy) are simply a “social construction”—for this argument maintains and reinforces the very distinction between reality and representation that Mitchell shows as a problem. The “making” of the economy and of the creative industries serves, rather, to organize and effect this apparent separation; it is only possible in a world in which such a separation has become accepted. 30. S. Buck-Morss, “Envisioning capitalism: Political economy on display,” Critical Inquiry, 21, 1995, 434–67; the quotations are from p. 439. Mitchell, too, places mapping at the heart of the constitution of “the economy.” The map, he argues, can be said “to prefigure the work of twentieth-century economics, defining a contained geographical space to be organized later as a national economy, and addressing issues of statistical information that were to play a central role” (Rule of Experts, p. 9). 31. W. Larner and R. Le Heron, “Global Benchmarking: Participating at a Distance in the Global Economy,” in W. Larner and W. Walters (eds.) Global Governmentality: New perspectives on international rule (Routledge, London and New York, 2004, 212–32). 32. DCMS, “Building a Global Audience: British Television in Overseas Markets,” 1999, available at http://www.culture.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/731796CA-0930-4984AFBC-D531BA193B3D/0/globalaudience.pdf (retrieved March 2006).

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33. Ibid., pp. 8, 35, 9, 35. 34. C.f. Oakley, “Not so cool,” p. 72: “Different [creative] industries work in different ways and hence need different sorts of interventions, a point that seems to be poorly understood in [the UK’s] current approach to creative industries support and development.” 35. See also N. Rose and P. Miller, “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government,” British Journal of Sociology, 43, 1992, 173–205: “Governing a sphere requires that it can be represented, depicted in a way which both grasps its truth and re-presents it in a form in which it can enter the sphere of conscious political calculation” (p. 182). 36. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, p. 35 and Rule of Experts, p. 9. 37. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, p. 176. 38. D. Demeritt, “The Statistical Enframing of Nature’s Limits: Forest Conservation in the Progressive-Era United States,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19, 2001, 431–59, at p. 445. On governmentality and the “cultural” industries under the influence of Foucault, see J. Bratich, J. Packer and C. McCarthy (eds.) Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality, SUNY Press, New York, 2002, and especially the essay by Tony Bennett, “Culture and governmentality,” 47–66. 39. DTI/DCMS, “A New Future for Communications,” HMSO, Norwich, 2000 (Cm 5010). 40. Des Freedman offers an important, parallel narrative—examining not powers of media regulation, so much as the power to formulate regulatory policy (in both the UK and US media industry contexts). See his “Dynamics of power in contemporary media policy-making,” Media, Culture & Society, 28, 2006, 907–23. 41. The Creative Industries Mapping Documents distinguish between the “Advertising,” “Television & radio” and “Film” sectors, but the regulatory relationships between them are not so clear. The new media and communications regulator—Ofcom—is ultimately responsible for regulation of broadcast advertising content as part of its media governance more generally, but it contracted out the day-to-day regulation of such content to the Advertising Standards Authority in November 2004. Meanwhile, the regulatory body for the film industry—the British Board of Film Classification, which provides a voluntary ratings system for public exhibition films and the regulation and classification of videos and DVDs—operates independently of Ofcom. 42. See especially B. Franklin (ed.), British Television Policy: A Reader, Routledge, London, 2001. 43. P. Smith, “The politics of UK television policy: The making of Ofcom,” Media, Culture & Society, 28, 2006, 929–40. 44. DTI/DCMS, “A New Future for Communications,” p. 9. 45. The link to the Creative Industries Mapping Document was made even more explicit a few pages further on, where the White Paper cited UK creative industries revenue—“approaching £60 billion a year” (ibid., p. 15)—to underline the “importance of the communications industry” and hence the need for regulatory intervention. 46. Ibid., p. 81. 47. I focus here on the media rather than communications since the former sit within the “creative industries” and the latter do not. 48. Hesmondhalgh, “Media and cultural policy,” p. 101.

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49. See http://www.ofcom.org.uk/about/sdrp/ (retrieved June 2006). 50. E-mail to author, June 13, 2006. Ironically, Thompson left Channel 4 in May 2008—to join Ofcom. 51. Rose and Miller, “Political Power,” p. 175. 52. Respectively: DTI/DCMS, “A New Future for Communications,” p. 82; http:// www.ofcom.org.uk/about/sdrp/ (retrieved April 2006, my emphasis). 53. J. Peck and A. Tickell, “Neoliberalizing Space,” Antipode, 34, 2002, 380–404; the quotations are from p. 384. 54. Rose and Miller, “Political Power,” p. 185. See also Larner and Le Heron, “Global Benchmarking.” 55. Rose and Miller, “Political Power,” p. 188. 56. http://www.ofcom.org.uk/about/sdrp/ (retrieved January 2006). 57. E-mail to author, June 13, 2006. 58. T. Gibbons, “Competition policy and regulatory style—issues for OFCOM,” Info, 7(5), 2005, 42–51. 59. Ofcom, “Ofcom’s Second Review of Public Service Broadcasting: Terms of Reference,” available at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/psb_review/psb_2review/psbreview2.pdf (retrieved May 2008). Not only that, but DCMS launched its own major, parallel inquiry into public service media content in October 2006; “UK Parliament—Culture, Media and Sport Committee—26 October 2006—Session 2005–06—New inquiry: Public service media content,” available at http://www. parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/culture__media_and_sport/cms061026. cfm (retrieved January 2007). 60. Ofcom, “Ofcom review of public service television broadcasting—Phase 1,” 2004, available at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/psb/psb/psb.pdf (retrieved December 2005), p. 2. 61. Ofcom, “Ofcom review of public service television broadcasting—Phase 2,” 2004, available at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/psb2/psb2/psb_ phase2.pdf (retrieved February 2006). 62. Ofcom, “Economic analysis of the TV advertising market,” 2004, available at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/tv/reports/tvadvmarket.pdf (retrieved May 2006). 63. E.g. M. Foucault, “Truth and power,” in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (Pantheon, New York, 1980, 109–33). 64. Porter, Trust in numbers. For two interesting comparative examples of how mathematics and models are invoked to legitimize markets and economic policies, see D. MacKenzie, “Is Economics Performative? Option Theory and the Construction of Derivatives Markets” in D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa and L. Siu (eds.), Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2007, 54–86), and A. Mason, “The rise of consultant forecasting in liberalized natural gas markets,” Public Culture, 19, 2007, 367–79. 65. “CoManCO Speech: Mansion House 6th November 2002,” available at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/media/speeches/2002/11/currie_20021106 (retrieved April 2006). 66. Ofcom, “A case study on public sector mergers and regulatory structures,” 2006, available at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/about/accoun/case_study/case_study. pdf (retrieved May 2006), p. 48.

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67. Ofcom had exactly 800 employees at March 31, 2007. “Ofcom Annual Report 2006/7,” available at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/about/accoun/reports_plans/annrep0607/annualrpt0607.pdf (retrieved January 2008), p. 58. 68. Ofcom, “Channel 4 Financial Review,” April 4, 2007, available at http://www. ofcom.org.uk/media/news/2007/04/nr_20070404a (retrieved December 2007). 69. Ibid. 70. This particular headline was in The Times, April 5, 2007. 71. http://www.ofcom.org.uk/ (retrieved October 2007). 72. “Record Ofcom fine for ITV,” Broadcast, May 8, 2008. 73. Among others, Chase-it TV in 2005 (“Chase-it TV licence revocation, February 8, http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/ifi/tvlicensing/tvupdates/cha) and One TV in 2006 (“One TV licence revocation,” August 22, http://wwww.radioauthority.org.uk/tv/ifi/ tvlicensing/tvupdates/onetv/). 74. Ofcom, “Engagement with Parliament,” available at http://ofcom.org.uk/ about/accoun/parliament/ (retrieved October 2007). 75. R. Collins, “Hierarchy to homeostasis? Hierarchy, markets and networks in UK media and communications governance,” Media, Culture & Society, 30, 2008, 295–317, at p. 312. 76. Ibid. 77. Ofcom, “Initial assessments of when to adopt self- or co-regulation,” available at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/coregulation/condoc.pdf (retrieved April 2008).

2 Television’s Economy and the Power of the Geographical Imagination

One of the most sensitive areas of cultural and political debate in New Zealand today concerns the objectives, responsibilities and status of TVNZ, the country’s largest television broadcaster, which operates the two free-to-air channels TV ONE and TV2. As New Zealand as a whole has gone through the convulsions of a radical swing to free-market neoliberalism in the mid-1980s, followed by a partial reassertion of moderate-to-leftist values and policies under Labour since 1999, so TVNZ has been shaken to and fro.1 In 1989, it was essentially turned into a fully commercial enterprise (albeit still owned by the government): exposed for the first time to competition from private broadcasters, thoroughly deregulated, required to turn a profit and deliver an annual dividend to its shareholder, and increasingly focused as a result on ratings and bottom-line financial performance. Gone was the public-service ethos that had been precariously but insistently yoked to commercial imperatives ever since the formation of TVNZ’s predecessor, the NZBC, in 1961. Labour, however, since 1999, has sought to resuscitate such an ethos.2 It has done so primarily through the introduction in 2003 of a charter requiring TVNZ programming to contribute to New Zealand’s cultural and national identity, and containing phrases such as “balance,” “diversity,” “intellectual, scientific and cultural development” and “tastes and interests not generally catered for by other national television broadcasters.” But the charter, insist critics, is a toothless tiger: TVNZ, funded (as it always has been) primarily by advertising, remains as preoccupied now with profits and ratings as it was during the 1990s, and is signally failing to observe the principles that the charter prescribes.3 This critique came to a head in February 2006 with an open letter to the then Broadcasting Minister Steve Maharey, signed by 31 prominent New Zealanders including 61

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Sir Edmund Hillary, judges, politicians and former Governors-General, castigating “cheap and easy” programming “designed for the lowest common denominator,” and calling for TVNZ to drop all advertising and adopt a fully publicly funded model.4 In this chapter I am concerned primarily with the rebuttal to this critique, for, propagated by the government and industry alike, this rebuttal invariably invokes an explicitly geographical thesis: that is, New Zealand cannot afford a national, publicly funded, public-service broadcaster because it is too small; it is, in this regard, underpopulated. This thesis is simple and tangible and appears, at first blush, perfectly reasonable. New Zealand only has in the region of four million inhabitants; the UK, with, in the BBC, the world’s highest-profile public-service broadcaster, has 60 million. There is a big, palpable difference between the two. Such simplicity also makes this thesis extremely powerful: it is one of those arguments that encourages passive acceptance, and which gets lazily and endlessly regurgitated, precisely because it is so easy to picture and comfortable to digest. But this surface appearance is entirely misleading. The thesis is, I argue, at best highly questionable, if not an outright fallacy. In and through the example of New Zealand television, the wider phenomenon I explore in this chapter is the power of popular geographical “imaginations” and “knowledges” to close off debate and obfuscate underlying political and economic issues, the latter inevitably being more complicated, and messier, than these neat geographical propositions that come to obscure them.5 This, I demonstrate, has been shown to be especially common where the geographical knowledge in question concerns numbers of people, or relative sizes of population. As Tom Bethell has written, the idea of overpopulation, in particular, has been an “enduring concern” of society ever since Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798.6 And geographers, including David Harvey in particular, have insisted that as with other geographical imaginaries, we should place “overpopulation” squarely in its historical and political-economic contexts, thus exposing its specific genealogy, mobilization and influence. Much less, however, has been said traditionally of “underpopulation,” either in the public sphere or in scholarly circles. Nevertheless, the idea of underpopulation is abroad, and I argue in this chapter—through the debate around TVNZ—that it needs to treated with the same caution, and subjected to comparable scrutiny, as the concept of overpopulation and other more familiar geographical knowledges. The argument proceeds as follows. Strictly to provide context, comparison and theoretical leverage, I first examine how claims of overpopulation have been used at various times and places to advance specific political or economic agendas, and at the ways in which these claims can be interrogated and unsettled. The second part of the chapter then introduces, at a

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general level, the idea of underpopulation, and some of its most common incarnations. I show that like overpopulation, its formulation is rarely neutral and its propagation is often tied to a discrete ideological, political or economic cause. It is extremely important to emphasise here, at the outset of the chapter, that while the chapter’s first two sections focus thus on the generic concepts of over- and underpopulation, these particular concepts are not themselves my central area of concern. My interest is in geographical imaginaries and their power. That the imaginaries in question happen to relate to relative sizes of population is, in at least one sense, by the by. In the third part of the chapter I anchor the discussion firmly in New Zealand. I argue that New Zealand represented a particularly fertile field for the germination of the broadcaster-underpopulation thesis because geographical knowledges and imaginaries have always been—and remain—a central feature of national political-economic discourse, circulating well beyond the borders solely of television or media economies. The remainder of the chapter then takes up the specific example of New Zealand television, identifying where and how the concept of underpopulation is marshalled, and showing that the arguments mustered to buttress this thesis are fundamentally flawed. I demonstrate this through a review of recent public debate on the future of TVNZ—in which the government, the broadcast industry and media commentators have all been key participants—allied to a critique of the economic-geographical assumptions enshrined in the dominant underpopulation theory. And I conclude in a similar vein to Susan George, who has advised that “whenever you hear the word overpopulation, you should reach, if not for your revolver, at least for your calculator.”7 My argument is that not only in regard to New Zealand television, but much more generally, the same injunction should apply when one hears the word underpopulation.

THE POWER OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION: DECONSTRUCTING OVERPOPULATION In recent years it has been argued convincingly, and with increasing regularity, that vivid geographical “imaginations” or “knowledges,” and those who wield them, can exert powerful influences in a variety of political and social contexts. The thrust of this argument has been threefold. First, it is clear that these knowledges are typically generated and articulated in support or justification of a particular policy, strategy or practice. Second, it has been demonstrated that many such knowledges are, at best, partial, distorted and subjective—in contrast to the garb of objectivity in which they are usually cloaked. And third, these geographical knowledges tend to serve to choke public debate rather than stimulate it, principally by way of appeal

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to the authority of science, economics or, more generally, “expertise.” The contexts in which such knowledges are deployed, meanwhile, have been shown to range widely. From the West’s “war on terror” to infinitely more parochial “wars” within critical human geography,8 and from constructions of Sydney as a “global city” to “universal” and “disembodied” representations of globalization itself,9 critics have shown imaginative geographies being leveraged to marked effect in numerous different matters of public or professional significance.10 In sum, as Derek Gregory has argued, there is a “considerable spectrum across which geographical knowledges are implicated in grids of power.”11 More than anyone else, David Harvey has sought repeatedly and forcefully to alert us to this “power of geography,” particularly when crafted as knowledge for public consumption.12 He first mused on the issue over thirty years ago with the specific question “What kind of geography for what kind of public policy?,” and has since offered numerous reflections on the subject.13 One essay, for example, showed specifically how the role of geographical knowledges under capitalism has changed in relation to shifting social needs.14 More recently, in two related essays, Harvey has offered something of an inventory of the different public-facing bodies that historically and now have produced and marshalled geographical knowledges as “critical undergirdings for policy formulation” in the “pursuit of commercial advantage and political-economic power”: a list including governments, supranational institutions (the World Bank, the WTO and so on), non-governmental organizations, commercial corporations, the media, and educational institutions.15 Among geographical imaginaries and knowledges, the concept of overpopulation holds a special purchase on the popular imagination. Most often traced back to Malthus and the late eighteenth century, it has been publicly revived in recent decades by, inter alia, professional scientists, such as Paul Ehrlich with The Population Bomb (1968); prominent think tanks, most famously the Club of Rome with its The Limits to Growth (1972); and even US senators and vice-presidents-to-be, namely in Al Gore, with his Earth in the Balance (1992).16 The essence of the overpopulation thesis is, and always has been, straightforward: too many people for the available land and means. And in an influential essay from the mid-1970s, Harvey tackled the concept of overpopulation head-on.17 He described, first, the conventional Malthusian take on this relationship between population and resources. The power of population, according to Malthus, is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence, so ultimately population will inevitably—naturally—press against and overwhelm subsistence resources. As a result, population can only be kept in balance with the means of subsistence through positive and preventive “checks” such as poverty, which Malthus says will always fall on the lower classes, but which

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cannot be avoided since they result from the operation of “natural” laws. In policy terms, Malthus concluded that it is best to do nothing about poverty because anything that is done to free the lowest classes from positive checks tends to result in an expansion of their numbers and thus an exacerbation of the underlying problem. Harvey juxtaposed with this thesis, and himself subscribes to, a contrary, Marxian take on the relationship between population and resources. For Marx, there is no such thing as a “natural” law (of population or anything else): our specific “problem” of overpopulation has to be understood and analyzed strictly in the context of the mode of production in which it materializes, namely capitalism. For Marx, a relative surplus population (or “industrial reserve army”) and its manifestations, such as poverty, are endemic to this capitalist mode, arising as capital is substituted for labor in the production process, and serving to maintain capitalist profitability by keeping wages in check. To those who are leery of the Marxian perspective, it is vital to emphasize that Harvey’s argument is far more subtle, and of much wider-reaching importance, than a simple “Malthus was wrong and Marx was right.” His more central case concerns the generic dynamic at work in the crystallization and application of the overpopulation thesis. He shows there are two key sets of linkages. First, he demonstrates that geographical knowledges such as this are always tied to specific ideologies and methodologies (in Malthus’s case, logical empiricism). And second, he shows how the formulation and popularization of such geographical knowledges serves to energize and buttress particular policy solutions. These observations on geographical knowledges have fundamental, wide-ranging pertinence. Before turning to the issue of underpopulation, it is helpful, I think, to illustrate how the overpopulation argument—laid out by Malthus, and critiqued in turn by Marx and Harvey, at a highly theoretical level—has been developed and harnessed in a particular historical-geographical context, and to examine the ways in which one can critically probe such specific applications. Thus, Timothy Mitchell has described and attacked the particular strain of Western development rhetoric, espoused by the likes of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which seeks to explain the plight of contemporary Egypt with the vivid geographical image of “too big a population, growing too quickly, on too little farmable land.”18 His argument, like Harvey’s, is that by positing Egypt’s problems as “natural” ones, the purveyors of this overpopulation thesis are able to avoid questions of political-economic inequality and global and local power relations. Mitchell’s rebuttal is convincing. First, he shows that on the basis of any comparables, Egypt has easily enough land for its population given its high levels of productivity; rural poverty is the effect not of insufficient land but, rather, of its inequitable distribution. And second, he shows that from 1965

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to 1990, agricultural production actually grew faster than the population, with Egypt required to import more staples to feed its people only because domestic production was steered towards livestock rearing—by increased demand for meat among tourists and the rich, and by a government that subsidized meat, dairy and poultry production while heavily taxing the production of staples—and because those staples which were still produced domestically were increasingly channelled to feeding animals. Mitchell goes on to argue that because the problems have been misconceived (as one of overpopulation), so, too, have the answers: external technology and expertise, based on inappropriate case studies from other parts of the world, simply did not help, and USAID’s decentralization of power away from the state to local government and landowners merely shifted the locus of exploitation and reinforced inequality. Mitchell’s, then, is a study in the roots, power and purpose of a contestable and highly ideological geographical imagination.

SITUATING “UNDERPOPULATION” If the theory and politics of overpopulation display a rich, controversial history, what of “underpopulation”? This concept is far less visible, much less discussed, and largely hypothetical: unlike overpopulation (and the Egypt example), one does not at the moment routinely find people describing particular countries or regions as underpopulated. But that does not stop speculation. Fuelled by below-replacement fertility, underpopulation is touted as a major problem in the making for regions such as Western Europe and Japan.19 The first significant text on the subject, The Birth Dearth, was published by Ben Wattenberg in 1987; more recently, Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation (yet another prominent think tank) has written The Empty Cradle (2004), a similarly alarmist forecast of shrinking populations and their potential social, political and economic implications.20 As another commentator has summarized, “Demographers now predict that our numbers will peak at about nine billion in 2070, and then begin to fall. Most of the richer nations will top out long before then. Russia’s population is already dwindling . . . Japan will start to shrink from next year onwards; Britain won’t be far behind. Europe’s population will fall 4 percent by 2025.”21 My interest here is in the fact that as with overpopulation, we tend to find underpopulation being espoused, or more often predicted, mostly by those with an agenda—political, ideological, economic—that is specifically buttressed by the imagination of such a geography. In other words, the thesis is leveraged at particular times, in particular contexts, for particular reasons.22 It can never be “proven”; but that does not diminish its potential power. A fascinating paper by Monica van Beusekom, for instance, shows how in one historical-geographical context, those in power actually lurched between the-

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ories of underpopulation and overpopulation in their efforts to legitimize the policies they enacted.23 Thus French colonial officials in West Africa initially evaluated the Sudan and French West Africa as underpopulated. But they had no reliable demographic data. Rather, their initial prognosis was tethered to a desire to introduce temperate farming techniques, which, they said, would allow increasingly productive agriculture and rich, densely settled communities; the existing lack of such communities proved their very possibility and necessity. However, the failure of French efforts to transform African farming systems ultimately led officials to re-evaluate their readings of the Sahelian environment and of the population it could sustain. Disinclined to acknowledge the misguided nature of their own interventions, they instead attributed failure to “natural” constraints: a hostile environment, rapid population growth, and hence (now) “overpopulation.” As with overpopulation, underpopulation is, and can only ever be, a relative concept; and if overpopulation means too many people for the extant resources, the concept of underpopulation ordinarily relates numbers of people not to physical resources but to economic systems. In short, the argument goes, as fertility falls and populations age, the primary “inputs” to national economic systems (the generation of wealth and of taxation receipts by those of working age) decline, making it increasingly difficult to fund the public expenditure “outputs” demanded of those systems, particularly those that inflate in line with an aging population. Hence, the key concerns for proponents of the underpopulation thesis are issues such as pensions provision. “The US and Europe are already being sucked into the inevitable pensions crisis,” we are told. “In Germany the state now spends 14 percent of its GDP on pensions and healthcare for the elderly: this will grow to 24 percent by 2040. General Motors already has two and a half times as many pensioners as workers, and a pension shortfall of $19 billion.”24 In sum, underpopulation is seen as a threat to the economic security and sanctity of existing nation-states. Italy serves as a good example, having experienced a marked decline in fertility rates. “In 1964 we had one million births in Italy, while today we have just a bit more than 500,000 [per annum],” says the demographer Antonio Golini. “We are seriously wondering if fertility is sufficient to sustain the Italian system from the social and economic viewpoint.”25 And in celebrating America’s recent achievement of the 300m population threshold, The Economist raised (in stark contrast to the American context) these same fears for Italy’s future. The fertility rate, it reported, has fallen to just 1.28 per woman (well below the “replacement rate” of approximately 2.1 for industrialized territories), which would cause the number of Italians “to halve in 42 years”—“without immigration.”26 The immigration caveat is of course key. Our central concern here, again, is that the idea of underpopulation, like that of overpopulation, tends to be

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advanced in the cause of very specific political, cultural or economic programs. It is notable in this regard that anxieties expressly about the decline or erosion of “national culture” or “national heritage,” for many years, have frequently been inextricably entwined with accounts of the threat posed by underpopulation.27 For such accounts, immigration is a doubly problematic issue: not only does its very existence dampen the severity of the perceived numerical and economic threat (or nullify it completely), but it frequently provokes its own “national culture” concerns to compound the cultural “threat” associated with a dwindling “indigenous” population. If debates over the “purity” and “sustainability” of nation-states offer a combustible crucible for the thesis of underpopulation, it also surfaces in the service of much more specific political projects. It is, for instance, increasingly proving grist to the mill for anti-abortion campaigners, for whom images such as “the empty cradle” clearly provide considerable succor (and Wattenberg’s most recent, 2004 book aligns him firmly with this camp).28 Most notably there is the Population Research Institute (PRI), an American organization founded in 1989, which describes itself on its website as “a non-profit research and educational organization dedicated to objectively presenting the truth about population-related issues” but also as “a pro-life educational organization dedicated to . . . dispelling the myth of overpopulation.”29 The PRI, then, gives us “truth” in place of “myth”: an extremely provocative case of one geographical imagination being marshalled directly to discount another. “Our long-term problem,” insists PRI’s President Steve Mosher, “is not too many children, but too few.”30 Later in this chapter I look in much greater detail at another case of people being told, essentially, “we are too few”: that of New Zealand television. This use of geographical “knowledge” is less inflammatory, but no less interesting, and equally potent; and I show that while it succeeds in smothering debate and reinforcing policy, it is in reality based on insecure empirical foundations. First, however, it is helpful to consider the place of geographical imaginaries in general within the wider national political-economic discourse of New Zealand.

GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINARIES AND THE NEW ZEALAND ECONOMY In a speech delivered at a “business breakfast” at the Papakura District Council (in south Auckland) in February 2005, Roger Kerr—a senior advisor to the leading architects of New Zealand’s neoliberal transformation in the 1980s, and now executive director of the New Zealand Business Roundtable (a free-market think tank based in Wellington)—delivered a disquisition on the materiality of “geography” as a determinant of national economic performance. His two main matters of specific concern were

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the “smallness” and “geographical remoteness,” in relative terms, of New Zealand. And the core question he was concerned to address was the following: does New Zealand’s combined smallness and remoteness (in short, its geography) substantively impact its ability to compete economically on the international stage? His answer was pithy and precise: “geography,” he concluded, “is usually relatively unimportant.”31 Kerr’s speech and conclusion are interesting less for their specific content (his analysis is unconvincing, at best) than for the fact that he registered, publicly, both the centrality of geographical imaginaries in the history of New Zealand’s national political-economic discourse, and the tendency for most previous commentators in that tradition to come to the opposite conclusion—namely, the conclusion that geography in general, and smallness and remoteness in particular, are material.32 If New Zealand television, which I turn to shortly, evinces a concern with smallness, we can usefully (but briefly) look to another sector of the economy—aircraft engineering—for a debate (and economic argument) that pivots on “remoteness.” This was a recent labor dispute involving Air New Zealand, the national airline that is 82 percent government-owned. In October 2005, when more than 600 Air New Zealand workers were informed that they would be losing their jobs because the company had decided to outsource some of its heavy maintenance engineering operations, it emerged that management’s justification was grounded in geography: specifically, the problems caused by New Zealand’s “remoteness.”33 According to the company’s former chief executive, Ralph Norris, Air New Zealand “had been unable to overcome New Zealand’s remoteness to compete against large-scale overseas maintenance units.”34 Precisely how such “remoteness” militated against effective competition remained unexplained. But my interest here is simply in emphasizing that where New Zealand and its economy are concerned, the concept of remoteness is not new—it has been invoked to powerful effect at many times and in many different contexts.35 But arguably even more central to the hybrid discourse of New Zealand political economy has been the country’s alleged “smallness”: in particular, its relatively small population. This theme has a long and illustrious history. Take, for instance, Harvey Franklin’s classic text on New Zealand’s economic “dependency,” Trade, Growth and Anxiety (1978). Its very first sentence gives a stark foretaste of the geographical construct that shapes the entire ensuing argument: “New Zealand is a small society,” Franklin begins, “one of the smallest in the world.”36 This smallness served fundamentally to explain, for Franklin, why New Zealand was a “dependent society—dependent in the past upon her British trade connections, dependent in future upon fashioning new trading links.”37 At around the same time, a similar argument was fashioned by the equally influential New Zealand at the Turning Point (1976), a report on planning mechanisms commissioned by Robert Mul-

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doon’s incoming government, and prepared by a task force led by (now) Sir Frank Holmes. “New Zealand’s size and isolation, its dependence and vulnerability, particularly in economic terms,” the report claimed, “point up the fact that the country is “expendable” as far as the power centres of the outside world are concerned.”38 In the remainder of this chapter, I demonstrate that this same geographical imagery—New Zealand’s smallness, and its purported economic implications—has recently been brought to bear with particular force in the debate about TVNZ. But it should be noted that as far as New Zealand’s media are concerned, the effects of “smallness” are commonly believed to be experienced much more widely than merely in television. A recent introductory text on media studies in New Zealand, for example, made much play of, but did not critically interrogate, the country’s geographical footing, emphasizing “our location as a small nation at ‘the edge of the world,’” and alleging (thus) that “New Zealand is vulnerably placed in the global economy.”39 My argument in this chapter is that such usage of geographical imaginaries is altogether too comfortable and uncritical.

TELEVISION NEW ZEALAND: DECONSTRUCTING “UNDERPOPULATION” The underpopulation thesis The thesis I explore here can be simply stated: that New Zealand cannot afford a truly national, publicly funded, public-service broadcaster because it is too small; the country is, in respect of the geographical economics of television, underpopulated. Notably, and in contrast to the wider warnings of national or regional underpopulation described above, it is not a matter here of the population declining too far to support a particular system, but of the population being too small tout court. And this, I should stress further, is the argument against a substantial publicly funded broadcaster: not just the main argument, but for most critics the only necessary argument. Thus we see it reproduced endlessly both by the government and by those in the industry who are either happy with the current state of affairs or who object to the idea of a “real” public-service TVNZ. It can be helpful at this juncture, I think, to pause to clarify some important terminological distinctions that we have already encountered, and which become increasingly salient in what follows—namely, the nature of the differences between “public broadcasters,” “publicly funded broadcasters,” and “public-service broadcasters.” “Public broadcasters” are simply those owned by the state: in New Zealand, TVNZ and Ma¯ori Television, and in the UK, the BBC, Channel 4 and S4C (Wales’s public broadcaster). “Publicly-funded

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broadcasters” are those financed wholly or largely from the public purse: of which there is only one in New Zealand (Ma¯ori Television), and only two in the UK (the BBC and S4C). Lastly, “public-service broadcasters” are those with “public-service” obligations—a veritable minefield of a term, but essentially meaning programming obligations beyond merely commercial ones (news, current affairs and religious and educational programming being common examples). In New Zealand, only TVNZ and Ma¯ori Television have such obligations; in the UK, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel Five and S4C all currently have public-service commitments inscribed in their broadcast licences, but of widely varying extent, and seen to be associated with markedly different opportunity costs. The argument advanced in New Zealand by the so-called “Group of 31” prominent New Zealanders—and against which the underpopulation thesis has been mobilized—is essentially that TVNZ, a public broadcaster, should also be publicly funded in order for it to assume and deliver more substantial public-service benefits (its current public-service obligations, it is argued, being extremely limited). Given that it is the government that would have to fund such a broadcaster, by way of either direct (licence fee) or indirect taxation, it is perhaps not surprising that the government has emerged as the most strident proponent of the underpopulation thesis that seeks to counter the public-service lobby.40 The former Broadcasting Minister Steve Maharey makes the case as follows: “In a small country like New Zealand the government cannot hope to fully fund public television.”41 The same argument is trotted out by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, which provides advice to the Broadcasting Minister (a seat occupied by Trevor Mallard since October 2007) on major broadcasting policy or regulatory issues and which administers much of the government funding to, and the Crown’s relationship with, TVNZ. Its line on underpopulation is this: “The size of the New Zealand market makes it difficult for free-to-air broadcasters to be profitable.”42 Meanwhile, the individual Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage—who happens to be none other than the Prime Minister Helen Clark—clearly espouses the same view. As the New Zealand media commentator Tom Frewen has wryly observed, “Helen Clark does not allow complete ignorance of the actual cost of running a public television channel to stand in the way of her firm belief that New Zealand cannot afford it.”43 One of the key findings of the critical literature on the deployment of geographical knowledges and imaginaries in support of public policy, as we have seen, has been the observed tendency for such knowledges to strangle debate. And this is precisely what has happened in New Zealand with the thesis of publicly funded broadcasting and underpopulation. In the wake of the open letter to Maharey from the “Group of 31,” which triggered a slew of responses—some positive, some indignant—on the nation’s airwaves and in print, even the most considered comments appeared to take the un-

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derpopulation thesis as read. Here, for example, is the New Zealand Herald feature writer Geoff Cumming, in an otherwise balanced and thoughtful reflection on TVNZ’s predicament. Yes, he admits, TVNZ is struggling in its current incarnation. “But the solution of the Group of 31—make TV One a commercial-free public service broadcaster—is off the spectrum. New Zealand lacks the population to sustain a “pure” public broadcaster such as the BBC.”44 How and why New Zealand’s “underpopulation” precludes a publicly funded broadcaster remains unexamined. And this is a striking feature of the “debate,” such as it is: underpopulation is frequently invoked but only very rarely substantiated, and then by way of threadbare reasoning. Two lines of “argument” seem to underpin the thesis. First, there is a strictly comparative methodology. Thus, when discussing whether or not New Zealand can or should adopt a “purer” public broadcaster model (with little or no advertising), the same international benchmarks are always enlisted. “People talk,” says media commentator and freelance television director and writer Phil Wallington, “about the ABC [the Australian Broadcasting Corporation] and BBC.”45 The proof that New Zealand is too small to afford such a broadcaster, in other words, is to be found partly at least in the fact that countries that do afford it—Australia (c. 20 million) and the UK—are much more populous. The second argument turns on the cost profile of television broadcasters. This says that no matter how many people live in a country, and therefore whatever the potential revenues for a national broadcaster, the costs of running such a broadcaster (publicly funded or otherwise) are broadly the same; and because—framing the argument in economics terminology— broadcasters are alleged to have primarily fixed costs (costs that do not vary with the quantum of goods or services produced) and very few variable costs (costs that do vary with output), it follows that the larger the country, the more profitable a national broadcaster can become. Richard Harman, a New Zealand independent producer and television commentator, offered in February 2006 a succinct version of this thesis as it is deemed to apply specifically to New Zealand; and his choice of international benchmarks, once again, should not go unnoticed. “We [New Zealand] do not have the same population as Britain or Australia,” he observes, “and Sony TV cameras cost as much in Auckland as they do in London.”46 This is ultimately a simple economies of scale argument: the greater the domestic population, the greater a national broadcaster’s financial viability because revenues increase but costs, on the whole, do not. Selective sampling My objective in this chapter, I should stress, is not to suggest that a true publicly funded, public-service broadcaster is the right model for TVNZ. It

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is, first, to highlight the fact that an expressly geographical “knowledge” is being deployed to rubbish the very possibility—preventing, in the process, the flowering of genuine public debate on the matter. Second, it is to demonstrate that this geographical imaginary—underpopulation—is simply not sustainable; and more particularly, that neither of the two arguments posited in support of the thesis is valid. Making this case does not mean opposing the policy that flows from that thesis (namely, a rejection of the publicly funded model); in fact I do not offer here any views, one way or the other, on the desirability or otherwise of changing the TVNZ model. The first, comparative supporting argument is, of course, especially suspect. To say that New Zealand cannot afford a publicly funded broadcaster because those countries that can afford one are larger, is akin to saying that a woman could not do a certain job because the person currently in that position is a man; it is a thoroughly circular argument with no logical basis. Is there a possibility, one should ask, that the UK and Australia are cited as comparables precisely because they are bigger, thus enabling the underpopulation argument to cohere? For, even a cursory review of publicly funded broadcasters around the world demonstrates that the UK and Australia represent, between them, a highly unrepresentative sample. Certainly each has a bigger population than New Zealand, but there are plenty of other countries of a similar size to New Zealand with successful publicly funded television channels. Were the critics to include such countries among their international benchmarks, the underpopulation argument would rapidly begin to disintegrate. A handful of examples will suffice. Finland has a population of just over 5 million and boasts, in Yleisradio (YLE), a widely admired national, publicly funded broadcaster. It operates five national television channels and thirteen radio channels and services; the Finnish public considers YLE to be a reliable source of news and current affairs; it plays a major role in producing and presenting programs dealing with national arts and children’s education; and, in 2001, more than half of its programs were domestic productions (the last point highly salient in the New Zealand context, as I later discuss).47 The national, state-owned broadcaster of another Scandinavian country, Norway (c. 4.5 million)—Norsk Rikskringkasting (NRK)—is held in similarly high esteem. But it is not a purely Scandinavian phenomenon. Croatia (c. 4.5 million) and Ireland (c. 4 million) also have national, publicly funded broadcasters, in Hrvatska radiotelevizija (HRT) and Radio Telefís Éireann (RTE) respectively; and, of course, they have comparable populations to New Zealand. And last, but not least, there is Ríkisútvarpið (RUV), the state-owned public-service broadcaster of Iceland (a country of just 300,000 people), whose main obligations are to promote the Icelandic language, Icelandic history and Iceland’s cultural heritage. In each of these cases, it is important to point out, the national broadcaster is not funded solely from public sources; and nor is it in the UK and

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Australia. The BBC has a commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, which generates nearly £1bn annually from merchandising, subscription and international sources; ABC also benefits from merchandising, while YLE receives funding from Finland’s commercial broadcasters, NRK exploits merchandizing and sponsorship, and HRT carries advertising, as do RTE (which also generates merchandise sales) and RUV. In all cases except RTE of Ireland, however, public funding accounts for well in excess of 50 percent of total income: over 75 percent for the BBC and ABC, for instance, and over 90 percent for NRK.48 In New Zealand, by contrast, public funding presently contributes less than 10 percent of TVNZ revenue.49 Sony TV cameras and “Desperate Housewives” If the first argument used to advance the underpopulation thesis is easily dismissed, the second merits closer consideration. A national broadcaster in a large country, it is said, will be more viable than in a small country because while its costs will be broadly the same (“Sony TV cameras cost as much in Auckland as they do in London”), its revenue potential is greater—whether those revenues consist primarily of advertising, subscriptions, or indeed taxation (licence fee) dividends. But is this actually true? Certainly, all other things—such as GDP per capita and the level of competition between broadcasters—being equal, a larger country will mean more revenue to be captured. The presumption of equivalent costs, however, does not stand up to scrutiny. Compare, for example, TVNZ and the UK’s Channel 4 Corporation: the latter probably a better benchmark than the BBC because its structure is similar to TVNZ (it is state-owned but funded by commercial revenues, especially advertising) and because it, unlike the BBC (with considerable interests in, for example, radio), is focused predominantly on television. In 2004, TVNZ’s total operating costs were NZ$417m (approximately £160m); Channel 4’s, meanwhile, were £780m.50 Of course, the differences between the two entities are considerable and should not be overlooked: TVNZ ran (in 2004) two free-to-air, national terrestrial channels while Channel 4 operated (in the same year) one national free-to-air channel (Channel 4) and two digital channels available only in some multichannel homes (E4 and FilmFour); staff wages are much higher in the UK; and Channel 4 had more ancillary businesses to finance (including international sales and an education division). But if running the core television business really were a matter merely of “Sony TV cameras,” it would be exceptionally hard to account for the fivefold difference in operating costs. What, specifically, accounts then for this large difference in costs? The answer—and by some margin the largest individual cost category for all television broadcasters—is programming. Programs, not capital equipment such

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as cameras, account for the bulk of expenditure. And here the difference between TVNZ and Channel 4 is especially clear. Channel 4’s total programming spend in 2004 was £541m, to TVNZ’s $215m (~£80m): an almost sevenfold difference in costs. Channel 4’s spend, remember, did include its non-core channels; strip these out and one is left with program expenditure of £486m on the core, terrestrial channel alone. But remember, also, this: that TVNZ’s £80m (a sixth of the spend on the core Channel 4 channel) served to program not one but two national terrestrial channels—TV ONE and TV2—which shared no programming with one another. In other words, £80m in New Zealand scheduled you two, twenty-four-hour free-toair terrestrial channels, while one such channel in the UK cost £486m; or, to put it another way, the per-hour program costs were approximately 12 times higher in the UK than in New Zealand based on the TVNZ–Channel 4 comparison. This statistic clearly gives the lie to the simplistic, misleading throwaway that “Sony TV cameras cost as much in Auckland as they do in London,” and similar assertions as to cost equivalence between broadcasters in countries with different populations. Indeed, looking up rather than down in size from the UK experience, consider in turn the US market, where total 2004 operating costs for Viacom’s two free-to-air terrestrial networks, CBS and UPN, were US$6,957m, or approximately £4bn at historic prices: five times Channel 4’s total costs, precisely mirroring Channel 4’s fivefold difference from TVNZ.51 We are still left with the question, however, of why programming, in particular, costs so much more in some (larger) countries than in others. The answer to this question is in fact fairly simple, and relates to the continuing US dominance of international trade in television programs. The US has long been the main exporter of programming to international markets, many of which screen more imported material than domestically produced content.52 Despite growth in production internationally, this dominance remains entrenched:53 the British Television Distributors’ Association recently estimated that the US generates fully 70 percent of global program trade by volume (program hours as opposed to program value), the UK ranking second with 10 percent and no other individual country originating more than 4 percent.54 For broadcasters in those countries, including New Zealand, where imports—and especially US imports—account for a significant proportion of the broadcast schedule, the price paid for those acquisitions will clearly have a marked effect on overall expenditure. And one of the key characteristics of the international trade in television programs is that US exports are priced on a market-by-market basis, with prices graduated by ability to pay, which in turn is a function in large part of a country’s population and relative wealth. Hence the pivotal fact that the UK—and, in Channel 4, one of the leading UK broadcasters of US acquisitions (among them Friends, The Simpsons and Desperate Housewives)—will

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pay considerably more for the same US import than will New Zealand and TVNZ (Friends, Desperate Housewives and many others). It is important to understand at this point both how it is that US distributors can afford to relinquish their programming in some small markets at extremely low prices, and the effects of this trade on local production capabilities. The answer to the first question resides in a fundamental economic attribute of cultural commodities such as television programs, observed by a long tradition of economists (and explored much more fully, particularly for its geographical dimensions, in Part II of this book): namely, that “the costs of reproduction are marginal in relation to the costs of production” and hence “the marginal returns from each extra sale tend to grow.”55 In other words, a US distributor can profitably sell a program in New Zealand for only a very small fee because the costs of distributing it there are marginal in relation to the original production costs. The effects of this trade on local production, meanwhile, especially in small markets where imports are priced cheaply, are profound: again, all other things being equal (audience preferences, charter responsibilities, and so on), broadcasters will opt to screen an imported program because it will almost always be cheaper than producing in-house or commissioning or buying a program from a local production company.56 This peculiar feature of the international trade in television programs accounts, according to many commentators, for the continuing US dominance of that trade and for the continuing import-reliance of many national markets.57 None of this should be taken to imply, however, that the television industry does not display pronounced economies of scale based on a high proportion of fixed costs. Clearly, it does demonstrate such economies; and geographers, most notably Allen Scott, have described and analyzed in great detail the specifically spatial manifestations that these economies typically assume in respect of productive organization.58 Furthermore, much of the fixed cost base in question comprises, of course, the programming: once a program has been created, it costs very little, as we have just seen, to reproduce it for further consumption; and this is the primary source of the scale economies that characterize television. My argument here is simply that while programming is a largely fixed cost for an individual broadcaster—it does not vary materially with the scale of the audience—this cost is not fixed across broadcasters. Depending on their respective locations within the international trade circuit, two broadcasters can and do pay a substantially different price for the same acquired program. The vexed issue of “local programming” TVNZ’s costs are significantly lower than Channel 4’s, then, in large part because it pays so much less for its program imports. And New Zealand has

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always been a heavily import-reliant market where television is concerned: indeed, historically, the world’s most import-reliant in a much-cited study encompassing 69 countries, importing in 1983 approximately 75 percent of its programming by volume.59 Interestingly, many of those in New Zealand who subscribe to and recycle the underpopulation thesis are fully aware of the cheapness of the programs it imports. Thus, NZ On Air, the government body that funds local programming by way of contestable grants to domestic broadcasters, has this to say: “Thanks to its small population, the rates for imported product are cheap and affordable by New Zealand broadcasters, for whom locally-made programmes may be as much as ten times more expensive.”60 In the very next paragraph, however, we are told that “the prospect of moving to a fully non-commercial broadcaster for television is most unlikely” and that such a possibility is precluded specifically by “the small population.” No explanation is offered for why a small population prohibits a fully publicly funded broadcaster, but one imagines the reason is cost—despite New Zealand’s smallness, as the previous paragraph stated, helping directly to lower the prices paid in respect of broadcasters’ main (programming) expenditure. If all of this seems contradictory (and it is), one must remember that the geography of programming source has cultural and political as well as economic dimensions, and that NZ On Air is very much an interested party. Thus, while imported product may be much cheaper, the New Zealand government—even during the strongly free-market years of the 1990s—has always insisted on the country’s broadcasters continuing to promote national identity and culture through investment in “local programming.”61 NZ On Air, established in 1989, has been and continues to be the government’s primary tool to achieve such an end. Charged with allocating government finance to local productions, NZ On Air clearly has a vested interest in promoting such programming in the face of cheap imports, even if it recognizes the favorable economics of the latter. The underpopulation thesis therefore meshes comfortably with NZ On Air’s own self-interest. In a (to NZ On Air, ideal) world of much more or even all TVNZ programming being local, that thesis would assume significantly greater credibility: TVNZ costs would be more comparable with broadcasters in larger markets, such as the UK, because the variance in local production costs is much smaller than the variance in import prices. When NZ On Air peddles the underpopulation line, it is viewing the world through rose-tinted spectacles—imagining a world in which imports, and hence very affordable operating costs, do not predominate. But history suggests that such a scenario is highly unrealistic, for deregulation of the domestic broadcasting market from the late 1980s, and the introduction of the local-programming-focused NZ On Air, have ultimately had little effect on the ratio of imported to local content.62 In 1983, as we

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have seen, New Zealand programming had accounted for 25% of all broadcast hours; by 1994, this proportion had in fact slipped further, to 23%; and it remained at 23% in 1999 (when the new Labour government announced its intention to intervene in the market), having risen slightly to 24% in 1998.63 Critically, the current government, in responding to the renewed calls for TVNZ to be fully publicly funded, argues that its introduction of the charter has since boosted local programming. But the claims ring hollow. First, while the former Broadcasting Minister Maharey trumpets the fact that 42.3% of peak-time programming on TVNZ in 2005 was local, the equivalent ratio for all New Zealand broadcasters in 1994 was in fact almost exactly the same (41.7%).64 Second, outgoing TVNZ chief executive Ian Fraser revealed, in an October 2005 memo leaked to the press by the Green Party,65 that in 2006 “the level of [peak-time] local content on TVNZ will shrink markedly . . . to about 36 percent. This is no more than the local content ratio we were achieving prior to the introduction of the Charter,” he went on, which “makes it hard for us to sustain the claim that local content differentiates TVNZ from its competitors and is, indeed, the key element of TVNZ’s ‘Charter difference.’”66 And third, much of the programming now categorized as “local” is arguably nothing of the sort—local adaptations of successful international formats (NZ Idol, for instance) may “count” as local but surely constitute questionable contributions to strictly national culture and identity. It is clear, then, that program imports, particularly from the US and UK, always have been and always will be a core component of New Zealand broadcast schedules: a function partly of audience preferences (New Zealanders certainly enjoy local content, but like audiences elsewhere in the world, they also want to see the best international material), partly of the shared language, and partly of the cost considerations we have described (given equivalent production qualities, local is always much more expensive). But it is also clear that it does not serve the government’s interests to acknowledge this fact; it pushes the local programming angle, and the claim that local content is thriving, for three key reasons. First, this argument plays well politically; to be seen to be pushing “local” in New Zealand is, quite simply, always a good thing.67 Second, the argument that TVNZ programming is increasingly sourced locally appears to validate the government’s existing policy towards that specific institution: it is a muchneeded yardstick of charter success and “progress” where, perhaps, no other tangible measure can be found.68 Third, and most important in the context of this chapter, the local programming perspective is essential girding to the underpopulation thesis. If the government were to admit to the inevitable preponderance of imports, it would become all too obvious that a national broadcaster in New Zealand can be profitably operated at much lower cost than in larger markets (a fact which TVNZ, after all, already am-

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ply demonstrates; that its financing is mainly private is largely immaterial), and the underpopulation thesis would unravel. To sustain this thesis, and the pivotal notion of cost equivalence for different national broadcasters, the emphasis on “local” content is essential—another example, one might say, of a contestable geographical “knowledge” being enlisted for expressly political ends.

SPECULATIONS ON POLICY RATIONALE If the underpopulation thesis I have described here in relation to New Zealand television is predicated on (respectively) circular and erroneous arguments, what in turn, we should finally ask, are its effects? Ultimately, it serves (and successfully so far) to repudiate the calls for a publicly funded broadcaster. But, importantly, it does so not by virtue of the strength of its underlying logics—these, remember, are only very rarely spelled out, and perhaps even more rarely considered in much detail—so much as through its capacity to stifle debate. And this capacity, I have suggested, is at least in part a function of the simplicity and seeming transparency of the thesis: we have a tendency to accept the idea of underpopulation because, like overpopulation, we think we understand it and we can almost visualize it. As emphasized throughout the course of the chapter, my objective has been merely to identify this geographical imaginary and the specific ways in which it has been put to work. I have wanted to demonstrate, above all, that geographical imaginaries or knowledges can be powerful and productive even if constructed on the shakiest of empirical foundations. But there remains an important, unanswered question in all of this, which is, I think, important to raise and which one might express as follows: do the opponents of a publicly funded, public-service TVNZ truly believe that New Zealand is “too small” to support such an organization, or is the underpopulation thesis merely a convenient (and extremely effective) fig leaf? The same question could perhaps more usefully be rearticulated thus: to what extent is the appeal to this geographical imaginary a calculated diversion? There is, of course, no simple or perhaps even “accurate” answer to this question (and not only because the imaginary is mobilized by all sorts of different people with different agendas). Indeed, I pose the question, in part, precisely to make that point. Geographical knowledges such as the one at hand are not discrete, preformed “explanations” that can be rationally and independently delimited, seized and “deployed” in the manner of statistical datasets or pieces of physical “evidence.” Rather, they become what they are—geographical imaginaries—only over a period of time and through the cumulative actions and words of a wide series of actors, acting from a wide range of motives and doubtless with widely varying forms and

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depths of knowledge. To question whether the mobilization of such imaginaries is ingenuous is to confuse a complex discourse in-the-making for simple, ready-made, packaged “information.” The power of the geographical imagination stems, to one extent or another, from the self-momentum it gathers in its making, which ultimately belies any simplistic differentiation between conscious deployment (whether “genuine” or otherwise) and a deployment that is more “unknowing” or structurally determined.69 What is apparent, nevertheless, is that the seemingly kneejerk acceptance of the underpopulation thesis in contemporary discussions of New Zealand television—and the associated dampening of debate—does serve to veil any other reasons that the government, in particular, might have for resisting the idea of a pure publicly funded broadcaster. By closing off debate, the underpopulation thesis effectively exempts the government from having to articulate any such other reasons in the public arena. (That is the power of the geographical imagination.) In concluding this chapter, it seems to me to be worthwhile to speculate briefly about what those other reasons might be—if indeed they exist. Ultimately, government resistance to calls for a national publicly funded broadcaster can probably be reduced to a simple question of priorities and of political expediency. In the scheme of things, when weighed against education, healthcare, defense, public infrastructure and other core demands on taxation funds, television likely does not figure prominently either on the government’s own agenda or, equally importantly, on the list of items that the government is prepared to ask the public to explicitly finance. Thus, what one industry commentator openly asked in response to the “Group of 31”—“whether the 31 dignitaries would prefer money to be diverted from health, education, roading or welfare to meet TVNZ’s shortfall if ads were axed”70—is almost certainly what Helen Clark, Steve Maharey, Trevor Mallard and colleagues have long discussed in private. And, of course, one should not necessarily criticize the government for placing a relatively low priority on television. What we should question, however, is its unwillingness to debate in full the nature of its opposition to a “true” public broadcaster while simultaneously lauding its own commitment to public broadcasting.71

NOTES 1. See especially R. Horrocks, “Studying New Zealand Television: Themes, Methods, Perspectives,” in R. Horrocks and N. Perry (eds.) Television in New Zealand: Programming the Nation (Oxford University Press, Auckland, 2004) and “Turbulent Television: The New Zealand Experiment,” Television and New Media, 5, 2004, 55–68. 2. M. Comrie and S. Fountaine, “Retrieving public service broadcasting: Treading a fine line at TVNZ,” Media, Culture and Society, 27, 2005, 101–18.

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3. E.g. P. Thompson, “The CROC with No Teeth? New Zealand Television in the Post-TVNZ Charter Context,” New Zealand Political Review, Autumn 2003, 18–27. 4. J. McNeish, I. Johnstone and L. Holborow, “An open letter to the Minister of Broadcasting, the Rt. Hon. Steve Maharey,” February 10, 2006, available at http:// media.apn.co.nz/webcontent/document/pdf/tvnz.pdf (retrieved February 2006). 5. I use the terminology of geographical “imaginations” (or imaginaries) and “knowledges” interchangeably in this chapter. I do so in a deliberate attempt to unsettle the idea that there is, or can ever be, a meaningful and clear distinction between the two: constructs that aspire to the status of “geographical knowledge” are always situated and thus always grounded in, or infused by, imaginaries of one form or another. 6. T. Bethell, “Endangered species: The coming crisis of underpopulation,” The American Spectator, 34 (Sep/Oct), 2001, 60–67, at p. 62. 7. S. George, “Conscience ‘planétaire’ et ‘trop nombreux’ pauvres,” Le Monde Diplomatique, 37 (May), 1990, 18–19, at p. 18. 8. See, respectively, D. Gregory, The Colonial Present, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, 2004; N. Smith, “Neo-Critical Geography, or, The Flat Pluralist World of Business Class,” Antipode, 37, 2005, 887–99. 9. Again, respectively, D. McNeill, R. Dowling and R. Fagan, “Sydney/Global/ City: An Exploration,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29, 2005, 935–44; W. Larner and R. Le Heron, “From Economic Globalisation to Globalising Economic Processes: Towards post-structuralist political economies,” Geoforum, 33, 2002, 415–19. 10. The work of Allan Pred on racialized geographical imaginations in Sweden represents an exemplar of work in this vein. See his “Somebody Else, Somewhere Else: Racisms, Racialized Spaces and the Popular Geo-graphical Imagination in Sweden,” Antipode, 29, 1997, 383–416 and Even in Sweden: Racisms, Racialized Spaces, and the Popular Geographical Imagination, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000. 11. D. Gregory, “Geographies, publics and politics,” Progress in Human Geography, 29, 2005, 182–93, at p. 182. 12. I take “power of geography” from the title of the influential collection edited by J. Wolch and M. Dear, The Power of Geography: How Territory Shapes Social Life, Unwin Hyman, Boston, 1989. 13. Indeed, so central has this theme been that Gregory recently claimed that much of Harvey’s enormous oeuvre could be seen precisely as “an affirmation and a critique of the power of geographical knowledges”; see D. Gregory, “Introduction: Troubling Geographies,” in N. Castree and D. Gregory (eds.) David Harvey: A Critical Reader (Blackwell, Oxford, 2006), p. 1. Harvey’s early statement can be found at “What kind of geography for what kind of public policy,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 63, 1974, 18–24; his most recent reflection on this “power of geography” is “Geographical knowledges/political powers,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 122, 2004, 87–115. 14. D. Harvey, “On the history and present condition of geography: An historical materialist manifesto,” Professional Geographer, 36, 1984, 1–10. 15. D. Harvey, “Cosmopolitanism and the banality of geographical evils,” Public Culture, 12, 2000, 529–56, at pp. 551–55 and “Cartographic Identities: Geographic

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Knowledges under Globalization,” in his Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Routledge, New York and London, 2001) at pp. 212–19. The quotations are from “Cosmopolitanism,” p. 553. 16. P. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, Ballantine Books, New York, 1968; D. H. Meadows, D. L. Meadows, J. Randers and W. Behrens, The Limits to Growth, Universe Books, New York, 1972; A. Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 1992. 17. D. Harvey, “Population, resources and the ideology of science,” Economic Geography, 50, 1974, 256–77. 18. T. Mitchell, “The Object of Development: America’s Egypt,” in J. Crush (ed.) Power of Development (Routledge, New York, 1995). 19. Underpopulation has also been posited, as I mention below, at various earlier points in history—but never as widely or as influentially as in the past two decades. 20. B. Wattenberg, The Birth Dearth, Ballantine Books, New York, 1987; P. Longman, The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It, Basic Books, New York, 2004. 21. G. Monbiot, “The Underpopulation Problem?,” 2004, available at http:// www.alternet.org/story/18832/ (retrieved February 2006). 22. A. Bashford, “Nation, Empire, Globe: The Spaces of Population Debate in the Interwar Years,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49, 2007, 170–201, provides an extremely helpful overview of the historical-geographical contexts in which the primary twentieth-century discourses of over or underpopulation—the main incarnations of, in her words, “population politics and expertise”—have been mobilized. 23. M. van Beusekom, “From underpopulation to overpopulation: French perceptions of population, environment, and agricultural development in French Soudan (Mali), 1900–1960,” Environmental History, 4, 1999, 198–219. 24. Monbiot, “The Underpopulation Problem?” 25. Cited in Bethell, “Endangered species,” pp. 61–62. 26. “Now we are 300,000,000,” The Economist, October 14, 2006, 37–38, at p. 37. 27. R. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1990, provides an excellent example at pp. 226–58. 28. B. Wattenberg, Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, IL, 2004. 29. http://www.pop.org/ (retrieved March 2006, my emphasis). 30. “New Revision Points to Underpopulation Crisis,” 2004, available at http:// www.catholicexchange.com/vm/index.asp?art_id=21731 (retrieved March 2006). 31. “The Size Of Nations,” 2 February 2005, available at http://www.scoop.co.nz/ stories/BU0502/S00021.htm (retrieved May 2007). 32. For an illuminating recent discussion of other key geographical imaginaries circulating through contemporary New Zealand politics and economics, see W. Larner, R. Le Heron and N. Lewis, “Co-constituting Neoliberalism: Globalising Governmentalities and Political Projects in Aotearoa New Zealand,” in K. England and K. Ward, (eds.) Neoliberalization: States, Networks, Peoples (Blackwell, Oxford, 2007, 223–247). On a closely related note, see also Miles Fairburn’s critique of New

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Zealand’s alleged national “uniqueness,” “Is there a Good Case for New Zealand Exceptionalism?” in T. Ballantyne and B. Moloughney (eds.), Disputed Histories: Imagining New Zealand’s Past (Otago University Press, Dunedin, 2006). 33. See, for instance, “Air NZ engineers plead for their jobs,” New Zealand Herald, October 20, 2005. 34. “Pressure on Air NZ to rethink job losses,” New Zealand Herald, October 21, 2005. 35. For a critical commentary on one such invocation, see G. Winder, “Seafarer’s gaze: Queen Street business and Auckland’s archipelago, 1908,” New Zealand Geographer, 62, 2006, 50–64. 36. S. H. Franklin, Trade, growth and anxiety: New Zealand beyond the welfare state, Methuen, Wellington, 1978, p. xv. 37. Ibid., p. xvi. 38. Task Force on Economic and Social Planning, New Zealand at the Turning Point: Report, Government Printer, Wellington, 1976, pp. xx–xxi. 39. L. Goode and N. Zuberi, “Media studies: switching on,” in their (eds.) Media studies in Aotearoa/New Zealand (Pearson Education, Auckland, 2004, 2–15), pp. 13–14. 40. Note that TVNZ does currently receive government funding to supplement its core advertising revenues, in the twofold (but very limited) shape of monies specifically to implement its charter, and access—on a contestable basis, in competition with other broadcasters—to funding made available from the two government bodies NZ On Air and Te Mängai Päho for the production, respectively, of local programming and Mäori language programming. The former licence fee (Public Broadcasting Fee) of $110 annually was abolished by the National government in July 1999. 41. “Current issues in New Zealand television,” April 7, 2003, available at http:// www.beehive.govt.nz/Print/PrintDocument.aspx?DocumentID=16441 (retrieved February 2006). 42. “Ministerial Briefings 2002: Arts, Culture, Heritage,” available at http://www. beehive.govt.nz/briefings/acl/arts/enhancement.cfm (retrieved December 2005). 43. T. Frewen, “Wednesday’s Child,” NZ Political Review, August 2000, 34–35, at p. 35. 44. “Troubles on the box,” New Zealand Herald, February 25, 2006. Note that Cumming’s use of scare quotes around the word “pure” is apposite here: the BBC, as I discuss below, is not a “pure” public broadcaster (if indeed such an entity actually exists anywhere in the world), though it is certainly closer to being one than TVNZ. 45. Cited in J. Black, “What a glorious mess,” New Zealand Listener, 201, November 19–25, 2005, 1–4, at p.1. 46. “Advertising calls the shots,” New Zealand Herald, February 17, 2006. 47. See especially T. Hujanen, The Power of Schedule: Programme Management in the Transformation of Finnish Public Service Television, Tampere University Press, Tampere, 2002 and G. Picard, “Media Economics, Content and Diversity: Primary Results from a Finnish Study,” in P. Hovi-Wasastjerna (ed.) Media Culture (Academy of Finland, Helsinki, 2003). 48. NZ On Air, “The future of public broadcasting: The experience in 6 countries,” 2003, available at http://www.nzonair.govt.nz/images/media/about/6countries_

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2003.pdf (retrieved December 2005), p. 31; “NRK Annual Report 2002,” available at http://www6.nrk.no/informasjon/2002/nrk2002_ny.pdf (retrieved January 2006). 49. “TVNZ Annual Report FY 2005,” available at http://images.tvnz.co.nz/tvnz/ pdf/tvnz_annual_report_2005.pdf (retrieved January 2006). 50. “TVNZ Annual Report FY 2005”; “Channel 4 Report and Financial Statements 2004,” available at http://www.channel4.com/about_c4/annual_report_2004.html (retrieved December 2005). 51. “Viacom annual report for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2004,” available at http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/813828/000104746905006777/ a2153214z10-k.htm (retrieved January 2006). 52. See especially T. Varis, “The international flow of television programs,” Journal of Communication, 34, 1984, 143–52; E. de Bens and H. de Smaele, “The inflow of American television fiction on European broadcasting channels revisited,” European Journal of Communication, 16, 2001, 51–76. 53. T. Miller, N. Govil, J. McMurria, R. Maxwell and T. Wang, Global Hollywood 2, British Film Institute, London, 2005, pp. 9–28. 54. Quoted in J. Steemers, “European television in the global marketplace,” paper presented to Euromedia Conference, June 25, 2005, available at www.swissgis. unizh.ch/e/pdf/Steemers.pdf (retrieved September 2005). 55. N. Garnham, “Concepts of Culture: Public Policy and the Cultural Industries,” Cultural Studies, 1, 1987, 23–37, at p. 30. 56. This cost comparison is critical, but also somewhat misleading: as Eli Noam has observed (and again, as I explore at much greater length in Part II of the book), the rights acquired on a program import (usually domestic television broadcast only) are generally not the same as those attached to a commissioned product (potentially up to and including global distribution rights across all media platforms), and hence one is arguably comparing the cost of apples and oranges. In practice, however, domestic television broadcast rights account for the bulk of realizable value on the majority of New Zealand productions (which typically struggle to secure significant overseas sales), meaning the direct cost comparison is a largely meaningful one. See E. Noam, “Media Americanization, National Culture, and Forces of Integration,” in E. Noam and J. Millonzi (eds.) The International Market in Film and Television Programs (Ablex, Norwood, NJ, 1993). 57. See especially C. Hoskins and R. Mirus, “Reasons for the U.S. dominance of the international trade in television programmes,” Media, Culture and Society, 10, 1988, 499–515, and C. Hoskins, S. McFadyen and A. Finn, Global Television and Film: An Introduction to the Economics of the Business, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998. 58. But not, I argue in chapter 4, in regard to the distribution of television programming. Scott’s two key texts in this area are The cultural economy of cities: Essays on the geography of image-producing industries, Sage, London, 2000, and On Hollywood: The Place, The Industry, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2005. On the latter, see my “Media geography’s dualities,” Cultural Geographies, 14, 2007, 156–61. 59. Varis, “The international flow of television programs.” 60. NZ On Air, “The future of public broadcasting,” p. 10. 61. A. Bell, “‘An Endangered Species’: Local Programming in the New Zealand Television Market,” Media, Culture & Society, 17, 1995, 181–200.

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62. G. Lealand, “Selling the airwaves: Deregulation, local content and television audiences in New Zealand,” Media Information Australia, 62, 1991, 68–73. 63. G. Lealand, “Regulation—what regulation? Cultural diversity and local content in New Zealand Television,” Media International Australia, 95, 2000, 77–90, at p. 82. 64. Respectively: “Leading group calls for TVNZ overhaul,” New Zealand Herald, February 15, 2006; Lealand, “Regulation,” p. 82. 65. “Green Party press release—Fraser bombshell shows TVNZ giving lip service to Charter,” 13 December 2005, available at http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/ PA0512/S00185.htm (retrieved July 2006). 66. Fraser’s prognosis was correct: the level of local content broadcast by TVNZ in 2006 was below the level in 2003, when the charter was introduced; from 2002 to 2006, local content fell by 7 percent on TV One and by 5 percent on TV2. See “Dwindling local TV content,” New Zealand Herald, May 9, 2007. 67. See Bell, “‘An Endangered Species’: Local Programming” and M. Debrett, “Branding Documentary: New Zealand’s Minimalist Solution to Cultural Subsidy,” Media, Culture & Society, 26, 2004, 5–23, for the ways in which this factor plays out specifically in the television sector. 68. Hence why the government was so furious when it emerged in early 2008 that TVNZ planned to use charter funds to help finance the production costs of broadcasting the Beijing Olympics—which is clearly not local content, even if it could be construed as public-service content. Indeed the government’s response has been to strip TVNZ of its unfettered power to choose how it spends its $15.1m annual charter monies, forcing it henceforth to apply to NZ On Air for such funds on a program by program basis (as it already does for its other publicly funded programming, though in the case of the charter money not on a contestable basis)—with no guarantee that it will be granted the full amount. See “TVNZ funding to be drip fed after Olympics bid,” New Zealand Herald, May 27, 2008. 69. I deliberately fall back here on the unsatisfactory, dualistic language of the structure-agency debate, specifically in order to try to find ways of thinking beyond such dualisms. 70. “Media strategist says funding shortfall if ads axed,” NZPA, February 17, 2006, available at http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3574582a1869,00.html (retrieved March 2006). 71. Says Maharey, “The determination to re-establish a far greater public service emphasis has led this government to reclaim the right—and the obligation—to be involved in broadcasting.” See “Current issues in New Zealand television.”

3 Knowledge Travels

In the first two chapters of the book I have been concerned largely with knowledge in place. Through the examples of discourses of creativity and market size in the UK and New Zealand respectively, I have tried to demonstrate some of the ways in which the production of knowledge is implicated in the constitution, regulation and reproduction of national media and television economies. In this chapter I seek to nudge this investigation a step farther forward, but at the same time I add to my preceding interest in place a more explicit concern with relations of space. For, just as (in the words of John Donne) no man is an island, neither can the “islands” of the UK and New Zealand ever truly be islands, isolated from international currents of knowledge and—of course—power. Knowledge, in short, travels. If, then, chapters 1 and 2 focused on the role of knowledge in the envisioning in place of individual economies, this chapter queries the extent to which such envisioning is impacted by international flows of knowledge, and the extent to which the processes through which knowledge is constituted (and in turn, constitutes) are themselves internationalized. The chapter approaches travels in knowledge through a focus on knowledge pertaining specifically to governance of the broadcast television space. I understand “governance” quite broadly here, encompassing the use of institutions, structures of authority and processes of collaboration to allocate resources and to coordinate or control activity in society or the economy.1 My empirical focus is on governance of both the UK and New Zealand television sectors, in an international context. My central inquiry in each case is into the manner and extent to which governance theories, policies and practices—governance “knowledges”—flow from place to place. Where do such theories and practices originate from and travel to, and to what degree 87

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are they reformulated and reconfigured between “departure” and “arrival”? That such travel occurs is well known—Bob Jessop, for instance, noting a decade ago the growing role of “foreign agents and institutions as sources of policy ideas, policy design and implementation”; yet the detailed lineaments of this travel, certainly in relation to the world of television, are not so clear.2 My primary objective, then, is to map, in relation to UK and New Zealand television governance, some of these extended geographies of knowledge. In doing so I draw on Edward Said’s idea of “traveling theory” to help formulate and frame the key questions I address.3 First, how much does the international travel of governance (of its theories, policies and practices) actually occur? Second, what primary factors influence whether or not travel occurs in individual instances? And third, where travel between countries does occur, by what conditions is such travel directed, circumscribed and fashioned? How and why Said’s thinking can be useful in this regard is explored in more detail below. But my interest is not limited to the empirical details or “factual reality” of travels in knowledge, so far as such a reality can be retrieved and articulated. In chapter 1, following Timothy Mitchell, I tried to argue that it is not easy or even desirable to draw a clear line in the sand between “reality” and “representation”; Mitchell thinks (and I think, at least, that I agree) that this very distinction is an effect of the exercise of power.4 As such, I not only explore here what I have been able to learn, through primary research, about international flows of governance knowledges, but I also discuss existing representations of such flows—partly because they are interesting and informative in themselves (for what they reveal), and partly because it is ultimately not possible to separate such representations from the geographies that they putatively re-present.5 The events or histories that I discuss in this chapter all concern recent high-profile developments in the regulatory architectures of New Zealand and UK television. I look initially at previous representations of these events, extracted from the two main existing public sources of information on such matters. One is the television industry’s regulators themselves: what do they tell us about the geographical derivation of the governance policies they have chosen, or been directed, to administer? The other source is commentary by industry observers. In each case, I argue, the suggestions as to flows of governance are highly misleading—but revealingly so. Most importantly, two key headline “narratives” can be seen to emerge from those sources, and we can helpfully discuss these narratives with reference to Nick Perry’s careful and illuminating development of Said’s traveling theory.6 Perry observes that the derivation of theory is typically described in one of two ways. Either it is (alleged to be) “theory from nowhere,” theory which “is not so much concerned to escape its origin as it is at pains to es-

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sentialize it, and thereby to defend itself against what is understood as the threat of dispersal, fragmentation and plurality.” Or theory is seen to come from “somewhere,” but with this “where” understood in an unhelpfully reductive fashion—as simply and exclusively an “actual place,” thus denying that the place of origin is always a “complexly mediated social location.” 7 Thus, I borrow directly from Perry in trying to think critically about what has—and has not—been said about the sourcing of theory and policy in contemporary television governance in the UK and New Zealand. I then endeavour to move beyond the types of narratives he outlines by way of my own research into such governance and its derivation. This research consisted of trying to identify, and then talk to, people who were actually involved in the formulation and implementation of the specific new policies and practices of governance with which this chapter is concerned. This very research experience was an instructive process in itself: the difficulty of singling out the “key” protagonists in such developments testifies to the fact that the processes whereby governance theory and policy takes shape are invariably complex and multi-facetted. They rarely reside in, or can be read through, one or more identifiable individuals. This caveat notwithstanding, I did seek to sort the wheat from the chaff (as it were) and pinpoint those individuals who were able to help me piece together empirically how theory and practice came to be, and where from. Inevitably, however, my account is a partial one, framed explicitly by the identity of those I interviewed (as well, of course, as by all the preconceptions and expectations that I myself brought to bear). In this regard one particular issue is especially important, its materiality disclosed by the very label pinned on many of the people I consulted: “policymaker.” For the word “maker” implies creativity and power—it suggests that this person makes rather than adopts, copies or refashions policy. As such, one might expect some such policymakers to amplify their own degree of policy “making” (for political reasons, personal reasons, or both). While I do not think this is by any means necessarily the case, I recognize the importance of being alive to such a possibility, and have sought as far as practicably possible to “cross-check” the information provided to me. This is partly a matter of triangulating (always reading one person’s words against those of others, and against histories and narratives gleaned from other sources altogether), and partly a matter of situating (always reading a person’s words in their unique individual context). To begin the chapter, however, some scene setting is required. This comes in two connected forms. First, because the chapter’s central concern is specifically with the sourcing of governance policy (rather than the detailed substance of the policy itself), and because the developments it analyzes are only selective, it is obviously important upfront to familiarize ourselves, at a relatively high level, with the basic architectures of UK and New Zealand

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broadcast industry governance. In the case of the UK we are already part of the way there, having encountered in chapter 1 the new converged regulator Ofcom and something of its disposition and dynamics; but some broadening and thickening of our understanding is nonetheless required. In the case of New Zealand, meanwhile, we are essentially starting from scratch. Coupled with this foregrounding of governance frameworks, I also provide a brief contextual discussion of industry power relations in each of the two markets, which is a theme that the book returns to much more fully in Part II. For if knowledge—its derivation, constitution, geographies and effects—remains the focal point in this chapter, as it has been in the previous chapters of Part I, it should be obvious that one cannot discuss the crystallization and distribution of theories and practices of governance without also talking about power. Governance structures and the processes of policy decisionmaking that make and remake them materialize not in a vacuum, but always in a particular political-economic context. Thus, before introducing the specific recent regulatory developments in New Zealand and the UK that concern me later in the chapter, I outline the primary contours of power in the environments within which those developments have unfolded. In this way I begin to move the focus of the overall book discussion from (in Part I) knowledge/power to (in Part II) something perhaps better understood as power/knowledge.

REGULATION, AND THE REGULATORY ENVIRONMENT Flows recast How, in the UK and New Zealand, is the governance of broadcast television conducted, and what principal forces frame this conduct? I introduced above the idea of governance-related knowledges flowing between places, but we can usefully think of “flow” in another way, too, one that can help us identify key differences between the UK and New Zealand cases. That is, governance ordinances or concepts can be shown to flow in different patterns and different directions within different social or economic milieus. In some situations, particularly those involving networks or partnerships as opposed to more hierarchical forms of regulation, the flow tends to be horizontal or lateral, or even “up and in” from dispersed subjects or participants to a coordinating “center” of some sort; in others, and perhaps more familiarly, the primary flow is in the other direction, demonstrably “down and out” from a governing command-and-control center to dispersed, governed entities. As far as the broadcast television industry is concerned, governance in New Zealand tends towards the former model, while in the UK it tends more towards the latter.

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Let us consider the UK environment first. Up to and including 2003, three main regulatory bodies were responsible for formulating and administering UK television content and competition policy. Two—the Independent Television Commission (ITC) and the Broadcasting Standards Commission—were responsible for regulation in the sector at large, including all aspects of commercial television and some elements of governance pertaining specifically to the BBC; all other areas of regulation of the BBC (such as fulfilment of its public service remit, and programming standards concerning due accuracy in news, in-program references to commercial products, and obligations for party political broadcasts) vested with the BBC Board of Governors. In each case, but especially with regards to the ITC, governance was typically proactive, hierarchical and directive: the various regulators sought to anticipate or react promptly to market developments, handing down advice, guidance and ordinances to those entities they regulated. Since the end of 2003, the entire structure of UK media and communications regulation has undergone a wholesale reorganization with the establishment in December of that year of the Office of Communications, known by its acronym, Ofcom (as discussed in chapter 1, and explored in further detail, from very different angles, later in this chapter). A new, consolidated “super regulator” for the media and communications sectors at large, Ofcom replaced not just the Broadcasting Standards Commission and the ITC but also the three radio and telecommunications regulators (Oftel, the Radio Authority and the Radiocommunications Agency). In the television sector, it now works alongside the BBC Trust, which replaced the Board of Governors in January 2007.8 At this stage of my argument, the most important observation to make concerning Ofcom is that it has, in my view, maintained the pattern of interventionist “top-down” flow that was familiar under its predecessor regulators. Some commentators, to be sure, have tentatively questioned this. Perhaps most notably, David Hesmondhalgh argued in 2005 that Ofcom had adopted a deregulatory stance, leading to a greater degree of media industry self-regulation—in other words, less regulation as a whole, and hence fewer and more gentle flows.9 (Quite how this admittedly early diagnosis squares with seventy-nine separate Ofcom consultations in 2005 alone is unclear.10) Richard Collins gestures in a similar direction, highlighting Ofcom-specific examples of what he calls, after the influential Grahame Thompson, both “network governance” (based on reciprocity and cooperation) and “market governance” (based on Adam Smith’s famous invisible hand)—each of which is characterized by explicitly horizontal flows.11 But as I demonstrated at some length in chapter 1, there is in reality little substantive evidence for a slackening of hierarchical market interventionism. Indeed, one can readily argue that the top-down flow of “directive”

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governance not only remains consistent under Ofcom’s tenure, but has intensified. What has changed, critically, has been the form of such interventionism. “Respond to these consultation questions”; “provide us with these data”; “come to see us every two weeks to update us on your policy on this issue”—light-touch, hands-off regulation it most definitely is not; it is, rather, a pervasive and, by all accounts, occasionally suffocating scrutiny. That UK broadcast industry governance remains hierarchical and interventionist is, then, my firm position; and even Collins readily acknowledges that five years after Ofcom’s accession to power, “the [UK] broadcasting sector is characterised by hierarchical governance to a greater extent than other sectors such as telecommunications or the internet.”12 If UK television regulation continues, as I suggest, to flow from the top down in a very prescriptive fashion, what of New Zealand television regulation? The first and most critical thing to say is that there simply is not that much regulation. This is neatly captured in a paper on New Zealand television by Geoff Lealand, which he titled bluntly “Regulation—what regulation?”13 “The problem in writing or speaking about media regulation in New Zealand,” he reflected, “is that there is so little to talk about.”14 It is tempting to attribute this state of affairs to the wider deregulatory trend within the New Zealand economy from the mid-1980s,15 but in reality there has never been a significant governance apparatus for New Zealand broadcasting. Today, the only “regulator” as such is the Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA), which responds to viewer complaints about broadcast content.16 Several other agencies take a peripheral interest in regulation of the sector, but as Lealand wryly observes, these constitute “little more than annoying gnats buzzing on the largely impervious, wrinkled hide of the beast that is commercial radio and television in New Zealand.”17 Indeed, various industry insiders—ranging from the BSA, and the Screen Producers and Directors Association (SPADA), to the former Minister of Broadcasting Steve Maharey—have claimed at different junctures, and with some justification, that New Zealand’s broadcasting environment is now the most deregulated in the world.18 This may yet change if the government’s ongoing 2008 review of broadcasting regulation determines that the existing framework is inappropriate or insufficient, but at the time of finalization of this book, the recommendations from that review had not been made public. 19 To the degree that the sector is currently regulated on a day-to-day basis, however, it is notable that the flows that occur are quite different from those characterizing the UK broadcasting environment. As opposed to a top-down, directive model, the New Zealand model is better described as self-regulating, with the main flows occurring “upwards” rather than down and out. This idea is well articulated by Steve Browning, previously Senior Manager in the Digital Television Group at TVNZ (the state-owned terres-

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trial broadcaster), and now General Manager of the country’s first free-to-air digital satellite platform (which I discuss at length in the latter part of this chapter). “For the most part,” Browning says, “the industry is not regulated through prescriptive judgements. Instead, it tends to be the case that we [the industry participants] seek assistance from government when we fail to satisfactorily resolve problems amongst ourselves. In such instances we appeal upwards for help and guidance.”20 In other words, the industry largely governs itself, except where it becomes clear to those involved that it is unable to do so to everybody’s satisfaction—a clear example of Thompson’s “market governance.” The only exception, perhaps, to this overall picture of an extremely lightly regulated New Zealand television sector, is TVNZ (which figures centrally in the analysis of geographical flows of governance in this chapter). The country’s largest and oldest broadcaster, the state-owned TVNZ is more tightly regulated than the country’s commercial broadcasters, and it has recently undergone significant, government-driven changes in status and responsibilities. As noted in chapter 2, the Labour-led government that took power in 1999 argued that the commercialization of New Zealand television, including TVNZ, had gone too far under the preceding National government, and it immediately announced plans to rebalance TVNZ’s commercial imperatives with a revived public-service ethos. These plans ultimately took the twofold form, in 2003, of a first-time programming charter specifically requiring TVNZ to contribute to New Zealand’s cultural and national identity; and, less significantly, of TVNZ’s conversion from a state-owned enterprise to a Crown Company (CroC). I discuss these developments (particularly the former) in detail later in the chapter; my interest here is merely to register that where New Zealand television is actively regulated, such regulation almost invariably focuses on TVNZ. Governance and corporate power If the regulatory architectures of UK and New Zealand television exist broadly as sketched out here, the other question I raised at the outset of this discussion concerned the forces that shape such architectures. In considering this question, my wider approach to regulation and its political-economic contexts is informed by those writing within the rough parameters of what has become known as “regulation theory.”21 For me, this approach implies three key assumptions or convictions. The first is that the “mode of regulation” is not shaped by the capitalist economy in anything like a deterministic manner; the relationship is always considerably more complicated than that. The second main argument is that in developing as they do, regulatory apparatuses typically serve to enable the ongoing reproduction of capitalist economic structures and relations; such apparatuses allow, in other words,

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for the successful aversion of underlying crisis tendencies in capitalist “regimes of accumulation.”22 The third, related observation is that capitalism’s regulatory “institutions” inevitably take historically and geographically specific forms. It is in these terms that I think we can most meaningfully understand the governance—such as it is—of the broadcast television industry in the UK and New Zealand. In both cases, the regulationists would argue, the specific mode of governance that has cohered is not in any sense arbitrary or free-floating. Rather, it is one that explicitly facilitates ongoing processes of capital accumulation and circulation in the television economy prevailing in that place and at that time. Regulatory architectures and amendments to them, in short, must always be set against, but not reduced to, their specific political-economic context—the context, that is, of capital. In New Zealand, any discussion of capital accumulation and circulation in relation to television—of, in my understanding, the primary framing context for the industry’s regulatory architecture—must start with and focus largely on TVNZ and Sky Network Television, the latter the country’s dominant pay-television operator. These are the two industry gorillas, generating between them in the region of two-thirds of all national television advertising and subscription revenues.23 The power of each of TVNZ and Sky is, in the final reckoning, relatively naked, and clear manifestations of this power surface not just in this chapter (specifically, when I discuss the process pursued by the government in 2005-6 in formulating its policy on free-to-air digital television) but throughout the book (for instance in the analysis of the economics of program import pricing in chapter 6). To the extent that the script of the national television industry is written domestically, as opposed to being configured by international forces, TVNZ and Sky, together, largely author it—though very often in conflict rather than collaboration. Indeed, historically it has been far from uncommon to hear executives at other industry participants bemoan the lack of a stronger regulatory hand; for such individuals, the problem is not the intrusions of mechanisms of governance, but a perceived absence thereof. In the UK, where there is more regulation and where the regulatory authorities are significantly more hands on, the power of the leading television industry participants is less transparent, and is often exercised and experienced in significantly more subtle ways; but it is arguably equally pronounced. Most observers would probably say that there are three overwhelmingly powerful participants in the market, but the distinctions between primary-level and secondary level players are by no means as clearcut as they are in New Zealand. Thus, while on the one hand the BBC and ITV Plc (terrestrial broadcasters), and on the other BSkyB (like Sky in New Zealand, a provider of pay television services via satellite), are clearly first-

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rank players (and I focus primarily on these entities in this introductory discussion), at least three others could offer up viable credentials to belong alongside, or not far behind, the aforementioned.24 First, there is Channel 4, the third largest of the terrestrial broadcasters behind the BBC and ITV, and the number two commercial terrestrial broadcaster. It is a powerful force in many areas of the market, particularly vis-à-vis the independent production community (being the only pure commissionerbroadcaster among the leading three terrestrials), and it provides, alongside the BBC, the real clout behind UK public-service broadcasting. Second, there is Virgin Media, the country’s cable television provider, and the number two pay television platform behind BSkyB. Recently consolidated (there were previously two competing cable companies, and before that, more than two), and now driven by the hugely successful Richard Branson, cable has, since 2006, been showing signs of offering more meaningful competition to BSkyB (and pay satellite) than it had previously managed; nevertheless, it remains a distant second, with fewer than half as many customers and vastly inferior operational and financial performance. And finally, third, there is Endemol UK, arguably the strongest and most influential of the new breed of production “super-indies” that have emerged through progressive rationalization of the fragmented independent production sector since the late 1990s. Again, however, there is good reason to place Endemol UK on a lower rung than the BBC and ITV (and, less relevantly, BSkyB): as I argue at some length in chapter 5, the leading UK terrestrial broadcasters have, for a number of critical reasons, largely maintained a position of dominance in relation to the production community collectively, despite the emergence of individual producer powerhouses such as Endemol. The raw numbers further demonstrate the existence of a steep change in market power between the top three players and the rest of the UK industry. Just as TVNZ and Sky Network Television generate in the region of two-thirds of all television advertising and subscription revenues in New Zealand, so, too, the BBC, ITV and BSkyB secure a similar cumulative share of the UK television consumer-revenue pie. This overall pie, it should be noted, is not dominated by subscription and advertising revenues to quite the same extent as it is in New Zealand: the licence fee alone represents over 20% of the UK television market by value, and incremental revenue streams (most notably shopping channel transaction income and betting revenues) contribute in turn approximately 10%. Thus we need to factor in these other revenue types when calculating overall market shares. Nevertheless, in 2004, UK television revenues totalled between £10 and 11bn, and, in order of magnitude, BSkyB, the BBC and ITV accounted, between them, for at least 70% of this total.25 We have, therefore, two television markets with vastly different regulatory apparatuses, but in each of which there is a significant concentration

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of power in the hands of a very small number of market participants. In each case, what can we discern of the regulationists’ pivotal relationship between “the economy” (here, its most powerful representatives) and the governance mechanisms arrayed around it? More particularly, to what extent, and in what ways, are regulatory structures shaped by those economic agents? In positing an admittedly very abbreviated answer to these questions, the danger highlighted by the regulationists—determinism—is one we must be especially careful to avoid. Starting, again, with New Zealand, one could argue that historically it has ultimately not been necessary for either TVNZ or Sky to invest significant time and resources in seeking to shape the regulatory process. As we have seen, there has only been a very thin layer of governance for them to worry about (barely waferlike, in Sky’s case). And where they have been required to engage the government or the minimalist regulatory authorities, they have typically done so in a relatively open, direct manner; everyone recognizes their power, and they have not been especially concerned to try to veil it. In contrast to the UK, then, where the strongest industry players repeatedly deny the exercise of raw market power, New Zealand’s Sky, in particular, has rarely flinched from accusations of unbridled influence. Chief Executive John Fellet was happy to confirm in 2007, for example, that Sky had summarily barred its preferred installation and maintenance contractors from working on the installation of the new, competing free-to-air satellite platform—an action that would almost certainly draw a stinging response from Ofcom if paralleled in the UK.26 All of this changed, however, towards the end of 2007, with the launch of the government’s review of broadcasting regulation. Suddenly confronted with the possibility of substantive regulation being introduced to the market for the first time, both Sky and TVNZ were provoked into the kind of feverish private lobbying and public relations blitz that had hitherto been wholly unnecessary. A well-known New Zealand media commentator, Bill Ralston, has captured the almost comic nature of this abrupt sea change far more colorfully than I could: “Normally, all of the networks boast that they have the most viewers, the best programmes, make the most money and, generally, they are far stronger and smarter than their opponents. Not in the submissions they have put to the [broadcasting regulation] review. Each cries that it is being cruelly and unfairly bullied by the other and that it is doing very poorly indeed as a result.”27 In their ensuing attempts to influence the outcome of the review, both Sky and TVNZ endeavored to put across two central—and at times seemingly contradictory—messages. First, each sought to argue that the other possessed too much market power: for TVNZ (and also for MediaWorks, the immediate holding company of the next largest national free-to-air broadcaster, TV3), Sky had a dangerous pay-television monopoly, and a

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particularly damaging hold on sports rights; for Sky, meanwhile, TVNZ was seen to benefit unduly from both direct (charter) and indirect (gifted spectrum) public funding. The second argument, made by both parties, was that notwithstanding these alleged pockets of market distortion, New Zealand still did not require the introduction of a heavy, interventionist regime of governance. “Despite the tough talking against Sky,” it was reported in May 2008, “TVNZ and MediaWorks have joined Sky [in] steering the bureaucrats away from a powerful regulator like the UK’s Ofcom.”28 In the UK, with its much thicker and historically embedded crust of governance bodies and mechanisms, the relationships between economic power and the forms and processes of governance are significantly more complex and intricate. We can discern at least three important ways, it strikes me, in which corporate power is “effected” or exercised in UK television’s regulatory environment. We need to bear in mind all three such effects—or at least, their possibility—when considering, below, the processes through which new governance policy or practice is formulated and instituted. The first is direct lobbying. All the major industry players have a dedicated staff of lobbyists, whose role it is to manage relations between the corporate entity and key stakeholders through a combination of formal briefing meetings and more informal mechanisms such as lunches or simple phone calls. The list of such stakeholders is not a short one. In the first place, and most obviously, there is Ofcom itself, which also affords scope for more “reactive” lobbying in the form of responses to its various consultations. But on “big” issues Ofcom is not enough, since new legislation will sometimes be required, and this is the preserve of government. For UK media companies, “government” means various interconnected individuals and departments, all of which need to be constantly courted: senior politicians themselves; the Number 10 Policy Unit; the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS); the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR, which replaced the Department of Trade and Industry in 2007); and even, with a general election looming and media policy often a slow burn, the opposition. To that list one can add the Treasury for the BBC and the Shareholder Executive for Channel 4. The ongoing second Ofcom Review of Public Service Broadcasting (PSB), touched upon in chapter 1, represents a case in point of why lobbying government is so critical: Ofcom will make recommendations, but government will ultimately decide what structural changes to the PSB system, if any, are required, and whether new legislation is needed to enact those changes. On this issue, as elsewhere, government would be entirely at liberty to ignore Ofcom’s suggestions. During periods of only light central government engagement with media policy, it would probably be unlikely for Ofcom to be overruled. But over the past 18 months, the UK government, led by successive Culture Secretaries James Purnell and Andy Burnham, has shown itself

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to be much more concerned to shape cultural policy than was previously the case, leading one commentator to suggest that it effectively “intended to reclaim . . . media policy-making from Ofcom.”29 Whether or not this particular reading is accurate, the importance of lobbying government is clear, and when senior officials from the DCMS, BERR or other key bodies deliver public speeches on media matters, the broadcasters’ lobbyists are guaranteed to be there in force. These lobbyists are typically senior, significant members of their respective corporate management teams, and as Jean Seaton, historian of the BBC, observes, they enable the UK’s broadcasters to apply “enormous pressure” on Ofcom in particular.30 The second way in which “big capital” frames the architectures of UK television governance is strategic. Most industry commentators would accept that the stated strategic rationale for a specific corporate initiative is not necessarily the only or even the most important rationale. BSkyB, for instance, put in play between mid-2006 and mid-2007 a number of different high-profile initiatives, each with its discrete rationale, and each of which prompted Ofcom to actively consider intervention—the purchase of a 17.9% stake in ITV in November 2006;31 the announcement in February 2007 that it would launch a pay-television service on digital terrestrial;32 and an ongoing “war” with Virgin Media over the rates for carriage of each one’s proprietary channels on the other’s pay-television platform.33 The interesting question to consider here is whether BSkyB truly expected to receive Ofcom’s backing, simultaneously, on all fronts. An alternative reading is that bringing all three initiatives to a head at the same time was itself a strategic decision, aimed at creating a set of cumulative pressures that would make it more likely that on one front, at least, BSkyB would be backed. Seen thus, an individual initiative might sometimes be less an end in itself, and more a means to leverage regulatory support on another initiative. I should emphasize that one does not need to subscribe to a Machiavellian reading of contemporary corporate politics to envisage such a scenario. Later in the book, in chapter 9, we will encounter another recent instance in which one of the major UK television players quite clearly pursued tactics on one strategic front that were intimately bound up with its desired outcome on another (regulatory related) front. The case in point was the BBC’s proposed move of several core departments to Salford, Greater Manchester, in 2011. As I later recount in some detail, the BBC was highly reluctant to commit to this move—a move of great political symbolism, as well as real social and economic implications—while still in negotiations with the government over the renewal of its licence fee. While the BBC flatly denied that it was holding a gun to government’s (and indeed, Salford’s) head by tying the possibility of the move to a satisfactory licence fee outcome, few (if any) commentators doubted that the BBC was taking a thoroughly strategic approach to the Salford project.

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Such strategies are always hovering in the background, to one extent or another, as the UK’s regulators go through the day-to-day processes of policy decisionmaking—even if the effects of such strategies are seldom explicit. But there is, I argue, a third way in which corporate power is “felt” in the realm of television governance, which is yet more complex, hazy, and diffuse. For, even if industry policy is not being researched, written and implemented by corporations in the private sector, its actual authors—government and its various regulators—have themselves increasingly become corporatized. This is not just a matter of the introduction of business practices (centered around concepts of efficiency, entrepreneurialism and accountability) into the public sector. More crucial, perhaps, is the fact that many of those working in government, and particularly at its regulatory bodies, hail from a private-sector background and hence bring with them— unavoidably, but of course to different degrees and with different levels of consciousness—private-sector dispositions. All 12 members of Ofcom’s Executive Committee, for instance, worked previously at the heavily corporatized BBC and/or for economic/strategy consultancies, investment banks or private industrial corporations.34 To register this is not to suggest that in their regulatory roles, such individuals would merely reproduce or pander to a corporate agenda. However, it is to insist that the influence of private companies, and of their underlying, accumulation-oriented imperatives, is exerted in many different ways in the regulatory realm, not all of them obvious or explicit.

THEORY FROM “NOWHERE” The establishment of Ofcom represents the biggest ever shake-up in UK media and communications governance, and it therefore offers an instructive context in which to begin to examine the geographical sourcing of governance theory, or such theory’s “travelling” qualities. Hence Ofcom is one of my two consistent points of focus in the next three sections of the chapter (only in the final section do I move away from Ofcom altogether). The other point of focus for these three sections is a parallel New Zealand– based development, specifically the changes in TVNZ’s governance that I introduced earlier—and in particular, the implementation of its charter. For this, too, offers an illuminating opportunity to reflect on the derivation of governance theory and policy. I start, as indicated, by examining existing representations of such derivation, with regards to both Ofcom (the institution) and the TVNZ Charter. The most cursory reading available to us is through the published statements of the respective architects of each entity, namely the UK and New Zealand’s governments and regulators. Beginning with Ofcom, the process

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of institutional origination needs to be traced back to well beyond the point, in December 2003, at which the legacy regulators were replaced by the new body. Based on the preparatory work of a Core Bill Team drawn jointly from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and DCMS, the government announced its headline plans for Ofcom in late 2000—claiming, with some justification, that maintaining five separate regulators no longer made sense in a world of “converged” communications in which the lines between radio, television and telecommunications were becoming increasingly blurred. To what extent, then, did the government shed light on the source or sources of inspiration for its vision of Ofcom? It is striking, I think, that in its detailed statement in late 2000 about Ofcom’s intended roles, responsibilities and organizational structure, the government did not offer a single comment on where the DTI and DCMS team had located the various components from which it proceeded to assemble the Ofcom model.35 More recently, furthermore, in an in-house study of its own early development, Ofcom has reproduced this same lacuna, failing to specify the origins of the governance policies that it ultimately institutionalized.36 The theory was, in this telling, placeless: emanating from nowhere, and attributable to nowhere. The same narrative (of absence) characterizes official communications on the development of the TVNZ Charter. Having come to power as a coalition following the 1999 election, and having soon after signalled its intention to reanimate a public service component at TVNZ (chapter 2), the Labourled government declared its intention to introduce a charter in July 2000, proceeding to publish a first draft (to which it received some 170 responses) three months later. Details of the finalized charter were then released in May 2001 by the then Broadcasting Minster, Marian Hobbs (the charter was not implemented until March 2003).37 And again, as with the Ofcom model in the UK, there was a singular silence as to the charter’s sourcing—the government did not specify which international models, if any, it had looked at, nor indeed who, within government, had actually crafted the draft and final versions.38 One would perhaps have expected industry commentators in New Zealand to at least raise the question of where TVNZ’s Charter had emerged from; UK commentators certainly posed this question of the Ofcom model, as we will see below. But discussion of the charter has in fact been quite limited in general, extending only to debate about its wording, arguments that the charter alone does not have sufficient bite to meaningfully check TVNZ’s commercialism, and, most recently, analysis of government’s May 2008 decision to radically circumscribe TVNZ’s freedom over spending of charter funds.39 Indeed, not only did commentators fail to investigate the charter’s derivation—its reliance, or otherwise, on the many overseas models (the charters of, say, the UK’s BBC or Australia’s ABC) to which, as

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I demonstrate below, it bears obvious parallels. Moreover, such headline similarities were themselves nowhere reported.40 What are we to make of such discourse, and its apparent positing of new governance, in both the UK and New Zealand, as “theory from nowhere”? As I suggested in the introduction to this chapter, Nick Perry’s thoughts on Said’s “travelling theory” can serve as a useful signpost here.41 Perry argues that when we are presented with theory as being placeless, as coming from “nowhere,” there is likely to be a sub-narrative that informs such a representation. For Perry, the most probable explanation is not that the guardians of such theory want to enable it to “escape its origin,” to be freed from any shackles that such a (fixed) origin might impose upon it. Rather, in not specifying an origin, he thinks that theory’s guardians more likely seek, perhaps perversely, to “essentialize” or “fix” that origin; that precisely in not identifying a source, the source is thereby protected from scrutiny, questioning and subversion—from, in Perry’s words, “the threat of dispersal, fragmentation and plurality.” By this understanding, the actual identity of the source is less important than the fact that the source is not named, and that specifically in not being named, it is being spared critical enquiry and potential dissolution. The significance, in turn, of this essentialization of origins, is that it becomes harder to criticize theory itself if the latter has been loosened from the source(s) from which it originally issued. The grounds (literally) on which to critique it are not visible. Viewed in this light, it is perhaps not surprising that the basic substance of the new governance theories and policies I discuss here was, in each case, accepted remarkably readily. The Ofcom model is a case in point. For, indeed, it is a curious feature of Ofcom’s early history that the essential idea of a merged regulator was rapidly and widely embraced, meeting with little substantive resistance. As a publication by Ofcom itself recently remarked, consensus on the basic concept was achieved so smoothly that “one senior official later expressed surprise that the consensus was not challenged before the process was completed.”42 Doubtless a host of different political reasons can help to account for this smooth passage, but the importance of theory being rendered “placeless” should not, it seems to me, be underestimated or discounted.

THEORY FROM “SOMEWHERE” According to Perry, a second major narrative that emerges in often-influential accounts of the derivation of theory is a simplistic geographical assignation—the theory, it is said, comes simply from somewhere. For Perry, this, too, is inadequate; but it is also revealing. It is inadequate because sourcing

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a theory simply to “a place” fundamentally misconceives the nature of the processes through which a localized theory comes to be—in particular, its ineluctable rooting in people, institutions, texts. Yet, equally, it is revealing, because the narrative of “theory from somewhere” can be seen to be put to work in the service of identifiable political projects. We can see something of this, I suggest, in existing critical commentary on the origination of Ofcom. The notion, explored above, of the Ofcom model being somehow “placeless” (as per the published statements of the institution’s architects) contrasts markedly with the speculations of industry observers. Many, perhaps unsurprisingly, have claimed to find in Ofcom a close parallel to America’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which was established in 1934 and which, like Ofcom, is an explicitly unified regulator—a unified regulator of, in its case, “communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable.” David Hesmondhalgh, whose work I have already referred to, is one prominent proponent of this thesis. Writing in 2005, he argued specifically that the example of the FCC had “seemed attractive to many [in the UK] who felt that European countries should aspire to notions prevalent in the United States of how to develop and operate media policy.”43 Two years earlier, and just prior to Ofcom’s launch, Julian Petley (like Hesmondhalgh, a widely cited UK media studies professor) had presaged this exact same argument—and even more forcefully. “In the end,” he claimed, “it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that what is envisaged here is the creation of the UK equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission.”44 My concern here is to raise three critical issues about this reading. The first is that my own research suggests that it is simply not correct. Ofcom is not, and never was intended to be, a copy of the FCC. To be sure, there are some similarities. But as I note in the next section of the chapter, when I come to discuss in detail Ofcom’s origination, these similarities are outnumbered and outweighed by the differences between the two bodies. If the FCC model impacted on the development of the Ofcom model, it was, I suggest, more as a counterpoint than as an exemplar. The second issue is informed by Perry’s argument. Perry says that the concept of “theory from somewhere” typically fixes that “where” simply as a place, and not as the “complexly mediated social location” from which, he says, theory always, in fact, germinates. This is precisely what happens in Hesmondhalgh and Petley’s interpretation of Ofcom. The model, they say, is simply and smoothly copied from “America.” My argument is not only that this is demonstrably not the case, but that such an interpretation fundamentally reifies place. More specifically, it reifies complex, multi-facetted relations between peoples, institutions and texts—mediated by all manner of diffuse, interlinked networks—in terms of relations between places. In so doing, it confers agency on places rather than on the peoples and things that are located there. The way the world works is not, of course, so simple.

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My third and final concern with “theory from somewhere” is that like so many (or perhaps even all) narratives, it can be seen to do work in the service of wider political projects. What might such a “project” be in this instance? I certainly do not mean to suggest that there is a hidden “agenda” here of some sort. Rather, it seems to me that the idea of Ofcom being a simple copy of a US model reflects—and in turn serves to reproduce—a much broader, entrenched discourse on the geographical structure of international relations of power. Specifically, it re-enacts the notion of a coreperiphery global system in which the US is an original core, and the rest of the world (the UK included) constitutes a periphery that cannot help but imitate, or be influenced by, that core. This, of course, is something like the classic cultural imperialism thesis that has exerted such a sway in scholarly studies of global media, and which I engage at various junctures later in the book. Now, clearly, it is well recognized that theory and policy do not always radiate centrifugally—that often, in David Harvey’s words, an “experiment carried out in the periphery [becomes] a model for the formulation of policies in the center.”45 My point is not to reiterate this, but to argue that despite this recognition, the narrative of cultural (or indeed, economic or political) imperialism remains an extremely potent one. And its potency means that particular histories are often shoehorned into such a narrative, even if the shoe, as it were, does not fit. In the case of Ofcom, the fact that it (Ofcom) does bear superficial parallels to the US model (the FCC) has arguably made it even easier to fall back on that narrative.

THEORY FROM “HERE” Ofcom: First principles versus the FCC The idea of Ofcom was essentially born in December 2000 with the government’s White Paper A New Future for Communications,46 although at least five previous publications had argued to one extent or another for a converged UK media and communications regulator, but without developing formal proposals for such an entity (a 1994 pamphlet from the think-tank Demos; a 1995 Labour Party policy document; and three studies in 1995 and 1996 from the Institute for Public Policy Research).47 As envisioned in the White Paper, and as later enshrined in Ofcom’s Statutory Duties and Regulatory Principles under the terms of the 2003 Communications Act, the new regulator would be characterized by five key features. First, it was to be a converged regulator in every sense: delivering joined-up regulation, eliminating overlap, and thus improving the effectiveness of governance. Second, it would be run like a private-sector company, with a separate chairman and chief executive, and both executive and non-executive board

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members. Third, it was required to demonstrate that it was efficient and provided value for money (as befitting a statutory corporation independent of government). Fourth, it would be “evidence based.” Fifth, and perhaps most important, its task was to ensure the operation of dynamic markets, intervening only where necessary, and seeking to reduce the overall regulatory burden on the media and communications industries. Where, if anywhere, among existing international governance frameworks, did the Core Bill Team find inspiration for this model? The short answer is provided by Simon Higdon, who was Transition Project Manager in the run-up to Ofcom’s launch, and who says that “overseas models were looked at, though not,” he emphasises, “in any great detail.”48 But what would a deeper, more textured answer look like? The first and most important matter to clarify—given the claims of Hesmondhalgh and Petley identified above—is how, and to what extent, Ofcom’s developers considered America’s FCC. Higdon provides a useful entry point here. He says that of all the overseas models that were looked at, the FCC was the most important. It ultimately had, he says, “a degree of influence on Ofcom’s governance structures,” primarily in three areas: “the mix of Execs and Non-Execs on the Board, decision-making, and the creation of a separate Content Board.” The fact that the Core Bill Team did look at the FCC (though, again, “not in much depth”) is reaffirmed by Tom Kiedrowski, formerly Regulatory Affairs Manager at the European Competitive Telecommunications Association before moving to become Policy Manager in the Strategy and Market Developments group at Ofcom.49 So what of my argument, foregrounded above, that critics have been misguided in identifying Ofcom as a mere copy of the FCC? This argument has two foundations. The first is the simple observation, offered up by both Higdon and Kiedrowski, that while the Ofcom Team did consider the FCC model (and indeed, more so than any other individual international regulator), it did so only superficially, and the degree of the FCC’s influence on how Ofcom materialized was very modest. But the second foundation for my argument is the more important one. This is that to the extent that the FCC model shaped thinking in the UK, it did so largely negatively rather than positively. This is made abundantly clear by Robin Foster, who from 2003 to 2005 was a member of Ofcom’s Executive Committee and Director of Strategy and Market Developments (and previously controller of strategy at the BBC, before moving to head up strategy at the ITC, one of Ofcom’s predecessors, in 2000). Foster recalls: “The FCC did feature somewhat in discussions, but largely to help Ofcom avoid the problems that the FCC was perceived to be experiencing rather than as a role model for what Ofcom would look like.” What were these “problems” that UK officials associated with the FCC? “Some observers at the time suggested that the FCC was often bureaucratic,” says Foster; it was also “perceived to be highly politicised and actually not that converged.”50

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In other words, to the degree that the Ofcom model borrowed from the FCC model, it did so not just very lightly but primarily in an inverse relationship. Granted, there are some similarities between the two: they are both converged regulators (although, as Foster notes, some UK officials question the FCC’s level of convergence); and each is dedicated, in principle at least, to light-touch regulation and market liberalization. But we can also discern many substantive differences between the two bodies, and these, to my mind, lend tangible support to Foster’s observations. For one thing, Ofcom is designed to be significantly more interventionist concerning content.51 Second, Ofcom is structured more along the lines of a corporate entity, for instance in the designation of the key roles of chairman and chief executive; the FCC, by contrast, has been described as more like a “collegiate policymaking body.”52 Third, Ofcom, unlike the FCC, is not bipartisan or multipartisan—senior appointments are made by government, with the result, says Russ Taylor, that “no person seriously questions whether New Labour directly controls [UK] media and communications policy.”53 If the originators of Ofcom actively considered the FCC, but largely in order to avoid its (avowedly) weaker or more damaging dimensions, it seems they barely considered other international regulators at all. Simon Higdon makes this observation. And so, too, does Robin Foster. Indeed, on reflection, Foster now believes that those individuals at the DTI and DCMS who crafted the Ofcom model—he was not centrally involved in the work—perhaps should (and certainly could) have spent more time looking at overseas models, and considering what those models could teach the UK. Why, does he think, was so little attention paid to other international models? It was not for a lack of viable benchmarks. “In the case of Ofcom,” Foster says, “one could have looked at Italy and to a lesser extent France for operational examples of converged regulators.” Rather, Foster thinks that the failure to consult such European models relates to the more fundamental predispositions of UK policymakers. “In the UK,” he notes, “we tend instinctively to look first to the U.S. and other Commonwealth models rather than to the rest of Europe.”54 This, I think, is an extremely important observation. If we are concerned with how, and where, knowledge travels, then clearly we need to recognize that the surface of international flows—of governance theory, as of all other “expert” knowledges—is marked by all manner of different gradients, obstacles, and even fissures. These topographical features of international knowledge circuits, in turn, are informed by a myriad different historical, cultural, political, and economic forces. Foster’s observation alludes to just one such constellation of forces, a constellation that inscribes the UK (and within the UK, Ofcom and its architects) in a highly specific location within strongly circumscribed patterns of “traveling theory.” At this point of the argument, I want to leave the observation at that; but I return specifically to

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such issues in the last section of the chapter when discussing recent digital television developments in New Zealand. Here, the final and central point to be made in regard to Ofcom is that in point of fact, the Ofcom model was developed and originated primarily locally. It did not depend to any great extent on theory imported from elsewhere. It was, as Foster remarks, “internally driven, looking mainly to first principles.” It was, in this sense, “theory from here.” In addition to the considerations already raised (such as the negative characteristics perceived to be attached to existing governance models such as the FCC), two further factors help to account for this local derivation. First, the whole Ofcom vision was predicated on the future rather than the past: a unified regulator was needed because of what was expected to happen (continuing convergence of technologies) rather than something that had already happened. It therefore made greater sense, Tom Kiedrowski says, to look (theoretically) at what would be required of governance in such a future, more than at governance models that had been built in accordance with a fast disappearing past. 55 Second, and perhaps more crucially, there were clearly some very forceful and ambitious personalities involved in Ofcom’s early formulation—few in number but, as Des Freedman notes, closely associated with Downing Street56—and they appear to have seen Ofcom’s design and implementation very much as an opportunity.57 It was an opportunity, amongst other things, to consolidate the UK’s (alleged) international leadership in digital media and communications—to lay down a marker, in a sense, for the rest of the world. It was, Foster observes, “a chance to do something different from what was in existence elsewhere.”58 And this meant first principles, not the FCC. In discussing, next, the development of the TVNZ Charter, I continue with this idea of “theory from here,” theory that bears a strong stamp on indigeneity. Part of the reason that theory being generated and put into practice locally—seemingly with minimal direct influence from elsewhere—is interesting, I think, is that it seems rather counter-intuitive in an increasingly globalized world. But I am also keen to problematize the “here” in this narrative, just as Perry (and I, above, in turn) questioned the nature of the “there” in the narrative of “theory from somewhere.” Just as the “somewhere” else from which theory sometimes originates is not, and can never be, a simple, reified place, so too, I argue, we must interrogate the nature of the “here” in cases of indigenous theory or policy development. Before doing so, however, I turn to TVNZ and its charter. Chart(er)ing governance of TVNZ The policy of instituting a charter to guide and inform strategy and programming decisions at national public broadcasters is a longstanding and

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fairly common one. The BBC has a (royal) charter; likewise Australia’s ABC and Canada’s CBC; and beyond the Commonwealth, so, too, among other broadcasters, do Ireland’s RTE and the Scandinavian public broadcasters NRK (Norway) and YLE (Finland). In headline model terms, then, TVNZ’s use of a charter closely replicates key elements of broadcast industry governance elsewhere. If one examines specific charter wording, furthermore, the similarities between TVNZ and international models appear even more striking. Take, for instance, key text from the respective charters of TVNZ and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) on, inter alia: geographical representation (TVNZ is required to “feature programmes that reflect the regions to the nation as a whole,” while CBC’s content must “reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences”); socio-cultural representation (TVNZ is to “promote understanding of the diversity of cultures making up the New Zealand population,” just as CBC programming should “reflect the multicultural and multiracial nature of Canada”); and national “bonding” (TVNZ is expected to “provide shared experiences that contribute to a sense of citizenship and national identity” and CBC should “contribute to shared national consciousness and identity”).59 It is just these similarities that, as I noted above, seemingly bypassed commentators on TVNZ’s restructuring in 2003. Given such semantic and structural equivalence, and also perhaps in view of New Zealand’s heavy reliance on programming imports from overseas (chapter 2), it would be easy to assume that the TVNZ Charter drew heavily on international models. But as with Ofcom and its putative likeness to the FCC, this presumption would be in large part wrong. Once the Labour-led government had decided in 1999 and early 2000 to revamp key elements of TVNZ’s governance, it established a new interdepartmental group to map out detailed policy recommendations. Known as the “Wednesday Group” for the day of its weekly meetings,60 this was chaired by Denis Clifford of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (one of the three central agencies responsible for co-ordinating and managing public sector performance), and contained representatives from the Treasury, the Ministry of Economic Development, and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage (MCH). Work specifically on the charter was delegated to the MCH under the direct auspices of this central inter-departmental group. One (anonymous) MCH official who was part of the charter team recalls the work that then went into drafting it.61 His central and most interesting observation is that despite the team looking at the charters of overseas television broadcasters, the “single biggest influence” on the TVNZ Charter was in fact the existing Radio New Zealand Charter, which dated from the mid-1990s. (Interestingly, and reinforcing the point about indigenous deri-

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vation, the Radio New Zealand Charter had itself been drafted largely by Steve Maharey—until recently Labour’s Broadcasting Minister—as part of a select committee while in opposition, drawing on his own background in media studies as a lecturer at New Zealand’s Massey University.) Besides this important point that the TVNZ Charter, like the Ofcom operating model, owed its origins primarily to “local theory,” three further observations are pertinent here. First, to the extent that the MCH team did consider overseas charters, it looked primarily at English-language countries where, as the same Ministry official notes, “we are accustomed to making comparisons.” This meant essentially the BBC, CBC and ABC, with the last—Australia’s—tapped for some of its provisions on minority audiences. The charters of the Scandinavian broadcasters did not feature. We have, of course, seen this tendency already with Ofcom and the fact that its designers, similarly, failed to consider non-English-speaking exemplars; and, as noted above, I focus in more detail in the final section of the chapter on the cultural politics of such tendencies. The second interesting aspect to this local derivation of the TVNZ Charter is that it does not sit easily with the “dependent New Zealand” trope that has long dominated the country’s political-economic discourse. Dependence, like the concepts of “smallness” and “remoteness” discussed in chapter 2, has been a central theme of the landmark texts of New Zealand’s economic literature. These include Harvey Franklin’s classic Trade, Growth and Anxiety (1978), which emphasized in no uncertain terms that New Zealand was a “dependent society—dependent in the past upon her British trade connections, dependent in future upon fashioning new trading links.”62 Even New Zealand’s pioneering neoliberal transformation of the past twenty-five years has for the most part failed to unsettle the hegemony of the dependence concept. It remains alive and well today, with Jane Kelsey, for example, arguing in 2002 that the country’s embrace of the global “free market” had left it “a pathologically dependent, vulnerable and under-performing economy.”63 The third and final point of interest can be broached through the question of why more time and energy was not devoted by the MCH team to learning from international experience. If, in the case of Ofcom, a key factor behind the “inwards” focus of its originators was a desire to be seen to be leading by example and shaping the future of mediated communications regulation, the environment in which the TVNZ Charter materialized was radically different. When the Labour-led government came to power in 1999 it reportedly had “no expert advice available on broadcasting policy,” and the Wednesday Group subsequently established by Marian Hobbs—the incoming Broadcasting Minister—consisted of non-specialist public servants who apparently took “many months to become familiar with television issues.”64 Compare this with the vast consultancy expertise marshalled in the

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run-up to Ofcom’s creation.65 To be sure, devising a charter document pales besides the scale and complexity of replacing five legacy regulators with one new one; but the politics, economics and logistics of converting TVNZ to a CroC were not exactly trivial, and the government’s “in-house” team sought no specialist advice on this project, either, relying instead on Treasury and a “menu of New Zealand models.”66 One possibility, then, is that the MCH charter team was not even aware, through no fault of its own, of public television charters existing in, say, Scandinavia. But some critics would go further still, suggesting that these government representatives, whatever their existing knowledge, actually showed no inclination to look very far for help in their deliberations—and that this apparent short-sightedness was a function, in turn, of the centralization of power in New Zealand. Tom Frewen’s words, written at the time of the Wednesday Group’s meetings, do not amount to conclusive “evidence,” but they certainly bear consideration. “The bureaucrats on the committee,” he objected, “are showing no more interest in outside opinion and advice than they or their predecessors did over the past decade. Broadcasting is power and the power over broadcasting in New Zealand resides in Wellington.”67 Theory from “here”? In this section I have been interested primarily in demonstrating that the derivation of governance theory or policy can often be a largely local phenomenon. I have referred to such instances as cases of “theory from here.” However, just as it was necessary, pace Perry, to problematize the “where” in “theory from somewhere,” so too we must question the sanctity and stability of the “here.” This does not have to be an onerous task. It can mean, I think, a simple recognition that even if the major sources for a new governance model are seen to be indigenous, what we think of as “indigenous” is itself a complicated matter. Take Ofcom. I have argued that those individuals who crafted the Ofcom model, particularly as it took shape in and through the 2000 White Paper and the subsequent (2003) Communications Act, appealed more to first principles than to existing overseas regulatory models. But while such individuals were locally situated, and sought to develop a model geared explicitly to local conditions, it is clear that they were and are very much worldly people. By this, I do not mean worldly in the sense of knowing, sophisticated, or practical (though they may be that, too); I mean worldly as in “of the world” at large. They were people whose life and, in particular, professional experiences had exposed them to modes of thought and experience that were anything but simply “local.” As one example, Ed Richards, now Ofcom’s chief executive and widely regarded as its leading architect,68 had previously worked as a

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strategy consultant, as an in-house BBC strategist, and latterly as a Downing Street policy advisor. In working on drawing up the Ofcom model, Richards and his colleagues may not have explicitly factored in substantive consideration of international models of governance, but it is inevitable that the patterns of thought they followed and the texts they produced were informed—consciously or unconsciously—by years of living and working in a fundamentally transnational space. It may therefore be that rather than “local,” the useful (if ungainly) descriptor “glocal,” associated with writers ranging from Zygmunt Bauman to Eric Swyngedouw, is the best way of capturing the spatiality of the governance models discussed here.69

TRAVELING THEORY If some of the major recent developments in television governance in the UK and New Zealand are indebted more explicitly to local knowledges and practices than to learnings from international models, it is clear that others, by contrast, have been substantially influenced by the analysis and selective replication of theory and policy developed elsewhere. In this last part of the chapter, I focus on one such development, involving both New Zealand and the UK. The development in question is the ongoing formulation of New Zealand government policy on the transition from analogue to digital television—and in particular, the role of free-to-air broadcasting in the digital environment—which, as we shall see, has drawn heavily on the UK experience. My argument is that the traffic in governance theory and policy which has informed New Zealand government decisionmaking on this matter has been highly circumscribed: more specifically, a series of “filtering mechanisms” have limited both where theory travels from, and the shape it assumes on being locally re-presented. This argument, then, is essentially about “travelling theory,” a term used by Edward Said to emphasize that a theory or policy’s “movement into a new environment is never unimpeded,” but “necessarily involves processes of representation and institutionalization different from those at the point of origin. This,” Said says, “complicates any account of the transplantation, transference, circulation, and commerce of theories and ideas.” Ultimately we need to ask, Said thinks, “what happens to [a theory] when, in different circumstances and for new reasons, it is used again.”70 Such questions are central to this account.71 A key theme I emphasize here is the central role of “expert” advisers—typically, management consultants—in stitching together international networks of traffic in industrial governance theory and policy. But I want to be clear about what I am, and am not, arguing. The argument is not that such “experts” themselves constitute, necessarily, a circumscribing, limiting, and directive influence. Rather,

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what seems interesting and salutary is the way such experts and the work they produce are commissioned, marshalled and invoked by government. This argument has two dimensions. The first is to reaffirm the well-established observation that using “experts” effectively depoliticizes modern governance. “Experts,” as Nicolas Rose and Peter Miller argue, “hold out the hope that problems of regulation can remove themselves from the disputed terrain of politics and relocate onto the tranquil yet seductive territory of truth.”72 The second dimension is that how experts are used tends to be inherently limiting. Which consultants are chosen; what they are asked to do; how their findings are translated and implemented: all these judgements serve, I argue, to place critical political, economic, cultural and geographical constraints or “filters” around travelling theory. We can demonstrate this by examining in detail the derivation of New Zealand government policy on digital free-to-air broadcasting. To understand and situate this policy it is necessary first to understand the political-economic and technological contexts. Countries across the world are at varying stages of “switching over” from analogue to digital television broadcasting. In countries with a strong tradition of free-to-air broadcasting (i.e. where channels are broadcast and received without an explicit consumer subscription payment), funded either by licence fees, general taxation or advertising (or any combination of these three), a key government policy issue has been how best to facilitate the development specifically of free-to-air digital—the worry being that without intervention, only those households taking a pay-television subscription (typically cable or satellite) will have access to digital. Moreover, the sooner the free-to-air analogue broadcast signal can be “switched off,” the sooner the associated radio spectrum can be released for other purposes. In some countries (e.g. Australia) the government has taken a relatively active role in managing the transition to digital broadcasting, while in others (e.g. Canada) it has been much more hands-off.73 In New Zealand, up to 2003, the government largely left the market to its own devices where digital television was concerned.74 And, to that point, digital television remained available only as a subscription service, predominantly via direct-to-home satellite.75 In 2003, however, the government took a series of decisions aimed explicitly at fostering the development of free-to-air digital services. These included, most importantly, requesting TVNZ to prepare (new) plans for digital services.76 Then, in late 2004, the government moved a step closer to spelling out a formal policy on digital with the publication of its Public Broadcasting “Programme of Action,”77 which reiterated the government’s prioritization of digital and initiated extensive discussions between government and New Zealand’s free-to-air broadcasters (TVNZ, CanWest, Prime, and Mäori Television).78 These discussions took place over the following 12 months, and culminated in late

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2005 with the government commissioning from expert advisers an in-depth cost-benefit analysis (CBA) intended to identify and quantify the costs and benefits to New Zealand as a whole—and to individual stakeholders such as the various broadcasters—of a free-to-air digital television platform. This CBA—its context, commissioning, content, publication and mobilization—sits squarely in the middle of my account because it has been fundamental to the government’s policy on free-to-air digital, which was finally announced in June 2006 after the analysis had been completed, digested, and discussed with industry. The CBA not only informed the government’s decision to support free-to-air digital both politically and economically; it closely shaped the substance of its specific policy proposal. Hence, if one visits the website of the Ministry for Culture and Heritage (which, under Jo Tyndall, took the lead in developing government policy on digital broadcasting), where the government’s announcements were published on 15 June 2006,79 the headline decisions taken by the government still (at the time of this writing in July 2008) sit hand-in-hand with the expert consultancy analysis—in summary80 and in full81—which has served to rationalize and mold those decisions. Before peeling away the contextual wrapping of the CBA, it is important to delineate the actual content of the government’s policy announcement.82 In short, the government said it would support the transition to free-to-air digital, arguing that it was important for all New Zealanders to have access to digital, and that the move to free-to-air digital would benefit the economy to the tune of “around $230m” (a number extracted directly from the CBA). Four key components to the plan were highlighted. First, the technology would be a hybrid: both satellite and terrestrial free-to-air digital platforms would be needed to get New Zealand to analogue switchoff. Second, the transition would be led by the country’s free-to-air broadcasters, operating as a consortium under the name Freeview. Third, during the transition to digital, Freeview would operate on a not-for-profit basis. And fourth, while the bulk of the costs associated with Freeview would be met by the broadcasters, the government would provide up to $25m over five years. The CBA and its authors, I argue, played a central role in getting the government from only a very broad, headline commitment to free-to-air digital as recently as early 2005, to this specific policy position by mid-2006. But to where, if anywhere, can we trace the main contours of this policy, and through which specific people, organizations, networks and filters did theory “travel” en route to materializing as this policy? The government (MCH) put the cost-benefit work out for tender in December 2005, the brief being “to establish the net national economic and public benefits of (a) launching a free-to-air digital television (DTV) service and (b) an eventual switch-off of analogue transmission (ASO), versus a continuation

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of the status quo.”83 The tender document referred potential bidders to an accompanying “scoping study,”84 produced for the MCH in November 2005 by the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER)—a local, private economic consultancy. This scoping study sought to narrow down the focus of the CBA; in other words, it was to serve as an “initial outline of a commissioning document.”85 Reading the tender document and the scoping study together, one observes, even at this early stage, a prescriptive narrowing down of the geographical field of theory or policy considered pertinent to the New Zealand context. Thus, NZIER stated that part of its remit was to provide “guidance on which countries/markets have DTV experience deemed to be relevant to New Zealand.” And while it was acknowledged that numerous countries around the world had “extensive available material” from which to extract learnings—and that “careful appraisal” would be required of the extent to which such offshore experience could be “carried over and applied” to New Zealand—the analytical spotlight was already being directed towards one country in particular: the UK. Thus, NZIER concluded that “a careful examination of the work undertaken in the UK would yield useful material in a number of respects.” Australia, too, might offer some useful “nuggets.” “Beyond these instances,” however, the “history and actual settings” of “both Europe and the USA” were considered “relatively further from the local situation” and hence less relevant.86 Why the digital experience of these countries was thought to be “relatively further” from the New Zealand context was not revealed. But NZIER’s determination was clearly instrumental, and was ultimately re-presented in the form of the tender document’s advice that “existing data and studies should be used as far as possible” and that “analyses of DTV have been conducted in other markets, notably in the UK.”87 In other words, the consultancies bidding for the CBA were being actively guided, before even being awarded the work, on where the relevant theory and practice could be located. It is interesting, then, to consider, in addition, who ultimately carried out the analysis. The contract went to Spectrum Strategy Consultants. Spectrum is an international strategy consulting firm specializing in all areas of the “digital marketplace” and with offices in Brazil, London, Spain, Italy, Singapore and Australia,88 and it was to the last of these offices (in Sydney) that the New Zealand government’s CBA contract was awarded.89 But a bit of digging demonstrates the degree of UK influence both within Spectrum as a whole and amongst the specific researchers and authors of the CBA. Founded in 1994 in London, the firm’s head office and center of gravity remains in the UK. More pertinently, of the report’s four named authors, two were based in the UK office,90 while the other two both began their Spectrum careers in London before moving to the Sydney office.91

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These details strike me as important because not only did the “set-up” of the CBA direct attention to the UK digital experience, but the CBA itself was authored by a very UK-centric team of experts. This geographic predisposition was then further reinforced by the New Zealand government by way of its quality control process. According to the cabinet paper released at the time of the digital policy announcement, the CBA had been “peer reviewed by leading advisers to Britain’s Digital Television Project.”92 In short, the whole contextual fabric of the CBA—its remit, its authoring, its vetting—was demonstrably UK-oriented. Is it any wonder, then, that the policy ultimately adopted by the New Zealand government vis-à-vis free-to-air digital mirrors exceptionally closely the UK model? Let us now examine that mirroring. The government’s decision in June 2006 was specifically to back a new industry consortium called Freeview, the design of which, emphasized the cabinet paper in which the government’s policy was laid out, was “informed by the British free-to-air platform of the same name [Freeview].”93 And, indeed, the (New Zealand) Freeview operating model—a collectively branded platform, launched in April 2007, and available to consumers for the one-off cost of a digital set-top box—has, from the moment of its conception, borne a marked similarity to the UK prototype. But more importantly, the New Zealand government’s own role in the wider governance of the free-to-air digital “space” closely replicates the UK experience in several critical respects. Freeview is mandated to include all existing content funded from public sources; free digital radio spectrum is to be provided to the free-to-air broadcasters up until analogue switch-off; and the government is now committed to analogue switch-off as a long-term objective, although without yet setting a firm deadline. In the case of government policy on digital broadcasting in New Zealand, therefore, the “theory” would appear to have travelled from one particular place (the UK), and largely free from local modification. This smooth, singular traffic, I would reiterate, was not so much a function of filtering applied by the expert consultants themselves; indeed, a close reading of the CBA illustrates the lengths to which the authors went to find and apply benchmarks from countries around the world, and not just the UK.94 Rather, the geographical circumscription that led to Freeview (UK) becoming Freeview (NZ) stemmed more from the directivity applied by the government itself, and from the particular ways in which it procured, deployed and invoked “expertise”: the initial, prescriptive highlighting of the UK market and UK analysis; the choice of a UK-based consulting firm (over local, New Zealand–based competitors); and the “back-up” of (again) UK expert peer review. In such circumstances, it would have been curious if anything but a UK-based model had been advanced.95 This spatial circumscription also reflects, I would suggest, a much wider, historically entrenched patterning of the international circulation of “ex-

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pert” knowledges. As we saw above with both the creation of the UK’s Ofcom (where, incidentally, one of the original 12 members of the Executive Committee happened to be Kip Meek, ex-director and co-founder of Spectrum) and the formulation of the TVNZ Charter, it appears to be typical, at least in respect of television governance, that English-speaking countries look only to a handful of other English-speaking countries for theoretical and policy exemplars—even if credible alternatives in other countries can be shown to exist. The geographical networks of “travelling theory” are framed, in other words, by a highly situated cultural and political economy, in which particular institutions, organizations and even individuals come to constitute privileged “expert” nodes in and through which knowledge can be produced, distributed and recycled. Identifying and understanding such networks and nodes is therefore essential to evaluating the processes of (in Said’s words) “representation and institutionalization” that occur when theory, ideas and policy travel from one place to another. Yet two further observations about this instance of travelling theory is important. This takes us back to the discussion at the beginning of the chapter concerning the relations of corporate power that frame and inform, in different ways and to different degrees, the processes of media policymaking. For such relations were never far from the surface of the events and decisions that collectively contributed to the New Zealand government’s digital television policy formulation, and this is clearly evident in regard specifically to the cost-benefit analysis. Key “industry stakeholders,” meaning primarily the country’s leading broadcasters, were implicated in the commissioning and content of this study—and, therefore, in the development of the resulting Freeview policy recommendations—in at least three critical regards. They, alongside the government, championed the idea of such an analysis in the first place. The projected financial implications for these entities constituted one of the main analytical outputs. And these “stakeholders” were directly consulted by the project authors during the course of the analysis, “firstly, to comment on the project methodology and, secondly, to respond to the market model outputs.”96 Lest it go unnoticed, then, it bears emphasizing that the context of capital casts a long shadow over this particular government policy and the traveling knowledge that fed it.

NOTES 1. R. Rhodes, Understanding governance: Policy networks, governance, reflexivity and accountability, Open University Press, Maidenhead, 1997. 2. B. Jessop, “Capitalism and Its Future: Remarks on Regulation, Government and Governance,” Review of International Political Economy, 4, 1997, 561–81, at p. 575. The simple recognition that policies travel underpins a now-substantial literature on international “policy transfer,” which has evolved largely in the past two decades,

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and which I draw on at points in this chapter. For an influential early paper, see D. Dolowitz and D. Marsh, “Who learns what from whom: a review of the policy transfer literature,” Political Studies, 44, 1996, 343–57. More recently, see in particular M. Evans, Policy transfer in global perspective, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004; and D. Stone, “Transfer agents and global networks in the ‘transnationalisation’ of policy,” Journal of European Public Policy, 11, 2004, 545–66. And, within my own discipline (geography), see especially J. Peck and N. Theodore, “Exporting workfare/importing welfareto-work: Exploring the politics of Third Way policy transfer,” Political Geography, 20, 2001, 427–60; J. O’Connor, “Cities, culture and ‘transitional economies’: Developing cultural industries in St. Petersburg,” in D. Power and A. Scott (eds.) Cultural industries and the production of culture, (Routledge, London, 2004, 37–53); K. Ward, “‘Policies in motion’: Urban management and state restructuring: The trans-local expansion of business improvement districts,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 30, 2006, 54–75; and E. McCann, “Expertise, truth, and urban policy mobilities: Global circuits of knowledge in the development of Vancouver, Canada’s “four pillar” drug strategy,” Environment and Planning A, 40, 2008, 885–904. 3. E. Said, “Traveling theory,” in his The World, the Text and the Critic, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1983, 226–47. 4. See especially T. Mitchell, “Everyday metaphors of power,” Theory and Society, 19, 1990, 545–77, at p. 546. 5. M. Hannah, “Representation/Reality,” in N. Castree, A. Rogers and D. Sherman (eds.) Questioning Geography: Fundamental Debates (Blackwell, Oxford, 2005, 151–66), usefully introduces recent debates around reality and representation and the relationship between them. 6. N. Perry, “Travelling theory/nomadic theorizing,” Organization, 2, 1995, 35–54. 7. Ibid., p. 38. 8. “BBC Trust,” available at http://www.bbcgovernorsarchive.co.uk/future/index.html (retrieved May 2007). 9. D. Hesmondhalgh, “Media and cultural policy as public policy: The case of the British Labour government,” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11, 2005, 95–109, at p. 101. 10. R. Collins, “Hierarchy to homeostasis? Hierarchy, markets and networks in UK media and communications governance,” Media, Culture & Society, 30, 2008, 295–317, at p. 297. 11. Ibid. See Thompson’s Between Hierarchies and Markets: The Logic and Limits of Network Forms of Organization, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003. 12. Collins, “Hierarchy to homeostasis?,” p. 312. 13. G. Lealand, “Regulation—what regulation? Cultural diversity and local content in New Zealand Television,” Media International Australia, 95, 2000, 77–90. 14. Ibid., p. 77. 15. The neoliberal turn, on which the literature is vast, but see especially J. Kelsey, The New Zealand Experiment: A World Model for Structural Adjustment, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1996, and D. Neilson, “State Autonomy and Political Regulation: The case of neo-liberal restructuring in New Zealand,” Studies in Political Economy, 57, 1998, 45–72. 16. “About us,” available at http://www.bsa.govt.nz/aboutus-intro.php (retrieved January 2007).

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17. Lealand, “Regulation—what regulation?” p. 78. 18. Respectively: “Broadcasting Standards Authority Decision Nos. 2001–71 to 2001–84” available at http://www.bsa.govt.nz/decisions/2001/2001-071_084.html (retrieved June 2006); “A New Broadcasting Policy for New Zealand—A Discussion Paper Published by the Screen Producers and Directors Association,” Wellington, July 2006 (copy available from author); “New Zealand Broadcasting: Speech to Victoria University of Wellington Media Studies Students,” April 24, 2006, available at http://www.beehive.govt.nz/ViewDocument.aspx?DocumentID=25546 (retrieved May 2007). 19. Ministry of Economic Development and Ministry for Culture & Heritage, “Review of Regulation for Digital Broadcasting: Terms of Reference,” available at http://www.mch.govt.nz/publications/digital-tv/terms-of-reference-regulation-review-may07.pdf (retrieved October 2007). 20. Interview with author, December 16, 2005. 21. See especially R. Boyer and Y. Saillard, Regulation Theory: The State of the Art, Routledge, New York, 2001. 22. Regulation theorists thus highlight, following Marx, “the inherent improbability of stable capital accumulation based solely on market forces”; and in view of this recognition, regulation theory “considers the main contributions of the capitalist type of state in conjunction with other non-market mechanisms in securing crucial preconditions for accumulation.” Bob Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State, Polity Press, London, 2002, p. 1. 23. For 2004, I have calculated the exact proportion to be 71.5%. Advertising and subscriptions are clearly not the only sources of revenues for the industry (the most significant other revenue stream is government grants), but they represent between them approximately 85% of the total market by value. See especially “TVNZ Annual Report FY 2005,” available at http://images.tvnz.co.nz/tvnz/pdf/tvnz_annual_report_2005.pdf (retrieved December 2006), p. 37; “Sky Network Television Ltd. 2004 Annual Report,” available at http://www.skytv.co.nz/files/Miscellaneous/Annual-Report-2004.pdf (retrieved May 2007), p. 39. 24. BSkyB is commonly referred to in the UK simply as “Sky,” and the parallels with the New Zealand television company of that name extend beyond just semantics and the nature of the business—in addition, News Corporation of the US (Rupert Murdoch’s business) is the largest shareholder in both. 25. It is extremely difficult to give a more exact figure, since a total revenue amount for the industry at large is not satisfactorily reported anywhere, and all the key participants follow different methods for breaking down their turnover in their accounts. However, the key headline numbers are broadly as follows: BSkyB generated a little over £3bn in subscriptions and advertising (mainly the former), the BBC generated approximately £3bn in end-market revenues (predominantly licence fees), and ITV generated almost £2bn (largely advertising). See especially “BBC Annual Report 2004/5,” available at http://www.bbcgovernorsarchive.co.uk/annreport/report05/ BBC_2004_05.pdf (retrieved January 2007), at pp. 104–5; “BSkyB press release—Results for the six months ended 31 December 2004,” available at http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/10/104016/press/Press_release.pdf (retrieved October 2006), p. 18; “ITV Annual Report 2004,” available at http://www.itvplc.com/itv/ fininfo/reports/itv/annualrep04/annualrep04.pdf (retrieved March 2006), p. 35.

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26. “Sky’s ban blocks Freeview,” New Zealand Herald, May 1, 2007. 27. “Television drama defies belief,” New Zealand Herald, June 29, 2008. 28. “UK-style regulator resisted,” New Zealand Herald, May 27, 2008. 29. Steve Hewlett, “Broadcasting gets political again,” The Guardian, June 23, 2008. On the politicization of media policy, see D. Freedman, The politics of media policy, Polity Press, London, 2008. 30. Interview with Maggie Brown, in “Should C4 get a slice of public money,” The Guardian, June 23, 2008. 31. “BSkyB snaps up 17.9% stake in ITV,” BBC News, November 17, 2006. 32. “Sky’s top shows to go terrestrial,” BBC News, February 8, 2007. 33. “Q&A: Sky and Virgin Media TV Row,” BBC News, May 24, 2007. 34. The Committee as at 7 December 2006; see http://www.ofcom.org.uk/about/ csg/ofcom_exec/ (retrieved December 2006). 35. DTI/DCMS, “A New Future for Communications,” HMSO, Norwich, 2000 (Cm 5010), pp. 11–13, 15–23, 76–83. 36. Ofcom, “A case study on public sector mergers and regulatory structures,” 2006, available at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/about/accoun/case_study/case_study. pdf (retrieved January 2007); see especially pp. 10–18. 37. On the “battle” to introduce the charter, see M. Comrie and S. Fountaine, “Retrieving public service broadcasting: Treading a fine line at TVNZ,” Media, Culture and Society, 27, 2005, 101–18, at pp. 106–10. 38. See “Hon. Marian Hobbs, Minister of Broadcasting—Public TV Charter released,” May 1, 2001, available at http://www.executive.govt.nz/minister/hobbs/ tvnz/news2.htm (retrieved January 2006); and “Hon. Marian Hobbs, Minister of Broadcasting—TVNZ Charter,” May 1, 2001, available at http://www.executive.govt. nz/minister/hobbs/tvnz/charter2.htm (retrieved January 2006). The only vague clue—and that is all it was—to sourcing lay in Hobbs’s observation that the content of the TVNZ Charter was ultimately “similar to that of our other public broadcaster, Radio New Zealand.” 39. E.g. P. Thompson, “The CROC with No Teeth? New Zealand Television in the Post-TVNZ Charter Context,” New Zealand Political Review, Autumn 2003, 18–27. 40. As recently noted by Comrie and Fountaine, “Retrieving public service broadcasting,” p. 108: “It was nowhere reported that the proposed Charter was similar to overseas models.” 41. Perry, “Travelling theory/nomadic theorizing.” 42. Ofcom, “A case study on public sector mergers,” p. 12. 43. Hesmondhalgh, “Media and cultural policy,” p. 101. 44. J. Petley, “The Re-Regulation of Broadcasting, or The Mill Owners’ Triumph,” 2003, available at http://keywords.dsvr.co.uk/freepress/body.phtml?category=&id=421 (retrieved August 2006). 45. D. Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development, Verso, London, 2006, p. 12. 46. DTI/DCMS, “A New Future for Communications.” 47. Ofcom, “A case study on public sector mergers,” p. 10. 48. E-mail to author, March 31, 2006. 49. Interview with author, March 22, 2006. 50. Interview with author, May 15, 2006 (emphasis added).

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51. British Screen Advisory Council, “Briefing Paper on the Federal Communications Commission,” 2002, available at http://www.bsac.uk.com/reports/fcc.pdf (retrieved June 2006), p. 6. 52. R. Taylor, “Rethinking Reform of the FCC: A Reply to Randolph May,” Federal Communications Law Journal, 58, 2006, 265–82, at p. 278. 53. Ibid., p. 279. 54. Interview with author, May 15, 2006. 55. Interview with author, March 22, 2006. 56. D. Freedman, “Dynamics of power in contemporary media policy-making,” Media, Culture & Society, 28, 2006, 907–23, at p. 913. 57. Tom Kiedrowski, interview with author, March 22, 2006. 58. Interview with author, May 15, 2006. 59. The TVNZ charter is available at http://images.tvnz.co.nz/tvnz/pdf/tvnz_charter_01.pdf (retrieved May 2006). I take the wording of the CBC charter from C. Hoskins, S. McFadyen and A. Finn, Media Economics: Applying Economics to New and Traditional Media, Sage, London, 2004, p. 81. 60. T. Frewen, “Wednesday’s Child,” NZ Political Review, August 2000, 34–35. 61. Interview with author, March 16, 2006. 62. S. H. Franklin, Trade, Growth and Anxiety: New Zealand beyond the Welfare State, Methuen, Wellington, 1978, p. xvi. See also, in a similar vein but from an earlier generation, C. Simkin, The Instability of a Dependent Economy: Economic Fluctuations in New Zealand, 1840–1914, Oxford University Press, London, 1951. 63. J. Kelsey, At the Crossroads: Three Essays, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2002. 64. “Prime Time,” Metro, August 2001, 62–68, at p. 64. 65. On which, Ofcom, “A case study on public sector mergers.” 66. Ministry for Culture & Heritage (MCH) official, interview with author, March 16, 2008. 67. Frewen, “Wednesday’s Child,” p. 35. 68. E.g. “Ofcom appoints Ed Richards its new CEO,” which describes Richards as “architect of what became the 2003 Communications Act”; available at http://www. dtg.org.uk/news/news.php?id=1975 (retrieved June 2007). 69. Z. Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998; E. Swyngedouw, “The Mammon Quest: ‘Glocalization,’ interspatial competition and the monetary order: The construction of new scales” in M. Dunford and G. Kafkalas (eds.) Cities and Regions in the New Europe (Belhaven Press, London, 1992, 39–67). 70. Said, “Traveling theory,” pp. 226, 230. 71. I also draw on the policy transfer literature (referenced above) and on some of the related avenues of inquiry opened up by expressly knowledge-based approaches both to the firm and to globalization. On the former, see especially G. Szulanski, Sticky Knowledge: Barriers to Knowing in the Firm, Sage, London, 2002, and C. Heckscher and P. Adler (eds.) The Firm as a Collaborative Community: Reconstructing Trust in the Knowledge Economy, Oxford University Press, New York, 2006; and on the latter, see, for example, N. Thrift, “The globalization of the system of business knowledge,” in K. Olds, P. Dicken, P. Kelly, L. Kong and H. Yeung (eds.) Globalization and the Asia Pacific: Contested Territories (Routledge, London, 1999), and M. Storper, “Globalization and knowledge flows: An industrial geographer’s perspective,” in J. Dunning

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(ed.) Regions, Globalization and the Knowledge-Based Economy (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000). For my purposes, the most pertinent finding from these two literatures—Ash Amin straddles both in his “Spaces of corporate learning,” in J. Peck and H. Yeung (eds.) Remaking the Global Economy: Economic Geographical Perspectives (Sage, London, 2003)—has been that learning and knowledge transfer are fundamentally situated, uneven, people- and network-based processes. 72. N. Rose and P. Miller, “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government,” British Journal of Sociology, 43, 1992, 173–205, at p. 188. 73. See Ministry of Economic Development (MED), “Discussion Document— Digital Television,” 2001, available at http://www.med.govt.nz/upload/17954/digitaltv.pdf (retrieved April 2006), pp. 43–5. 74. Although it did intervene in January 2000 when it declined approval to TVNZ to proceed with the original plans the latter had been formulating for digital, arguing that it (the government) first needed to more fundamentally rethink TVNZ’s role in the broadcasting landscape, a process leading to the introduction of the charter and TVNZ’s conversion to a CroC, as documented earlier in this chapter; see “TVNZ Annual Report 2000,” available at http://images.tvnz.co.nz/tvnz/pdf/tvnz_annual_ report_2000.pdf (retrieved January 2005), p. 17. 75. Indeed, prior to 2007, the only digital free-to-air television in New Zealand comprised a small digital terrestrial trial in Auckland. 76. MED, “Cabinet Minutes of Decisions,” 2003, available at http://www.med. govt.nz/templates/StandardSummary____9006.aspx (retrieved February 2006). 77. MCH, “Building a Strong and Sustainable Public Broadcasting Environment for New Zealand—A Programme of Action,” 2004, available at http://www.mch. govt.nz/publications/public-broadcasting/PublicBroadcastingProgrammeofAction. pdf (retrieved November 2005). 78. As late as 2004, CanWest owned the third most popular terrestrial channel (TV3), and Prime TV—the fourth most popular channel—was owned by Prime Television Limited of Australia. Since then, the ownership status of both TV3 and Prime TV has changed. The former was acquired by Australian private-equity group Ironbridge Capital in 2007, and the latter was taken over by Sky Television in February 2006. 79. “Free-to-air Digital Television announcements,” available at http://www.mch. govt.nz/publications/digital-tv/index.html (retrieved June 2007). 80. Spectrum Strategy Consultants (Spectrum), “Executive summary of cost-benefit report,” 2006, available at http://www.mch.govt.nz/publications/digital-tv/Final_Report_Exec_Summary_June06.pdf (retrieved June 2007). 81. Spectrum, “Cost-benefit analysis of the launch of digital free-to-air television in New Zealand,” 2006, available at http://www.mch.govt.nz/publications/digitaltv/CBA_DTV_Public_June06.pdf (retrieved June 2007). 82. “Hon. Steve Maharey—Free-to-air digital TV to begin roll-out next year,” June 15, 2006, available at http://www.beehive.govt.nz/ViewDocument. aspx?DocumentID=26150 (retrieved June 2006). 83. MCH, “National net economic benefits of a launch and transition to free-toair digital television,” 2005, p. 1; copy available from author. 84. New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, “Scoping study: BCA of launch and transition to free-to-view digital television,” 2005; copy available from author. 85. Ibid., p. 1.

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86. Ibid., pp. 2, 8–9. 87. MCH, “National net economic benefits,” p. 6. 88. See www.spectrumstrategy.com. Spectrum announced a merger with the Milan-based management and IT consulting group Value Partners in February 2007. 89. “Industry Capability Network New Zealand—Post-Award Contract Notice 920, Ref. 14521,” 2006, available at https://www.gets.govt.nz/Default.aspx?show=A wardedDetail&AwardedID=920 (retrieved June 2007). 90. Spectrum, “Cost-benefit analysis,” p. 1. 91. Private communication to author. 92. MCH, “Digital Television: Overview of Proposed Approach and Cost-Benefit Report,” 2006, at p. 3; available at http://mch.govt.nz/publications/digital-tv/BR2006248-26-APR-06-DTV-FINAL-PAPER1-OVERVIEW.pdf (retrieved September 2006). These “leading advisers” were, specifically, Michael Starks (who had been Project Manager of the UK Digital TV Project that led to the establishment of the UK’s own free-to-air digital terrestrial television platform) and Michael Crosse (an economist at the UK’s DTI); information from Jo Tyndall, e-mail to author, June 19, 2006. 93. Ibid., p. 7. 94. Spectrum, “Cost-benefit analysis.” 95. The choice (in New Zealand) of the name Freeview was probably a reflection not only of the fact that the operating model would mirror Freeview (UK), but also of the marked success that the latter had been seen to enjoy during its first five years. In other words, the designers of New Zealand’s Freeview were almost certainly hoping to benefit by association—to receive (essentially) free marketing by piggybacking on the UK name. 96. Spectrum, “Executive summary,” p. 6.

Conclusion to Part I

In the introduction to this book, I argued for a somewhat different approach to the television economy than we find in conventional political economy, or indeed in mainstream media economics. Rather than assuming the existence of “organized power” and questioning where, how and why such power maintains its sway, my alternative was to try to unpack the very notion of “power” and its relation to media capital. What do we mean when we talk about power, are these assumptions accurate and meaningful, and what economic processes and outcomes do we potentially overlook—or perhaps even contribute to—by presuming rather than pondering “power” and its configuration? My main suggestion was that we could not begin to come to terms with media power unless we consider, in the same moment, knowledge and geography, and their respective bearings on power and its form, exercise and effects. In Part I, my primary emphasis was on knowledge. In the next few paragraphs I pause briefly to recapitulate and clarify where, collectively, these three separate encounters with “knowledge geographies” have led us, and to signpost as clearly as possible where, and why, my approach takes us next. Three observations are vital. First, while it is apparent that there are manifold ways in which knowledge is implicated, geographically, in what we identify and treat as “the economy,” two deserve particular mention and, I would argue, closest consideration. One, we can think of as geographies in knowledge. That is to say, if we are in a position to identify and critically examine “a” knowledge—a representation, a discourse, a policy, a hypothesis, a philosophy—we should also ask what geographies, if any, inhabit that knowledge, and whether the existence of such geographies is material or merely incidental. Such a geography might constitute the very essence of the knowledge in question (New Zealand as underpopulated, for instance) 123

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or “merely” the language and cognitive framework (mapping, say) in which such knowledge is conceived, configured and articulated. One thing I have wanted to emphasize, however, is that the “geography” is not necessarily any more or less material for falling into one category or the other. Alongside geographies in knowledge, meanwhile, there are geographies of knowledge. Knowledges have a definite, if often elusive, spatial materiality: they develop somewhere, they are situated somewhere, and they travel. In this book I have barely scratched the surface of such spatialities, but in doing so, in chapter 3, I hope to have demonstrated two basic points: first, that because they have effects, such geographies matter in and of themselves; and second, that we can much better understand knowledge’s imbrication with power if we explicitly examine its geographical faultlines. We need, in short, to analyze myriad knowledge geographies in order to try to understand the extent to which and ways in which knowledge is productive or constitutive of “economy.” But my second principal observation emerging from Part I is that while knowledge does, clearly, serve to constitute, it can also effectively mask or obscure. Chapter 2 offered a particularly vivid example of knowledge in an obscuring—if not obscurantist—guise. And yet it should also be clear from the discussion in chapter 2 that knowledge, in such cases, simultaneously constitutes precisely by obscuring. Third, and finally, we move in Part II beyond these specific questions of knowledge and its various geographical dimensions. In doing so we must not of course ignore or dispute their ongoing salience. Nevertheless, it is, for me at least, vital to stress that there is more than “just” knowledge; that the economy and the power relations buttressing and reshaping it cannot be reduced to knowledge, to representation, to discourse. Power certainly always entails knowledge, but knowledge does not and cannot, in itself, explain or account for power. Nobody, in my view, has expressed this relation better than Stuart Hall, who, while insisting that “how things are represented and the ‘machineries’ and regimes of representation in a culture do play a constitutive, and not merely a reflexive, after-the-event, role,” also insists that accepting as much does not mean “infinitely” expanding “the territorial claim of the discursive.”1 Thus, Part II advances beyond the territory of the discursive to focus resolutely on power. At the same time, we will begin to see emerging some of the more tangible, physical geographies with which Part I’s geographical knowledges are inextricably—but rarely straightforwardly—intertwined, and which then take center stage in part III.

NOTES 1. S. Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in K. Mercer (ed.), Black Film, British Cinema (BFI / ICA Documents 7, London, 1989, 27–31), p. 27, original emphasis.

II CAPITALIZING AND CIRCULATING POWER

4 Power, Scarcity, and a “Spatial Fix”

Part II of the book, comprising this chapter and the four that follow, is concerned first and foremost with power relations in the world of television. More explicitly than in Part I, the emphasis is on power specifically in respect to institutional capital—what sociologists, after Max Weber, tend to call economic power, and economists more often call market power. I am interested in the nature and exercise of these power relations at a number of different scales. Some of the analysis is intra-national; indeed, in the previous chapter I already cast a very high-level, introductory eye over configurations of market power in UK and New Zealand television respectively, and I take that work forward here, particularly in relation to the UK. 1 But the bulk of the analysis that follows, especially in chapters 6 and 7, is international. My primary objective in these contexts is to examine and understand how such (largely economic) relations of power are constituted and negotiated geographically. The current chapter is intended to serve mainly, but not only, as a form of contextualization. It seems to me that to undertake any study bearing on economic power in the world of television, practically anywhere in the world, one must first recognize and closely consider the fact of extreme concentrations of power at the highest levels of the industry on a global scale. Put simply, international television, like international film, is dominated by the US, and that dominance resides in the hands of a very small number of huge corporations. Getting to grips with the nature of the oligopolistic dominance of these corporations, namely the Hollywood studios, is a prerequisite for engaging with media power. If one surveys the literature on the dominance of the Hollywood studio system over global television and film,2 one notable and vital development since the turn of the millennium has been an evolving inquiry into the 127

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ways in which and extent to which this dominance is now threatened by the proliferation of digital and networked media environments. The role of the Internet is seen to be fundamental here. While the nature of the “threat” associated with the Internet is by no means singular or simplistic, its key parameters have been usefully captured by the influential legal theorist Yochai Benkler. Traditionally, the television and film industries, as we will see below, have epitomized a “mass media” model of cultural production and distribution: highly concentrated and capitalized means of production (reflecting high upfront costs) combined with extended distribution networks (reflecting low marginal costs of distribution). The Internet, says Benkler, “by decentralizing the capital structure of production and distribution,” holds out the possibility for the first time of fundamentally rewriting this model. “Network routers and servers,” he emphasizes, “are not qualitatively different from the computers that end users own, unlike broadcast stations or cable systems, which are radically different in economic and technical terms from the televisions that receive their signals.”3 The inquiry into how digital and networked technologies threaten to destabilize existing business models and existing relations of economic power in the media industry has expanded rapidly. The bulk of this literature has focused on music, film and television, where the “threat” is seen to be most pronounced.4 One observation I want to make here of this literature is that it has rarely addressed explicitly the geographical dimensions of the changes that are taking place—even, I would argue, in the work of economic geographers.5 It is also the case that the work carried out in this area by such geographers has focused much more on music and film than on television.6 As such, the last section of this chapter considers the threat to entrenched industry power from new technologies—specifically in regard to the television sector, and specifically from a geographical perspective. Yet it is vital to emphasize that this (the nature and effect of developments in such new technologies) is not my main focus, either in this chapter or in the book more generally. This is not to discount the importance of such developments, which would clearly be reckless, not to mention entirely without foundation. Rather, it reflects three key recognitions. The first is that notwithstanding the development of the capability, in particular, to view video online, the vast bulk of the consumption of television programming, even in the most technologically advanced territories, still occurs offline. Thus, in the UK, while at mid-2007 a reported 43% of broadband Internet users claimed to watch some previews or full episodes of television shows online, that equated to only around 20% of all UK television consumers; and just 9% of the UK population said it watched online video “regularly,” a proportion that had grown to 19% by the middle of 2008, driven in large part by the launch in December 2007 of the BBC’s catch-up iPlayer service.7 Moreover, the amount of time the UK population as a whole spends watching “tradi-

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tional” television—an average of 3.65 hours per day in the first six months of 2007—is holding firm from previous years.8 Data from the US appear to be broadly consistent: at mid-2007, just 12% of online households reported that they regularly watched television shows online.9 These consumption metrics are further backed up by revenue splits: while the UK “offline” television economy, as we saw in the previous chapter, is worth over £10bn per annum, the country’s online television revenues are not expected to exceed £25m (or just 0.25% of the value of the offline market) in 2008.10 Second, and equally important, my interest in this book is explicitly in television as a distribution medium, as well as in television as a programming form. That it is to say, I am interested, though not uniquely so, in the economic geographies of video content being delivered to television sets. In this regard it is noteworthy that some of the more interesting recent developments in the distribution and commercialization of online video—video “broadcast” over the Internet—involve facilitating the viewing of such video not on the personal computer but on the (traditional) television set. There are many examples of this: Sony’s Bravia Internet Video Link, a small addon module connecting to the television on one end and an Ethernet cable on the other, introduced to the market in early 2007; Apple TV, a digital media receiver connecting the television to any computer running Apple’s iTunes media player, for delivery to the former of digital content streamed or downloaded to the latter; and an increasing number of services allowing for streaming or downloading of video content to television-connected games consoles, with Microsoft and its Xbox Live service currently leading the way.11 Such developments, which are expected to proliferate rapidly through 2008 and beyond, suggest a reversioning of the traditional royalist proclamation: “The television is dead. Long live the television!” Third, and perhaps most important of all, while I recognize the significance of new threats to incumbent media power complexes from networked technologies, and while there are undoubtedly critical geographical components to this unfolding story, I am not convinced that the existing relations between power, economy and space in the world of television have, as yet, been adequately elucidated. As such, my main focus in this chapter is on how existing relations of power in the television industry have encouraged—and have in turn been reproduced by—the development of striking spatial structures of distribution that are only beginning to be disrupted by new technologies. That my focus is mainly on geographies of distribution is not merely incidental. To the extent that geographers have written about the media economy, they have generally been concerned with production—with the question of where media production takes place, in what geographical configurations, and why. This is now an extensive literature, originating in the work of Susan Christopherson and Michael Storper in the 1980s,12 but most closely associated since then, and today, with the UCLA geographer

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Allen Scott.13 (Chapter 9 of this book is, amongst other things, a modest and peripheral contribution to that literature.) While recent years have seen the first signs of a thematic engagement by geographers with questions of distribution,14 the emphasis on production remains marked.15 This emphasis reflects and reinforces, in my view, geographers’ preoccupation with the institutions that make up the media industry as opposed to the products produced and distributed by those institutions. This in turn reflects the same bent, as I point out below, within the wider literature on the political economy of mediated communications. I do not mean to suggest that the geographies of distribution of media commodities in general, and television programs in particular, have not been studied. There is, of course, an enormous literature on precisely such matters. It grew out of concerns over the longstanding dominance of the US in international cultural trade (as discussed in brief later in this chapter), these concerns cohering into a broadly based critique of so-called cultural imperialism that flourished from the 1960s through to the 1980s.16 This critique of cultural imperialism has since segued into a series of less determinist, more textured debates around cultural “globalization,” scholars showing that international trade in television programming, while dominated by the US, does not consist simply of a one-way flow—the flows are increasingly multi-directional, with strong centers of production and export origination elsewhere in the world (for example, the UK, Mexico and Brazil), often supplying regional “geolinguistic” or “geocultural” markets rather than global markets.17 It is essential to stress that I am not ignoring these literatures. My point, however, is that while they have helpfully mapped the spatial patterns of television program trade, they have not analyzed the underlying spatial architectures of media distribution markets. To do this, it is necessary to focus more on media commodities, and less on the institutions that produce them—the latter having been the main analytical focus not only for economic geographers of the media such as Scott, but also within a long tradition of political economy of media and communications.18 For theoretical guidance in studying the media or television “commodity,” we can more productively consult the work of more mainstream economists who, together with a mere handful of political economists such as Nicholas Garnham, have written about the nature of media commodities such as television programs. These literatures are invaluable in helping us to sketch out the main structural attributes of the geographical economy of television program distribution. The argument I develop in this chapter is, for the most part, neither radical nor new (although I do not think it has been clearly articulated in the form I present it, or from the perspective I bring to bear). Moreover, the chapter is, more than any other in the book, heavily reliant—though by no means exclusively so—on existing secondary sources. The main reason for

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laying out this argument is that it provides, I believe, an essential foundation and context for understanding and situating what follows in chapters 5 through 8. The argument runs, then, basically as follows. Such is the particular nature of media commodities like television programs that the economics of their distribution is driven by two main, but fundamentally contradictory, imperatives. The media industry, and especially its most powerful US participants, has over time developed important ways of managing this contradiction, and hence of defending the power of those dominant players. This means of resolution is explicitly geographical, and hence I use the term “spatial fix” to denote it. There are four parts to the chapter. The first paints a (very) headline picture of the ongoing, oligopolistic dominance of the Hollywood studios in the international television industry. The second focuses in on the key attributes of television programs as commodities, explaining how and why there are contradictory forces at work in their distribution. The third section of the chapter identifies the spatial “fix” to this contradiction. It takes “spatial fix” from the work of David Harvey, but with a crucial twist: for Harvey, geographical expansion has been one of the primary means by which capitalism’s core contradictions are (temporarily) contained; in my account of the television industry, it is instead the contradictions that arise through geographical expansion that have needed to be resolved or “fixed.”19 The fourth and final part of the chapter then looks provisionally, as noted, at the threats to incumbent industry power posed by new networked technologies, particularly insofar as those technologies challenge the aforementioned spatial fix.

TELEVISION OLIGOPOLY The importing of foreign television programming is a worldwide phenomenon. This is well known and much discussed, and need not detain us long here. It is important at this juncture, however, to make two observations in relation to this fact. The first is that the degree to which different national television markets rely on imported programming varies extremely widely. This was shown most clearly in Tapio Varis’s now-dated, but still-influential study of international flows of programming, carried out in 1983, which analyzed 69 countries and showed that the proportion of broadcast content which was imported ranged from under 2% in the US, all the way up to the highest figure of (as noted in chapter 2) 75% for New Zealand.20 Today, there is still equally marked variance.21 And it remains the case that in its extremely limited exposure to foreign-produced mass media, the (non-Hispanic) US population is, as Jeremy Tunstall recently observed, “unique.”22 The second pertinent observation is that in the majority of national markets, the reliance on imports has in fact increased in the last two decades.23

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The reason for this is easy to pinpoint: these two decades have coincided, in most markets, with a rapid increase in the number of channels as the development of various forms of multichannel television has led to an explosion of bandwidth. More channels, simply stated, means more programming, and typically the gap has been plugged by (often cheap) imported programming from overseas. The UK stands as a case in point: despite a generally strong performance on the export front over the last decade, the country’s television trade deficit has nonetheless soared, more than doubling from £272m to £554m in the five-year period from 1997 to 2002 alone.24 The significance of these developments is this: because the majority of national television markets (particularly non-US markets) are import-dependent, and because that dependence has in most cases been increasing, trade must figure as a central component of any analysis of power in international television. More specifically, we need to try to get a handle on the power relations that frame that trade. In this regard, the single most critical factor is the fact that global television trade is overwhelmingly dominated by the US. Any number of different metrics could be marshalled to demonstrate this fact, but for me the most telling data-point is the one I cited in chapter 2: that the US generated, in 2004, fully 70% of global program trade by volume, the UK ranking second with 10% and no other individual country originating more than 4% If one looks at the data for major individual markets, they reinforce this overall picture. Thus, in the late 1990s, each of Italy, Spain and Sweden was sourcing between 60% and 70% of its imported programming from the US; for Australia, France and the Netherlands, the figure was between 70% and 80%; and the proportion went as high as 83% in Japan and 87% in Germany.25 Furthermore, not only is the lion’s share of global television trade originated in the US, but within the US this export trade has, over time, become increasingly consolidated in the hands of a small number of large firms—hence my use of the term “oligopoly.” This consolidation within television export is most helpfully situated in the context of the extraordinary rationalization of the US media industry more widely. The latter process has been chronicled over the past quarter-century by Ben Bagdikian, in six successive editions of The Media Monopoly and then, in 2004, The New Media Monopoly. When the first edition of the former was published in 1983, Bagdikian reported that 50 major corporations controlled the national media; but as he revised his text in each new edition, the number was gradually whittled down, first to 29 (by 1987), then 23 (1990), 14 (1992), 10 (1997) and finally six (2000).26 The number has remained at six since.27 And the only material difference between this macro picture painted by Bagdikian, and the picture pertaining specifically to television and its export, is that one of the six (Bertelsmann, based in Germany) has no presence in the US television market. That leaves, then, five

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major media companies with a stranglehold on the export of US television to international markets. They are NBC Universal, Viacom, Walt Disney, Time Warner and News Corporation.28 But to appreciate in full the degree of dominance and the sources of dominance enjoyed by these five, it is necessary to take the analysis a stage further. For, not only do these five entities distribute internationally the vast bulk of exported US television, but also they also dominate the domestic broadcast market,29 and also produce, in-house, almost all of the programming that is aired domestically and then exported. This, it is worth noting, has not always been the case. Up until the 1990s, financial interest and syndication rules prevented the owners of the three major US over-the-air broadcast networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) from owning program production activities. However, the repeal of these rules has since triggered a major shift towards vertical integration of production and distribution,30 to the degree that nearly all of the most successful and recognizable US television shows are now produced by the major broadcast networks’ in-house production arms.31 Thus, the percentage of independent productions on the networks had fallen from 50% in 1995 to just 18% in 2007.32 This snapshot overview of consolidation and concentration in the US media industry in general, and US television—and television export trade— in particular, is, I think, adequate context for what follows. The only other factor worth noting at this stage is that while the export of US programming to international markets occurs largely by way of program sales to local broadcasters, the last twenty years have seen the emergence of various other important strategies through which US television companies have sought to boost their international presence and earnings. One is the establishment of joint initiatives with international broadcasters, such as Discovery Channel’s long-term and wide-ranging venture with the BBC, which I discuss in chapter 10. More common, however, has been the establishment of wholly owned local broadcast entities in one or more international markets (foreign direct investment).33 The names of many such burgeoning international channel empires—including MTV, CNN, and Discovery itself—will be familiar to most readers.34 Nevertheless, it seems to me to be important to emphasize that the operation of these overseas channel portfolios is only one part of the Hollywood studios’ international weaponry. I stress this because a (misplaced) exclusive or even primary emphasis on these channel operations could easily lead one to seriously misread the nature and extent of the overall power still enjoyed by those US studios on the global television stage. This, I think, is the mistake recently made by Jeremy Tunstall, whose argument that the power of the US media on the world scene has been “in decline . . . for several decades” is predicated in large part on the observation that “even the most successful” US-owned international channels such as MTV and Dis-

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covery “have very small niche audience shares around the world.”35 So they do; but what, one is left wondering, about all the US-produced programming aired on the major domestically owned channels in those markets? Where, and by whom, is the value generated through that programming captured? I return to this latter question in depth in chapter 6.

BASIC ECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS Over the next few pages, my objective, as stated, is to examine some of the key attributes of television programs as economic products, and to demonstrate how and why it is that these attributes generate contradictory forces in the distribution of those programs. This is not, of course, the first place in the book that I have touched on such core attributes. Indeed, precisely because I consider them so important for our overall inquiry into constellations of power, knowledge and space in the television economy, I provided a headline synopsis of those attributes in the Introduction. I also drew upon some of the implications of these core attributes in my discussion in chapter 2 of the effects of low program import prices in New Zealand. Here, I hope to take the analysis significantly deeper. My starting point is to think of television programs as “cultural commodities.” But simply invoking this latter term itself raises complexities—how to define or classify so-called cultural commodities (before moving on to look at their economic attributes)? In the Introduction and in chapter 1, I conceptualized such commodities primarily as the products of the “cultural” or “creative” industries (while also recognizing the huge complexity and the political materiality associated with these latter designations). But the “cultural” industries clearly produce all sorts of different goods. Bernard Miège, however, has helpfully split these into three fundamental types.36 The first is what he describes as “reproducible products” not requiring the involvement of “cultural” workers in their production, which would include television sets, hi-fi systems, and so on. The second type is reproducible products that do require the involvement of cultural workers in their production; television programs belong here, along with books, recorded music, and others.37 Finally, there is what Miège calls “semi-reproducible products,” by which he means things like craft work, art prints, and certain types of cultural performance. Television programs, then, are reproducible cultural commodities requiring the labor, to one extent or another, of cultural workers. And as argued in the Introduction, economists have typically described and analyzed such cultural commodities as a form of “public good.” A pure “public good,” it bears reiterating, is both nonexcludable and nonrival in consumption. Some examples of the television program commodity fulfil both of these

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criteria: in particular, free-to-air, unencrypted, terrestrial program broadcasts. Others, however, such as many of the programs distributed by satellite or cable, are nonrival but are not nonexcludable; they are, in other words, excludable (usually by means of encryption). Both facets of the idea of the public good are pertinent in what follows. Reproducible cultural commodities with “public good” qualities have been the subject of a substantial amount of inquiry both within mainstream, neoclassical economics (especially the sub-discipline of media economics) and within political economy. While these two disciplinary traditions diverge and disagree, as discussed elsewhere in the book, on very many dimensions of the media economy—what it is, how it should be analyzed, how it should be managed and regulated—they actually have much the same things to say on the economic attributes that sit at the core of the cultural commodity. Therefore, while I rely here on an elegant, influential (and relatively early) synoptic paper by the political economist Nicholas Garnham, it is important to emphasize that what he says on such matters is not manifestly different from the position occupied by more mainstream economists.38 What, then, are the “special” characteristics or attributes of commodities like television programs? The first, according to Garnham, is that “the costs of reproduction are marginal in relation to the costs of production” and hence “the marginal returns from each extra sale tend to grow.”39 The basic premise here is that once one unit has been produced, it costs very little to produce another. Think, for example, of a feature film. It may cost a million dollars—or, in the case of the Hollywood studio pictures that dominate the global film industry, an average of tens of millions of dollars—to script, shoot and edit a film, but once this process is complete and a print of the final movie is ready, each incremental print costs only a few thousand dollars to produce. And in television (or recorded music, or digital film), the costs of reproduction are even lower.40 In all cases, this distinctive cost profile generates pronounced economies of scale, whereby cumulative returns increase with each unit sold because only minimal marginal revenues are required to meet the marginal unit costs.41 Such economies of scale, of course, exist in a wide range of industries; Garnham’s point, in line with mainstream media economists, is that the cultural industries represent perhaps the quintessential, most extreme example of such economies. This first attribute translates, Garnham goes on to argue, into “a powerful thrust towards audience maximization as the preferred profit maximization strategy.”42 In other words, the more people that pay to consume a cultural commodity, the greater the vendor’s return because the marginal costs of reproduction are so low. This drive to audience maximization is evident, as Garnham notes (and as we saw in the previous section on the shape of the US media industry), in the high level of consolidation and cross-media ownership among distributors of cultural products. But it also has a very ex-

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plicit geography: in a word, “internationalization.”43 And there is, of course, nothing novel or surprising in this observation: clearly, it will ordinarily be easier to sell a product to a new customer than to resell it to an existing one, and once local markets have been saturated the only way to reach new customers is through geographical expansion. Thus, we see in the cultural industries a history of a quest not just for maximum geographical coverage within national markets—for example, the comprehensive local affiliate networks of the national US radio and television broadcasters, or the regional transmission networks of their UK counterparts—but also, for commodities that are perceived to have the ability to “travel” across cultures, internationally.44 The growing contribution of international film markets to Hollywood’s coffers is perhaps the most familiar and widely cited example, this contribution having grown from an average of approximately 30% in the 1920s to around 70% today.45 But the same trend is palpably evident in international television distribution, specifically (and as alluded to above) in the “Big Five’s” drive not only to grow export earnings but also to colonize international markets with proprietary broadcast businesses.46 The first basic attribute of cultural commodities such as television programs, then, is an expansion imperative driven by low marginal costs. The specific usefulness of Garnham’s discussion is that he explicitly juxtaposes this first attribute with a second, showing how the two together generate an essential contradiction (which I come to shortly). And this second attribute is nonrivalry: the fact that consumption by one person does not limit or detract from consumption by another person. Hence, the cultural industries, Garnham claims, have pursued strategies for “artificially limiting access in order to create scarcity” because “the cultural commodity is not destroyed in the process of consumption” and thus “it has been difficult to establish the scarcity on which price is based.”47 The key factors in this analysis are access, scarcity and price. Whereas the degree of scarcity of physical supply plays a key role in determining the price of most products (because price is, in most cases, a function primarily of supply and demand), it cannot play a similar role for cultural products because, access permitting, they can be endlessly reconsumed without their value being eroded. The “access” caveat is, of course, critical here—it is, as Garnham states, in seeking to “artificially” limit access that cultural producers and distributors have been able to construct a locus of scarcity around which price can settle. Hence, much of the inquiry into cultural commodities as public goods has focused precisely on identifying (and often critiquing) the cultural industry’s strategies for the “production” of such scarcity. The most obvious “strategy” among these has been to seek to impose the most watertight copyright regulations possible. By “copyright,” we mean the exclusive right to license, make copies of, and otherwise commercially

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exploit a creative work; at its most general (and perhaps most pertinently in the context of the present chapter), it is, literally, the “right to copy” an original creation. Copyright has been, and remains, the primary means available to the Western cultural industries to limit access and hence realize commodity scarcity, and the history, politics and economics of copyright have been widely explored and debated.48 But there is, we must not forget, and as writers such as Lawrence Lessig continually remind us, nothing “natural” about copyright as a legal framework: it is very much a product of economic history.49 As Marx himself observed, “Every form of production creates its own legal relations.”50 But copyright is not the only strategy pursued in the aim of establishing such scarcity. Garnham highlights four other strategies.51 First, one often finds monopolistic or oligopolistic control of distribution—often linked to the state (as in both the UK and New Zealand), but sometimes not (as we have seen with the US media oligopoly sketched out earlier). Second, and as I discuss in much greater detail in chapter 8, the nexus of commoditization has very often been transferred from the product to the consumer (and, more specifically, her attention), whereby the audience is constituted as a commodity for sale to advertisers and the product itself merely acts as a free lunch.52 Third, and related to this strategy, the cultural industries historically have often sought to concentrate profit extraction in the provision of hardware (television sets, hi-fi systems), effectively using content as a loss leader.53 Fourth and lastly, we commonly see the “creation of commodities, of which news is the classic example, which require constant reconsumption.”54 Before concluding this section, there are two important points to emphasize. The first, which links this discussion both back (to the analysis of media oligopoly in the US) and forward (to, in the final section, the threats to that oligopoly), is that these strategies for producing scarcity do not merely assist the principals of the media economy, but enable them to be. There would be no “media economy” as we know it without these strategies—or some combination of them—existing in one form or another. These strategies, in other words, are central to the exercise and maintenance of Hollywood studio power. The second point, following Garnham, concerns the contradiction that arises out of our two core attributes of cultural commodities. For these attributes exist, Garnham observes, in perpetual tension with one another, generating what he aptly describes as “a contradiction at the heart of the cultural commodity.”55 How is this so? The attributes are contradictory, he explains, because low marginal costs encourage expansion (spatial or otherwise, and preferably without limits), while the absence of natural scarcity compels, in the service of producing scarcity, some form of limitation and constraint—of which copyright is the paradigmatic form. Thus, in Clive Barnett’s words, the cultural industry’s expansion imperative is forever

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“dogged” by “the problem of maintaining the economic scarcity of commodities that are durable as well as cheap and easy to reproduce.”56 Having summarized here the main strategies for realizing such scarcity, I turn now to the idea of a “spatial fix,” because these strategies have, historically, been framed by an explicitly spatial architecture.

SCARCITY IN SPACE AND WINDOWING AS “SPATIAL FIX” The central concept I explore in this section is that of windowing. Windows, I argue, provide the “spatial fix” that underpins the cultural industry’s strategies for creating scarcity. But what do we mean by “windows”? They are, quite simply, the means employed by distributors to stagger the release and transmission of television programs and films, both by territory and by media platform; in other words, windows do not just segregate geographical spaces, but also isolate the different types of media through which cultural commodities can be accessed and consumed. Such windows are probably most familiar in the guise of the typically earlier release of feature films in the US than the rest of the world (“geographical windowing”), and in the conventional lag between films appearing in cinemas and their later availability through other media such as broadcast television (“platform windowing”). But in what sense does geographical windowing offer a “spatial fix”? If we return to the contradiction identified in the previous section, we need to ask specifically how economic scarcity can be maintained at the same time as international television and film distribution networks are being relentlessly expanded. In principle, films and television programs can very easily, cheaply and rapidly (indeed, in Marx’s “twinkling of an eye”) be made available to a transnational audience, in precisely the manner encouraged by the trivial costs of reproduction and by the general capitalist imperative to accelerate turnover time. But if this were to occur in an unconstrained fashion, most particularly without the local exclusivity conferred by copyright, the owners of the intellectual property would fail to maximize revenues from the commodity in question—partly because some consumers might consume it without paying for it (a piracy issue, which can never be fully contained), and partly because many would consume it under conditions unattended by the desired economic constraints (a scarcity issue). Windowing imparts an order to market internationalization through the regionalized configuration of “scarcity in space.” This idea of scarcity in space—the economics of supply within a specific region being scrupulously constrained and calibrated, most often through a legalized local monopoly—is helpfully illustrated and grounded by way of example. In New Zealand, for instance, the government introduced new legislation in 2002 to ban the commercial “parallel importing” of films, videos

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and DVDs. 57 Thus, for nine months from a title’s release in New Zealand (be it the theatrical or “packaged media”—DVD and VHS video—release), only the single authorized local distributor can import that title, allowing said distributor to fully dictate local access and price during that time window. What this enables, effectively, is the production of spatially bounded scarcity; the industry, more defensively, calls it “orderly release.”58 I like and invoke the idea of a “spatial fix” simply because it trades on much more generalized and powerful theoretical ideas propounded by David Harvey; but with a twist. For Harvey, market internationalization itself is the primary “fix” (albeit an imperfect one) to capitalism’s inherent contradictions in place; here, by contrast, it is the internationalization of cultural markets, and specifically internationalization’s intrinsic tension with the demand for scarcity, that actually requires spatial fixing or control. All of this should come into clearer focus if we look in a bit more detail at windowing. The origination of windowing can be situated against the backdrop of two key historical developments. The first, which necessitated geographical windowing, we have already encountered: the growing importance to Hollywood, over the decades of the twentieth century, of international revenues. As overseas markets have assumed a greater financial materiality, the US studios have increasingly had to grapple with the issue of when to release their films and television programs to those markets—if not simultaneous with US or North American release, then how much later (or, indeed, earlier)? Ultimately such decisions are based on a single overriding imperative: to maximize revenues from each individual territory. The traditional approach of releasing product to international markets several weeks or months after US release has been predicated on two primary considerations. First, and most importantly, it is believed that this delay enables the product to build momentum (“buzz”) from US exhibition, and thus to acquire a weight of “self-marketing” to foreground and supplement formal advertising in foreign markets. Second, and relating most specifically to films, there is the fact that actors cannot be everywhere at once to publicize a new feature. Figure 4.1, as an example, charts the geographical windowing of M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, a film with a traditional Hollywood windowing cycle, which was released theatrically (in cinemas) in North America in November 2000. The second key historical development—particularly as far as films are concerned—has been the proliferation of media platforms, which has driven platform windowing in parallel with geographical windowing. As broadcast television and then cassette-based video recorders developed into US mass-market propositions in the 1950s and 1980s respectively, they offered the studios incremental routes to market, and the same question soon arose: namely, when to tap such platforms. Each, it was decided, needed to be given its own discrete window (time) of opportunity after theatrical

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International theatrical release schedule for Unbreakable

Source: Author, derived from www.imdb.com

release. Since the 1980s, this picture has become even more complicated as further platforms such as subscription and pay-per-view television, and now the Internet, have emerged. The upshot is that as many as nine separate windows, including “niche” windows such as airplane film release, are now routinely recognized and observed in the feature film industry; Figure 4.2 simplifies this picture somewhat by illustrating only the main windows, together with the type of in-territory release pattern that was, until relatively recently, the norm (although it should be emphasized that this pattern has always varied to some extent by territory, and indeed by individual studio and film).59 The Internet, it will be noted, is not included here—for the simple reason that, as I will discuss below, its precise positioning in the windowing cycle remains highly unstable. The monies at stake in platform windowing, it should be emphasized, are no less material than those affected by geographical windowing: just as major Hollywood films typically now take as little as one-third of their total revenue from the domestic market, an even smaller proportion (averaging just 15%) now accrues from the theatrical circuit (down from approximately 55% in 1980). Packaged media contribute the lion’s share.60 And, where geographical windowing serves—in theory—to maximize the revenues from each territory (and therefore in sum), so platform windowing is designed to optimize the distribution of consumption moments across a film’s multi-platform trajectory to ensure that it generates the maximum

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Figure 4.2: Typical platform windowing sequence for a studio feature film Source: Author

cumulative income. This, inevitably, is an intricate business. Those who craft and implement platform windowing strategies must be alive to many complex, overlapping dynamics: not only, for instance, the potential for exposure on one platform to stimulate consumption on another, but also the opposite possibility, namely that of one window cannibalizing another. Decisions as to optimal window sequencing and length are therefore delicate matters, and economists have discussed these issues in some detail.61 Readers will observe, of course, that the latter part of the preceding discussion relates specifically to feature films and not to television programming (my main concern in this book). While geographical windowing applies centrally to both forms of content, platform windowing has, historically at least, been significantly more evolved in the film industry; indeed, television, as a distribution medium, constitutes one or more windows for the delivery of films (free-to-air television, pay television, and so on, as shown in Figure 4.2). However, it is important to recognize that a form of platform windowing does take place specifically for television programming, even if it is much less widely discussed. Most notably in this regard, the televisionrelated release schedule depicted in Figure 4.2 for feature films tends to be reversed when it comes to non-film television programming. Thus, while films originating in the theatrical circuit normally air first on pay television, and only later on free-to-air terrestrial networks, the mass-market free-toair broadcast window will usually be used to launch a television program

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per se, serving to build the program’s brand before it is then redistributed on the more limited subscription television and, typically later again, on packaged media.62 And yet inevitably, the recent emergence of online broadcasting and viewing of television programming is now considerably complicating this picture. When, and under what economic conditions, to allow online viewing, have become critical questions for the television industry. The industry will doubtless continue to wrestle with such issues for some time—with the choice, in particular, between subscription models and advertiser-supported models, and between different time lags from offline to online release. For now, with the online video market very much in its infancy, “the formulas for money-making . . . are still being written.”63 Such matters, as noted, fall outside the central remit of this book. Nevertheless, I will have no choice, at various junctures both in this and later chapters, but to discuss some of the implications of such developments. Here, it seems important to observe simply that if platform windowing has historically been more evolved and granular in relation to films than television programming, the latter may now be “catching up.” “The big question,” confirms one senior television industry executive, “is how you move your product through the windows, both those you own and control and those you license to so that you give everyone [in the cycle] value and not cannibalize your revenues. [With all the new platforms], figuring out how you avoid cannibalizing a dollar for a dime is really a challenge.”64 To summarize, then, we can say that windowing facilitates the territorialization of scarcity by virtue of the spatial partitioning of access and copyright. It allows distributors to get their products to the maximum geographical (preferably global) audience in the end, but, critically, under conditions and on a schedule of their own choosing—whereby availability in time and space are mediated to engineer local scarcity and maximize local demand, and (as we will see in more detail below) price can be differentiated by market to maximize revenue. As a film or television program is rolled out internationally, its global distribution map evolves sequentially, unevenly, into a complex, contoured economic-geographical lattice of fluctuating pricepoints and staged release. The spatial “fix” to the contradiction described by Garnham, then, consists of checking geographically the unguarded and undifferentiated market expansion that the first core attribute of cultural commodities—increasing marginal returns from each incremental sale—would otherwise trigger. In short, the absence of natural scarcity has required the film and television industries to develop spatial strategies to constrain access while still allowing, eventually, the globalization of audience. In the next and final section of this chapter I discuss how various new technologies of distribution—some newer than others—can be seen to pose threats to the incumbent television industry power that is concentrated in

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Hollywood. In doing so, I focus specifically on how these technologies and their uses challenge the “spatial fix” that is windowing. But in concluding this section, I want to stress that such threats are not something new. Hollywood has been confronted by new technologies at various stages in the past, and has always managed to successfully domesticate them—integrating them into the prevailing market structure, and reworking windows to accommodate them without changing the basic fabric and logic of the windowing architecture. Thus the political economist Ronald Bettig describes how cable television and VHS video were both tamed in the US, despite their being introduced into the marketplace before a set of copyright laws had been implemented, and despite their carrying the potential to fundamentally disrupt existing markets and market powers.65 Bettig’s analysis of how this domestication played out internationally is especially revealing. The US studios, he shows, repeatedly engaged in “foreign policy making alongside the U.S. government,” primarily to compel foreign governments to enforce the intellectual property rights of copyright owners.66 This history of “foreign policy making” is, I suggest, essential to hold in mind as we consider some newer technologies and the threats that they ostensibly pose; I look, in turn, at DVD, satellite, and the Internet.67

CRACKS IN THE SPATIAL FIX? DVD The explosion in popularity of DVD (“digital versatile disc”) as the preferred home-video packaged media proposition, beginning in the late 1990s but really taking hold of the mass market internationally from the turn of the millennium, has already had a marked impact on Hollywood’s windowing strategies. I am interested here, as noted, more in the effects on geographical than platform windowing, but since it is difficult (as will become clear) to understand one in isolation from the other—and, equally, to understand changes in the windowing of television programs in isolation from the windowing of feature films—I start by looking briefly at the main changes in platform windows. These changes have been most pronounced in the film sector. As the share of the studios’ film revenues generated from packaged media has increased (see above), the studios have responded by narrowing the gap between the theatrical and packaged media windows, so reinforcing the very trend to which they were reacting in the first place. Thus, although perhaps imperceptibly to the majority of consumers, the average gap between a studio feature film’s theatrical release and its debut on VHS and DVD shrank, in the US, from around six months in 1994 to four-and-a-half months in

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2005. On some studio titles, it is now even smaller: three months for The Pacifier, and a little under that for xXx: State of the Union.68 Furthermore, powerful industry figures have for some time now been openly debating far more radical possibilities. Robert Iger, president and chief executive of Disney, became in 2005 the first such leading figure to publicly moot the idea—pure heresy to theater owners—of releasing DVDs simultaneous with a theatrical run.69 Another studio head, NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker, admitted more recently that while simultaneous release of studio features was perhaps not “imminent,” it was nonetheless “inevitable.”70 And yet the studios can even be said to be dragging their heels on this matter. The independent—but growing—US media company 2929 Entertainment announced in April 2005 that it would be partnering with the acclaimed director Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven) to direct six films and release them simultaneously in theaters, on broadcast television, and on DVD.71 The first of these six, Bubble, a $1.6m film featuring a cast of non-professional actors, was released in January 2006, the DVD appearing just four days after the simultaneous theatrical opening and television screening. Predictably, the theater business was furious, and many chains refused to show the film.72 John Fithian, head of the (US) National Association of Theatre Owners, was reported at the time as saying that the concept of simultaneous or so-called “day-and-date” releases was “the biggest threat to the viability of the cinema industry today.”73 But such releases are nonetheless steadily increasing in frequency, albeit without the major US studios (yet) jumping on board. In the UK, in fact, Fithian’s worst fears would seem to have been realized in the case of Pathé’s horror movie The Cottage, which will be released simultaneously on DVD, on pay-TV and, indeed, online—with theatrical release being eschewed altogether.74 Such developments are also increasingly perceptible, albeit only in isolated instances, in regard to non-film television programming. On most programming the rights owners continue to hold back the DVD window to protect original over-the-air broadcast, syndication and pay-television revenue streams; indeed, in some instances, this holdback can seem interminable, with, for example, 20th Century Fox having only released to DVD, in July 2008, the first four series of the acclaimed drama NYPD Blue, with seasons five (1997-8) through 12 yet to appear. But there are, nevertheless, several cases of the DVD window being brought radically forward: NBC, for example, signed a deal with the US DVD-rental service Netflix in November 2007 to make new episodes of its show Heroes available to Netflix users the day after they aired on the broadcast network. 75 Platform windowing, in the age of DVD, is far from being rendered superfluous; but it has clearly been powerfully pressured and compressed. A rejigging of geographical windows, meanwhile, has been equally clear to see, in relation both to feature films and to non-film television programming.

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In the former case, many studios are now releasing films internationally on more or less the same date, rather than one, two or more months after US release. They are doing this primarily to undercut piracy, most especially in Asia and Eastern Europe, where illegal DVD copies of US feature films have increasingly been circulated in advance of local theatrical release.76 Thus, on the day King Kong went on general release in the US (14 December 2005), it was also released in 32 other countries around the world; another 17 countries saw it open the following day; and release in Norway, Spain and New Zealand (home of director Peter Jackson) actually occurred from 24 to 48 hours before US release.77 Geographical windows have also been converging in the world of television programming. Partly, as for feature film, this has been driven by DVD piracy; but far the more significant concern has been online piracy (especially the illegal international distribution of television programming through peer-to-peer file-sharing networks), and for this reason I deal with the narrowing of geographical windows on television programming not here, but in the final subsection of the chapter. In the remainder of this subsection, I argue that the specific implications of DVD for geographical windowing do not relate only (as in the above discussion of film) to piracy. There is, in fact, a whole other area of concern, which takes us back to the idea of “scarcity in space” introduced above. As we saw, geographical windowing has, historically, enabled the studios to carve up the world into a series of discrete, atomistic local monopolies, within each of which exclusive copyright allows the local distributor to create a bounded market for the film or television program in question. Crucially, this territorialized architecture has meant that the terms of each local market can be calibrated precisely to local conditions. In being produced locally, in other words, scarcity is customized; for what constitutes “scarcity” inevitably varies between large and small markets, wealthy and poor markets, and so on. Hence, as we saw in chapter 2, a television program will typically be sold to a UK broadcaster for many times the price paid for the same product by a New Zealand broadcaster. Such an architecture is all well and good, and is easily maintained, where audio-visual trade occurs solely between corporations—and corporations who, by and large, observe the same rulebook. Think, for instance, of a television program for distribution on national television. If a UK broadcaster wants to buy the rights for UK broadcast of a US studio’s show, that broadcaster has no choice but to purchase the rights from the authorized distributor of the show, at the price stipulated for the UK market (which is of course open to negotiation). There is no other place to buy it. But what if, a year later, a UK consumer wants to buy a DVD of the same show? To be sure, she can buy the DVD in a UK high-street store—a DVD priced specifically for the UK market by the authorized local distributor. Yet this consumer might credibly harbor hopes of buying a DVD of the same show, but from another country.

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Some of the ways in which she might do this are discussed below. The point to emphasize here is that this very possibility fundamentally threatens the studios because, in such an eventuality, the boundedness and atomism of international audio-visual markets suddenly begins to break down. For geographical windowing to work to perfection, buyers (of all stripes) in a local market must be required to purchase a product as configured (and in particular, as priced) for that market; once buyers can secure product configured for another territory, there is a risk of the architecture unravelling. Ultimately, this is because economic scarcity, which is so hard to realize in the first place in the world of the cultural commodity, is not a free-floating phenomenon; it is always place based, territory specific. Once audio-visual trade escapes the “safe,” exclusive hands of large, public-facing, legally accountable corporates—studios, broadcasters, cinema chains—it becomes considerably harder to police national boundaries. And this is what threatens to happen in the DVD economy. Who, then, might actually want to secure access to DVDs priced for, and distributed within, other national markets? There are, broadly speaking, two main categories of such consumers. The first is non-US consumers trying to get hold of DVDs distributed within the US, who might be driven by two different motivations. The first, and most significant, is the fact that DVDs of US studio television shows or feature films have traditionally been released in the US several months in advance of their international release on DVD (and sometimes even in advance of international theatrical release or, in the case of television programming, of international broadcast). For some consumers, this advance purchasing opportunity is reason enough to seek out the US DVD. The second possible motivation is price: DVDs (like other packaged media products) have tended to retail in the US for slightly less than they do in wealthy European markets such as the UK.78 But in reality this second factor is of minor importance—once shipping costs have been factored in, there is typically little or no price difference. The second group of consumers who might want to buy DVDs distributed formally into overseas markets is, perhaps perversely, Americans themselves. For, if DVDs cost as much or more in Western Europe, or Japan, as they do in the US, in some countries they cost considerably less—with the price differential seemingly growing all the time. This issue was thrust onto the public agenda in 2006 when Warner Home Video announced that it would be selling cut-price new-release DVDs in China, to combat rampant piracy, for as little as $1.50: a huge price differential from the $15–30 that US consumers are accustomed to paying.79 With almost all internationally distributed DVDs containing English-spoken versions (as an option if not the default), the motivation for US consumers to try to access such discs— and for companies outside of the studio oligopoly to try to assist them in doing so—is now clear.

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Of course, consumers, US or otherwise, wishing to buy and watch DVDs manufactured for other national markets need to overcome not just the challenge of procuring—economically—such DVDs; they also have to have the means to play them. This is a critical caveat, for, since the earliest days of the DVD economy, the studios have pursued two linked strategies for preventing circumvention of their geographical windowing of that economy. Both are centered on the technology of “region coding,” whereby the discs themselves are assigned a regional code (from 1 to 6) identifying the world region in which distribution and playback is legislated, and whereby DVD players are assigned a matching code identifying which discs are and are not compatible.80 The two defensive strategies constructed around this coding have been, first, to try to ensure that all DVD players can only play discs of one regional type; and second, to try to ensure that in any country, only discs of one regional type are legally available to consumers.81 Before assessing the success, or otherwise, of these two headline strategies, it is important to note that the studios’ efforts in these regards have received a significant amount of criticism. In particular, there have been widespread accusations that by allowing the studios to “price discriminate” internationally, region coding constitutes a violation of World Trade Organization free trade agreements. Indeed, in 2001, antitrust regulators in Australia and the European Union carried out investigations into whether region coding—and the resulting higher prices of DVDs in Europe and Australia compared to the US—violated trade laws in those territories.82 While nothing conclusive came out of these investigations, and while court cases heard in different national markets have delivered widely varying decisions, legal and economic arguments around region coding and its price implications remain prevalent.83 What, then, of the studios’ twinned efforts to uphold the spatial architecture of region coding? In short, these efforts have achieved only patchy success; but we should be clear upfront in understanding such efforts as, cumulatively, another example of the “foreign policy making” tradition described by Ronald Bettig—that is, the long history of the US studios seeking to retain and exercise their power by pressuring international governments and corporations to toe the (copyrighted) line. Thus, where DVD hardware (the players themselves) is concerned, to the extent that consumer electronics manufacturers worldwide have followed the region coding protocol— enabling their machines to play only discs from the “right” region—they only ever did so “under pressure from movie studios.”84 But while the studios have repeatedly called for manufacturers and retailers to respect such machine “locking,” they have ultimately had no recourse internationally to binding legal redress, and many players therefore allow playback of any disc, or can be modified to do so. In recent years, the market has been flooded with “multi-region” DVD players that defeat regional

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lockout by automatically identifying and matching a disc’s region code and/or by allowing the user to manually select a specific region.85 Other players simply bypass the region code check entirely. Further, some manufacturers and retailers of DVD players freely supply information on how to disable regional lockout.86 All in all, the locking system, while perhaps technically sound, is widely abused by consumer electronics manufacturers, retailers and consumers alike. The second route to safeguarding geographical windows in the DVD economy—preventing the purchase of out-of-region DVDs—has been barely more successful. Many online retailers, especially in non-US markets, have repeatedly sought to circumvent the restriction in question. Initially, in the late 1990s, the studios’ response of relentless “foreign-policy making” bore fruit: several UK retailers selling new Region 1 (US) DVDs, for instance, were taken to court, successfully sued, and so brought to heel.87 Similar policing strategies by the studios and their preferred distributors also proved largely effective in France and Scandinavia; in the latter case, Region 1 titles were believed to account for as high as 30% of DVD sales in 1999, but this proportion had fallen to 5–10% by the middle of 2001.88 And the New Zealand government’s 2002 decision to ban parallel importing resulted from precisely the same strain of lobbying.89 Yet the reality today, after years of collective pushing at the studios’ defenses, is that although the leading local packaged-media retailers (offline or online) in, for example, the UK or New Zealand, only allow purchase of new discs with the correct region code (Regions 2 and 4 respectively), any consumer in New Zealand or the UK wishing to purchase a new Region 1 DVD can easily do so. One option is to buy direct from US online retailers such as Amazon.com, which is happy to ship Region 1 DVDs to international markets (but does so with the caveat that a small number of such discs will not be playable internationally, even on “multi-region” or “region-free” players, due to the efforts of some studios to reinforce standard region coding through a supplemental technology called “Regional Coding Enhancement”). Another option is to purchase the DVD from another consumer through one of the numerous popular online marketplaces, some of which have been established by online retailers themselves (Amazon, inevitably, being one), while others (most famously eBay) are retailer-independent. Many of the DVDs for sale at these sites are used, but new discs are invariably available too. Where, then, does all of this leave geographical windows—and behind those windows, US studio power and its “spatial fix”—in the world of DVD? Given the ease with which multi-region DVD players can be obtained, and the ready availability, mainly online, of out-of-region discs, it would be easy to conclude that region coding has failed. However, it seems to me that this would be the wrong conclusion. There have, for instance, been many “expert” predictions that the studios would abandon region coding in the face

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of the difficulties it has encountered.90 But this has not happened. Similarly, many commentators predicted that “next-generation,” high-definition DVD would be introduced without any regional coding apparatus. But this has not happened either.91 The studios, surely, would not be investing large quantities of time and money in lobbying for the continued application of region coding if they believed that they were no longer realizing meaningful economic benefits from doing so; it is notable that where they appear to have let down their guard (for instance in “allowing” Region 1 DVDs to be bought internationally), it tends to be in areas where the original economic threat has been greatly diminished, in particular by the closing of the time gap between geographical windows. Equally, if the studios thought that DVD had fundamentally “broken” the architecture of territorial rights allocations, we would not expect to see them continuing with aggressive “foreign-policy making” in other areas where that architecture is threatened. But this, as I discuss in the final two subsections on satellite and Internet distribution respectively, is precisely what they have been doing. Satellite Just as shortwave radio has for many years enabled broadcasters to transmit signals across national boundaries, so, now, on a much broader scale, does satellite television. The basic geographical problematic associated with the development of direct broadcast satellite systems is this: that whereas nation-states and audio-visual broadcast networks (terrestrial or cable-based) were, traditionally, coterminous, there is now often a material misalignment between the borders of the nation-state and the “footprints” of satellite broadcasts. A vivid illustration of this came with the early, live international satellite broadcast Our World in June 1967, which, two decades before domestic satellite receivers began to be rolled out widely as a mass-market consumer technology, was seen by an estimated 4–500 million viewers in 24 different countries.92 Today, the issue of “spillover”—signals transmitted from one country “spilling over” into others—is writ large in the footprints of many commercially oriented communications satellites. A good example is SES Astra’s satellite Astra 2A, which is used primarily by the UK’s BSkyB to deliver its digital broadcast service. Figure 4.3 demonstrates that while BSkyB’s is ostensibly just a UK service, the south beam of the 2A satellite can, even with a relatively modestly sized reception dish, be received throughout most of continental Europe. Scholarly analysis of satellite spillover has invariably focused on its cultural and political implications.93 Naomi Sakr, for instance, in a fascinating account of satellite television in the Middle East and North Africa, offers compelling instances of both.94 Culturally, she describes, among other examples, how the many French speakers in Algeria and Morocco have

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Figure 4.3: Approximate footprint of the Astra 2A south beam (based on 90 cm dish) Source: Author, derived from SES Astra data

come to orient themselves towards the Arab world for music and drama on Arabsat channels, and towards the European world for French-language news and documentaries via the France Télécom satellite system. Politically, meanwhile, her most telling example relates to a 1998 policy paper by Jon Alterman—then at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and later director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington—which highlighted the purported dangers of a “new Arabism” welling from the influence of pan-Arab satellite channels such as Al-Jazeera in linking members of the Arab diasporas in Europe and the US with their countries of origin.95 But the potential economic dimensions of such “spillover geographies” have received much less attention, and it is these that I consider here, specifically in respect to the US studios and their “spatial fix.” To address these matters, it is necessary to consider and understand satellite television, like DVD distribution, in the context of both our platform and geographical windowing strategies. When distributors—who may or may not be the ultimate owners—of television program rights sell their product into different territories, they do so, as we have seen, on a window-by-window basis.

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Typically, they will distinguish between pay (subscription) and free-to-air broadcast windows (see Figure 4.2). The pay rights will entitle the acquiring broadcaster to air the program on all subscription-based platforms, most of which are either cable or satellite-based.96 However, satellite is not necessarily a pay-only proposition. In some countries, such as Germany, satellite has from its earliest days contained a subscription-free element. And in other countries—New Zealand and the UK being two such—satellite began purely as a subscription-only platform, but is increasingly available to consumers as a free-to-air alternative. Thus, satellite is most accurately seen not as a window in itself, but as contributing to the technological framing of one or more platform windows. This distinction is important, because in what follows I differentiate between the implications of satellite distribution in subscription and free-to-air contexts. In its capacity as a frame for the pay-television window, satellite has certainly posed the studios a number of economic problems, but these have generally been less significant than the problems that arise in respect to free-to-air satellite transmission. Footloose footprints and the resulting transnational spillover can be and have been managed by pay-television satellite broadcasters through the application of what is generically called “conditional access” technology. Essentially, this means that broadcast signals are encrypted and that access is provided only to consumers with valid access codes or decryption cards, the latter often called “smart cards.” Although their satellite footprints may be international, broadcasters generally refuse to supply smart cards or access codes to people without a legitimate address or phone number in the territory from which they are broadcasting. Hence, rights owners have, even in the more complex geographical world of satellite broadcasting, largely succeeded in continuing to monetize their rights discretely by territory, without worrying about consumers in one territory accessing broadcasts originating from another territory—broadcast. But the economic geography of direct broadcast satellite spillover has not proven to be watertight, even in the subscription-based context where encryption technologies can be utilized. A number of prominent examples can helpfully demonstrate some of the key faultlines and the economic issues at stake. The first example centers on the US-Canadian border. There are two satellite providers in Canada providing encrypted subscription services: Star Choice and ExpressVu. However, these broadcasters do not provide exactly the same service as the two US satellite broadcasters, DirecTV and DISH Network, and nor do they charge the same subscription fees. This, combined with the fact that the vast majority of the Canadian population lives within a relatively short distance of the US border—placing them within the footprints of the satellites used by the two US broadcasters—has led to large numbers of Canadians buying satellite television services from the US broadcasters rather than

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from their Canadian counterparts, most often by falsely representing themselves as being American residents or by providing American addresses. This is illegal under Canadian law (although the domestic broadcasters’ economic arguments have been thrown up against “freedom of expression” appeals in a number of Canadian court cases).97 Nevertheless, most estimates suggest there are at least 750,000 such subscriptions, and Canadian broadcasters have estimated that their “lost” revenues amount to $450m annually, thus undermining “the competitiveness of Canadian broadcasting [and] making less funding available for Canadian producers, writers, artists, camerapersons, technicians and trades people.”98 Much the same set of issues can be seen in a comparable example from Europe. As already noted above, the signals from BSkyB’s UK satellite service can be received throughout most of continental Europe, and just as many Canadian homes are known to subscribe to US-based satellite services, so, too, BSkyB clearly has a significant number of subscriptions based on the continent (though there are very few reliable estimates as to how many). The bulk are full-time UK expatriate residents; but there are also a sizeable number of commercial premises, such as bars and clubs, taking Sky’s UK service. Plenty of locally based companies openly advertise that they can secure you a BSkyB subscription even if you do not have an active UK address.99 Perhaps the most interesting factor linking these two similar examples is the fact that the US studios, to the best of my knowledge, have barely batted an eyelid, despite each case constituting a blatant circumvention of their cherished international distribution architecture. Would one not expect the studios to pressure the US satellite broadcasters and the UK’s BSkyB to clamp down on these extra-territorial subscriptions, and the inherent flouting of geographical windows? Perhaps. But if we stop to think about the underlying economics here, the studios’ silence begins to be comprehensible. Let us take the North American case first. The Canadian consumers in question may be depriving the US studios of Canadian-originated revenues by not taking a Canadian pay-television subscription (which the studios would monetize, in turn, by charging local Canadian broadcasters higher fees for rights acquisition), but at least such consumers have paid for those studio rights—indirectly, through a US-based satellite platform subscription. The fact that the place of consumption is detached from the place of purchase is material to the consumer and the local broadcaster but, arguably, immaterial to the rights owner. In fact, we can advance this logic a step further where the UK’s BSkyB is concerned. If Anglo-oriented homes and commercial premises in, say, Spain, were not able to take a UK BSkyB subscription, what would their consumption alternatives be? The first, and most likely, would be no pay television at all (local Spanish subscription services probably being of little interest). The second would be for such homes and premises to take pay television from a

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Spanish provider. But in both such cases, the revenues ultimately accruing to the US studios would be likely to be lower than at present. The reason why is transparent in the first case—BSkyB would have fewer overall subscribers, and the UK channels broadcasting on its platform would therefore be required to pay less for US studio rights—yet somewhat less so in the second. But let us suppose that an expatriate home in Spain takes a Spanish pay-television service in place of BSkyB’s. Which scenario would be likely to deliver more revenue to the studios back in the US? The answer is BSkyB’s service, and for two reasons. The first, and most important, is that on a per capita basis, the studios sell their rights in the UK for more than they do in Spain since the former is the wealthier market.100 The second is that the studios are able to sell more of their television and film content into the UK pay-television market in view of the linguistic and cultural compatibilities (although the quantity differential is now quite small). All of this serves to explain why the studios have failed to kick up a fuss about flagrant, satellite-related circumvention of their geographical windowing strategies in both North America and Europe. In short, it would not pay to do so. Before moving on to consider the disruptive economic geographies of satellite broadcasting in the free-to-air window, however, it is instructive to highlight a pay-television case where the ultimate rights owner has protested against extra-territorial sourcing of satellite broadcast services. This, too, concerns the UK and BSkyB, but it reverses the geography described above: the issue is not non-UK individuals or businesses taking a UK (BSkyB) service, but UK businesses taking a non-UK service. Specifically, a number (unknown) of UK public houses and clubs have, in recent years, taken advantage of the fact that with the right equipment, they can pick up the signals from continental European or even north African satellite broadcasters. For such pubs and clubs, the ability to screen live UK Premiership football (soccer) matches is a key selling point, and the owner of the broadcast rights to those matches—not the US studios, but the UK’s Football Association Premier League (FAPL)—happens to sell those rights to broadcasters internationally, as well as in the UK (primarily to BSkyB). Thus, a number of overseas-based satellite platforms have, for some years now, made available to UK pubs and clubs their satellite services. One such is the Greek broadcaster Nova; another is the Moroccan broadcaster ART. The main rationale for a UK pub to take its feed from Nova or ART rather than BSkyB is economic: Nova charges approximately £800 a year, whilst BSkyB’s service costs in the region of £6,000.101 But there is another rationale, too: to protect live match attendances, the FAPL refuses to sell live broadcast rights to games kicking-off at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon to anyone in the UK (not even BSkyB), but it does sell these rights internationally. In an ironic quirk of economic geography, then, Nova or ART can offer UK pubs not only a far cheaper service than BSkyB, but more live games.

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The FAPL, not surprisingly, does not look kindly on all of this—and for precisely the same reasons, albeit turned on their head, that the US studios turn a blind eye to the transgressions described above. Its argument is that overseas broadcasters are paying only for the right to show Premiership games in their respective territorial markets—and that the price they pay for those rights reflects this geographical circumscription. But what is perhaps most interesting and revealing about this case is the specific route pursued by the FAPL in seeking to redress the situation. One option would have been to terminate contracts with all offending international broadcasters—but the economics of such an option make it distinctly unappealing, of course. Another option would have been to seek to charge the offending international broadcasters more for UK football rights because their actual customer base is larger than it “should” be. But the FAPL has not attempted to do this, either. There are likely two reasons. First, it would be seen to constitute a tacit acceptance of the practices in question. Second, and almost certainly more importantly, the actual course of action taken by the FAPL will be considered more likely to maximize the revenue it generates from the Premiership television rights. This, then, is to force the offending UK pubs and clubs to take BSkyB’s (more expensive) service—so allowing the FAPL, in turn, to charge BSkyB more money—specifically by stopping such premises from taking services from the likes of Nova or ART. Thus, the FAPL has been using a company called Media Protection Services to have a number of individual publicans prosecuted for breaching copyright law; in one of the more high-profile cases, the FAPL has emerged victorious in the magistrates’ court, the crown court, and most recently in the High Court, although the defendant’s High Court appeal, having failed on the basis of domestic law, was due to resume at some point in 2008 to consider competition and free movement components specifically of European law.102 In the final reckoning, then, it is all about the money. If we move on now to satellite broadcasting in a free-to-air context, the threat to the “spatial fix” is arguably greater still, because even the protective canopy of conditional-access technology, imperfect as it is, is missing: consumers with suitable dishes do not need a smart card to decrypt the satellite signal, simply because it is not encrypted. We can begin to draw out some of the relevant issues by focusing, again, on UK-based satellite broadcasting, where many channels have for some years been broadcasting “in the clear.” But until recently, such channels typically did not have significant rights issues to worry about (in other words, they did not broadcast premium content sold internationally strictly on a territory-by-territory basis, in the way described above); all the channels carrying US studio content, for instance, were encrypted. This all changed, however, in 2003, when the BBC announced that all of its wholly owned channels would henceforth be

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broadcast in the clear on satellite.103 The BBC suite was then followed freeto-air, in 2005, by the ITV channel portfolio.104 Two key drivers informed these developments. First, there was a simple cost issue: the BBC, in particular, no longer wanted to continue to pay BSkyB for conditional access, transponder rental and its EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) listing, at what it believed were inflated rates; thus it claimed, on announcing its decision to broadcast unencrypted, that it would save £85m over five years. Second, and more important in the longer term, both the BBC and ITV see non-subscription, unencrypted free-to-air satellite as a complementary solution to Freeview (the UK’s free-to-air digital terrestrial platform)—which, prior to the commencement of analogue switch-off in 2008, remains physically unavailable to approximately a quarter of UK households—in mopping up, digitally, the UK’s remaining non-digital households, before the competing pay-television platform operators can do so.105 Such motives are immaterial, of course, to the US studios that supply the BBC and ITV with much of their feature film and television program schedules; but the economic-geographical implications of the broadcasters’ abandoning of satellite encryption are not immaterial. Here, the studios do consider that they have a great deal at stake, and this is reflected in the “foreign-policy making” they have subsequently engaged in. Their concern, of course, has been that continental European viewers with suitable dishes will now be able to watch their content on BBC and ITV channels, but that because the BBC and ITV have paid them for the UK rights only, those viewing these channels for free in, say, France, will not have contributed to funding those rights. Again, it is simple (geographical) economics. The studios’ main response has been to require all the leading UK broadcasters with whom it has supply relationships to rewrite their contracts, to the effect that if they broadcast in the clear they must do so not on the Astra 2A satellite, with its massive spillover, but on Astra 2D, the footprint of which is more tightly focused on (but still not limited to) the UK.106 But even this, it seems, has not entirely satisfied all of the studios, and when the BSkyB channel Sky One captured the third series of Fox’s hit show 24 from the BBC in December 2003, it was reported that the BBC’s decision to broadcast in the clear had been a “significant factor” in prompting Fox to make the switch.107 One other free-to-air example merits brief discussion before we move from satellite to, finally, the Internet. This relates to the Republic of Ireland, and the state broadcaster Radio Telefís Éireann (RTE). The BBC’s decision in 2003 to broadcast unencrypted on satellite suddenly created a significant dilemma for RTE, whose channels at that time were broadcast encrypted on the satellite platform, but which were available, among BSkyB subscribers, only to those with a Republic of Ireland address and hence an Irelandspecific smart card. Essentially, RTE was left with two choices.108 First, RTE

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could remain encrypted. But there would be a significant risk attached to doing this. For, once the BBC began to broadcast in the clear, its channels would become available to Irish homes with a satellite dish (with or without a BSkyB subscription)—homes that previously had not been able to pick up the BBC. The risk was that Irish homes with satellite but without a BSkyB subscription (those, for example, which had churned from BSkyB) would now drastically reduce their viewing of RTE, not only because the BBC channels were newly available to them, but also because they would have to get up from the couch to switch the television set back to the terrestrial signal to watch RTE. This, then, left RTE with a second choice—to broadcast unencrypted, like the BBC. And yet this option would, it was clear, open up a whole other geographical can of worms: without the protection of conditional access technology, RTE’s channels would, in such an eventuality, become available throughout the wider satellite footprint, including the whole of the UK. And this, in turn, would mean that RTE could no longer negotiate separate Irish rights for US studio films and television programming. As one Irish newspaper put it, “If RTE were on a satellite that 55 million people in Britain could see, then the rights to screen programmes like Friends, The Sopranos, ER or The Simpsons would cost a lot more—so much more, in fact, that RTE couldn’t afford to pay.”109 And thus, ultimately, RTE decided to keep its channels encrypted. That it did so, and risked the wholesale loss of viewing that such a decision threatened, simply testifies to the disruption that satellite broadcasting can cause in a world where US-driven audio-visual economics remain strictly segregated by the geographies of the nation-state. Online In my discussion of DVD, I argued that in relation to Hollywood’s rigid, territorialized approach to the international distribution of television programming, the development of the DVD economy had raised two main sets of issues. One related to piracy—to the illegal copying to disc, and subsequent unauthorized sale, of copyrighted material. The other concerned contravention specifically of the territorialized terms of the global television economy, particularly through the purchase and playback of “out-of-region” DVDs. In this final subsection of the chapter, I suggest that this dualistic approach is also a useful way of approaching and analyzing the Internet and its impact on our “spatial fix.” However, in discussing DVD, I also argued that changes to geographical windowing are intimately entangled with developments in platform windowing, and it is clear that the same applies with the Internet. It is valuable, then, to briefly examine first of all where the Internet “fits” into the platform windowing cycle, both for films and for television programming.

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Legal streaming and downloading services for such content have become increasingly widely available, beginning in 2005 in the case of television programming and, more restrictively, approximately a year later in the case of movies. The latter, downloadable from the likes of iTunes, Amazon and Blockbuster, for either purchase or rental, have typically been held back until in the region of two months after the DVD window; however, since May 2008, many major Hollywood films have been made available on iTunes, initially only in the US, day-and-date with their DVD releases.110 In the case of television, meanwhile, a very different model has been adopted from the outset, with programming being made available online—in region (a critical restriction that we return to presently)—more or less immediately after its broadcast transmission. Turning now more specifically to the effects of the Internet on geographical windowing, there is, first, the matter of online piracy, which has received an enormous amount of publicity—both good and bad, it must be said— over the last decade.111 Piracy, of course, is said to come in many forms. The most hostile and sustained critique has been aimed at file-sharing amongst individual consumers over peer-to-peer networks: once one copy of a television program appears on such networks in a compressed audio-visual, digital format, it suddenly becomes available for sharing, free of charge, worldwide. The Hollywood studios have, unsurprisingly, confronted the developers and users of such networks with a plethora of legal actions. But critics of “piracy” also paint much bigger fish with the same brush. Hence the Google-owned company YouTube came under sustained attack from the studios (and, incidentally, also from the UK’s FA Premier League) in the middle of 2007 for the fact that it has not prevented users from uploading copyrighted material to its popular video-sharing website.112 The most obvious geographical effect of the growth of online piracy of television programming has been very much akin to the impact of DVD piracy in the world of feature film. That is, it has led rapidly to a trend towards geographical alignment of transmission windows (programs of US origin, like Hollywood movies, having traditionally aired in the US some time in advance of any overseas transmission). The rationale is straightforward: make sure viewers in international markets can watch the programs on television as soon as possible after the US airing, otherwise they will get hold of the program illegally online and—it is feared—will not watch the television broadcast. This trend has inevitably been more pronounced in some genres than others, with top-rating drama showing the most significant change. Take, as one example, Disney’s Lost, first aired in the US (on ABC) in the fall of 2004. The gap between US and UK transmission has narrowed remarkably rapidly: for the first episode of series one (broadcast in the UK by Channel 4), it was just under a year; for the premiere of season two, it was a little over seven months; for the season three premiere (now on Sky

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One in the UK), the gap was six-and-a-half weeks; and by the time that the final episode of season three came around (May 2007), the gap had been whittled down to just four days. (Time-space compression, anybody?113) Such basic realignment of geographical windows, it is hoped, will serve to protect television’s existing (broadcast) distribution economy from the disfigurations threatened by online piracy. But broadcasters, as we have seen, are not simply sitting idly by and hoping that the Internet leaves their businesses untouched. They know that to remain viable in the longer term, they need to embrace rather than fend off developments in online programming distribution. As such, major broadcasters in almost all Western markets had introduced, by early 2007, the capability for online viewers to legally stream or to download and watch later their programming—sometimes for free, sometimes for a fee, and through both proprietary platforms and third-party sites such as iTunes. This, then, brings us to the second key set of online-related issues: the question of whether the explicit territorialization of the global television economy, as discussed throughout this chapter, can be maintained in such a world. Or, to put it another way, is there is a risk, as we saw with both DVD and satellite, that consumers will be able to readily access “legal” online video “extra-territorially,” or out of region? And would this be seen to threaten the studios’ basic geographical economics in the same complex, and often contradictory ways? The (admittedly early) signs are that territory-specific television program release and monetization may in fact be somewhat easier to defend and uphold in the online world than in the world of DVDs and satellite broadcasting. The reason is that companies “broadcasting” online (“webcasting”) can and do use so-called “geoblocking,” “geolocation” or “geofencing” technologies to ensure that people in territories for which the webcaster does not own the rights are unable to access such content. Thus, when a user-generated request for content arrives, the unique Internet Protocol (IP) address from which it originates is checked against a database to establish its location. This is not as impossible a task as it sounds: first, most Internet service providers have IP address ranges that are specific to countries; and second, databases of these address ranges are maintained and constantly updated by the companies who supply these geoblocking services. Moreover, most such services are able to detect the most common methods of circumventing geoblocking, such as when requests are sent via anonymizing proxies in order to try to mask the true originating address. To be sure, not all such circumvention can be prevented. And of course, the danger of renegade webcasters in—to extend an earlier example—Greece or Morocco offering their online video services direct to UK or even US residents, knowingly or “unknowingly,” is a real one. Nevertheless, geoblocking and comparable technologies do hold out the hope for the studios that the

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Internet’s geographical economy will be considerably more controllable than they may have feared. Given the years of extraordinary hype about the Internet dissolving all territorial barriers and hence crystallizing the “end of geography,” the increasing use of such blocking technologies constitutes a profoundly ironic twist in the new media story, if indeed we are “witnessing,” in Dan Svantesson’s words, “the Internet undergoing a remarkable change—from the world’s first and only “borderless” communications medium to something that much more resembles our physical world divided by borders of different kinds.”114 And so, despite plenty of “experts” predicting that the Internet would demolish the territorialization of rights in the television industry—“the end of television as we know it,” as a 2006 IBM consultancy report put it, including “an end to the traditional concept of release windows”—it seems to me that the “spatial fix” I have tried to depict in this chapter remains well and truly in place, even if slightly frayed around the edges.115 Much the same predictions accompanied the growth of satellite television, of course (and for the very reasons discussed above), but it too has failed thus far to materially dissemble the prevailing structures and logics of territorialization; the fate of Star TV and its imperial ambitions in Asia, brilliantly deconstructed by Michael Curtin, being perhaps the best example of such failure.116 Furthermore, I think it would be difficult to argue that the studios’ oligopolistic hold on media power, which is buttressed by our spatial fix, has suffered anything more than the most marginal erosion. For the foreseeable future, at least, it seems certain that the studios will continue to be able to slice up the world into a lattice of discrete national markets that, for the most part, they can monetize one by one. It is for this reason that I have focused in this chapter on describing, and trying to understand from economic first principles, the existing spatial architecture of international television distribution. There is, too, the not-insignificant matter, not discussed here in any detail, of how viewing of television programming online, and viewing through the traditional broadcast medium, actually relate to one another in terms of audience dynamics. There is a presumption in much of the more shallow commentary that growth of one (online viewing, whether legal or illegal) will inevitably mean decline in the other. But is there evidence of this? As yet, there is not, or at least not anything persuasive. The BBC reported in the middle of 2008 that “the usage of iPlayer has not affected TV viewing at all.”117 Indeed, there are reasons to think that the relationship between the two media will be considerably more complicated than most observers have presumed, and that in certain circumstances it may even be mutually beneficial. I therefore end this chapter with one such example, and I have chosen it specifically because it is an example that I return to and discuss in significantly more depth later in Part II of the book (chapter 7).

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The example is NBC Universal’s Battlestar Galactica, the first series of which, for a number of reasons, aired in the UK (on Sky One) three months before the US (on NBC Universal’s Sci Fi channel). Inevitably, as soon as each episode had played in the UK, it found its way “back” to the US through online peer-to-peer networks such as eDonkey and BitTorrent. Some commentators regarded this development as nothing short of catastrophic for the broadcast television industry more generally; one went so far as to label 18 October 2004 (the date of the first episode airing in the UK) as “the day TV died.”118 And yet elsewhere, this “piracy” has been credited with generating highly favorable word of mouth in advance of the show’s US broadcast premiere, hence contributing to the eventual success of the program as a broadcast proposition—indeed, it became Sci Fi’s most popular ever program.119 Moreover, it is probably no coincidence that two years later, Sci Fi became one of the first US television broadcasters to experiment with using short, online-only “mini-programs’ precisely to promote the television program proper.120 (The program in question: Battlestar Galactica.) All of which is to say, simply, that it is much too early to tell how the viewing of television on television will ultimately be impacted by its consumption online. The studios themselves appear to remain in two minds, and nobody has captured this ambivalence (or, perhaps more accurately, this bifurcation) better than Ian Schafer, chief executive of a USbased online advertising company. “The marketing guys love YouTube,” he has observed, “and the legal guys hate it.”121

NOTES 1. Chapter 5 and, to a lesser extent, chapter 8. 2. This literature is vast and has a number of different strands, and I dip into it at various points not just in this chapter but throughout the book; but for a helpful starting point, one could do much worse than T. Miller, N. Govil, J. McMurria, R. Maxwell and T. Wang’s Global Hollywood 2, British Film Institute, London, 2005. 3. Y. Benkler, The wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2006, p. 30. 4. On music, see J. Alderman, Sonic boom: Napster, P2P and the battle for the future of music, HarperCollins, London, 2001, and P. Burkart, Digital music wars: Ownership and control of the celestial jukebox, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2006; on film, J. Lasica, Darknet: Hollywood’s war against the digital generation, John Wiley, Chichester, 2005; and on television, B. Owen, The Internet challenge to television, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000, and E. Noam, J. Groebel, and D. Gerbarg (eds.) Internet television, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, 2004. 5. A rare exception is the work of Andrew Currah, which I reference below. 6. On film, see three related pieces by A. Currah: “Digital effects in the spatial economy of film: Towards a research agenda,” Area, 35, 2003, 64–73; “Holly-

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wood versus the Internet: The media and entertainment industries in a digital and networked economy,” Journal of Economic Geography, 6, 2006, 439–68; and “Hollywood, the Internet and the World: A Geography of Disruptive Innovation,” Industry & Innovation, 14, 2007, 359–84. On music, see A. Leyshon, “Time-space (and digital) compression: Software formats, musical networks, and the reorganization of the music industry,” Environment and Planning A, 33, 2001, 49–77, A. Leyshon, “Scary monsters? Free software, peer-to-peer networks and the spectre of the gift,” Environment and Planning D, 21, 2003, 533–58, and A. Leyshon, P. Webb, S. French, N. Thrift and L. Crewe, “On the reproduction of the music industry after the Internet,” Media, Culture & Society, 27, 2005, 177–209. 7. The metrics are taken from, respectively: “Web TV market ripe,” The Guardian, May 3, 2007; “Online video ‘eroding TV viewing’,” BBC News, 27 November 2006; and “Online adverts put TV in the shade,” The Times, June 1, 2008. 8. “Commercial channels edge forward,” Broadcast, July 31, 2007. 9. Forrester Research, “Paid video downloads give way to ad model,” May 11, 2007, based on Q3 2006 survey; copy available from author. 10. Screen Digest, “Sharp upturn in usage of BBC iPlayer catch-up service consolidates broadcaster in leading position,” February 6, 2008, available at http:// www.screendigest.com/press/releases/FHAN-7BJMKW/pressRelease.pdf (retrieved February 2008). Similarly in the US, the broadcast networks generated an estimated $120 million in advertising revenue from free streaming of content online in 2007, or approximately 1% of the more than $9 billion spent on traditional television advertising. “What’s Streaming Worth to Writers?” Broadcasting & Cable, February 28, 2008. 11. On the last, see “NBC U joins Microsoft’s Xbox plans,” Variety, July 14, 2008. 12. S. Christopherson and M. Storper, “The city as studio; the world as backlot: The impact of vertical disintegration on the location of the motion picture industry,” Environment and Planning D, 4, 1986, 305–20; M. Storper and S. Christopherson, “Flexible specialization and regional industrial agglomerations: The case of the US motion-picture industry,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 77, 1987, 260–82. 13. Scott has published a large number of research papers on these matters, in a wide variety of journals both in and outside the discipline of geography, but his main arguments are traced out in two books, The cultural economy of cities: Essays on the geography of image-producing industries, Sage, London, 2000, and On Hollywood: The place, the industry, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2005. As far as the audio-visual industries are concerned, Scott has worked primarily on film rather than television, though on the latter see especially his “The other Hollywood: The organization and geographic bases of television-program production,” Media, Culture & Society, 26, 2004, 183–205. 14. In Scott’s work, see his “A New Map of Hollywood: The Production and Distribution of American Motion Pictures,” Regional Studies, 36, 2002, 957–75, and “Hollywood and the world: The geography of motion-picture distribution and marketing,” Review of International Political Economy, 11, 2004, 33–61, and chapter 8 of On Hollywood; elsewhere, see N. Coe and J. Johns, “Beyond production clusters: Towards a critical political economy of networks in the film and television industries,” in

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D. Power and A. Scott (eds.) Cultural industries and the production of culture (Routledge, London, 2004, 188–204). 15. See most recently A. Scott and N. Pope, “Hollywood, Vancouver, and the world: Employment relocation and the emergence of satellite production centers in the motion-picture industry,” Environment and Planning A, 39, 2007, 1364–81. 16. The literature on cultural imperialism is vast, but for an excellent critical introduction, see J. Tomlinson, Cultural imperialism: A critical introduction, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1991; and for a more recent overview, C. Sparks, Globalization, Development and the Mass Media, Sage, London, 2007, chapters 5 and 6. 17. See especially M. Tracey, “The poisoned chalice? International television and the idea of dominance,” Daedalus, 114, 1985, 17–56; J. Straubhaar, “Beyond media imperialism: Asymmetrical inter-dependence and cultural proximity,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 8, 1991, 39–59; J. Sinclair, E. Jacka and S. Cunningham (eds.) New patterns in global television: Peripheral vision, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996. 18. A point expressly made by Vincent Mosco in his influential The political economy of communication: Rethinking and renewal, Sage, London, 1996, at p. 140. 19. For Harvey’s original ideas, see his “The spatial fix: Hegel, von Thünen and Marx,” Antipode, 13, 1981, 1–12, and pp. 431–45 of The limits to capital, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1982; more recently, see his “Globalization and the ‘spatial fix,’” Geographische Revue, 2, 2001, 23–30. Erica Schoenberger provides a helpful reading of Harvey’s concepts and their enduring applicability in “The spatial fix revisited,” Antipode, 36, 2004, 427–33. 20. T. Varis, “The international flow of television programs,” Journal of Communication, 34, 1984, 143–52. 21. T. Havens, Global television marketplace, BFI Publishing, London, 2006. 22. J. Tunstall, “International-regional-national: The national media system as the lead player,” Global Media and Communication, 3, 2007, 321–24, at p. 322. 23. In New Zealand, as we saw in chapter 2, it has remained remarkably consistent at around 75%. 24. For a helpful discussion and analysis, see Television Research Partnership, “Rights of passage: British television in the global market,” February 2005, available at http://downloads.uktradeinvest.gov.uk/britishtvinaglobalmarket.pdf (retrieved June 2007), pp. 4–5. The annual trade deficit figures for 1997 and 2002 are taken, respectively, from DCMS, “Building a Global Audience: British Television in Overseas Markets,” 1999, available at http://www.culture.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/731796CA0930-4984-AFBC-D531BA193B3D/0/globalaudience.pdf (retrieved March 2006), p. 8; and “UK television trade deficit soars above £500m: Modest increase in exports offset by huge jump in imports,” Screen Digest, 387, Dec 2003, 355. Note that the UK’s balance of trade in television hovered at around zero until the very end of the 1980s—which was, of course, when multichannel television was launched in a meaningful form (see chapter 5). 25. DCMS, “Building a Global Audience,” p. 17. 26. B. Bagdikian, The media monopoly, 6th edition, Beacon Press, Boston, 2000, pp. xx–xxi. 27. B. Bagdikian, The new media monopoly, Beacon Press, Boston, 2004. My own view is that Bagdikian’s reading of media power is too limited. For instance, he ig-

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nores in his account the hugely influential cable and satellite distribution-platform operators which gate-keep residential television access in the vast majority of US homes. The leading cable operator, for example, is Comcast, which at mid-2007 had over 24 million customers. Ignoring such entities in any top-level analysis of the US domestic media sector seems, to me at least, misguided, and the Federal Communications Commission would appear to agree: concerned by the increasing power wielded specifically by the likes of Comcast, the commission voted in December 2007 to impose a 30% cap on the proportion of multichannel-television homes any one cable company could control (Comcast, at that point, was at 27%) (“FCC Passes 30% Cap on Cable Operators’ Subscriber Counts,” Broadcasting & Cable, December 18, 2007). The idea of a US “media monopoly” sans Comcast feels wrongheaded. Nevertheless, for the purposes of my own account, Comcast, the other leading cable platforms and the two satellite operators (EchoStar/DISH Network and DirecTV, the latter of which is owned by News Corp and Liberty Media) can be left aside since they have no presence in international distribution. 28. On the consolidation of the television and film businesses more specifically, see especially W. Kunz, Culture conglomerates: Consolidation in the motion picture and television industries, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2006. 29. They dominate this market, but it is important to recognize that they are not the only participants. Between them, they own all four of the major over-the-air broadcast networks—ABC (Disney), CBS (Viacom), NBC (NBC Universal) and Fox (News Corp)—and many of the largest multichannel-only (i.e. cable and satellite) networks—such as ESPN (Disney), MTV (Viacom), Bravo (NBC Universal) and Fox News (News Corp). There are three other substantive over-the-air networks—MyNetworkTV, The CW (created from the combination of WB and UPN in September 2006) and PBS (the country’s non-profit public broadcaster)—and one of these (The CW) in fact sits within the ranks of Bagdikian’s “Big Five” (being owned 50:50 by Time Warner and Viacom). And there are, of course, hundreds of other multichannel-only networks, some owned wholly or in part by the “Big Five,” but many not. 30. See M. Einstein, Media Diversity: Economics, Ownership, and the FCC, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, 2004. 31. The only material exception is Warner Bros., producer of programming including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Smallville and Dawson’s Creek, and owned by Time Warner—which, alone among the “Big Five,” does not control one of the four major over-the-air networks. 32. “Independent producers call for network, cable set-asides,” Broadcasting & Cable, 8 November 2007. 33. For a useful economic analysis of how copyright issues affect the strategic trade-off between the foreign direct investment and export alternatives, see P. McCalman, “Foreign Direct Investment and Intellectual property rights: Evidence from Hollywood’s global distribution of movies and videos,” Journal of International Economics, 62, 2004, 107–23. 34. See J. McMurria, “Global channels,” in J. Sinclair (ed.) Contemporary world television (BFI Publishing, London, 2004), for a useful introductory discussion. On MTV, see especially J. Banks, “MTV and the globalization of popular culture,” Gazette, 59, 1997, 43–60; on CNN, R. Ammon, Global television and the shaping of world

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politics: CNN, telediplomacy, and foreign policy, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 2001; and on Discovery, C. Forrester, “Discovery Communications: ‘Growing, growing, growing . . .,’” Transnational Broadcasting Studies, 11 (Fall–Winter), 2003, available at http://www. tbsjournal.com/Archives/Fall03/Forrester.html (retrieved October 2005). 35. J. Tunstall, The media were American: US mass media in decline, Oxford University Press, New York, 2007; and “International-regional-national.” The quotations are from the latter, pp. 321–22. 36. B. Miège, The capitalization of cultural production, International General, New York, pp. 26–27. 37. In the final chapter of the book (chapter 11), I argue that television programs are reproducible to subtly different degrees, and that this degree of reproducibility fundamentally impacts the economies that cohere around them. In particular, I distinguish between the economics of finished programs and of program formats. 38. See especially C. Hoskins, S. McFadyen and A. Finn, Media economics: Applying economics to new and traditional media, Sage, London, 2004, at pp. 295–99. Also D. Waterman, “Electronic Media and the Economics of the First Sale Doctrine,” in R. Thorne and J. Viera (eds.) Handbook of entertainment, publishing and arts (Clark Boardman & Co, New York, 1987, 3–13). 39. N. Garnham, “Concepts of culture: Public Policy and the Cultural Industries,” Cultural Studies, 1, 1987, 23–37, at p. 30. 40. On television specifically, see C. Hoskins, R. Mirus and W. Rozeboom, “US television programs in the international market: Unfair pricing?” Journal of Communication, 39, 1989, 55–75; C. Hoskins, S. McFadyen and A. Finn, Global Television and Film: An Introduction to the Economics of the Business, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, at pp. 77–79; Hoskins, McFadyen and Finn, Media economics, at pp. 222–23. 41. Hoskins, McFadyen and Finn, Media economics, at pp. 97–99. 42. Garnham, “Concepts of culture,” p. 30. 43. Ibid., p. 31. 44. Hoskins, McFadyen and Finn, Media economics, chapter 14. 45. See especially K. Segrave, American films abroad: Hollywood’s domination of the world’s movie screens from the 1890s to the present, McFarland & Company, Jefferson, NC, 1997. 46. Miller, Govil, McMurria, Maxwell and Wang, Global Hollywood 2, helpfully compare the situations in film and television in chapter 1. 47. Garnham, “Concepts of culture,” p. 30. 48. See especially R. Bettig, Copyrighting culture: The political economy of intellectual property, Westview, Boulder, CO, 1996; chapter 2 provides a history of copyright. On copyright economics, see R. Towse, Creativity, incentive, and reward: An economic analysis of copyright and culture in the information age, Edward Elgar, Northampton, MA, 2001. 49. L. Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, Penguin, New York, 2004. 50. K. Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 88. 51. See also Bettig, Copyrighting culture, pp. 79–115. 52. See especially D. Smythe, “On the audience commodity and its work,” in his Dependency road: Communications, capitalism, consciousness and Canada (Ablex,

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Norwood, NJ, 1981, 22–51); and P. Napoli, Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the Audience Marketplace, Columbia University Press, New York, 2003. 53. This strategy is now less common: many international broadcasters, mobile telephony operators and Internet service providers have adopted the obverse strategy in recent years, “giving away” hardware (set-top boxes, phones, modems, even laptop computers) specifically to encourage take-up of lucrative subscription services. 54. Garnham, “Concepts of culture,” p. 31. 55. Ibid. 56. C. Barnett, Culture and democracy: Media, space and representation, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2003, at p. 52. 57. “NZ to get tough on parallel video imports,” Screen Digest, January 2002, 5. 58. Ministry of Economic Development, “Parallel importing in New Zealand,” available at http://www.med.govt.nz/templates/Page____1230.aspx (retrieved June 2007). 59. For more detailed pictures, see Hoskins, McFadyen and Finn, Global Television and Film, p. 124, and H. Vogel, Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, p. 76. 60. M. Geist (writing for BBC News), “The fact and fiction of camcorder piracy,” February 2007, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6334913.stm (retrieved June 2007). 61. E.g. B. Owen and S. Wildman, Video economics, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992, p. 30. 62. See G. Doyle, Introduction to media economics, Sage, London, pp. 84–87. 63. “The giants awake,” The Guardian, June 30, 2008. 64. “Q&A With Jeffery Schlesinger, president, Warner Bros. International Television,” Multichannel News, December 20, 2007. 65. Bettig, Copyrighting culture, chapters 5 and 6. 66. Ibid., chapter 7; the quotation is from p. 189. 67. US corporate/government foreign-policy making in regard to international audio-visual product trade has, of course, ranged far more widely than simply the matter of recognition of intellectual property; and it has been triggered by all manner of different political and economic concerns, of which the implications of new technologies constitute but one set. In the last two decades, perhaps the most concerted support Washington has offered to Hollywood in respect of international trade has been its repeated attempts to include audio-visual products on the same terms as other products and services in international trade agreements—this desire for full liberalization running up against protracted resistance from Canada, France and a number of other European countries, in particular, to the inclusion of the “cultural industries” under free trade rules. On the history of this complex and highly emotive area of trade negotiations and the role of the Hollywood/Washington axis, see especially C. Pauwels and J. Loisen, “The WTO and the Audiovisual Sector: Economic Free Trade vs. Cultural Horse Trading?” European Journal of Communication, 18, 2003, 291–313; D. Freedman, “Cultural policy-making in the free trade era: An evaluation of the impact of current World Trade Organisation negotiations on audio-visual industries,” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 9, 2003, 305–18; D. Geradin and D. Luff (eds.), The WTO and Global Convergence in Telecommunications and Audio-Visual

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Services, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004; P. Guerrieri, P. Iapadre and G. Koopmann (eds.), Cultural Diversity and International Economic Integration: The Global Governance of the Audio-Visual Sector, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2005. 68. “What’s Driving the Box Office Batty,” Business Week, July 11, 2005. 69. “Studios Mull Changes to Movie ‘Windows,’” The Associated Press, August 28, 2005, available at http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2005-08-28-dvdwindows_x.htm (retrieved February 2005). 70. “Zucker offers insight to NBC’s future,” Variety, February 27, 2008. 71. “Soderbergh in digital movie deal,” BBC News, April 30, 2005. 2929 has holdings in film and television production (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room was one of its films), film distribution, theatrical exhibition (it owns the 59-strong US cinema chain Landmark Theatre Corporation) and television broadcasting. 72. “Distributors hold firm against day-and-date,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 17, 2006; CBC News, “U.S. cinemas back out of Soderbergh’s ‘Bubble,’” January 18, 2006, available at http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2006/01/18/bubble-soderbergh. html (retrieved September 2006). 73. “‘I am sure it’s a scary idea for the studios,’” The Guardian, January 27, 2006. Theater owners in major European markets have, if anything, been even more reactionary than their US counterparts. Leading UK and German chains pulled the Fox movie Night at the Museum in January 2007 after Fox announced that the DVD release date was set for April 2nd, just three months (97 days) after theatrical release (the accepted norm in those markets now being about four months). See “Windows spat inflames exhibitor passion,” Screen Digest, 425, February 2007, 55. 74. “BSkyB, Pathe agree ‘Cottage’ pact,” Variety, May 27, 2008. 75. “NBC, Netflix Strike Heroes Deal,” Broadcasting & Cable, November 29, 2007. 76. As Brian Larkin has argued, international networks and infrastructures of pirated media circulation probably do not lag far behind the official, legal circuits of global media distribution in terms of size, scope and speed of delivery, enabling a vast shadow economy in which consumers marginalized by copyrighted cultural economies are able to “participate in the immediacy of an international consumer culture.” See his “Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy,” Public Culture, 16, 2004, 289–314; the quotation is from p. 297. 77. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0360717/releaseinfo (retrieved April 2006). There is, it should be noted, a real cost to the studios in releasing films internationally at the same time as in the US, rather than months later. In particular, their upfront marketing costs escalate accordingly as release in those international markets does not derive the benefit of “buzz” from US exhibition. 78. Writing this chapter in the middle of 2007, however, with the US dollar trading at lows against the Euro, Sterling and other major international currencies, this historic price differential had been almost entirely wiped out. 79. “Warner tackles Chinese piracy with cut-price DVD,” Financial Times, April 21, 2006. 80. Region 1 covers the US, Canada, Bermuda, and US territories; Region 2 encompasses the Middle East, Europe, Egypt, Greenland, Japan, Lesotho, South Africa and Swaziland; and so on up to Region 6 (China). 81. This is an excellent example of the wider shift in the enforcement of copyright law in the digital age from regulating copying to regulating the design of tech-

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nology, a shift charted by Tarleton Gillespie in Wired shut: Copyright and the shape of digital culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007. 82. “Probes into regional DVD imperils studio strategy,” Variety, 383, June 4, 2001, 12; “EC investigates allegations of DVD price fixing by Hollywood studios,” June 12, 2001, available at http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Exclusive/0,,505690,00.html (retrieved January 2006). 83. For a useful discussion of these issues, and of judgements reached in different national courts, see I. Brown, “The evolution of anti-circumvention law,” International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, 20, 2006, 239–60. 84. B. Hu, “Closed Borders and Open Secrets: Regional Lockout, the Film Industry, and Code-Free DVD Players,” Mediascape: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 1, 2006, available at http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/archive/volume01/number02/reviews/hu.htm (retrieved June 2007). 85. “Will piracy sink the DVD?,” BBC News, March 15, 2004. 86. One example: in 2005 I bought a DVD player in New Zealand from a leading high-street retailer. The player, manufactured by a leading global brand, was a Region 4 machine, but the box in which the player was packaged contained a slip of paper with simple instructions (so-called “cheat codes”) on how to render the machine region free. 87. See, for example, details of the early and high-profile case against the UK’s Laser Enterprises in 1998: “US DVD importers ruled illegal,” available at http://news. zdnet.co.uk/emergingtech/0,1000000183,2076436,00.htm (retrieved January 2007). 88. “New twist in NZ row over DVD imports,” Screen Digest, October 2001, 293. 89. “NZ to get tough on parallel video imports.” 90. E.g. “Border controls crumble in DVD land,” BBC News, August 19, 2002. 91. Until early 2008 there were two competing high-definition DVD formats: Blu-Ray (developed by Sony, and supported by Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Panasonic) and HD DVD (Toshiba, supported by NEC, Microsoft and Intel), but the latter was abandoned in February of that year (“Sony’s Blu-Ray wins the HD DVD battle,” The Guardian, February 19, 2008). Interestingly, HD DVD players did not incorporate region coding, whereas Blu-Ray players and discs do (although, confusingly, the region codes are not the same as for traditional DVD). See “In this war, how to ally with both,” New York Times, January 31, 2008. 92. As discussed at length in chapter 1 of L. Parks, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2005. 93. E.g. A. Thomas, “Regulating Access to Transnational Satellite Television,” International Communication Gazette, 61, 1999, 243–54; M. Butcher, Transnational Television, Cultural Identity and Change: When STAR Came to India, Sage, London, 2003; J. Chalaby, “Deconstructing the transnational: A typology of cross-border television channels in Europe,” New Media & Society, 7, 2005, 155–75 (2005); J. Albizu, “Geolinguistic Regions and Diasporas in the Age of Satellite Television,” International Communication Gazette, 69, 2007, 239–61; M. Shuraydi, “Feeling at home away from home: The pioneering role of Al-Jazeera and other Arab transnational satellite channels in the maintenance and change of Arab diasporic enclaves,” Arab World Geographer, 9, 2006, 1–22. 94. N. Sakr, Satellite realms: Transnational television, globalization and the Middle East, I. B. Tauris, London, 2001, at pp. 1–26.

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95. See also N. Miladi, “Satellite TV news and the Arab diaspora in Britain: Comparing Al-Jazeera, the BBC and CNN,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 32, 2006, 947–60. 96. The two other main alternatives are television via telephone-based broadband networks, such as Tiscali TV (ex-HomeChoice) in the UK, or subscriptionbased digital terrestrial television, such as the now defunct ITV Digital (again, in the UK). But cable and satellite, around the world, are overwhelmingly dominant. 97. S. Handa and M. Amore, “Foreign Satellite Television Services in Canada,” Blakes Bulletin on Information Technology, July 2005, available at http://www.blakes. com/english/publications/it/ITJuly05/ForeignSatellite.asp (retrieved May 2007). 98. D. Flournoy, “Satellite signal security: Copyright Protection, Korean DBS Content and Transaction Security,” Online Journal of Space Communication, 6, 2004, available at http://satjournal.tcom.ohiou.edu/Issue6/overview3.html (retrieved March 2007). 99. E.g.: http://www.skysthelimit.tv/ (retrieved August 2006): “No UK address? No UK bank account? No Problem!” 100. See, for example, Hoskins, McFadyen and Finn, Global Television and Film, pp. 70–71. 101. “Pub football fight hots up,” BBC News, June 5, 2007. And BSkyB announced in July 2007 that the subscription price it charges pubs and clubs would be rising by an average of 11% from 1st September—further increasing the attractiveness of “competing” services from overseas broadcasters. “Sky hikes pub prices,” Broadcast, July 10, 2007. 102. “FA fights to protect broadcast revenues,” Broadcast, December 1, 2007; “Court rules against pub TV appeal,” BBC News, December 24, 2007. If the FAPL ultimately prevails, it is probable that many of the pubs and clubs prevented from taking overseas satellite services would decide not to take BSkyB’s service, given its high relative cost. However, the FAPL would probably argue that even if only one such pub does switch to Sky, it (the FAPL) will benefit financially because it can monetize that subscription (by charging BSkyB more) whereas it currently makes no money from that particular pub. 103. “BBC ditches Sky,” The Guardian, March 12, 2003. 104. “ITV and BBC to take on Murdoch,” The Guardian, September 8, 2005. 105. Hence the joint BBC/ITV launch of the free-to-air satellite service Freesat in May 2008. “BBC/ITV service goes live,” The Guardian, May 6, 2008. 106. Jonathan Thompson, Head of Strategy & Research at Channel 4, e-mail to author, June 12, 2007. 107. E.g. “Sky One grabs third series of 24,” The Guardian, December 17, 2003; see also, for background context, “Hollywood in screen battle with BBC,” The Guardian, August 7, 2003. 108. “RTE could join forces with BBC on imported shows,” Sunday Business Post, April 27, 2003. See also “Irish twist to BBC/Sky row,” The Guardian, March 17, 2003. 109. “RTE could join forces with BBC on imported shows.” 110. “Apple to sell new-release films on iTunes,” The Times, May 1, 2008. 111. A good place to start is J. Gantz and J. Rochester, Pirates of the digital millennium: How the war over intellectual property is destroying companies, economies, and personal freedoms, FT Prentice Hall, London, 2004.

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112. E.g. “Viacom sues YouTube for copyright abuse over television and film clips,” The Guardian, May 2, 2007; “Premier League sues YouTube,” The Guardian, May 8, 2007. 113. See D. Harvey, The condition of postmodernity, Blackwell, Oxford, 1989, especially pp. 240–42, 276–78. 114. D. Svantesson, “‘Imagine there’s no countries . . .’—Geo-identification, the law and the not so borderless Internet,” available at http://epublications.bond.edu. au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1131&context=law_pubs (retrieved July 2008). 115. For the IBM report, see IBM Business Consulting Services, “The end of television as we know it: A future industry perspective,” 2006, available at http:// www-935.ibm.com/services/us/imc/pdf/ge510-6248-end-of-tv-full.pdf (retrieved June 2007). See also a recent article in Info, the journal of “policy, regulation and strategy for telecommunications, information and media,” which argues that the “development of new business models for [audio-visual] content and distribution businesses must incorporate,” inter alia, the “irrelevance of geographic exclusivity” (J. Meisel, “The emergence of the internet to deliver video programming: Economic and regulatory issues,” Info, 9, 2007, 52–64). This is a bold claim—but very much unsubstantiated, in my view, by industry developments to date. 116. M. Curtin, “Murdoch’s dilemma, or ‘What’s the price of TV in China?’” Media, Culture & Society, 27, 2005, 155–75. See also, for a more generic argument, C. McPherson, “From Digital Hype to Islands of Isolation: European Union Policy and Transborder Communications at the Dawn of the Digital Era,” Television & New Media, 3, 2002, 75–94. 117. “iPlayer came, we watched, it conquered,” The Guardian, June 30, 2008. 118. M. Pesce, “Piracy is Good? How ‘Battlestar Galactica’ Killed Broadcast TV,” 2005, available at http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html (retrieved October 2005). 119. “The good, the bad and the ugly of TV piracy,” Video Age International, 26(3), 2006, 1–2. 120. “Sci Fi Creates ‘Webisodes’ to Lure Viewers to TV,” The New York Times, September 5, 2006. 121. “Showbiz’s site fright: Web seen as both a threat and a gold mine,” Variety, March 10, 2007.

5 Television’s Local Power Relations

If we are interested, as I am in this book, in how economic power relations are constituted and contested across international space—and in particular, the question of who successfully captures value, and where they do so—economic geographers would argue that we must not only attend to relations of space, but also to the specificities of place. That is, we cannot understand how places, or the corporations that inhabit them, are related to one another, unless we understand the “distinctive contextual circumstances” of those individual places themselves. This is not to champion an insular, old-fashioned “regional geography”; conversely, there needs to be explicit recognition that “places are as much created by their relationships with the ‘outside’ as they are by things that happen internally.”1 But it is to insist that, as a number of eminent geographers have long argued, and as I explore more fully in Part III of the book, place—and its irreducible uniqueness—matters.2 Thus, in examining relations of media power transnationally, we must root that broader analysis in an appreciation of power in local (here, UK and New Zealand television) worlds, and of how those situated power relations may or may not be changing. I broach this subject in the current chapter by following a stage further the arguments introduced in chapter 4 about the core economic characteristics of cultural commodities. As we saw, economists and political economists have written revealingly about the primary implications of these commodities’ public goods status. The specific extension I draw upon here is the claim that these characteristics tend to lead to a concentration of media industry power—in place—in the hands of distributors rather than producers. Those who control the local distribution of media content to consumers, and not the original production of that content, are said to be the industry’s essential 171

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power brokers.3 The question I ask in this chapter is therefore a simple one: in the UK and New Zealand television sectors, is this correct? My answer, in short, is yes; but the answer, unlike the question, is by no means a straightforward one, and understanding the local complexities behind this headline assessment is, I think, critical to understanding the wider, transnational constellations of media power explored in later chapters. The chapter has five sections. The first introduces the theoretical argument that media power resides in distribution. I suggest that it may not be incidental that this argument was posited most forcefully in the UK in the 1980s, for the contemporary UK media industry in general, and television industry in particular, was, for a number of reasons, overtly characterized by distributor dominance. So too, I show, was New Zealand’s 1980s television industry, and I highlight the main reasons. The second section focuses specifically on New Zealand and brings its story up to the present day. I show that there, distributor dominance remains thoroughly entrenched. The third and fourth sections deal with the UK, where the story is, I argue, considerably more complicated. In the first of these sections, I discuss a number of relatively recent developments that have clearly had a degree of positive influence on the power wielded by the production community, and I document “evidence” of this. In the fourth section of the chapter, however, I temper this argument by placing these developments in the context of strong countervailing forces that—in the final analysis—have served to largely maintain the dominance of UK distributors. There then follows a short concluding section in which I return to the economic attributes of cultural commodities that purportedly underpin distributor dominance, and ask whether we now need to refine our understanding of these attributes—long enshrined in economic theory—in the light of the latest developments in the media economy.

THE CIRCULATION OF POWER IN TELEVISION: FOUNDATIONAL PROPOSITIONS AND “EARLY” HISTORIES In chapter 4 I focused on the two economic attributes of cultural commodities that have, arguably, been most discussed by economists. One was the marginal costs of reproduction, generating strong economies of scale and an expansion imperative; the other was nonrivalry, and the resulting problematic of configuring economic scarcity. In Nicholas Garnham’s account, which I drew upon above, a third central attribute is added to the mix. Because demand for any individual cultural commodity is impossible to predict (it is more volatile and unpredictable, Garnham implies, than in perhaps any other industry), he observes that for businesses in this sector, there is a considerable premium attached to diversifying beyond a single

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product to be able to offer a portfolio of cultural goods across which risk can be spread.4 My specific interest in Garnham’s paper in this chapter is with where he goes next with these three underlying attributes. Together, he argues, “the drive to audience maximization,” “the need to create artificial scarcity by controlling access,” and the risk-related advantages of product bundling, serve to render “cultural distribution, not cultural production” the “key locus of power and profit.”5 This, then, is the self-professed “central point” of Garnham’s analysis. It means, he expands, that cultural economics is “as much, if not more” about “creating audiences or publics” as it is about “producing cultural artefacts,” and that it is therefore in distribution that “we typically find the highest levels of capital intensity, ownership concentration and multi-nationalization.”6 Part of the reason that this thesis is particularly interesting to consider here is that television, for Garnham, is the area of the media in which such tendencies are most pronounced. It is in television, he argues in a cowritten book on the economics specifically of the UK industry, that the concentration of power in distribution historically reached its apotheosis, “symbolized by and realized in control over access to the [analogue terrestrial] transmitter.”7 Television, in other words, historically epitomized a distribution economy—an economy in which ownership of or privileged access to the means of distribution (here, limited radio spectrum) provided the source of meaningful competitive advantage precisely because it was the means of distribution that was most scarce. The argument that media power resides primarily in distribution has, note, become a centerpiece of wider scholarship on the cultural industries.8 And it is important, also, to recognize that although the two works in which Garnham laid out this argument were written in the UK in the 1980s, one (the 1987 article) was written as a generalist thesis rather than a UK one, and Garnham, moreover, continues to argue that the thesis maintains a generic relevance; thus, in a 2005 paper, his claim that the bulk of cultural industry profits accrue to “controllers of technological distribution systems rather than to the original producers of the cultural products or services.”9 Yet it is nonetheless the case that the UK television industry in the early and mid-1980s constituted a particularly marked example of the structural relationships depicted by Garnham. It was, palpably, a distribution economy, in which (from 1982, and the launch of Channel 4) only three organizations—Channel 4, the BBC and ITV—had access to the single (analogue terrestrial) means of transmission. To register this is not to refute the possibility that the concept of distributor dominance has a wider historical-geographical purchase. But the recognition does beg a vital question: as the importance of “access to the transmitter” has been eroded, though not yet negated, through the development in the UK of multichannel television

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distribution of various stripes (subscription and free-to-air, cable, satellite and terrestrial), how, if at all, has the disposition of the UK’s television’s powers changed as a result? I try to answer this specific question in the third and fourth sections of this chapter, but first it is important to say a little more about why distributors did, indeed, dominate the television industry in the 1980s, in New Zealand as well as the UK. For it was not only a matter of severely limited access to the technology of distribution—a situation which was even more marked in New Zealand than in the UK, with just one broadcaster (the state-owned TVNZ) monopolizing the terrestrial radio spectrum until 1989. In the UK, the most significant other factor in ensuring distributor dominance in the early 1980s was the simple fact that there were not very many independent producers in the first place.10 The UK’s two main broadcasters, the BBC and ITV, sourced the vast majority of their programming from their own inhouse production arms. Only 268 hours of programming were produced in total by all the UK’s independents in 1983.11 To the extent that there were stand-alone producers, therefore, these had very little power because they were entirely dependent on the broadcasters, and because the BBC and ITV were able to function largely independently of them. To be sure, the launch in 1982 of Channel 4, a publisher-broadcaster with no production activities of its own, did much to grow the quantum of independent production hours, but for reasons I discuss in the third section of the chapter, it did not materially increase the power of independent producers. Much the same set of circumstances prevailed in 1980s New Zealand. The broadcast side of the television business was of course extremely concentrated—indeed, comprising only TVNZ, it could not have been any more concentrated. And the country’s solitary broadcaster, like the BBC and ITV in the UK, carried out the bulk of its own program production activities; it did not even appoint its first commissioning editor until 1986.12 The number of substantive independent production companies operating at that time could be counted on one hand; in fact, of today’s leading independent production houses, only one (the Gibson Group, which began producing television in 1978) predates the late 1980s.13 But in New Zealand, there was a further reason why power lay singularly in the hands of broadcasters rather than producers, one that did not apply to nearly the same extent in the UK. This was the market’s heavy reliance, as previously discussed, on imports. New Zealand, we saw in chapter 2, was importing in the early 1980s approximately 75% of its programming; the comparable figure for the UK’s BBC and ITV, in 1983, was just 14-15%.14 What this meant in New Zealand was that the marginal production community was deprived of what limited leverage it possessed by TVNZ’s ability—if the terms of trade offered by such producers were not wholly favorable to the monopoly broadcaster—not only to produce programming in-house, but

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also to source programming cheaply from overseas and then broadcast it to a nation thoroughly accustomed to international fare.

THE DISTRIBUTION OF POWER IN NEW ZEALAND TELEVISION TODAY Readers will recall that in chapter 3, as necessary context for the discussion there of governance-policy decisionmaking, I provided a very high-level sketch of contemporary power relations in New Zealand television, arguing that the two overwhelmingly powerful participants are TVNZ and Sky Network Television. In making that argument, I implied—but did not begin to demonstrate—that the country’s independent television production community remains relatively bereft of influence. In this brief section, my objective is to flesh out that premise, showing that it is indeed distributors (TVNZ and Sky both falling into this category) who maintain the upper hand. In surveying changes in the New Zealand television market since the 1980s, and the ways in which those changes have impacted (or otherwise affected) the balance of power between distributors and producers, two key sets of developments demand attention. The first is the dissolution, since 1989, of TVNZ’s monopoly on over-the-air broadcasting. TV3 began broadcasting in that year; C4 (under the same ownership as TV3, and originally called TV4 before its relaunch in 2003 as a music channel) dates to 1997; Prime (now owned by Sky) went on air a year later; and the most recently launched, sixth free-to-air channel is Mäori Television (2004). This opening up of the free-to-air spectrum to competition has certainly had consequences for the local production market, but I will argue that local producers remain a relatively weak constituency. Part of the reason for this is that the newer terrestrial broadcasters, Mäori Television excepted, are even more reliant on imports than TVNZ. The figures for 2006 are striking: just 22% of C4’s broadcast hours comprised local content, while the proportion was even lower for both TV3 (19%) and Prime (13%). (Prime had actually dipped below 10% in 2005.)15 What this has meant is that the considerable growth in overall free-to-air broadcast hours from the early 1990s has not been matched by commensurate growth in demand for locally produced content. Moreover, CanWest (owner, until very recently, of TV3 and C4) and Prime both developed their own in-house production operations, further limiting the growth upside for independent production. More growth in independent production hours has actually come, somewhat ironically, from TVNZ, even though it is not airing substantively more local content than it was in the 1980s. Rather, the growth has derived from the fact that the company began scaling down its in-house production

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divisions in the early 1990s as the emergence of broadcasting competition from TV3 prompted a strategic rethink—TVNZ gradually, over time, becoming “primarily a programmer rather than a producer.”16 This is not to say it abandoned in-house production entirely; it did not, and it still produces in-house more content, and receives from the government (through NZ On Air and Te Mängai Päho) more production funding, than almost any other local producer.17 But to the extent that the independent production sector did receive a fillip in the 1990s, it came mainly from TVNZ’s declining emphasis on producing programming in-house. However, despite the independent production sector having grown since the 1980s, it has not demonstrably increased its leverage vis-à-vis the broadcasters. For, while the free-to-air broadcasters continue to comprise a very small, concentrated, oligopolistic corporate cohort—two of whom, TVNZ (TV One and TV2) and MediaWorks (TV3 and C4), still account between them for nearly 80% of all television viewing—the independent production sector remains, by contrast, hugely fragmented, with very little consolidation having taken place, and hence no discernible pooling of producer power into substantive entities with the critical mass to shape the market.18 Four over-the-air broadcasters, more precisely, face off in the market for programming against a reported 1,065 independent production companies—the vast majority of which generate annual revenues of less than $1m.19 Data from NZ On Air, showing the various destinations for its contestable funds for local production, are also revealing. In the year to 30 June 2006, it granted a total of $73m,20 representing approximately 25% of the total investment in local program production.21 But this $73m was spread among 69 different recipients (including the production arms of TVNZ and CanWest), with only four independents receiving in excess of $4m.22 In short, the independent production sector remains extremely dispersed and fragmentary. Before turning to the second key set of developments since the 1980s— the birth of local multichannel television and the associated rise to prominence of the satellite broadcaster Sky—it is important to identify one other dimension to the ongoing weakness of local producers in their relations with terrestrial broadcasters. This dimension specifically concerns the one “local” producer that has been notably absent from the discussion so far: NHNZ (previously called Natural History New Zealand), which, as I note in my extended treatment of this entity in chapter 10, belongs alongside South Pacific Pictures as arguably New Zealand’s leading independent. Does not NHNZ, with productions valued at $40–50m flowing through the company each year, enjoy substantial leverage with the broadcasters? Ultimately, the answer is no, for NHNZ has, ironically (and hence the scare quotes around the word “local” above), now largely abandoned the domestic market. It appears to have done so, in part at least, precisely because it lacked such

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leverage, admitting to “having great difficulty in getting TVNZ to screen its documentaries.”23 In any case, whatever the reason, NHNZ is now oriented almost exclusively to international markets, exploiting connections opened up in this regard by its membership in the wider News Corp “family.” This mention of News Corp brings us neatly to multichannel television in New Zealand, for News Corp is the main shareholder in Sky Network Television (with a 44% holding as at mid-2007)—just as it is in the UK’s BSkyB. Sky, which began broadcasting in 1990, is the overwhelmingly dominant force in New Zealand multichannel television: until the recent (May 2007) launch of Freeview (chapter 3), there was no free-to-air multichannel television, and while there is a limited cable television proposition from TelstraClear (simply resale of Sky’s services), New Zealand pay-television is, essentially, Sky.24 Its service is now taken by approximately 43% of New Zealand’s 1.6m households.25 Sky has clearly had an enormous impact on the landscapes both of the national television industry and of national media consumption, but what effect has its growth had specifically on the balance of power between television distributors and producers? This is actually a relatively simple question to answer, because the various proprietary and third-party channels which broadcast solely on the Sky platform have not materially added to the weight of New Zealand local program production. Rather, almost all programming is imported, and as such the arrival and subsequent growth of pay television has not improved the position of New Zealand’s independent producers; if anything, it has served to reinforce distributor dominance. It is, however, important to point out at this juncture that the New Zealand Screen Council’s observation that Sky “does not fund the development of local productions” is not wholly accurate.26 Assuredly, the majority of the local content broadcast on New Zealand pay-television (approximately 90% of the 14,132 hours in 2006) consists either of sport or music videos, where almost all value not captured by the broadcaster accrues to rights holders—such as the New Zealand Rugby Football Union, in the case of the rugby coverage that does so much to drive subscriptions to Sky—rather than to producers (independent or otherwise).27 But the level of local content that is not sport or music is, slowly, increasing. The key issue in the present context is that this growth has so far been too slow, and too limited, to substantively affect local power relations between broadcasters and the production community. In concluding this section, one other relevant development merits recognition, in part because it concerns a set of issues that I take up much more centrally in the next section of the chapter on the UK market. This is the crucial question of how the various different rights associated with television programs are divvied up between broadcasters and producers. Such rights

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include not just domestic television transmission (free-to-air and pay) but also online distribution, packaged media (mainly DVD), merchandising, and any overseas program sales. In New Zealand, as we will see was also the case in the UK, the traditional model has been that the broadcaster takes all such rights, in addition to a majority share in the back end (75–80% of the back end in the case of TVNZ).28 But ongoing negotiations between relevant parties are likely to see some changes in this model in the relatively near future, with these negotiations triggered in particular by the growing awareness on both sides of the value of new media rights. While there are numerous different dimensions to these discussions, my interest is in what these discussions might tell us specifically about prevailing relations of power. One could argue that the very fact that the broadcasters are having to negotiate means they now have less power than they once did; certainly, the Screen Production and Development Association (SPADA), the producers’ trade body, appears increasingly to be a force to be reckoned with. And yet the devil will, without doubt, be in the details. The latest indications are that to secure the most valuable domestic rights (including new media rights), the broadcasters may be prepared to cede international sales rights to the production community. To my mind this in itself is instructive, for, as I discuss in the following chapter (chapter 6), the ultimate value of international sales rights on the vast majority of New Zealand–made programs is not just low but, more precisely, zero. In other words, while the broadcasters are having to relinquish some rights, the rights they seem most likely to relinquish are—based on historic experience—among the least valuable. This, it strikes me, is another reflection of the relative power that those broadcasters continue to enjoy.

TOWARDS PRODUCER POWER IN THE UK Production volumes and terms of trade Over the next few pages I argue that independent producers in the UK, unlike in New Zealand, are now beginning to realize a greater degree of power in the local television economy. One of the reasons for this, I suggest, is ongoing growth in the volume of programming being outsourced to the independent production community. Yet this observation itself raises an important question, for independently produced hours have been on the increase in the UK for some twenty years, without leading, until very recently, to greater producer leverage. Why, then, did previous rounds of growth leave the production community still relatively disempowered? I start this section of the chapter with this specific question, before moving on to assess what is qualitatively different about contemporary industry developments.

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As indicated earlier, the launch of the publisher-broadcaster Channel 4 in 1982 provided the first major stimulus to the UK’s independent production sector. The sector was then boosted further, a decade later, by the introduction of an independent production quota under the terms of the 1990 Broadcasting Act. This quota required all the terrestrial broadcasters to source at least 25% of production hours from independent producers. The effects of these two major developments on UK independent television production are readily apparent in the data, with the 268 independently produced hours in 1983 growing to over 2,000 hours by 1989, and over 4,500 hours by 1995.29 However, despite this growth in production volumes, the UK independent production sector remained, throughout the 1990s and by the government’s own admission, “characterised by hundreds of very small companies with minimal resources and investment capability.”30 (It was, in this respect, very similar to the New Zealand independent production sector, both then and today.) What concerns me here is precisely why this was so. Undoubtedly, the relative youth of the sector played its part, as did its heavy reliance on Channel 4, both in the 1980s and for much of the 1990s. Yet there was more to it than that. As a later report into the UK program supply market stressed, the practice of broadcasters “fully funding” productions was, in this respect, critical.31 Full funding was and remains essentially a low-risk option for the independent producer, whereby the broadcaster agrees upfront to meet the full costs of production and pays the producer a fixed production fee, sometimes supplemented by a minority share in the back end.32 This model traditionally gave the commissioning broadcaster all rights to exploit the resulting programs, not just in primary (free-to-air terrestrial) domestic markets but in secondary markets (such as pay television, packaged media and new media) and overseas. For the producer, it meant a low-risk, guaranteed income—but also, more negatively, a very limited ability to accumulate and exploit capital assets. Even as late as 1999, over 70% of UK independent productions were still fully funded; in the 1980s, it had been closer to 100%.33 In practice, then, producers in full funding relationships were independent only in name, and relations of power were skewed massively towards the leading broadcasters. “In fact,” as Garnham and co-authors put it during the heyday of full funding, UK independents “are producing “to order” and their “independence” refers to their ownership status rather than their product.”34 Even as recently as 2002, the BBC Director-General Greg Dyke was comfortably able to bask in the dominance of distributors, observing imperiously that the BBC was “not in the business of making independent producers rich.”35 One of the key differences today, I argue below, is that not only is full funding less dominant, but even where productions are fully funded, we are seeing

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potentially significant changes in the implications of this funding structure for the ownership and exploitation of program assets. First, however, we do need to consider the quantum of production hours being outsourced by broadcasters—and especially by the terrestrial broadcasters—to independent producers. For, while growth was relatively modest during the first half of this decade, there is good reason to believe that it will ramp up in the years ahead as a result of pressure on broadcasters from both the UK government and the UK communications regulator, Ofcom, each of which is expressly committed to a thriving and growing UK independent production sector. This pressure has been perhaps most noticeable in regard to the BBC, which, historically, has often struggled to meet its 25% independent quota (to repeated howls of protest from the independents themselves). Pressure from the government and Ofcom ultimately saw the BBC make commitments, during the recent review of its charter and its licence fee renewal application, that it would never fail to meet the quota in future. More specifically, it vowed to treat 25% as a floor, opening up a further 25% of its programming hours as a “Window of Creative Competition” (WoCC) for which, it says, there will be genuine, open competition between independent and BBC in-house producers.36 Should the BBC go even some way to seeing good on this commitment, the impact on independent production could be pronounced; and provisional data for the first WoCC year (April 2007–April 2008) indicates that the BBC is indeed fulfilling this mandate, with independents taking some two-thirds of the 25% of BBC commissions that constitute the WoCC, meaning that the independent sector is effectively now producing in the region of 40% of BBC network television output (excluding news, where the WoCC does not apply).37 Thus, in the view of most commentators, the prognosis for growth in the independent production sector is currently very healthy. A 2006 report commissioned by Pact, the UK trade association for independent television, film, animation and interactive media companies, forecast such growth at just under 7% per annum to 2010.38 And this projection was in fact exceeded in the first year of the forecast period (2007), when a revenue increase of 9.4% took total turnover for the sector to £2.14bn (with the BBC’s WoCC clearly contributing significantly to this uplift).39 Of course, as we have seen from relatively recent historical experience in the UK itself, a larger independent production community producing more hours would not necessarily be a stronger production community. However, it seems likely that ongoing growth in independent production hours will increasingly be allied with improved terms of trade for independent producers. To understand these latter developments, we need to go back to 2002, when Ofcom’s predecessor, the Independent Television Commission (ITC), published a review of the UK television production sector, recommending that new codes of practice be put in place between independent producers

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and the public-service terrestrial broadcasters (the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel Five and S4C). These codes have since been implemented by the broadcasters, based on guidance issued by Ofcom in 2003. Fundamental to this guidance, and hence to the new codes, is that “producers should retain rights in their programs unless these are explicitly sold to broadcasters and other parties” and that the “primary rights” that public-service broadcasters do routinely acquire when commissioning and funding programming from independents consist only of “transmission on wholly-owned public service channels”—not transmission on commercial digital channels (for example, ITV’s ITV2 or Channel 4 Corporation’s E4), not overseas program sales, and not packaged media, new media or merchandising.40 These regulations mark a decisive break from the past, where, as I discussed earlier, broadcasters typically picked up all rights, a convention which long facilitated an extremely lucrative ancillary revenue stream for the public-service terrestrials in particular.41 Around the time of the implementation of these codes, Ofcom embarked on its own full-scale review of the production sector in a follow-up to the 2002 ITC report, publishing its conclusions in early 2006.42 Despite evidence of broadcaster-distributor resistance to the new codes, and the inevitable lobbying, Ofcom reiterated its predecessor regulator’s tough stance, emphasizing that the producers’ gains on terms of trade should stand, and that “the conditions for a withdrawal of regulation from the television production sector will not be met in the medium-term.” Moreover, on the specific matter of BBC commissioning, while applauding the BBC’s commitment to treat the 25% quota as a “floor,” Ofcom clearly remained concerned that independents would continue to be disadvantaged vis-à-vis BBC in-house producers, and insisted “there should be more clarity on how the BBC’s commissioning structure will work to ensure in-house and external producers can compete on equal terms.” Another key facet of the 2006 review concerned the status of new media rights under the new codes of practice, which, as Ofcom noted, was proving an area of considerable industry confusion and conflict. Ofcom failed to reach a final decision on this issue, and chose to initiate further consultation.43 Nonetheless, the review, in sum, showed Ofcom standing its ground in support of independent producers. We can therefore expect in future to see a larger independent production sector enjoying improved terms of trade. Value chain maneuvrings But the sources of an incipient expansion of independent producer power do not relate solely, I want to emphasize, to numbers of production hours and to the allocation of rights between broadcaster and producer. We also need to consider significant developments in the advertising industry. In

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recent years, there has been growing interest in and use internationally of alternatives to the traditional spot commercial, such as advertiser-funded programming or simple product placement. Such developments have been hastened by the growing penetration of devices—especially so-called digital or personal video recorders (DVRs or PVRs)—giving consumers greater control over their television viewing experience, including, critically, the ability to skip commercials.44 Although assuming many different forms, the common objective of these new advertising industry developments has been to try to embed marketing messages within program content itself, and hence to make it harder to escape those messages. Historically, the US has been much more fertile territory for such innovation than Europe and the UK, with a longer history of product placement in general, and more liberal policing of the boundary between sponsored and non-sponsored content.45 In the first three months of 2008, for example, there were a total of more than 115,000 individual product placements across America’s leading 11 television channels—with almost 4,000 on The Biggest Loser alone, and more than 3,000 on American Idol.46 But in recent years, the UK, too, has begun to witness increasing advertiser investment in these alternative strategies, starting in the early 2000s, and initially very warily, with advertiser-funded programming. Thus, in just one example from 2003, Heinz funded a 10-part cooking series on Channel Five called Dinner Doctors. UK investment in such alternatives to the spot commercial is expected to increase further in the years ahead, with product placement seen as the main opportunity. A key stimulus to such a development was the European Commission’s (EC) announcement in 2005 that it planned to relax its Europe-wide restrictions on product placement, this proposal finally being rubberstamped by the European Parliament towards the end of 2007. The EC now allows product placement—national legislation permitting—in fictional programming, but not in children’s programs, the news or factual material.47 How product placement might develop specifically in the UK market, however, remains uncertain. Ofcom has taken its first tentative steps towards loosening the UK’s regulations.48 But it has not yet reached a final decision. And the UK’s Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, made it clear in mid-2008 that he and the government still had considerable reservations about allowing such a loosening to take place.49 Notwithstanding these uncertainties, we need to consider such developments here because they clearly have important implications for the positioning of producers in the television value chain. Advertiser-funded programming is already a market reality, and on an ever-increasing scale. Instead of working solely with broadcasters, who in turn have traditionally managed advertiser relationships, we are increasingly seeing UK producers working directly with the advertising community in generating content

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funded directly by the latter.50 Product placement would merely reinforce this existing trend. In such instances, the key point is that producers are integrally involved—and are potentially able to extract profit along—the full chain of value creation. The Netherlands-based (but internationally successful) production company Endemol, of Big Brother fame, was arguably the first production company to recognize and begin to aggressively exploit such possibilities, and it has long since established a leading reputation for creating innovative, advertiser-backed programming. Its 2003 acquisition of the UK interactive agency Victoria Real, which had a history of strong relationships with leading consumer brands such as Tesco, was a clear, early statement of its intent. Endemol’s strategy increasingly appears to be to deliver audiences directly to advertisers across a full range of media. Indeed, in May 2008 it created a new “brand partnerships” division, New State, as part of its plans to extend its successful existing advertiser-funded programming business into new areas.51 This division almost immediately announced one of the UK’s highest profile advertiser-backed programming deals: Apple’s iTunes fully funding an Endemol-produced series of summer music festivals, to be broadcast on ITV2.52 The successful strategies in this area of Endemol and other production companies are important for many reasons, but mostly, in the present context, in view of their implications for producer-distributor power relations. UK producers, as we have seen, have traditionally seen their market influence constrained by various different structural circumstances, most notably the practice of full funding and the associated rights apportionment arrangements. But another critical factor has always been producers’ exclusion from the single transactional relationship that has for so long dominated UK commercial television—that of advertisers buying airtime, and broadcasters selling it. The emerging role of the producer as direct partner to the advertiser, television’s traditional paymaster, would seem to me to be another reason to anticipate an ongoing tilting of the balance of power between producers and broadcaster-distributors in the direction of the former. Investment trends Given these observations on growing independent production volumes, on improved terms of trade, and on the development of advertiser-funded programming, one might reasonably expect to see some evidence of the UK independent production community beginning to accumulate increased leverage. And we can arguably locate such evidence in two interconnected industry trends. The first of these concerns “external” investment in the UK independent production business. Financial investors had historically been entirely disinterested in a sector that lacked a track record of building and

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exploiting capital assets, but in recent years they have become much more actively engaged. Two high-profile examples will suffice, involving private and public equity respectively. First, in 2003, Bridgepoint Capital backed a £50m management buy-in of the UK production company Chrysalis TV (makers of Midsomer Murders), leading to the formation of All3Media.53 Second, in 2005, Shed Productions (of Footballers’ Wives fame) was floated on the stock market.54 The importance of these transactions lies specifically in their substantiation of investor belief that such producers are beginning to accrue more power, and will therefore be able, through translating power into profit, to deliver a positive return on investment.55 Running in parallel to this increase in “external” investment has been growing “internal” investment, by which I mean merger and acquisition activity leading to sharp industry consolidation. For much of the history of the UK independent production business there was very little consolidation activity because, asset-wise, there was little to actually consolidate: the business, as we have seen, comprised merely a string of fully funded productions, each effectively “owned” by the commissioning broadcaster in question; combining two producers with no leverage would simply have produced a larger producer with precisely the same degree of impotence. But with the various developments discussed above now seen to be relatively empowering the independent, there appears to be, suddenly, good reason to consolidate—two producers with a modicum of power combining, according to the industry logic, to produce a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Hence, among numerous examples, and subsequent to the investment events just noted, we have seen All3Media acquire Lion Television (Castaway) and Mersey TV (Hollyoaks), and Shed acquire Ricochet (Supernanny) and Wall to Wall (Who Do You Think You Are?).56 The upshot of the sector’s wider consolidation trend has been rationalization from around 1,000 companies in total in 2001 to about 700 in 2005.57 More tellingly, while the top five UK independents accounted for just 19% of industry turnover in 1993, their share had increased to 40% by 2004, and is predicted to reach 70% by 2014.58 These, then, for obvious reasons, are dubbed the “super-indies.”

VIEWING, ADVERTISING AND THE MASS-MARKET PREMIUM In this section, I place the above UK developments in context. My argument, in brief, is that while the UK’s independent production community is beginning to accrue more leverage, as evidenced in the significant recent inflow into the sector of private and public equity finance, we need to be cautious about overstating the extent of any rebalancing of power relations. For, while some developments are clearly aiding independent producers,

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there remain in place various other sets of forces that continue to buttress, in the final analysis, a manifest distributor dominance. It is these forces, involving the UK television sector’s fundamental behavioral (viewing) and economic (advertising) dynamics, which concern me here. To understand these dynamics, however, we need first to précis the recent history of UK television platform and channel proliferation. Platform and channel proliferation Prior to the launch in the late 1980s of analogue cable and satellite pay-television services, all UK television viewers were restricted, as we have seen, to just four terrestrial channels: BBC1, BBC2, ITV, and Channel 4. Upon the launch of these analogue multichannel platforms, the number of channels available to subscribers immediately increased—to 19, in the case of the satellite service Sky Television—but the number of homes subscribing to these services grew only slowly. It took until late 1992 for the number of cumulative subscribers (cable and satellite) to exceed two million (out of a total television household universe at that time of approximately 24 million), and until late 1995 for the total to double again to four million. Throughout this period—and indeed up to the present day—satellite boasted the lion’s share of subscribing pay-television homes, its dominance vis-à-vis cable peaking in 1993 (when it had four out of five pay households). The gradual growth in the number of subscribing homes, meanwhile, was outstripped by rapid growth in the number of available channels, which had increased to around 60 on analogue satellite and slightly fewer on cable by 1998, when BSkyB—the product of Sky Television’s merger with British Satellite Broadcasting—launched the UK’s first digital television platform (Sky Digital). The arrival of digital broadcast services—a subscription-based digital terrestrial service, ONdigital (later ITV Digital), was launched the same year as Sky Digital, and digital cable services were available from 1999 (Telewest) and 2000 (ntl)—marked a decisive turning point in the evolution of the UK’s multichannel television landscape. Not only did the number of channels witness another step change (to over 200 on Sky Digital), but, fuelled in particular by BSkyB’s decision to give away digital set-top boxes to steal a march on its competitors, the universe of multichannel households entered a period of strong growth that it continues to enjoy. Prior to the launch of digital services in 1998, the total number of UK multichannel homes stood at approximately six million—or just under a quarter of all television households, after a full decade of multichannel service availability. The next six million multichannel homes would be added in half the time: 50% UK multichannel penetration was achieved by September 2003.59 If BSkyB’s subsidization of set-top boxes was the primary stimulus of multichannel growth in the early part of this digital period—the number

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of total BSkyB subscribers, having stagnated at between three and four million from 1995 to 1998, subsequently increased to nearly six million by the end of 2001—the collapse of subscription-based digital terrestrial television (ITV Digital) in 2002, and its replacement the same year by a freeto-air digital terrestrial service (Freeview) requiring the purchase only of a cheap set-top box, and offering from 30–40 channels, underpinned multichannel growth from 2002 onwards. Thus, 1.8 million Freeview homes by the middle of 2003 had mushroomed to an estimated 6.5 million by the end of 2005 and nearly eight million a year later.60 These respective growth dynamics have, then, combined to generate a contemporary UK television platform landscape that can best be summarized as comprising three main cohorts: first, approximately 11 million (primarily satellite and cable) homes with pay-multichannel services to their primary set; second, approximately nine million homes with free multichannel primary-set services (mainly on Freeview, but also including in the region of one million free-to-air satellite viewers, most of whom have churned out of BSkyB’s subscription service); and third, a rump of approximately five million analogue terrestrial homes.61 Some very simple data can help to explain why this platform history matters so much, and hence why I have singled it out for attention. In 2004, ITV1 (the flagship, free-to-air channel of the newly merged ITV plc, called simply ITV before the launch of digital channels ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4) secured viewing shares among all adults that varied widely by platform: 29.2% in analogue terrestrial homes, 23.4% in Freeview homes, 19.1% in digital cable homes and 17.8% in Sky Digital homes.62 What this means is that as the makeup of the platform environment changes, so inevitably does the audience (ratings) performance of the channels that populate this environment, and thus also, in turn, the economics of the distributors of those channels. Put crudely, and all other things being equal, more multichannel homes (and hence fewer analogue terrestrial homes) means lower cumulative viewing shares for the five channels carried on analogue terrestrial, including ITV1. The question I ask now is whether, and to what extent, changes in power relations between content producers and channel distributors (especially the terrestrial distributors) have accompanied changes in the latter’s ratings performance. The mass-market premium The starting-point for this analysis is in the effects of multichannel rollout on the composition and internal dynamics of the channel distributor base. As I showed just now, there has been an explosion in the universe of channels, which now number well in excess of 300. Many of these are owned by niche, single-channel operators; others belong to consolidated groups

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of channels, comprising either a mix of analogue terrestrial and multichannel-only channels (as with ITV and Channel 4’s respective portfolios) or, more commonly, just multichannel-only channels (as with, for example, the Flextech, BSkyB, or Viacom channel bouquets). Inevitably, given the difference in viewing performance on different platforms for individual channels that I identified earlier for ITV1, the growth in multichannel availability has seen the analogue terrestrial channels lose share over time to multichannel-only channels.63 From an all-home cumulative viewing share well in excess of 95% at the beginning of the 1990s, the analogue terrestrials—five in number since the launch of Channel Five in 1997—had slipped to a cumulative share of adult viewing of 69.2% in 2006: in many respects a remarkably small loss, given the fact that more than three-quarters of UK homes now have multichannel television of some variety, and that of these multichannel homes, well over half have access to (literally) hundreds of channels. This impressive resistance to the wholesale loss of viewing is of course a reflection of several factors, most importantly the vastly superior programming and marketing budgets with which the license fee (in the cases of BBC1 and BBC2) and a legacy of oligopolistic access to advertising revenues (in the cases of ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel Five) endow the terrestrial operators, combined with a pronounced inertia in consumer viewing patterns. Of more interest here, however, is the fact that the terrestrial operators’ loss of advertising revenues has been even smaller than their loss of viewing. To establish a direct comparison between the two we need to shift our attention from viewing share (a metric that includes the non-advertisingcarrying BBC channels) to share of “commercial impacts,” which excludes the BBC channels and thus essentially equates to the share of all non-BBC viewing (one commercial impact is defined as one person seeing a 30-second commercial once).64 By 2006, the share of all-home adult commercial impacts accounted for by the three commercial analogue terrestrial channels—ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel Five—had declined to 58.1% from (as per viewing share) in excess of 95% delivered by ITV and Channel 4 at the beginning of the 1990s. The three channels’ collective share of advertising revenue, meanwhile, had suffered significantly less erosion: declining from close to 100% in the early 1990s to 72.0% in 2006 (see Figure 5.1 for the 2001–2006 period).65 Identifying the reasons for the fact that the analogue terrestrial channels have resisted loss of advertising revenues more successfully than loss of viewing is critical to understanding the persistence of distributor (namely, terrestrial broadcaster) dominance in the UK television market. A key concept in this regard is what is commonly referred to as the mass-market premium. In conceptual terms, the mass-market premium is the extra value accorded by advertisers to analogue terrestrial inventory; in mathematical

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terms, it is the ratio of share of advertising revenue to share of commercial impacts, which, for ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel Five collectively in 2006, equated to an index of 124 (72.0% divided by 58.1%). (In advertising sales terms, this approximates to the average annual price, or cost per thousand, when indexed against the market as a whole.) Essentially, this means that in 2006, inventory on the analogue terrestrial channels was 24% more valuable to advertisers than the “average” market inventory. The mass-market premium derives from a number of linked sources, of which four are critical.66 First, there is an issue of regional availability: national advertisers who want national coverage place a premium on channels that are available to all television households, which in practice means only ITV1 and Channel 4. (The alternative—painstaking and expensive—is to piece together national coverage through an assemblage of regionally limited channels.) Second, the analogue terrestrial channels are less afflicted by repeat viewing: if an advertiser wants to buy one thousand impacts, for example, it might be able to secure two spots on a multichannel-only channel, as opposed to just one on, say, ITV1, but the impacts delivered by ITV1 will all constitute unique viewers, whereas a degree of duplication is likely on the competitor channel. This directly enhances the value of ITV1 inventory, since advertisers will pay more to reach a new audience than to reach the same audience a second time. Third, and related to this, the simple difference in average audience size means advertisers can saturate the market more quickly by using analogue terrestrial channels, which is key for those advertisers (for example, movie studios) who need to build momentum over a limited period in advance of time-specific events (the movie release). And lastly, the terrestrials’ viewing strength is concentrated in peak (prime) time, which of course is the most highly valued advertiser inventory. This pivotal market characteristic—the enduring power to secure a disproportionate share of advertising revenue, conferred on the terrestrial broadcasters by the mass-market premium—could of course be read simply as evidence of a skewed field of power relations within the channel distributor base: as evidence of newer, multichannel-only players being economically disadvantaged in relation to their analogue terrestrial competitors. And it would be right to read it partly in this manner. However, it is clearly about more than this. The mass-market premium has also served to sustain the dominance of the leading channel distributors vis-à-vis independent producers. Why should this be the case? In short, because the ability of the free-toair broadcasters to resist erosion of advertising revenues continues to limit the range of viable outlets for independent productions. More precisely, the inability of multichannel-only channel operators to achieve advertising revenues commensurate with the audiences they attract (which are themselves relatively limited, of course) precludes them from competing financially for

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the strongest original commissions. It is, at heart, a vicious circle: unable to successfully monetize their viewing, these smaller channels cannot spend money to grow their viewing and are unable to attract capital to do so. This, in turn, leaves independent producers hamstrung, still tied to the analogue terrestrials in general and Channel 4 (still the largest commissioner) in particular. We can select from a whole raft of statistics to drive home this point: for example, as recently as 1999, the five analogue terrestrial channels accounted for 94% of independent productions (excluding sports) by value; and in the same year, fully 79% of independent producers produced material for only one channel.67 The prognosis for the future might be more positive for multichannel-only channels and independent producers alike were it not for two important trends in the area of viewing, advertising revenue and the mass-market premium. First, the mass-market premium has been inexorably increasing during the transition from an analogue terrestrial television world to an increasingly digital one.68 In 2006, as shown earlier, the cumulative index of this premium for the three UK commercial analogue terrestrials was 124; in 2001, it was 108, based on a cumulative share of advertising revenues of 82.5% compared with a cumulative adult impact share of 76.7% (Figure 5.1). Explaining this inflation of the mass-market premium is important in itself. It certainly relates in part to the ongoing flood onto the market of an increasing mass of low-value multichannel inventory, in the process inflating the relative price of terrestrial inventory. More fundamentally, however, as the value of analogue spectrum is gradually whittled away by multichannel growth, it can be argued that television is shifting from a distribution

Figure 5.1: Cumulative commercial impact and advertising revenue shares for the UK terrestrial broadcasters69, 2001–2006 (Showing corresponding inflation in the terrestrial broadcasters’ collective mass-market premium70). Source: Author, based on BARB and Channel 4 Television data

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economy to an attention economy, where the primary locus of economic scarcity inheres now less in distribution (Garnham et al’s paradigmatic “access to the transmitter”) than in consumer or viewer attention.71 Under these conditions, the few remaining mass-market windows that can successfully and rapidly aggregate consumer attention assume an even greater economic value precisely by virtue of their own increasing scarcity. By this argument, the power of the analogue terrestrial channels is now located less in their ability to reach an audience (power based on distribution scarcity) than in their ability to originate and maintain an audience (power driven by attention scarcity). As Michael Curtin has remarked on the mechanics of this specific shift, “branding of products” and “marketing, promotion and the control of intellectual property” have effectively superseded “futile attempts to control the mode of distribution.”72 The key point here is that the durability and hardening of the mass-market premium have served to prevent an unsettling of terrestrial broadcaster dominance that one might have expected to derive from the audience fragmentation associated with increased multichannel (and especially digital multichannel) penetration. The second important trend concerns the increasing number of digital (multichannel-only) channels being launched by the owners of the analogue terrestrial channels—for this only serves to compound their dominance both within the distributor base and in relations with producers. It is a striking statistic that in 2006, seven of the 10 largest multichannel-only channels (ranked by viewing share) were owned wholly or in part by terrestrial broadcasters: two wholly owned channels for each of the BBC (CBeebies and BBC3), ITV (ITV2 and ITV3) and Channel 4 (E4 and More4), and one 50%-owned BBC channel (UKTV Gold). (Of the other three, notably, two were BSkyB channels: and I turn to BSkyB shortly.) The success of these terrestrial spin-offs is explained by several factors, of which the most important have been extensive cross-promotion from the analogue terrestrial channels, sharing and clever cross-scheduling of tent-pole programming, and (perhaps most critically of all) privileged access to increasingly valuable Freeview real estate—as of Spring 2007, fully two-thirds (23 of 35) of the channels available on Freeview were wholly or partly owned by terrestrial broadcasters.73 The upshot of this success, meanwhile, is that channels not aligned with terrestrial broadcasters are denied the audiences and revenues that might otherwise have become available to them, and the dominance of the terrestrial broadcasters—again, in relation both to other distributors and to producers—is reinforced. Producer power? I would argue, then, that notwithstanding the gains that independent producers have clearly made in recent years, the distributor dominance

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described by Garnham in the UK television industry of the 1980s is, now, perhaps only slightly less pronounced than it was then. In positing this argument, it is important to note that, just as in New Zealand, the growth of multichannel television in itself, by greatly increasing the overall demand for broadcast content, has not had a significant effect on the local independent production sector, and nor therefore on the relations between that sector and local broadcasters. This is mainly because, as in New Zealand, the incremental demand for content generated by the many new channels has been met in large part by import rather than local production: by the late 1990s, BSkyB was reported to be importing more than 100,000 hours of US programming per annum.74 There is, assuredly, more of a market for local commissioning by multichannel broadcasters in the UK than in New Zealand, but the value of such commissions is typically low—relative both to local terrestrial broadcaster commissions, and, increasingly, to the major overseas acquisitions made by channels such as Sky One (24, Lost) and Living TV (Grey’s Anatomy, Boston Legal). Thus, the explosion in the number of UK television channels has not, in my view, materially affected distributor-producer power relations. The dominance of the terrestrial broadcasters remains. Indeed, it would be fanciful to suppose that these broadcasters will allow their historic grip on power to simply slip away in the face of developments such as an increase in advertiser-funded programming and new terms of trade for independent producers. The City, for instance, appears to have cooled somewhat on such producers, with one broker (Numis Securities) suggesting in 2006 that the benefits of the new terms of trade had been exaggerated and that prevailing valuations were therefore unrealistic.75 And many independents, in private at least, would doubtless concur: more than two-thirds claim to have experienced “netting off” (broadcasters paying less for programs now that producers have additional rights), although Ofcom says it can find no prima facie evidence of this.76 The point, nonetheless, is well taken: any shift in power towards the UK’s independent producers is preliminary, and will inevitably be strongly resisted. Such resistance can and does take many different forms, but towards the end of 2007, ITV signalled a particular form of resistance which may well become more common in the years ahead: acquiring, and integrating into ITV Productions, the independent producer 12 Yard Productions.77 To paraphrase a well-worn saying, if you cannot (always) beat them, buy them.

SHIFTING SCARCITY I have argued in the latter two sections of the chapter that several different sets of forces—some strongly favoring the continued dominance of

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distributors and others tentatively encouraging a shift in the locus of power towards producers—have combined to begin to unsettle the overwhelming distributor dominance that obtained in the UK analogue terrestrial world of the 1980s, but not (yet) to substantively corrode it. Having arrived at that conclusion, we can fruitfully end the chapter by backing up several steps to briefly revisit the arguments with which we began it. The “theory” of distributor dominance, we saw at the beginning of the chapter, is based on a set of underlying observations concerning the basic economic attributes of cultural commodities such as television programs. I first introduced two of the pivotal such attributes—nonrivalry and marginal costs of reproduction—in Chapter 4, before adding, in this chapter, a third: the strong preference among media businesses to build diversified product portfolios in order to mitigate the risk attached to reliance on single cultural products and their highly unpredictable demand profiles. But if, as I have suggested here, the dominance of the UK’s leading television channel distributors is no longer—or, not for much longer—quite as marked as was once the case, it surely behooves us to ask whether anything material has changed in respect to the cultural commodity’s three core attributes that, for economists, are seen intrinsically to foster such dominance. In the first place, it is clear that the costs of reproduction of such commodities remain marginal in relation to production costs, and that the primary manifestations of this fact (consolidation and internationalization) still fully hold; one need only reflect on the acquisitive and international-oriented strategies of all of the large US-based media corporations to be convinced of this. Equally, businesses in the cultural products sector self-evidently remain as concerned as ever to ensure that they are not overly exposed to a single product or product category, and to the risk that such exposure inevitably entails. Indeed, this is as true for producers as it is for distributors. But what of the third characteristic? Do the cultural industries still strive to create scarcity (of goods that, technology permitting, can be reconsumed ad infinitum) by “artificially” regulating access? Again, in general, yes; and the evidence is there in, most transparently, the desperate ongoing political and legal battles with digital piracy in general and Internet-based file-sharing functionalities in particular.78 But the caveat to this final point is not incidental. While the desirability of strategies to limit access remains undiminshed, there must be a question mark, raised as much in the previous chapter as in this one, as to the enduring practicability of such strategies. One certainly gets the sense that many in the industry see they are fighting a losing battle; that ultimately it may be impossible to circumscribe and police access, and hence “create” scarcity where none “naturally” exists, to the degree that was once possible. Neither of two of the principal sources of scarcity that once obtained—scarcity imposed by limited spectrum (the great control mechanism of analogue

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terrestrial television) and scarcity enforced by technological and legal constraints on illegal reproduction—remains particularly viable. Perhaps, then, we can read initiatives such as the BBC’s Creative Archive project—whereby clips of BBC factual programs are being made available online for free download for non-commercial use—and its interactive iPlayer (offering “catch-up television” online) if not as an admission of defeat in the struggle to gatekeep access, then certainly as an acceptance that conventional methods for arbitrating access are approaching their sell-by date. Unable to reliably and consistently manufacture meaningful and defensible scarcity in distribution, it would appear that channel operators will increasingly come to rely instead on real scarcity—not merely to protect profits, but to preserve the very viability of their business models. And ultimately, the only credible source of such scarcity will be better content than one’s competitors’, although clearly the powerful marketing networks available to the leading distributors will always mean that some types of content, economically scarce or otherwise, will be more findable than others. This scenario, in which distributors’ economic performance is more and more closely tied to the quality of the content they offer, is perhaps most interesting to contemplate in view of its distance from the terms of the fastvanishing analogue past—at least, that is, in the case of the UK television industry, where renewal of the BBC licence fee typically occurred without a particularly stringent review of its quality delivery (the renewal agreed in 2007, significantly, was very different), and where the quality of content distributed by ITV, in the 1980s and indeed much of the 1990s, was largely immaterial to the quantum of advertising revenue it generated (so much so that Roy Thomson, the late media mogul, was once minded to describe an ITV franchise as “a licence to print money”). Such a scenario would also, of course, have significant consequences for the degree of power enjoyed by the independent production community—and especially by those of its members producing the strongest, most sought-after programming.

NOTES 1. The quotations are from N. Coe, P. Kelly and H. Yeung, Economic geography: A contemporary introduction, Blackwell, Oxford, 2007, at pp. 16–18. Or as David Harvey succinctly puts it, “What goes on in a place cannot be understood outside of the space relations that support that place any more than the space relations can be understood independently of what goes on in particular places.” “From space to place and back again: Reflections on the condition of postmodernity,” in J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam, G. Robertson and L. Tickner (eds.), Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change (Routledge, London, 1993, 3–29), at p. 15. 2. See especially “Place matters—Forum,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 91, 2001, 681–723.

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3. The distinction between distribution and production in the world of media is not always an altogether clear one. For my purposes, “production” means precisely that: the production of an original, edited, ready-to-be-consumed piece of content (“production” therefore encompassing the various elements of so-called “post-production”). Everything that comes afterwards is, in my understanding, distribution: this includes the packaging of such content into, for example, scheduled television “channels,” as well as the physical distribution of such content to consumer devices. 4. N. Garnham, “Concepts of Culture: Public Policy and the Cultural Industries,” Cultural Studies, 1, 1987, 23–37. See also R. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000, who argues that the creative industries have seven key economically influential properties, one of which (indeed, the first on Caves’s list) is this fact that demand is uncertain and risk is commensurately high, so ways of allocating or sharing such risk become pivotal for the organization both of production and of distribution. 5. N. Garnham, “Concepts of Culture,” p. 31, original emphasis. 6. Ibid., pp. 31, 32. 7. R. Collins, N. Garnham and G. Locksley, The economics of television: The UK case, Sage, London, 1988, p. 12. 8. See, for instance, the influential D. Hesmondhalgh, The cultural industries, Sage, London, 2002, at pp. 227–29. 9. N. Garnham, “From cultural to creative industries: An analysis of the implications of the “creative industries” approach to arts and media policymaking in the UK,” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11, 2005, 15–30, at p. 20. 10. When I write in this chapter about “independent” producers, it is important to be clear about what precisely I mean by independent. I do not mean that the entity in question is necessarily an independently owned company as such (though it may be). Rather, I mean that its ownership is independent of local broadcasters. Thus, as one example, the New Zealand production company South Pacific Pictures is not an independent company in strict legal terms—the UK’s All3Media is a shareholder, alongside management—but it is independent in the way I am using the term here. 11. DCMS, “Creative Industries Mapping Document 1998—Television and Radio,” available at http://www.culture.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/5D342E05-1AF1-464A93BA-8B7C13E3855B/0/tvradio.pdf (retrieved May 2007), at p. 106. 12. New Zealand Screen Council, “Overview of the New Zealand Production Sector,” November 2005, available at http://www.nzscreencouncil.co.nz/documents/ NZSC_production_001.pdf (retrieved May 2007), p. 5. 13. South Pacific Pictures was founded in 1988, and in any case it was a subsidiary of TVNZ up until 1998 (when it was sold). Similarly, NHNZ, the highly significant, Dunedin-based production company that is best known for its natural history programming (and which I discuss in depth in chapter 10), is independent of New Zealand’s broadcasters (it is ultimately owned by News Corp of the US), but in the 1980s it was not—it, too, was part of TVNZ. 14. T. Varis, “The international flow of television programs,” Journal of Communication, 34, 1984, 143–52. 15. NZ On Air, “Television Local Content Report 2006,” May 2007, available at http://www.nzonair.govt.nz/files/about/lc_report_06.pdf (retrieved June 2007), at p. 3.

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16. New Zealand Screen Council, “Overview of the New Zealand Production Sector,” p. 14. 17. In the year to June 30, 2006, only one local production company—South Pacific Pictures—received more NZ On Air funding than Television New Zealand, for instance. See “NZ On Air Annual Report 2005/6,” available at http://www.nzonair.govt.nz/files/about/AR06.pdf (retrieved June 2007), at pp. 55–59. 18. Viewing share data taken from Spectrum, “Cost-benefit analysis of the launch of digital free-to-air television in New Zealand,” 2006, available at http://www.mch. govt.nz/publications/digital-tv/CBA_DTV_Public_June06.pdf (retrieved June 2007), p. 32. 19. Statistics New Zealand, “Screen Industry in New Zealand, 2005,” November 2006, available at http://www.stats.govt.nz/NR/rdonlyres/7E7DAC2F-2087-42CB87A7-B9510CD428CF/0/screenindustryreport2005fullSO.pdf (retrieved March 2007), p. 11. 20. “NZ On Air Annual Report 2005/6,” p. 59. 21. Statistics New Zealand reports that New Zealand “screen production companies” received a total of $236 million in television program funding in 2005 (Statistics New Zealand, “Screen Industry in New Zealand, 2005,” p. 18). However, this figure excludes television program funding received by companies (such as TVNZ) that are not categorized as production companies (as well as their own internal investment in production), which likely amounted to in the region of $60 million. This would give a total figure for annual investment in New Zealand television program production of around $295 million, and I base my 25% metric (the proportion of this overall investment contributed by NZ On Air) on this number. But we can also helpfully triangulate with other sources: surveys by the Screen Production and Development Association (SPADA), for instance, repeatedly suggest that 20–25% of local program production finance comes from New Zealand government sources (see New Zealand Screen Council, “Overview of the New Zealand Production Sector,” p. 15), with the remainder invested by broadcasters, offshore bodies, and private sources. 22. The four were South Pacific Pictures, Eyeworks Touchdown, Firehorse Films and the Gibson Group. Figures collated by author from “NZ On Air Annual Report 2005/6,” pp. 55–59. 23. “Wild Times,” Masseynews, April 2005, available at http://masseynews.massey. ac.nz/magazine/2005_Apr/stories/focus-1.html (retrieved October 2005). 24. For discussion of the New Zealand pay-television market, see Spectrum, “Cost-benefit analysis of the launch of digital free-to-air television in New Zealand,” pp. 30–31. 25. “Sky Network Television Limited—Interim Report—December 2006,” available at http://www.skytv.co.nz/files/Miscellaneous/final-interim-2007.pdf (retrieved May 2007), at p. 5. 26. New Zealand Screen Council, “Overview of the New Zealand Production Sector,” p. 14. 27. These data are from NZ On Air, “Television Local Content Report 2006,” p. 37. 28. Leigh Wilson, TVNZ Content Licensing Manager, interview with author, May 15, 2007. 29. DCMS, “Creative Industries Mapping Document 1998,” p. 106.

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30. Ibid. 31. David Graham & Associates, “Out of the Box: The Program Supply Market in a Digital Age. A Report for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport,” 2000, available at http://www.culture.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/AEA5903A-E29B-4847C2C58FE8321323B/0/Outofthebox.pdf (retrieved August 2005), pp. 35–36. 32. Full funding is also sometimes referred to as “cost plus,” and contrasts with the “deficit financing” that is more common in the US broadcast market—on which see especially R. Litman, “The Economics of Television Networks: New Dimensions and New Alliances,” in A. Alexander, J. Owers and R. Carveth (eds.) Media economics: Theory and practice (Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, 1998, 131–50). 33. David Graham & Associates, “Out of the Box,” p. 35. 34. Collins, Garnham and Locksley, The economics of television, p. 12. 35. Cited in “Sexy again in the City,” The Guardian, May 12, 2003. 36. See “Ofcom review of public service television broadcasting. Phase 3—Competition for quality,” 2005, available at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/ psb3/psb3.pdf (retrieved October 2005), and “A new window of opportunity for indies. Speech given by Jana Bennett at the BBC/PACT Briefing Day, London, July 13, 2005,” available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/speeches/stories/bennett_indies.shtml (retrieved December 2005). 37. “Indies winning battle for BBC WoCC commissions,” Broadcast, March 6, 2008. 38. Pact, “UK TV Content in the Digital Age: Opportunities and Challenges,” 2006, available at http://www.pact.co.uk/uploads/file_bank/2021.pdf (retrieved January 2007). And see “UK production to grow by 7% year on year,” Broadcast, September 12, 2006. 39. “U.K. producers see revenue jump,” Variety, February 20, 2008. 40. See Ofcom, “Guidelines for broadcasters in drafting codes of practice for commissioning programs from independent suppliers” 2004, available at http:// www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/ifi/guidance/cop_prog_ind/indies_pdf.pdf (retrieved October 2005), p. 3. 41. For example, 4 Rights—the entity responsible at the time for exploiting all non-primary rights acquired by Channel 4 on independent commissions, both in the UK and overseas—generated £33.3m in revenues in 2003. “Channel 4 Report and Financial Statements 2003,” available at http://www.channel4.com/media/ pdfs/annual_report_2003/accounts_section.pdf (retrieved May 2005), p. 44. Channel 4 has since sold its international sales business. 42. “Ofcom review of the television production sector,” 2006, available at http:// www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/tpsr/tpsr.pdf (retrieved February 2007). 43. By early 2007, Pact had hammered out full agreements on new media rights with all the leading broadcasters. See “Pact agrees terms of trade with BBC,” Broadcast, February 8, 2007. 44. See B. Christophers, “Spot Repair: Does TV Advertising Need Mending?,” in K. Suresh (ed.) Advertising—Innovative Media Options (ICFAI University Press, Hyderabad, 2006). 45. Not often in Europe, for instance, does one encounter such explicit and unashamed product placement as seen most recently with the automaker Toyota’s “buy” of NBC’s revamped American Gladiators (on which see “Toyota enters ring

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with ‘Gladiators,’” Variety, 18 December 2007). That said, the industry regulator in the US (the Federal Communications Commission) does appear to be increasingly keen to tighten things up. See, for example, “FCC preps product-integration inquiry,” Broadcasting & Cable, November 30, 2007. 46. “Chloe, it’s Jack. Who does our phones?” The Guardian, June 16, 2008. 47. “Product placement coming to a TV near you,” The Guardian, December 14, 2005; “Europe gives green light to product placement,” Broadcast, December 1, 2007. 48. Ofcom, “Product Placement—Summary of responses to consultation on issues relating to product placement” 2007, available at http://ofcom.org.uk/consult/ condocs/product_placement/statement/statement.pdf (retrieved April 2007). For a sampling of UK broadcaster perspectives on the possibilities for more product placement, see “U.K. TV to take product placement,” Variety, January 7, 2008. 49. “Product placement debate not dead,” Broadcast, June 24, 2008. 50. We are also seeing producers attempt to circumvent broadcasters in other interesting ways—perhaps most notably by planning to launch their own direct-to-consumer distribution services, whether these be traditional linear broadcast propositions or more innovative video-on-demand services. For examples of each, see, respectively “HIT and Chellomedia to launch kids TV channel,” Broadcast, September 27, 2007; and “Super-indies link up for new VoD service,” Broadcast, April 19, 2007. 51. “Endemol launches unit to develop ad-funded programmes,” Broadcast, May 21, 2008. 52. “ITV2 and iTunes agree major ad-funded tie-up,” Broadcast, June 25, 2008. 53. “Former ITV trio pays £51 million for Chrysalis TV,” The Guardian, August 1, 2003. Note that the Chrysalis/All3Media portfolio included—and still does—a majority holding in New Zealand’s South Pacific Pictures. 54. “Shed four to share £22 million in flotation,” The Guardian, March 18, 2005. Other examples include private equity investments in Zenith Entertainment (CD: UK), Hat Trick (Have I Got News For You?) and Mersey TV in 2003 and 2004. 55. A belief seemingly borne out by recent trends: average operating profits at UK independent television production companies increased markedly from 6.0% in 2005 to 9.3% in 2007; “UK producers see revenue jump.” 56. “Redmond sells Mersey TV,” The Guardian, June 21, 2005; “Wives and Supernanny under one roof,” The Guardian, November 26, 2005; “Shed acquires Wall to Wall for £25m,” Broadcast, December 1, 2007. 57. “Ofcom review of the television production sector”; Mediatique, “From the Cottage to the City: The Evolution of the UK Independent Production Sector. An Independent Report commissioned by the BBC,” 2005, available at http://www.bbc. co.uk/thefuture/text/independent_production.html (retrieved May 2006). 58. “Broadcasters ‘cosy up’ with super-indies,” Broadcast, August 2, 2007. Note that the identity of the leading five independents did not remain the same at each juncture. 59. Ofcom, “Digital Television Update—2003 Q3,” available at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/tv/reports/dtv/dtv2003q3/#content (retrieved October 2005). 60. Ofcom, “The Communications Market: Digital Progress Report. Digital TV, Q4 2005,” available at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/tv/reports/dtv/dtu_2005_ q4/q4_2005.pdf (retrieved May 2006); and “Digital Progress Report - Digital TV, Q4

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2006,” available at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/tv/reports/dtv/dtu_2006_q4/ dtu_2006_q4.pdf (retrieved March 2007). 61. Identifying actual numbers of homes on each type of platform is notoriously difficult. In point of fact, an exact number can only be sourced for pay cable (as reported by Virgin Media plc, the consolidated corporate product of ntl, Telewest and Virgin Mobile); even BSkyB’s numbers are unreliable for the UK since, as we saw in chapter 4, its subscriber base is known to include a large number of customers who are resident full-time in continental Europe (although the exact number of such subscribers is not publicly available). Estimating numbers for Freeview digital terrestrial and free-to-air satellite is harder yet as there are no paid subscriptions. My approximate breakdown of the UK market is guided primarily by the industry regulator, Ofcom. 62. Here, in the remainder of this chapter, and indeed elsewhere in the book, all UK viewing share (and “commercial impact” share) data is taken from BARB (Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board), the UK’s equivalent of Nielsen Media Research in the US. BARB provides in-home television viewing measurement based on a cross-platform panel of 5,100 homes, and its data are available on a subscription basis. I discuss BARB further in chapter 8. 63. Growth in multichannel distribution has clearly not been the only driver of shifts in share, however; within-platform shares have also shifted markedly in many cases, most notably in recent years for ITV1, which has been losing shares on all multichannel platforms. 64. Essentially, but not exactly: the fact that different commercial channels carry varying advertising minutage means that the arithmetic relationship between viewing share and commercial impact share varies accordingly. 65. Again, the viewing/impact share data are from BARB. I am grateful to both Channel 4 and Channel Five for personal communication of industry revenue data. 66. My own analysis of the mass-market premium is rooted in the UK market. On the existence of—and reasons for—a comparable mass-market premium in US television advertising, see F. Fisher, J. McGowan and D. Evans, “The Audience-Revenue Relationship for Local Television Stations,” The Bell Journal of Economics, 11, 1980, 694–708; D. Waterman and Z. Yan, “Cable Advertising and the Future of Basic Cable Networking,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 43, 1999, 645–58; and P. Napoli, Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the Audience Marketplace, Columbia University Press, New York, 2003, at pp. 109–110. 67. See, respectively, DCMS, “Creative Industries Mapping Document 2001—Film and Video,” available at http://www.culture.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/1979C4B6-E0724D63-A0FA-B2D1CBB65556/0/Film.pdf (retrieved July 2005), p. 9; David Graham & Associates, “Out of the Box,” p. 34. 68. In the US as well as in the UK: see M. Wöhrle and P. Volle, “Advertising and how to survive it: What’s best for business,” Media Context, April 2003, 14–23, available at http://www.mercermc.com/Perspectives/Specialty/Media_pdfs/Apr03.pdf (retrieved April 2005), at pp. 16–22. 69. ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel Five (i.e. excludes GMTV and all of the broadcasters’ respective multichannel-only channels). 70. Calculated as share of advertising revenue divided by share of commercial impacts.

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71. A number of “experts” have written, with varying degrees of insight, about the emergence of such an “attention economy” (in other words, the label is not new), though typically in respect of the Internet rather than television. See, for instance, M. Goldhaber, “The Attention Economy and the Net,” 1997, available at http://www. firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/ (retrieved April 2005); T. Davenport and J. Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 2001. 72. M. Curtin, “Media Capital: Towards the study of spatial flows,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6, 2003, 202–28, at p. 212. 73. “Our channels,” http://www.freeview.co.uk/channels/?__SITE=public&p[0]= channels (retrieved April 24, 2007). 74. J. Tunstall (with D. Machin), The Anglo-American media connection, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, p. 9. 75. “Report cool on U.K. indie TV’s upside,” Variety, April 12, 2006. While interest may have cooled, however, it is still there: the private equity group Permira, for instance, acquired a majority stake in the leading independent production company All3Media in August 2006, in a deal valuing the company at £320m (“Equity firm nabs Brit TV producer,” Variety, August 1, 2006). 76. “Indies attack cuts in production budgets,” Broadcast, March 16, 2006. 77. “TV buys gameshow producer 12 Yard,” The Guardian, December 5, 2007; “12 Yard’s Young predicts more broadcaster deals,” Broadcast, December 5, 2007. 78. J. Gantz and J. Rochester, Pirates of the digital millennium: How the war over intellectual property is destroying companies, economies, and personal freedoms, FT Prentice Hall, London, 2004.

6 Power and Program Pricing in International Markets

In May 2007, the BBC announced that it had acquired exclusive UK rights to the second series of the US television drama Heroes, meaning that whereas the first series was originally screened in the UK on pay television by the Sci Fi Channel, and only later on the free-to-air BBC2, the program’s second series would air only on BBC channels. Although it is unclear how much the BBC paid NBC Universal for these exclusive rights, what is clear is that the unexpected success on pay television of the first series made the second series considerably more expensive to acquire, in part because the BBC had to fend off competition from, it was reported, ITV, Sky, Channel 4 and Virgin Media. Thus well-placed industry commentators speculated that the price paid by the BBC was “in excess of £400,000 per episode” (for over twenty episodes), a sum “around five times more than it paid for the first season.”1 It is the world of international trade transactions like this one that I turn to now. I have picked the examples of Heroes, I should say, not for any particular quality or historical or economic significance, but simply to highlight some basic features of this trade—the fact that rights, as we have previously seen, are partitioned by window; that prices for individual programs can be extremely volatile over time; that trade often (but not always) takes place in a competitive context; and that, frequently, large sums of money (here, over £8 million) are involved. I have already indicated in chapter 4 why I consider such transactions to be important in the particular context of this book: in examining, as I am, geographies of power in international television, it is essential to analyze trade simply because most non-US markets are heavy importers, and the reliance on imports (especially US imports) is in many cases increasing. Understanding the power relations bound up in such trade seems indispensable to an analysis of television’s spatial economy. 201

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Thus, where the previous chapter focused on relations between producers and broadcasters within national markets, this chapter looks at what happens where the media supply chain is extended and territorially segmented— where production occurs in one country and broadcast in another. More specifically, if we think of local program availability as creating value in a place (be it through advertising, subscriptions, or a license fee), by whom and, more pointedly, where is this value ultimately captured? If it appears self-evident that, as Jeanette Steemers observes, “some countries or corporations have more power than others to initiate flows and invest in programming and the infrastructure for its distribution,” I will argue that a map of the actual places and spaces of value capture does not simply draw itself.2 Rather, it must incorporate significant complexities in the relationships between (in Steemers’s words) “countries, corporations and power”—the three central, mutually constitutive components of the international television trade economy, and in turn of this chapter. How, we have already asked and begun to examine, is power actually exercised across space in the media economy? In chapter 4 we saw one set of answers to that question, specifically in the US-dominated international context that concerns me centrally in this chapter. Those answers revolved around what I described, after Ronald Bettig, as “foreign-policy-making.” This was the idea that US media corporations, sometimes in direct alliance with the US government, have exerted and reproduced their power in international markets partly by seeking to ensure that all market participants play by the same (American) rules of the game. Perhaps most importantly of all, the studios have vigorously defended their ability to distribute their programming on a strict territory-by-territory basis. In this context, policing of DVD region coding and of satellite footprint spillover are examples, precisely, of foreign-policy making. They can be seen most fundamentally as strategies for maintaining the conditions for ongoing capital accumulation. In my discussion in the present chapter of program trade economics, I deal quite extensively, and for obvious reasons, with work in the established sub-discipline of media economics, for which audio-visual content trade has long been a major analytical theme.3 I mention this here because one thing that I, at least, find striking about this literature is that notions of foreign-policy making—of power realized by way of enforcement of economic “law”—are almost entirely absent. In fact, as I discuss at greater length in the third section of this chapter, mainstream economics has remarkably little to say more generally about power in the world of international television. The main exception to this absence, however, concerns price. Where power is a factor, economists (and not only media economists) argue, it is manifested through, and can be identified in, pricing behavior. One of the main claims I make in this chapter is that there is a profound irony to this argument. The irony is this. Relations between countries and

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companies in the world of international television are shot through with relations of power, and as I have discussed above and will discuss further in subsequent chapters, the US and its corporations demonstrably enjoy the upper hand in most material respects. However, if one is interested, as we are in this book, in the relationships between the television economies of the US on the one hand and the UK and New Zealand on the other, it turns out that price is the one analytical dimension that—examined in isolation—can generate a neutral, if not contrary reading of the geographies of power. My suggestion, to be clear, is not then that price and power are unrelated. Rather, the observation I develop is simply that specifically with regard to program export pricing, the US and its media giants, at least until relatively recently, have often not operated from a position of dominance; their importing counterparts in the UK and New Zealand have frequently had significantly more leverage in price negotiations. But in recognizing this, clearly we should not dismiss the wider structures of power that frame relations between these US and international trading partners. For power is not only about price, and any reading of power that is limited to price risks painting a partial, and potentially inaccurate, picture. My position is that it is certainly important to analyze “power in price,” but that this analysis must be situated within a much broader and more textured investigation of economic power—one which includes, inter alia, the aforementioned strategies of foreign-policy making. That, then, is the approach I have taken, and my discussion in this chapter of program pricing and of the geographies of value capture sits squarely in the wider context of what has come before, and what follows. I hope that the chapter will be read at two levels. First, it is explicitly an analysis of television program trade, focusing on exports from the US to both the UK and New Zealand, and concerned to think through the drivers and implications of pricing processes and outcomes. The central empirical feature of that trade which it ponders and reflects on is the great variance in the price paid by broadcasters in different territories for the rights to the same program. This analysis is based not only on a review of publicly available data but also, more productively, on a series of interviews with participants in the television trade economy, primarily in New Zealand and the UK. Second, the chapter is also constructed as a dialogue with the media economics literature and with what it has to say on these matters. At points this dialogue takes the form of a relatively firm critique (as in my argument against the analytical restriction of power dynamics to price dynamics); at others, I argue merely that there are other—and not necessarily “better”—ways of going about tackling the questions in hand than the economics literature allows. A brief outline of the chapter’s development will hopefully expedite its navigation. First, I discuss what has been, perhaps, the most prominent and persistent critique of the US studios’ program pricing strategies in interna-

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tional markets—the argument that in some such markets, the price paid by local broadcasters is so low that the trade amounts to a form of “dumping.” I argue that this critique, most closely associated with critics of “cultural imperialism,” is clearly inappropriate in respect to the UK and New Zealand markets. But I also take issue with the specific argument against “dumping” proffered by media economists. My claim here is that this argument constitutes what we can call, after Matthew Sparke, an “anaemic geography”: that is, it is underwritten by, but does not acknowledge or account for, a fundamentally geographical set of assumptions which, upon close scrutiny, does not appear to be tenable.4 In the second section of the chapter, I assess how media economists have themselves sought to explain the wide variance in export price, which they have typically done through the construction of statistical models. I argue that this approach ultimately does not—indeed, cannot—explain variance; it can only suggest causal relationships. Another, more “qualitative” language is required if we seek genuine understanding. Noting that the “explanations” posited by economists have identified market power as one among several key variables that influence price, I go on, in the third part of the chapter, to suggest that this “reduction” of power to such a variable is indicative of the way economics treats power more broadly. For mainstream economists, including the leading media economists, largely disregard questions of power. With perfect competition the assumed norm, power essentially becomes, in theories of imperfect competition, an exception—an exception that can be reduced to a variable in a model (sometimes present, but sometimes not). My preference is for a political economy perspective that sees power as endemic. I argue that power is in fact the critical factor in determining program export pricing, but that only in recent years have the US studios begun to realize and exploit a position of power specifically in the pricing realm. In the fourth (and last substantive) section, I argue that media economists’ approach to program pricing is limited not only for its conception of power, or indeed for (“anaemic”) geographies that it incorporates but does not interrogate; I suggest that it also excludes important geographies. These geographies are twofold. First, there is no recognition of the specificity of place in all its complexity, and of how this specificity impacts on price. Second, I argue that economic processes themselves, and not just the places in which they are played out, are spatially differentiated, and that a fuller understanding of program pricing requires recognition of this. The chapter then ends with an observation that also serves as a prompt for, and segueway into, some of the analysis in later parts of the book. The observation is simply that discussions of power and trade in the international media economy remain largely fixated on the influence of the US, and its products, in other places—on, for instance, the fact that cheap US imports can make it

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very difficult for local producers to compete. The prompt is to look also in the other direction: to assess issues of power, and other relevant factors, in relation to international producers’ penetration of the US television market. I begin to do this here with a very brief discussion of New Zealand’s (very limited) television export trade, before turning to such matters in much greater detail in regard to the UK in subsequent chapters.5

CULTURAL IMPERIALISM, PRICE, AND PROGRAM “DUMPING” Cultural imperialism The idea of cultural imperialism has cropped up in a couple of places earlier in the book, and it will become increasingly prominent in later chapters. It is, in fact, arguably the main prism through which the US domination of international trade in audio-visual products, which was briefly documented in chapter 4, has come to be viewed and discussed over the past forty years. This is not to say that all commentators concur with the thesis of cultural imperialism; many, especially latterly, do not, but even where they advance different readings of such trade, its motivations and its effects, they frequently do so explicitly in opposition to, or at least in tension with, that thesis. Cultural imperialism, in other words, has become a reference point or touchstone for a vast quantum of diverse writing on trade in films and television programs. It is important to emphasise that America’s alleged global cultural influence in the modern era, both for critics and champions of this “power,” has never been just about the mass media that concern me here. “Cultural imperialism” has been used as an interpretive framework to describe and explain developments in areas ranging from international relations to business and management and sports.6 Thus, when writers such as Carl Bernstein and Matthew Fraser write about America’s “leisure empire” (Bernstein) and “soft power” (Fraser)—about America “saturating the world with its myths, its fantasies, its tunes and dreams” in an exercise in “imperial selfconfidence”—they are talking about not just television programs, films and music but also, at the very least, about malls, theme parks and franchised restaurants.7 But while acknowledging this range of conduits of cultural influence, we should underline the fact that the media are privileged in almost all such critiques: hence why some commentators speak specifically, and revealingly, of “media imperialism.”8 The original media-centered concept of cultural imperialism is perhaps most closely associated with Herbert Schiller and his two works, Mass Communications and American Empire (1969) and Communications and Cultural Domination (1976). In the former, he first advanced his view that US me-

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dia and communications companies, networks and products formed a key component of a national military-industrial “complex” intent on global dominion. The media were, he claimed, consciously developed and used by the government as instruments of empire-building power. In the latter book, Schiller offered his now oft-quoted definition of cultural imperialism as “the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating center of the system.”9 Since the mid-1970s, three key elements of Schiller’s original formulations have been fleshed out, added to and (where necessary) revised both by Schiller himself and by those broadly in agreement with his thesis.10 First, the locus of control in this global cultural empire has, it is argued, largely (though not fully) shifted from a national, government-sponsored military-industrial “complex” to transnational, but still US-centered, media corporations.11 Second, while the manifestations of US dominance include the export not only of media content (films, television programs, music) but also of organizational forms, production practices and content models, it is in the trade in content that this dominance is most clear. Third, it is alleged that the export of US content not only allows the US media to influence the nature of cultural consumption around the world, but also to transmit, in the process, American cultural and economic values. “The world’s needs and desires have been irrevocably homogenized,” wrote Theodore Levitt as early as 1983.12 Dumping I have laid out these main components of the cultural imperialism thesis not only because I later return to it at various points, but also because it is within the context of this critique that arguments about program “dumping” first emerged and have since remained couched. What do we mean by “dumping”? Generically, dumping means exporting products to overseas markets at unreasonably or unnaturally low prices—though how one defines “low” is inevitably a major bone of contention—specifically in order to quash competition from local producers by rendering their economics unsustainable. Thus, those who perceive dumping in television trade typically point to the vast discrepancies in the prices paid for the same program in different national markets—to the fact, for instance, that UK terrestrial broadcasters paid $20,000–100,000 per commercial hour in 1995 for programming which secured just $3,000–5,000 per hour in Belgium and only $200–250 in Zimbabwe.13 Dumping, then, means exploiting unequal relations of power not to overprice but, somewhat perversely, to underprice: to undercut local competition in, say, Zimbabwe, so as to secure or main-

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tain local market dominance. As such, dumping has been posited as the economic modus operandi of cultural imperialism, and Schiller himself discussed it in such a vein in Mass Communications and American Empire.14 There is of course little doubt that the ready and relatively cheap availability of US television programs in international markets has long had significant implications for local production. For, if programming can be imported at low cost, the incentive to produce alternative local material— typically at much greater cost—declines accordingly. Thus, twenty years ago, Philip Schlesinger claimed that even in the UK it cost broadcasters approximately eight times as much to produce a drama series locally as it did to acquire a US series.15 More recently, a ratio of “as much as ten times” has been reported for New Zealand.16 The actual ratio, however, is not as important as its ramifications, with local production activities often seen to be stifled simply by virtue of the cost disadvantage they bear. And yet at what specific point can export price be deemed to have declined sufficiently far for “dumping” to have actually occurred? To the extent that the notion of dumping has ever received analytical definition, it is said to require either or both of the following conditions being met: that a product is sold in a foreign country for less than its price in the domestic market, or for less than the cost of making the product. But clearly both conditions apply in the case of the sale of most (if not all) US television programs into most (if not all) international markets. And this in itself should ring loud alarm bells about the potential pertinence of such a “definition” of dumping in the first place. I note this definition, however, not so much because it interests me per se (I actually think it is entirely meaningless), but rather in view of my interest—discussed below—in media economists’ specific response to such a “definition.” It is surely more productive to question, first, the very idea of dumping than any definition that might be conferred upon it. In short, where this book is concerned, is it really credible to suggest that US exporters, now or in the past, have consciously underpriced their programs in sales to the UK or New Zealand in order to keep out, or stamp out, competition from local producers? The question is an important one if only because the idea that the US has dumped programming in such markets remains alive and well in significant pockets of scholarly writing on television trade.17 Moreover, it is clear that through the 1980s and much of the 1990s, the prices paid for US programming by local broadcasters in those territories were, compared to today, relatively (and often extremely) low on the basis of almost any relevant benchmark—be it actual program production costs, the price of acquisition in the US market (where applicable), or equivalent local production costs. Nevertheless, I have found no evidence, or even a suggestion, that the studios have effectively dumped (underpriced) programming in the UK or New Zealand. For one thing, those who have been involved for many

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years in program acquisition in those markets make it clear that even when international program sales were considerably less material to the studios than they are today—international television markets became significant to Hollywood much later than international film markets, and sales remained, well into the 1980s, “a pittance”—the studios’ overseas distributors consistently sought to secure higher prices than they were ultimately able to obtain.18 “Low” prices reflected not studio strategy, but market conditions. In the third section of this chapter I discuss in some detail the key market characteristics that were common both to the UK and New Zealand. But there were also important individual considerations driving down import prices in each case. In the UK, the bargaining position of the BBC and ITV—the two main buyers—in negotiations to acquire product from the US studios was bolstered through the 1980s both by the fact that each had a longstanding and viable internal production business of its own, and also by import quotas.19 In New Zealand during the same decade, meanwhile, buyer leverage accrued less from the existence of local production alternatives than from a ready supply of content to TV One and TV2 from—and long-term local audience familiarity with—program exports from the UK itself. Scaling economics Media economists have given the idea of dumping similarly short shrift.20 But I suggest here that their specific critique of the notion of dumping is also problematic—and more particularly, it is geographically problematic. Before developing this argument, some theoretical context is necessary. For geographers, it is a given that one cannot produce social scientific analysis that is not in some sense geographical. For instance, all research is situated somewhere (even if the “place” in question is “virtual” rather than material); and all research is framed at a particular scale or scales (be it bodily, local, regional, national, international). But some social scientists (geographers among them), it has been claimed, tend to be insufficiently reflexive about the geographies that frame and inhabit their analysis. Does the fact that our conclusions were derived from this specific location matter? Is it significant that we examined the operation of those processes only at the urban scale? These are typical of the many questions that geographers believe it is important to address. In his book In the Space of Theory (2005), Matthew Sparke uses the term “anaemic geographies” to try to capture this lack of reflexivity, substance and depth on matters geographical.21 In examining changes in the relationship between “nation” and “state” in North America, Sparke mobilizes the thinking and writing of a series of influential social scientists, including Arjun Appadurai, Timothy Mitchell, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. While offering deeply textured readings of state and nation, these writers

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rely, Sparke claims, on blunt and unrefined concepts of space, place and scale. Hence Sparke’s critique of Mitchell, for example, is that his idea of “state effects” is limited and limiting because such effects are conceived solely at the level of the traditional nation-state. Sparke’s exact critique, however, is less important for my purposes than the wider proposition: that all social scientists could offer richer accounts of social life if they interrogated both the nature of the geographies underpinning their work, and the ways in which those geographies shape such work. What has all of this to do with television program trade, export prices, and dumping? One alleged “condition” for dumping, we can recall, is a product being sold in an overseas market for less than the cost of producing it. Media economists, too, argue that it is essential to compare export price with a program cost if one wants to demonstrate or disprove dumping. However, for these economists, the relevant cost is not the cost of original production to which advocates of the “dumping” thesis appeal. Rather, they argue that one needs to identify a specifically national cost: a cost associated solely with the product being made available in the particular country into which it is being sold. This proposition is based on the fact that the (export) price with which one intends to compare this cost applies to the price for distribution of the program in question solely within that single national market. What such media economists suggest, in other words, is that we frame and conduct our analysis at the national scale. Both price and cost are to be pegged to the space of the nation—specifically, the nation to which the program is being exported. And on the face of it, this would seem to constitute a much more logical approach: it is surely wrong-headed, as such economists insist, to compare the price for, say, UK rights alone with the total cost of producing a program that is potentially sold worldwide. However, appealing instead to a “national cost” raises a very important and difficult question: how to define and identify such a cost? Given the predominance of marginalist analysis within neoclassical economics more generally, it is perhaps not surprising that the consensus answer to this question among media economists has been the marginal cost—the cost, that is, of making one additional copy of a program and distributing it to the export market in question. This, the cost of program reproduction, is seen as the relevant cost to which one should compare export price to determine whether or not “dumping” has really occurred.22 And as these economists have consistently pointed out (indeed, as was discussed at length in chapter 4), the marginal cost of reproduction is, for television programs as for many other media products, extremely low—much lower, in fact, than the export price for most (if not all) US television programs in most (if not all) international markets. Quad erat demonstratum: if “national price” exceeds “national cost,” the notion of dumping can be summarily dismissed.

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For me, this argument is problematic at two different levels. The first relates specifically to the idea of marginality. The comparison of export price with marginal cost may make sense in abstract analytical terms, but in practical terms it is, at best, an anachronism. The programs that concern us here, namely programs exported from major markets (and especially from the US), are typically conceived from the outset as global products. Comparing the UK export price with (only) the marginal cost presupposes that the UK market is precisely that: marginal; an after thought; an unforeseen economic upside. But clearly, such a premise has not been remotely credible for many years (if it ever was). Countries such as the UK and Japan, perhaps once considered “gravy” by the studios, are now seen as “a fundamental part of the market” for almost all US original television productions.23 Hence international sales are factored into budgeting and investment decisions for US shows from their very inception, and indeed are frequently locked in through pre-sales, even if a first-run commitment from a domestic broadcaster remains the key to an investment decision.24 If, then, we really do desire to provide a realistic geographical “matching” of program cost allocation with program revenue origination, we would need to amortise a share of original production costs—as well as the marginal costs of reproduction—against international revenues since these upfront costs are demonstrably financing international in addition to domestic distribution. It should be emphasized here that this inherent internationalization of the television program is not only a feature of the very top-end US shows, although this is certainly where that feature is most explicit. Thus, whereas the BBC’s international arm (Worldwide) used to invest upfront in BBC productions as an advance against international sales “only on the very best” such programs, it now does so, according to Director of Investment Matt Forde, “on almost every show.”25 I will turn presently to the second level at which I see problems with the coupling of export price with marginal cost to “disprove” dumping. But first I want to remain with “marginality” and pick up on the central argument of chapter 2—the argument that geographical knowledges and imaginaries have power. Coupling export price with marginal cost constitutes a geographical knowledge because it spatializes the production hierarchy: the US market is rendered primary, original, the solitary realm of production; other markets become secondary, marginal, the realm (only) of reproduction. Such a geographical knowledge can be said to have power because it allows the crystallization of other “knowledges.” Thus, only on the basis of this spatial hierarchy is it meaningful to assert—as it so often is—that most films and television programs fail to make a profit from domestic distribution alone.26 Collapse the spatial hierarchy, and the emptiness of such an assertion becomes plain. Would one ever proclaim that films fail

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to make a profit only from theatrical admissions by women? Assuredly one would not, for films are not (or, are very rarely) made solely for consumption by women; and nor is US television produced solely for consumption by Americans. My second concern with media economists’ argument against dumping is not so much the restriction of a program’s “national” cost (the cost associated with making the program available in an individual export market) to marginal cost, but the very effort to try to identify such a “national” cost in the first place. I would argue that there is, in reality, no such thing as a “per-country” or “national” program cost. And to understand this we need only think back to the discussion in chapter 4. There is, we saw there, nothing natural about television’s economic territoriality. The global television economy is segmented into discrete national markets only because it has been made that way. But, critically, this manufactured territoriality applies solely to revenues—not to costs. So, while it is meaningful to analyze program revenues at the scale of an individual nation (but only, I emphasize, because that is how the studios continue to regulate program distribution, and only because such an approach has not yet been undermined by threats such as wayward satellite footprints), it cannot be meaningful to do so with program costs. Any talk or analysis of “national” program costs is, therefore, by its very nature, an example of an “anaemic geography”: it rests on a geography (the premise that program costs are spatially distinguishable) but does not acknowledge or interrogate that geography. This anaemic geography, moreover, is itself the indirect product of those corporations that control the international media economy and territorialize it in order to profit from it. To pitch our analysis at the level of the nation, then, is to limit our terms of reference to those manufactured by the entities we should be trying to understand. The fact that these terms of reference are, in this instance, incongruous merely makes such a limitation doubly problematic. All too often, scholars impart a naturalness to the media’s spatial structure by neglecting to question its origins. Jeremy Tunstall, for instance, says that of five geographical scales occupied by the mass media, “the most important level is that of the nation-state.”27 But is this really so, and if it is, how, when and why was the nation constituted as such? Whenever we carry out economic analysis at the national scale—or, indeed, at any other geographical scale—we need to ask ourselves why we have selected that scale, whether it is meaningful, and what effects, if any, such a choice of scale might have on our analysis. In short, we need to ask the question posed (ironically) by the economist Paul Krugman, who crucially recognizes that “there is no particular reason to think that national boundaries define a relevant region” for economic analysis, and who thus queries, “Where does the nation-state fit into the story of economic geography?”28

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ON MODELS Economists’ work on television trade and program pricing in export markets has not, of course, been limited to a rubbishing of the dumping argument. The last twenty years has seen the emergence of an extensive body of neoclassical economic analysis of trade in audio-visual products. Such work, it should be noted, covers both television and film; this is an important observation because the two literatures are closely linked, and because economists’ ideas have arguably been more clearly articulated in relation to film than television.29 The key thrust of the overall literature has been to seek to explain America’s overwhelming dominance in international audiovisual trade (a phenomenon noted both earlier in this chapter and, more fully, in chapter 4). Eschewing political-economic arguments such as the “cultural imperialism” thesis discussed above, economists have argued that US dominance of such trade is readily explicable within the framework of the neoclassical tradition. In particular, the greater scale of the US domestic market, which in turn is said to allow higher average production budgets, is regarded as a critical factor. Thus, these media economists have produced a number of microeconomic models designed to explain and describe the relationships between underlying market “variables” (market size being one) and the resulting patterns of international trade flows.30 It is this explicit preference for quantitative, model-based approaches to explanation that I discuss in this short section. However, my main focus is not specifically on those models relating to US trade dominance. Rather, given that the main theme of this chapter is to understand the geographies of differential value capture—how surplus value is apportioned between differently placed participants in the international media economy—I focus on parallel (but very closely linked) economic modelling work that examines not (or, not only) relative trade-flow volumes but the pricing of media product exports. In particular, I look at economists’ analysis of another notable feature of television trade discussed above, namely the wide variation between the prices paid for individual programs in different national markets. By my reading, the most influential and enduring model of television program export pricing and its observed variance has been Hoskins et al’s (1989) joint-consumption model.31 The model in question is a statistical model. That is, it draws on real-world empirical data to try to identify and describe repeating relationships among numerical variables. Program price, in this case, is seen as the “dependent” variable: the model seeks to show how, in mathematical terms, price depends on a series of other, prior, “independent” variables. In the model, the nature of this relationship between the independent and dependent variables takes the form of a regression, or a line of “best fit”; and correlation statistics are used to describe how well (or badly) the modelled line or regression fits the original empirical observations.

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The resulting Hoskins et al model suggests that four key variables underlie the bulk of variance in prices paid for the same US programming in different export markets, and that the first three of these account for approximately 70% of observed price variation: a country’s population (or more specifically, the estimated number of television sets); its national wealth (expressed as GNP per capita); the degree of local buyer power; and the so-called “cultural discount.” The first two of these are straightforward: bigger, wealthier countries, the model shows, pay higher prices than small, poor ones. The latter two variables require a bit more comment. “Buyer power” refers, essentially, to local market structure: buyers will have more power (vis-à-vis the US program vendor) in markets with less local competition. The “cultural discount,” meanwhile, has become a pivotal concept in economic writing on international trade in cultural products—referring to the premise that countries at a greater cultural “distance” from the US will place relatively less value on its output.32 The Hoskins et al model is a fairly simple one, and intuitively it makes sense: one would expect a broadcaster with a wealthy, Western audience of 60 million people to have to pay more for a program than a broadcaster in (to use an earlier example) Zimbabwe—the attached revenue potential is, clearly, substantially higher. However, the modelling approach to explaining price variation prompts, in my view, a number of important concerns. These relate most critically to what models can and cannot do, and to the type of analysis that might be required to fill in the gaps left—or even the disfigurations generated—by such models. A first concern is with the way in which statistics are used here. For, in the pricing model and the narrative constructed around it, statistics are being mobilized at two linked levels. In the first place there is the statistical relationship itself (here, as noted, a regression) between price on the one hand and socio-economic variables (population, wealth and so on) on the other. So far, so reasonable. But statistics—correlation statistics—are then invoked at another level to substantiate the claim that this primary statistical relationship (the regression) is “significant”.33 My argument, following Deirdre McCloskey, is that in turning (back) to statistics to answer the question of whether statistical results are themselves important or “significant,” this type of economic analysis confuses statistical significance for scientific or economic significance.34 Too much is being asked of the numbers. The determination of economic significance, I would argue, can only ever be a human judgement, not a mathematical one; as McCloskey writes, a “human assessment of largeness or smallness” is always required.35 The second, related concern is to do with the faith invested by such model-based approaches specifically in correlation. If social science aims to identify causation, then correlation cannot suffice because, as Andrew Sayer has forcefully argued, even “a strong correlation . . . need not imply

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causation.”36 Hoskins et al effectively ascribe causality to their correlations and hence impute to the model explanatory power. Thus, the statement that approximately 70% of program export price variation is “explained by per capita GNP, the number of TV sets, and the bidding situation” renders those variables as causal entities rather than merely, and more accurately, as (cor)related metrics.37 Yet, as Sayer emphasizes, statistical “regularities” are “not sufficient conditions for the identification of causes.” The conclusion that Sayer draws from this is the one I want to emphasize. “The use of mathematical models as an aid to causal explanation,” he says, “is inevitably problematic because, as a language, mathematics is acausal and astructural. It lacks the categories of “producing,” “generating” or “forcing” which we take to indicate causality.”38 The essence of Sayer’s (and indeed McCloskey’s) critique is that statisticsbased models are not sufficient if we are interested, as we are here, in explanation. Rather, statistics (Sayer again) “must be supplemented by realist appraisals based on qualitative causal and structural analysis.” This, of course, is not to say that statistics are useless or necessarily misleading. But it is to posit that the usefulness of statistics varies widely between contexts—it depends intimately on the type of objects to which the statistics are applied—and that an evaluation of such usefulness always requires, as McCloskey would say, “a non-statistical examination of the objects of interest.”39 To my way of thinking, then, the statistical model-based approach to television export program pricing is limited by the fact that ultimately it neither can nor does explain variance in price; it can only suggest structural relationships. And nor, it should be stressed, do models help us to understand how export prices are actually reached; that is, they shed no light on economic process. Indeed, the rarefied language of mathematics actively obscures the dynamics of pricing processes, hiding from students of the media economy a great deal of material economic complexity and a rich tapestry of real economic life. My own research into program pricing, discussed in more detail below, suggests that the variables isolated by the Hoskins et al model probably are useful “predictors” of television export prices in certain situations (though certainly not in all). But the model does not explain why this is so—and why, sometimes, it is not—and nor does it help us determine causality.

PRICING AND POWER Readers will have noticed that the microeconomic model discussed above does recognize, or at least posit, that power has a role to play in influencing television program export prices. The specific implication of the regression analysis is that increased competition among credible buyers in the importing market pushes up the price ultimately paid for the program;

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limited or zero competition, by contrast, results in relatively lower prices. I do not want to dispute this particular finding in what follows. By and large, I think, as will become very clear, that the implication is correct (and not particularly surprising, it must be said). My argument operates, rather, at a different level, concerning, fundamentally, the ways we think about, envision and account for power in the media economy. The place to start is with the broad tradition of mainstream economics. One of the most striking characteristics of economic scholarship for those operating outside of that disciplinary realm is the fact that economics has so little to say about issues of power. In fact, as Randall Bartlett has argued, economists have, for the most part, neglected power—power has been, he observes, “only a peripheral interest for mainstream economists.” Moreover, the most influential strand of economics for the past half-century, neoclassical economics, “has had the very least to say about power” (evolutionary and institutional economics have tended to treat power more directly and overtly).40 And this lacuna has been faithfully reproduced within media economics, where a neoclassical approach remains predominant, and where, to the best of my knowledge, not one paper relating centrally to matters of power has been published in the leading scholarly journal (the Journal of Media Economics) in the past decade. Why is it that power does not feature centrally in economic thought? The answer cuts to the very core of the economic tradition, and in particular microeconomics, where the analysis of markets—of the interactions between buyers and sellers, and the law of supply and demand—takes pride of place. For, the theory of supply and demand is founded on the assumption of perfect competition, and under perfectly competitive markets it is assumed that no producer or consumer has the market power to influence prices. Economists’ fascination with markets, then, together with the core assumptions that frame this analytical fascination, help to explain power’s peripherality in neoclassical economics, for as Bartlett summarizes, “power is absent from, even antithetical to, markets.”41 Does this then mean that questions of power are entirely absent from neoclassical economics? It does not, because economists have long recognized that perfect competition is only an assumption, and that economics therefore needs to account for economic behavior under conditions of imperfect competition. The seminal and overlapping work of Joan Robinson and Edward Chamberlin in the 1930s—albeit from very different starting points—triggered an extensive, ongoing tradition of economic analysis in this area.42 Thus, where neoclassical economics does consider issues of power, it is where competition is deemed to be imperfect, meaning that certain buyers or sellers are in a position to influence market price. And these, for me, are the two key points: that power only “appears” in certain situations, and that it is examined almost exclusively in relation to its effect on price.

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What this makes power, however, is an exception—an exception to the “norm” (of perfect competition), and one that thus can be readily reduced to a variable in a mathematical model: sometimes present, but sometimes not. And this is precisely the status of “power” in the Hoskins et al exportpricing model: a simple, dummy variable (“single buyer” or “competitive”). My own preference, as should be clear by this stage of the book, is for a political economy perspective that sees power, first, as endemic, and second, as present, pertinent and material far more widely than simply in regard to the price relation. Where media economics, then, is concerned with power mainly as an “exception” whose significance is limited to effects on price, political economy makes power—in all its forms—the kernel of critical analysis.43 It does not deny the connection between power and price; but it insists on viewing this connection in the context of a much broader field of power and its various forms of exercise. Without analyzing the local history of pricing of US television imports in one or more international market, it would be extremely difficult to appreciate the degree to which relative power relations impact on program prices. Conducting such an analysis in the UK and New Zealand markets demonstrates that power is in fact the critical factor in determining, in the final reckoning, the price at which trade takes place; power dictates the distributor’s starting position (“we don’t think you have any” or “we recognize that you do”) and it shapes the scope, intensity and outcome of all ensuing negotiations. As Pascal Volle, long-term strategic advisor to a number of leading US broadcasters, neatly summarizes, “The major driver of price in the television export market is the degree of local competition for your program.”44 Less competition means more power for the purchaser and, all other things being equal, a lower price. The irony of the price-power coupling, as noted in the introduction to the chapter, is that until relatively recently the US studios, so often assumed to be all-powerful, enjoyed very little power in export markets such as the UK and New Zealand specifically in regard to pricing. There were, as identified in my discussion of dumping, various unique local factors contributing to this state of affairs, but by some margin the main determinant of strong purchaser leverage was the same in each territory: the fact that prior to the development of multichannel television in the late 1980s (UK) and early 1990s (New Zealand), there simply were not many potential buyers. There were only, credibly, two (the BBC and ITV) in the UK (Channel 4 did not enter the international acquisitions market until the 1990s), while in New Zealand there was only one (TVNZ) until 1989, and only two (with the launch of TV3) in the early part of the following decade. Without a large number of potential buyers, the US studios found limited scope to drum up competition and inflate prices accordingly.

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However, it would be wrong to assume—as media economists’ models do—that it was simply a question of numbers. Political economists have frequently observed that capitalist firms do not necessarily engage in the “real,” price-based competition assumed by neoclassical economics. Instead, as Joseph Schumpeter observed in the early part of the twentieth century, big corporates can often be seen to behave towards each other in what he called a “corespective” manner, perhaps maintaining the impression of serious competition but in reality refraining from eating into each other’s profits; explicit price-fixing would only be the most egregious example of such behavior.45 In their influential Monopoly Capital (1966), Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy later argued that such behavior had in fact become the norm within modern capitalism (and competition, “perfect” or otherwise, the exception), with “an attitude of live-and-let-live toward other members of the corporate world” dominating microeconomic affairs.46 If we look back at the world of the television industry in the UK in the 1980s and New Zealand in the early 1990s, it is clear that such “corespective” behavior was very common, particularly insofar as the market for US program imports was concerned. Richard Collins and co-authors, for example, reported many years ago on the “understanding” that prevailed in the 1980s between the BBC and ITV that they would not compete for the same US series.47 In this environment, the US studios inevitably had very little pricing power. And it was a very similar story in New Zealand in the early 1990s, where a comparable “gentleman’s agreement” long held firm between TVNZ and TV3,48 and where—in consequence—the General Manager of Commercial & Business Affairs at TVNZ, Chris Caradus, fondly recalls that era’s price negotiations with the US studios as having been “great fun.”49 In both cases, a simple analysis of buyer numbers would see the market being modelled by economists as “competitive”; but in reality, corespective behavior served to convert local oligopsony into effective monopsony. As political economists have amply demonstrated, however, all configurations of social and economic power relations are inherently unstable, and so it has proved in regard to television’s international export markets. As the UK and New Zealand markets have matured, multichannel penetration has risen, and the level of internal competition has increased, it is evident that US exporters have begun to enjoy a significantly stronger hand in price negotiations. In the UK there are now six serious bidders for US acquisitions: the four analogue terrestrial broadcasters, plus BSkyB (typically for its Sky One channel) and Virgin Media (for Living TV and, since October 2007, Virgin 1). In New Zealand the competition remains somewhat less intense—the number of realistic buyers having actually reduced from four to three with Sky’s recent takeover of Prime—but the importance of Sky, in particular, as a catalyst to meaningful competition should not be underestimated.

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These changes can be helpfully illuminated by looking in detail at the recent history of the distribution of one US studio’s marquee drama titles into both the UK and New Zealand. The studio in question is Disney, whose portfolio currently (in 2008) includes, most recognizably, Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy and Ugly Betty, and which is distributed internationally by the Disney subsidiary Buena Vista International. For many years, Buena Vista’s preferred approach to international distribution (like that of many other studios) has been to establish “output deals” with broadcasters in individual export markets, meaning that such broadcasters take a bundle of Disney programs, as opposed to those programs being sold individually.50 Disney’s output deal for the New Zealand market came up for renewal in 2003. The incumbent was TV3. Critically, however, Disney’s programming—in the words of TVNZ’s Caradus—“hadn’t really been performing” during the two seasons leading up to the renewal date. Thus, when TVNZ declared its interest in taking over the output deal (which, in New Zealand, is for all Disney shows), TV3 did not put up much of a fight and TVNZ ultimately paid a very modest price in successfully capturing the rights.51 A similar series of events occurred in the UK the following year, although Disney’s output deal is structured somewhat differently in that market: Channel 4 signed a three-year deal with Buena Vista which allowed it “to cherry-pick two [new Disney] shows each year without having to bid against other broadcasters.”52 The two new shows that Channel 4 selected each year would then be tied to Channel 4 for two years at a fixed per-episode rate. Like TVNZ, Channel 4 faced only very modest local competition when negotiating this deal. In 2004–2005, from amongst Disney’s new offerings, Channel 4 picked Lost and Desperate Housewives; in 2005–2006, it took Ugly Betty and Brothers and Sisters; and in the last year of the deal, 2006–2007, it took Reaper and Dirty Sexy Money.53 From the perspective of TVNZ and Channel 4, what probably looked like reasonable prices at the time of the deals being struck came to look like exceptional prices by the middle of 2005, with Lost, Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy having all proven huge hits for TVNZ in New Zealand (as for Disney’s ABC in the US), and with the first two of these performing equally well for Channel 4 in the UK (where Grey’s Anatomy airs on Living TV). Thus, in retrospect, Caradus admits that TVNZ effectively “stole” the Disney deal from TV3; and Channel 4 is widely acknowledged to have also hit the jackpot, its reported payment of just £200,000 per episode for each show becoming “notorious” among UK acquisitions editors.54 While it is impossible, for a whole series of reasons, to determine how much advertising revenue TVNZ and Channel 4 each secured through transmission of these Disney shows in 2005 and 2006, what is certain is that the lion’s share of this economic value was captured and retained locally—by TVNZ and Channel 4—rather than by the originating US studio.55

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Why, then, did I suggest above that the US studios typically now possess significantly more leverage in the pricing context than a decade ago? That this is the case is clear from what happened in 2006 when the Disney output deal came up for renewal once again in New Zealand, and when Channel 4’s existing UK agreement with Disney specifically for Lost and Desperate Housewives also expired. For, with, now, a strongly performing program portfolio, Buena Vista found itself in a position to exploit its increased leverage, which it clearly had not been at the time of the previous negotiations in each market.56 In both countries, the main competition to the incumbents came from the local satellite broadcaster, namely BSkyB in the UK and Sky in New Zealand (which share, in News Corp, a principal shareholder). This competition for the Disney shows put unprecedented upwards pressure on prices in both places. In New Zealand, TVNZ decided that it could not afford to lose any of its three Disney hits, each of which airs on TV2, and it renewed the full output deal.57 In the UK, however, Channel 4 concluded that at the prices BSkyB was prepared to pay, it could afford to keep only one of Desperate Housewives and Lost, opting for the former.58 For this, though, it had to stump up a reported £975,000 per episode, far higher than it had ever previously paid for a US acquisition (including Friends).59 To put this spend in context, while the show represents less than half of one percent of Channel 4’s original programming broadcast schedule (by hours), the outlay of over £22m per annum will alone have accounted for between 4 and 5 percent of the broadcaster’s annual program budget of approximately £500m in 2007.60 So much, then, for the days of it costing UK broadcasters eight times more to produce a drama series locally than to acquire “cheap” US equivalents.61 While the 2006 Disney renegotiations are arguably the most high-profile instances, in New Zealand and the UK, of increased local competition among broadcasters augmenting US studio power and hence increasing program export price, it is important to note both that these examples are not the only ones from those two territories, and that similar trends are apparent in other major US export markets. In the UK, for example, BSkyB has since outbid the incumbent UK broadcaster, Five, for the third season of Fox’s Prison Break.62 Fox has also extracted its pound of flesh in New Zealand, where, in 2008, competition between TV3 and TVNZ for the Fox output deal sent the import price soaring before the latter eventually pulled out.63 Meanwhile, in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset forked out an unprecedented combined amount of US$1.1bn in 2007 to secure four-year output deals with Warner Bros. and Universal, covering all Italian television and new-media rights to the studios’ films and television shows, including both forthcoming productions and substantial portions of their respective libraries.64

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Finally, two features of these developments seem particularly important to highlight. One concerns the changing nature of broadcaster “competition” itself: both BSkyB in the UK and Sky in New Zealand (and, in the background, News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch himself) have been called many things by competitors, but “corespective” is assuredly not one of them. Second, the US studios’ stronger hand in price negotiations—which is seeing their pricing power becoming increasingly aligned with their power in other political-economic dimensions—will of course lead to a substantive shift in the geographies of value capture in the international television economy. As the studios cement their ability to charge premium export prices for premium program product, the value created in export markets through such products will, more and more, be repatriated back to the US.

PLACE, PROCESS AND PRICE I now turn back, again, to media economics and its model-based approach to explaining program export pricing. I do so in order to suggest that this approach is limited not only for its conception of power. By looking at pricing in the UK and New Zealand markets, I argue that it is also limited from a geographical perspective. But this is not, I stress, a simple repetition of my earlier argument about “anaemic geographies” within media economics. There, I suggested that geographies (and specifically, scales) were present, but not adequately presented, in media economists’ arguments; here, I discuss an entirely different set of geographies, which in this case are excluded. Before doing so, however, I think it is helpful to provide some more substance to the picture of precisely what it is that is being priced and bought in these television trade transactions. At its most basic it is the exclusive right to broadcast a program in the domestic market. But we have already seen that things are not quite so simple: there is, for one thing, the matter of which broadcast television window or windows (first or second run, pay or free-to-air) the rights cover. And the rights issue has become increasingly complex in recent years with the advent of Internetbased distribution. Generally speaking, international distributors try to “disaggregate” or “unbundle” program rights by platform as far as practicably and commercially possible, for they see this as a means to maximize value. Moreover, where Internet rights are successfully sold separately to broadcast television rights, distributors normally insist on a time delay on the former so as not to erode the (separate) value of the latter.65 In practice, however, acquiring broadcasters, and especially the powerful US broadcasters in their relatively limited import business, will often insist on bundling new media rights with any television acquisition.66 Overall,

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the picture on rights allocation—and its impact on pricing—remains fluid and extremely variable. A second area in which export deals vary widely is the size of the deal. By “size,” I mean not the economic value but rather the volume of programming being acquired. This might seem an incidental consideration, but two aspects of deal volume are, in fact, highly material. One concerns the question of whether programs are being sold individually. Often, as with TVNZ’s ongoing output deal with Disney’s Buena Vista discussed above, they are not. Packaging is important because it can and does lead to the inclusion of programming that would otherwise remain unsold. Such programs, as Channel 4’s Gill Hay notes, are essentially “baggage,” which realize value for the distributor only through cross-subsidization by the programs that acquiring broadcasters actually want, and which thus seal package deals (the “drivers”).67 Typically, an individual buyer or seller will, at any one time, use a variety of different frameworks for bundling—or not bundling—the programs it imports or exports. TVNZ, for example, has three main categories of import deal. First, it makes “spot purchases” of individual programs, which account for only 10–15% of all its acquired programming. Second, it enters into one-time “major deals—for a handful of movies or, say, six programs.” And third, it has a number of output deals along the lines of the Disney deal described earlier. These last are normally multi-year deals, where TVNZ does not know precisely what programming it is paying for beyond the first year. Such deals come in two main forms: with the US studios, they are usually “full deals” on which TVNZ takes all qualifying programming; with UK exporters (TVNZ’s other main suppliers), the deals normally stipulate a minimum guaranteed spend per annum.68 The other important aspect of deal volume is deal duration. Some deals are for one year only; others are for two years; and some are for three or (very occasionally) even longer. Friends went through a total of four rounds of renegotiation during the 10 years of Warner’s UK distribution deal with Channel 4.69 The price implications of deal duration vary greatly, but if we think about Disney’s output deals in the UK and New Zealand the key issues can readily be brought into focus. If renewal in each market had come earlier than 2006, Buena Vista might, for example, have been able to extract its price premiums earlier, and hence for a longer period; however, it is by no means obvious that BSkyB and Sky would have been quite as competitive at an earlier date, and nor is it clear that the market value of the programs in question would have appreciated to the same degree as it had by the time the renewals actually occurred. In short, timing matters, and the studios’ preference has, on the whole, gravitated towards shorter rather than longer deals—the gains from quickly recapitalizing strongly performing programs seen to outweigh the losses associated with earlier renewals on weaker performers.

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Missing geographies The Hoskins et al model of television program export pricing clearly acknowledges the fact that geography is important. Its central tenet is that US export prices vary with population size, wealth, buyer power, and “cultural distance” from the US, and it assumes that we can somehow quantify each of these variables for different places. If places did not differ in these regards, the model would be meaningless. Nevertheless, I want to suggest here that this model-based approach to economic explanation offers us a reductive and hence limited geography in two key respects. First, there is no recognition of the specificity of place in all its economic, historical, political and cultural specificity. More precisely, economic models such as this one neglect real places, instead rendering locations and regions simply as points along, or spaces in, an abstract economy. This seems limited if only because such specificity clearly impacts price. We need to be more sensitive to the importance of local variation because the specificity of place can very often override, in a way that models do not allow, variables deemed of more generic significance. This factor manifests itself in a number of different ways, and BBC Worldwide’s Director of Investment, Matt Forde, relates a peculiar but revealing example. One of the franchises handled by Worldwide is the international distribution of the BBC’s coverage of the annual World Professional Darts Championship. One of the countries that has long taken the coverage is the Netherlands, and historically at prices similar to those it paid for other minority-interest sporting events from the UK. However, after a number of years, Worldwide grasped that darts was hugely—and disproportionately— popular in the Netherlands, and that its coverage there attracted very large television audiences. With this singularly local knowledge in hand, Worldwide tripled its license fee at the next round of renegotiation.70 But the specificity of place, and its economic materiality, is not always so transparent. Anyone who has worked in or researched the world of international television program distribution will know that this world essentially hangs on a web of personal relationships among a relatively small network of buyers and sellers in specific locations.71 The nature of these personal relationships in place, and between places, is fundamentally important to the overall transnational television economy and the myriad price relations that ultimately constitute it. If we did not recognize this fact, it would, for instance, be extremely difficult to explain why, in the vast majority of cases, program sale contracts are renewed with the importing incumbent when they come up for renegotiation. (Cases of distributors switching to competing local broadcasters, while they attract considerable press commentary, remain relatively rare.) The development of enduring relationships between individuals on the buying and selling sides is, in this regard, very significant.

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So, too, according to buyers, is the specific place-based association—even symbiosis—that often emerges between broadcast channels and particular program imports. For audiences, channels can readily become associated with, and defined in terms of, individual shows, while those shows in turn become known by the channels where they air. Breaking such tight connections is not undertaken lightly, as in most cases “it is really in nobody’s interest—not the distributor, not the local broadcaster.”72 In these examples place is important in absolute terms, but it is clear that place can also be important in a relative sense. What I mean by this is that there are in fact very few absolutes when it comes to the pricing of television program exports. The microeconomic model may suggest absolutes (local price being driven directly by local market size, wealth, and so on), but in reality what happens in one place is often tied less to the attributes of the place in question than to how that place is positioned with respect to other places. If this sounds obscure, an example should help. Thus, major UK television exporters such as BBC Worldwide generally price “off” US export prices. US shows, says Worldwide’s Forde, are “the benchmark—that price is the maximum the market in question will take.” What this means in practice is that the likes of Worldwide “try to find out—and we normally can—what the US is getting for Lost in, say, Estonia, and then we go from there. We come after the US studios in the international pecking order.”73 Pricing, in this reading, is a strictly relational affair. That economists tend to overlook the specificity of place, in either absolute or relative terms, is well documented.74 Indeed, most economists are not unaware of this; economics, they say, is about the search for repeating patterns or generalizable processes, which, because of local differences, may not play out in exactly the same way from place to place, but which are important to identify and model nonetheless. Where geographers tend to depart from economists is in their insistence that one can never adequately understand—or, more importantly, intervene productively in—a place and its economy unless one takes proper stock of its unique characteristics. But as geographers such as Ron Martin have pointed out, economics can be seen to be ageographical in more ways than one; in other words, a flattening of place is only part of the (perceived) problem. My particular interest in Martin’s argument is with his observation that while economists recognize that economic processes operate unevenly across space, they rarely allow that such processes are “themselves spatially differentiated and in part geographically constituted.”75 Not only the outcomes of economic processes, then, but the processes themselves, can differ across space, not least because “geographical differences between places,” in Eric Sheppard’s words, create different “conditions of possibility for economic action.”76 The last part of this section of the chapter is therefore taken up with pursuing this suggestion in the specific context of the pricing of television program

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exports, and counterposing the idea of differential economic processes with the model-based approach to pricing discussed earlier. The key here, geographers argue, is that to understand the ways in which economic processes differ from place to place we need to consider them “not as vague and abstract forces somewhere ‘in the air,’ but as real and lived experiences on the ground.”77 Interestingly, this has been the approach adopted by an increasing number of students of the media economy, in relation both to international program trade and to other important areas of that economy.78 But in what ways can we envisage program pricing as lived experience? To an extent we have already encountered this idea, in the fact that international program trade is filtered—and experienced—through a small number of transnational, interpersonal relationships. But are the processes through which prices are actually reached, and hence the ways such relationships are played out, materially different in different export markets? Again, the comparison between New Zealand and the UK can be an instructive one, particularly where new US shows are concerned. Not surprisingly given its size, the New Zealand market has always been a relatively peripheral one for the US studios, dwarfed in financial significance by the major markets of Japan and Western Europe. Hence the pricing of new programs being sold into New Zealand has generally been a relatively simple affair. If we refer back to the work of Hoskins et al, we can find a table (reprinted from the trade magazine Variety) showing the 1985 prices of half-hour US programs on the international market.79 This, essentially, was a simple matrix, showing the range of program prices (minimum to maximum) for different export markets, in most of which the range was very small (from $90 to $100 for Algeria, for instance, and from $8,500 to $10,000 for France). The reason for mentioning this matrix is this: for the bulk of programming, in the majority of international markets (and especially “small” markets such as New Zealand), the US studios’ international distributors still use precisely such matrices to anchor new program price negotiations—and, in many cases, to simply fix program price—twenty years later. Where this is the case, the process of price setting is fairly straightforward and, indeed, relatively impersonal. It bears pointing out, nonetheless, that the pricing matrices or tables used are, and have for a long time been, far more complex than this simple historical example allows. Thus more recent studies of US program export have reprinted tables highlighting two additional parameters involved in price setting: in the first place, the identity of the acquiring broadcaster (national terrestrial networks, for instance, with their wider distribution, will typically be expected to pay more than pay-television networks); and in the second place, the genre of program being traded (drama generally being the most expensive—after film—and children’s the cheapest).80 Moreover, interviews with both buyers and sellers in the UK and New Zealand confirm the sig-

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nificance of further variables, one being the time slot in which the acquiring broadcaster will be scheduling the program in question.81 But the fact remains that in smaller markets such as New Zealand, the process of sale and pricing of new programs is, typically, quite uncomplicated. The UK, meanwhile, throws up an altogether different set of processes. One key factor to consider here is that new US programs rarely now get the chance to prove their worth in advance of international distribution: where international buyers used to wait to see how the US broadcast networks’ latest offerings performed in September, October and November before making purchases, almost all US output is now bought at the pilot stage (in May through July), reflecting the increased competition for such products in those international markets.82 Export price bands for the first season (sometimes two) of a new program are thus established, now, much earlier than ever before, and the critical event in this regard is May’s week-long LA Screenings, when international buyers descend on Los Angeles to view in the region of 40–50 pilots and begin the process of negotiating new purchases.83 The Screenings are central to the wider set of processes through which US television trade with the UK occurs and program prices for the UK market are ultimately arrived at.84 This is not, I emphasize, to suggest that New Zealand’s buyers stay away from the Screenings; they do not, and they are joined there not only by UK and Canadian and German broadcaster executives but buyers from “Hong Kong and Jamaica and Estonia and Dubai and almost everywhere in between.” My argument, rather, is that the Screenings play an entirely different role for UK buyers and the UK market than they do for New Zealand; and, reciprocally, UK buyers (and the UK market) in turn fulfil a very different function than New Zealand’s buyers for the studios’ overall international trade business. This is simply because the UK is the most lucrative of all America’s television export markets, and the decisions made by the UK’s leading buyers can increasingly be seen to guide the development and economics of the US program export market as a whole. That is, negotiations specifically between the studios and UK buyers contribute in large part to setting wider program price benchmarks and expectations. And while in New Zealand the purchasing and pricing dynamics are not quite as derivative and basic as in Estonia—where “they don’t so much pick shows as buy them by the metre”—it is clear that transactions relating to the New Zealand market are far less formative than UK-focused market developments. All of which is to argue that economic processes demonstrably are not the same from place to place. There is a substantive difference not only between the prices paid for US programming in New Zealand and the UK, but also between the processes that generate those prices. In concluding this section, however, we should recognize, equally, that in some areas of program trade, economic processes in different places appear to be converging. Thus, if the dynamics behind the sale of new programs differ markedly, the nature

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of the negotiations involved in the resale or renewal of existing, successful programs is becoming increasingly consistent. Here, as with the renewals of the Disney output deal discussed earlier, there are no tables or matrices to inform the pricing process. Pricing simply comes down to negotiations between the program distributor on the one hand and one or more local broadcaster on the other. What is clear is that the US studios, in recognition of the increasing contribution of international markets to program revenues, are taking a much more active interest in the workings of those markets to enable them to make more informed demands of their local trading partners. And, significantly, this applies not only to major international markets such as the UK, where, for several years, as Channel 4’s Hay observes, US distributors have been “highly analytical” in their approach to setting price expectations.85 It is also the case now for smaller markets such as New Zealand. Indeed, Chris Caradus admits to having been “very surprised” by the level of detailed local knowledge—down to TVNZ’s individual advertising rate-cards—marshalled by Buena Vista when it came to renegotiate the existing Disney deal with TVNZ in 2006.86 In such cases, the studios’ strategy increasingly is to assess the local market, make estimates as to the amount of revenue their program (or programs) will deliver in that market, and then set a price according to the proportion of those local revenues to which they feel they (as the distributor) are entitled. Negotiations then ensue. If variables such as a country’s population size and wealth lurk in the background of such arithmetics, they certainly do not figure explicitly; sector advertising and subscription revenues, broadcaster advertising discounts, and program viewing shares constitute much the more relevant, immediate currencies.

ORIENTATIONS OF “MEDIA EMPIRE” We have seen both in this chapter and in chapter 2 that the price of imported television programming is a major issue in non-US markets for a whole host of reasons. There is the matter, discussed latterly, of these import costs increasing as domestic competition intensifies. There are also a whole host of complex political and cultural considerations, as noted in chapter 2 in the New Zealand context. But wherever one may care to look, one concern has, for many years now, been predominant: the fact that, typically, it is considerably cheaper to buy US programming than to make original programs domestically, and that this has inevitable consequences for the health of the local production sector. In this final part of the chapter I seek to unsettle this pervasive discourse, not so much because it is “inaccurate,” but because it rests on yet another anaemic geography. What is the nature of this geography? The easiest way

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to see what I mean is by thinking about what exactly one is buying or creating in each case. In the case of the US program import, one is acquiring the right to distribute the program in question in the domestic market—and only in the domestic market. But when a UK or New Zealand producer creates a new program, they create the potential to distribute that program globally. A direct comparison of the price of one (the import) with the cost of the other (the local production) is, in this sense, unfair, because the geographical scope of the associated markets is, in principle, radically different. There is, in other words, a fundamental geographical slippage, very seldom acknowledged, in the argument that “imports are cheaper”; it is more meaningful to say that imports are cheaper, but in part because one is paying only for local distribution rights.87 Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that buying US imports—except in the still relatively rare circumstance that competition has significantly inflated import prices—is economically preferable, on the whole, to producing programming locally in non-US markets. But this is emphatically not because those imports are categorically “cheaper”; as we have seen, this is a simplistic and false comparison. Rather, the economics are superior because, in most cases, the profitability of the import option is greater, and profitability is a function of both costs and revenues. In the case of the US import, a New Zealand broadcaster is paying a “New Zealand price” and is realizing New Zealand-based revenues; in the case of the local production, by contrast, the producer is incurring a “global cost” but is seldom realizing global revenues. This, then, is the nub of the issue: the fact that aside from a steady stream of sales to the Cook Islands and the odd international success further afield, television programming produced in New Zealand is normally only ever sold in New Zealand.88 And this recognition allows us to entirely reorient our analysis. Ultimately, importing US programs is more profitable not so much because they are “cheaper” but because exporting local product is so difficult. If we are interested in the question of power in international television, therefore, we need to ask whether our analytical concern should be less about the US (allegedly) exploiting power imbalances to price unfairly in overseas markets (the “dumping” argument), and more about the inability of almost all international producers to penetrate and profit from the US market. For, given the fact that the US market is far and away the largest national television market by value, it is precisely this inability to make money in America that restricts the headline value of television programming produced elsewhere—and which therefore makes US imports “cheaper.” For me, this question actually raises a much broader set of issues. Discussions of power and trade in the international media economy, both critical (“cultural imperialism” and its antecedents) and otherwise, remain largely fixated on the influence of the US and its media products in other places, notwithstanding the development of niche literatures focused on

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such phenomena as Latin American telenovelas and purported evidence of contra-flows.89 That is, to the extent that scholars still think and write about not just “cultural imperialism” but, perhaps more usefully and accurately, America and Hollywood’s global media empire, the emphasis remains on the centrifugal forces of such empire. But what, it seems to me important to ask, about the centripetal forces of media empire? Should we not seek to assess the relevance (or otherwise) of power in relation to international producers’ access to and penetration of the US television market? In Part III of the book and, particularly the book’s Coda, I confront this question at greater length. I do so there mainly in relation to the UK and the experience of its leading producers and exporters in their dealings with the domestic US television market. The UK example is especially interesting in this regard in part because it is so unique—more or less alone amongst other exporting nations, the UK has in fact enjoyed a measure of success in “opening up” American television. But even in the case of the UK, I argue, we need to be very careful not to exaggerate such achievements. I emphasize in those later discussions, and also want to stress here, that the question of international producers making headway in the US market is not merely a question of export volumes—of the degree to which such producers have, or have not, been able to actually get their product into the US market. If we want to think specifically about questions of power in the context of such trade, then we must consider not only the volume of such trade—America, historically, importing less than 2% of its television programming by volume—but also the terms on which such trade occurs.90 And while the terms of trade obviously extend well beyond price considerations, price, or the relative distribution of value, is clearly a central concern. In short, the question I want to begin to address here is whether power, or a lack of it, is the reason why internationally based television producers continue to extract relatively little value from the domestic US market. Almost inevitably, the answer to that question is, in my view, both yes and no. Yes, we need to consider the exercise of power in various forms to understand why the US television market remains so dominated by US producers; and insofar as I deal with such dominance in this book, it is mainly aspects of this yes answer that interest me, in relation both to New Zealand producers (discussed briefly here) and, more fully, to UK producers (chapters 10 and 11 and the Coda). Nevertheless, I think it has been persuasively argued that the answer to my question is not only in the affirmative—that there are various factors non-related or only peripherally related to power that also help to explain the resistance of US television to foreign product. Some factors, such as the longer history of the US market and its much earlier multichannel growth (and hence earlier demand for large quantities of programming), are relatively straightforward, while others are less so, but much has been written on this score.91

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Where New Zealand is concerned, the basic state of affairs is that there is relatively little television export trade, despite various industry and government efforts to boost audio-visual export earnings—efforts that have of course borne significantly more fruit in the film sector.92 When the domestic broadcasting landscape was shifted towards the private sector in the late 1980s, TVNZ initially put significant effort into distributing New Zealand programming (and especially its own) overseas through TVNZ International, but “significant financial losses” saw it closing this business in 1993 and subsequently losing what presence it had gained in international markets, despite transfer of the in-house catalogue to the UK’s HIT Plc.93 Meanwhile, of the hundreds of independent television production companies in New Zealand, only “perhaps 10” look “seriously” at trying to access international markets.94 For “the vast majority of producers, the international market has remained out of reach.”95 And among the small minority of New Zealand producers that do actively target international sales, including TVNZ itself, the US is regarded as by some margin the most difficult market in which to make headway; most international program sales are to Australia (especially in the factual and reality genres) and Europe (family entertainment, documentary, lifestyle). For a host of reasons that ultimately boil down to a lack of substantive leverage, the US is seen to be (and experienced as), in the words of TVNZ’s Content Licensing Manager Leigh Wilson, “just too hard.”96 This is not to suggest that New Zealand–originated programs and formats are never successfully sold into the US market.97 They are—but the number of such sales is extremely small and, perhaps even more revealingly, we can see from individual examples of such sales that New Zealand individuals and companies generally lack the power to realize much of the value thus generated. Perhaps the two highest-profile international successes from New Zealand television in the last decade have been Popstars and The Chair—each of which was distributed as a format rather than as a program per se—and although their histories are very different, the underlying themes illustrated by those histories are broadly consistent.98 Popstars was a talent-contest-based reality-television program conceived of and first produced in New Zealand by Jonathan Dowling in partnership with his co-producer Bill Toepfer, which aired on TVNZ (TV2) in 1999. From the New Zealand program a Popstars format was then developed for international distribution, and this program format was ultimately sold into more than 30 countries, including the US (making it the first ever New Zealand format sale into that market). While the program lasted for only one season in New Zealand itself, and for only two seasons in the US (where it was essentially superseded from 2002 by the hugely popular American Idol), it enjoyed longer-term success elsewhere and remains on air in both France and Germany.

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From my perspective, the interesting feature of the Popstars story is the matter of how and, more particularly, where the value from its international distribution was realized. Creators Dowling and Toepfer recognized relatively early that the format could potentially be successfully exported, but at the same time they felt that neither they nor, more tellingly, other local industry participants (including TVNZ) enjoyed the necessary resources, skills and contacts to successfully drive such an export initiative. This belief led Dowling to sell the worldwide rights to the concept to Australian company Screentime.99 And it soon became very clear that in doing so, Dowling had undersold the format, so failing to capture a material share of the value that he and his partner had created. Thus, when America’s Warner Brothers network picked up Popstars in July 2000, and the New Zealand media described it as a “coup” for Dowling since he was entitled to a royalty payment, Dowling himself admitted that he stood “at the end of a long food chain” and that as a result there would only be “a little bit of food.” Local New Zealand producer Richard Driver reinforced this somewhat gloomy message, confirming that the sale of Popstars into America was “not significant in earnings or export dollars” and that perhaps the best the New Zealand production community could hope for was “to maybe get a few more meetings with people who otherwise may have . . . considered us as people from the bottom of the world.”100 Two years later the New Zealand media had cooled rather on this so-called “coup,” noting that while the original show had been financed by NZ On Air, the format had then been “gleefully exported by Australian company Screentime,” while New Zealand itself “seems to have endured more of the overseas versions of the show than any other country has bothered to screen.”101 That New Zealand producers typically operate from a relatively disempowered position in the international media economy is also evidenced by the history of The Chair and, more especially, that of its New Zealand producer Touchdown Productions. The Chair was a game show developed by Touchdown in late 2001, and the format was soon sold successfully to various international broadcasters, including, again, in the US (where it was picked up by ABC and hosted by legendary tennis player John McEnroe, but where it was cancelled before the end of its full 13-episode first season). By financing the program’s development and pilots, Touchdown retained all intellectual property rights in the project, and it managed international distribution of the format in-house.102 It was, by any measure, a great success for New Zealand television and its production community, and it led Touchdown’s chief executive Julie Christie to make some fairly grand claims. “I guess the term they would probably use is that we punch outside our weight (whatever they say in boxing),” she said in 2002. “Everyone knows about us. Sometimes they refer to us as ‘the new Endemol.’”103 Commentators broadly concurred, Geoff Lealand writing that the story of The

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Chair proved that “small players can sometimes occupy a central role in the complex world of the international format trade.”104 And yet the subsequent history of Touchdown itself requires us to temper these assertions. From the time of the original creation of The Chair, Christie had made it very clear that she and her company wanted “to be an international rather than just local player.”105 But The Chair did not turn Touchdown into such an international player. Not only did Touchdown fail to create any subsequent, internationally successful formats (its only other widely exported format, Treasure Island, pre-dated The Chair). Far more significantly, Christie took the decision in 2006 to sell the company to the much larger Dutch production company Eyeworks. And she took this decision, it seems, precisely because she felt unable to turn Touchdown into a substantive international force—or even to place it on the map of the international media economy—without the leverage afforded by an established international outfit. We know this because Christie has since said of the sale to Eyeworks, simply but revealingly, “I sold because I want to be part of a global television industry.”106 Anyone who had read the 2003 report “Taking on the world” by the New Zealand government-appointed Screen Production Industry Taskforce would probably have been unsurprised by this turn of events. Appointed by government in May 2002 “to identify the major barriers to growth in foreign exchange earnings” from the film and television sectors and to suggest “how these barriers might be removed,” the Taskforce was chaired by Christie, and its report makes for fascinating reading.107 In particular, it recognized that New Zealand’s television producers, for all Touchdown’s individual success with The Chair, essentially remained at the mercy of more powerful international players. “If emerging production companies,” it insisted, “are to realise the full income-earning potential of their productions, they need to understand how to form alliances with experienced, compatible international distributors who are dedicated to maximising returns for producers.” Popstars is not mentioned by name here, but clearly burns in the memory of the report’s authors. This is clear from what follows: “There is a very real risk that the naivety of inexperienced producers could result in less favourable distribution deals which have the flow-on effect of less revenue for the producer.”108 It is also important to note that in pursuing her chosen course of action—taking on an overseas production company as principal, controlling shareholder—Christie was following a well-established path for New Zealand producers with serious international aspirations. Several years before Touchdown, the management of both South Pacific Pictures and NHNZ had come to the same realization that only through amalgamation into larger and more powerful international entities might it be possible to forge a long-term presence in overseas markets in general and the US market in particular. The first to move in this direction was NHNZ, a majority holding in which, as I discuss

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at greater length in chapter 10, was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in 1997 (News acquiring the outstanding shares in 1999). Then, in 1998, John Barnett led a buyout of South Pacific Pictures from TVNZ. He was given the option, as he recently recalled, of “taking complete ownership,” but he knew the wider marketplace well and he realized that it would be “critical” to have a major international player as a partner.109 In the event he teamed up with Chrysalis Pictures of the UK. For both NHNZ and South Pacific, then, as later for Touchdown, it was clear that to succeed internationally it was necessary to relinquish locally situated control. Interestingly, and in conclusion, it is notable that South Pacific, with UK rather than US ownership affiliation, has never achieved the level of success specifically in the US market that NHNZ has gone on to enjoy. Being part of News Corp has opened doors for NHNZ that might otherwise have remained closed, as they have for other New Zealand production companies. I make this observation because, as I go on to argue in the book’s Coda, even UK production companies can be seen to have struggled to capture value from the US market to the extent one might have expected; and I emphasize the word “even” because producers from the UK, as noted earlier in this chapter, have had more success in the US than those from any other international territory. I asked, at the very outset of this chapter, how power is actually exercised across space in the media economy. In finishing this chapter, and in beginning to focus more on the centripetal forces of US media empire, we can now perhaps suggest that power involves the ability to keep out (of the US) meaningful competition—as well as to influence export price (this chapter) and to make foreign policy (chapter 4).

NOTES 1. “BBC snaps up Heroes second series before airing first,” Broadcast, May 24, 2007. 2. J. Steemers, Selling television: British television in the global marketplace, BFI Publishing, London, 2004, p. 10. 3. My reading of media economics, and in particular its treatment of the audiovisual sector, is based primarily on the Journal of Media Economics and five key texts: H. Vogel, Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986 (a seventh edition was published in 2007); B. Owen and S. Wildman, Video Economics, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992; A. Alexander, J. Owers and R. Carveth (eds.) Media economics: Theory and practice, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, 1998; G. Doyle, Understanding media economics, Sage, London, 2002; and C. Hoskins, S. McFadyen and A. Finn, Media economics: Applying economics to new and traditional media, Sage, London, 2004. 4. M. Sparke, In the space of theory: Postfoundational geographies of the nation-state, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2005.

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5. See especially chapters 10 and 11. 6. E.g. M. van Elteren, “U.S. Cultural Imperialism Today: Only a Chimera?” SAIS Review, 23, 2003, 169–88. 7. C. Bernstein, “The leisure empire: American entertainment has gone global and is changing both those who consume it and those who create it,” Time, December 24, 1990, 56–59; M. Fraser, Weapons of mass distraction: Soft power and American empire, Thomas Dunne Books, New York, 2005. The quotation is from Bernstein, p. 56. 8. See especially O. Boyd-Barrett, “Media imperialism: Towards an international framework for an analysis of media systems,” in J. Curran, M. Gurevitch and J. Woollacott (eds.), Mass communication and society (Edward Arnold, London, 1977, 116–35), and “Cyberspace, globalization and empire,” Global Media and Communication, 2, 2006, 21–41; J. Straubhaar, “Beyond media imperialism: Asymmetrical inter-dependence and cultural proximity,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 8, 1991, 39–59. 9. H. Schiller, Mass communications and American empire, A. M. Kelley, New York, 1969, and Communications and Cultural Domination, M. E. Sharpe, New York, 1976. The quotation is from Communications and Cultural Domination, p. 9. 10. I should emphasize “those broadly in agreement” since, as noted, many writers fundamentally disagree with Schiller. J. Tomlinson, Cultural imperialism: A critical introduction, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1991, provides a good overview of the various critiques, while perhaps the best-known and most influential of the many books that came, from the early 1990s, to prefer the label “globalization” to that of “cultural imperialism,” is Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1997. 11. H. Schiller, “Not yet the post-imperialist era,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 8, 1991, 13–28. 12. T. Levitt, “The globalization of markets,” Harvard Business Review, May–June 1983, 2–11, at p. 3. 13. C. Hoskins, S. McFadyen and A. Finn, Global Television and Film: An Introduction to the Economics of the Business, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, p. 69. 14. Schiller, Mass communications and American empire, p. 101. 15. P. Schlesinger, “Trading in fictions: What do we know about British television imports and exports?” European Journal of Communication, 1, 1986, 263–87, at p. 271. 16. NZ On Air, “The future of public broadcasting: The experience in 6 countries,” 2003, available at http://www.nzonair.govt.nz/images/media/about/ 6countries_2003.pdf (retrieved December 2005), p. 10. 17. E.g. most recently, C. Jordan, “Who shot J.R.’s ratings? The rise and fall of the 1980s prime-time soap opera,” Television & New Media, 8, 2007, 68–87, at pp. 80–81. 18. “A pittance” is from “American TV rebounds worldwide,” Broadcasting & Cable, 18 September 2006. 19. On the former, see chapter 5; on the latter, R. Collins, “Wall-to-wall Dallas: The US-UK trade in television,” Screen, 27, May–August 1986, 66–77. 20. The seminal and still widely cited paper is C. Hoskins, R. Mirus and W. Rozeboom, “U.S. television programs in the international market: unfair pricing?” Journal of Communication, 39(2), 1989, 55–75.

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21. Sparke, In the space of theory. 22. Some economists have shown caution in asserting that “national” program cost equates to the marginal cost; Gillian Doyle (Understanding media economics, p. 92), for example, claims merely that “marginal costs seem in some ways to provide the [most] relevant benchmark.” But the leading authorities on media economics have shown no such hesitation. Most notably, Colin Hoskins and co-authors have repeatedly argued, over a span of nearly twenty years, that marginal cost is the appropriate comparator for export price. See, for example, Hoskins, Mirus and Rozeboom, “U.S. television programs in the international market,” p. 70, and Hoskins, McFadyen and Finn, Media economics, p. 322. 23. Gill Hay, Channel 4 (Deputy Director of Acquisitions), interview with author, August 31, 2006. 24. Hoskins, Mirus and Rozeboom, “U.S. television programs in the international market,” p. 61. 25. Interview with author, August 31, 2006. 26. See, for instance, the Wall Street Journal’s “College Journal” on “Broadcasting & Entertainment” at http://www.collegejournal.com/researchindustries/researchindustries/entertainment-v.html (retrieved March 2007). 27. J. Tunstall, “International-regional-national: The national media system as the lead player,” Global Media and Communication, 3, 2007, 321–24, at p. 321. 28. P. Krugman, Geography and trade, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991, pp. 71, 69. I say “ironically” because Krugman’s “geographical economics” has itself been subjected to searching criticism by geographers on various grounds, many of which amount to the suggestion that it, too, is fundamentally “anaemic” from a geographical perspective. See especially R. Martin, “The new ‘geographical turn’ in economics: Some critical reflections,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 23, 1999, 65–91; A. Scott, “A perspective of economic geography,” Journal of Economic Geography, 4, 2004, 479–99. 29. Thanks to Steve Wildman for this observation. 30. See especially C. Hoskins and R. Mirus, “Reasons for the U.S. dominance of the international trade in television programmes,” Media, Culture & Society, 10, 1998, 499–515; D. Waterman, “World television trade: The economic effects of privatization and new technology,” Telecommunications Policy, 22, 1988, 141–51; S. Wildman and S. Siwek, International trade in films and television programs, Ballinger, Cambridge, MA, 1988; B. Frank, “A note on the international dominance of the U.S. in the trade in movies and television fiction,” Journal of Media Economics, 5, 1992, 31–38; Owen and Wildman, Video economics, chapter 2; S. Wildman, “Trade liberalization and policy for media industries: A theoretical examination of media flows,” Canadian Journal of Communication, 20, 1995, 367–88. 31. Hoskins, Mirus and Rozeboom, “U.S. television programs in the international market.” 32. See, originally, Hoskins and Mirus, “Reasons for the U.S. dominance of the international trade in television programmes”; more recently, P. Sora, “China’s consumption of Korean television dramas: An empirical test of the ‘cultural discount’ concept,” Korea Journal, 44, 2004, 265–90, and F. Lee, “Cultural Discount and CrossCulture Predictability: Examining the Box Office Performance of American Movies in Hong Kong,” Journal of Media Economics, 19, 2006, 259–78; but see also, for a

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somewhat contrary perspective, M. Dupagne and D. Waterman, “Determinants of U.S. television fiction imports in Western Europe,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 42, 1998, 208–20. 33. Hoskins, Mirus and Rozeboom, “U.S. television programs in the international market,” p. 68. 34. D. McCloskey, The rhetoric of economics, 2nd edition, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1998. 35. Ibid., p. 113. 36. A. Sayer, Method in social science: A realist approach, Hutchinson, London, 1984, p. 179. 37. Hoskins, Mirus and Rozeboom, “U.S. television programs in the international market,” p. 68, my emphasis. 38. Sayer, Method in social science, pp. 175, 162. 39. Ibid., pp. 176 (my emphasis), 179. 40. R. Bartlett, Economics and power: an enquiry into human relations and markets, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 3, 4 (my emphasis). 41. Ibid., p. 4. 42. See especially J. Gabszewicz and J-F. Thisse (eds.), Microeconomic theories of imperfect competition: Old problems and new perspectives, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 1999. 43. There has been very little dialogue between (neoclassical) media economists and political economists of the media, although the Journal of Media Economics has made tentative moves to expedite such a conversation; see the theme issue on “The political economy of communications,” 12(2), 1999, 85–163. 44. Interview with author, December 6, 2006. 45. For a scathing, Schumpeter-inspired critique of “corespective competition” specifically in the context of the contemporary media industry, see R. McChesney, “Global media, neoliberalism, and imperialism,” Monthly Review, 52(10), March 2001, available at http://www.monthlyreview.org/301rwm.htm. 46. P. Baran and P. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1996, p. 48. 47. R. Collins, N. Garnham and G. Locksley, The economics of television: The UK case, Sage, London, 1988, p. 84. 48. Private communication from confidential industry source. 49. Interview with author, November 9, 2006. 50. On the early years of such deals and the controversy they caused, see “Europeans Revolt at U.S. Studio Tactics,” International Herald Tribune, October 8, 1997. 51. Chris Caradus (TVNZ), interview with author, November 9, 2006. 52. “How C4 let Sky get Lost,” Broadcast, October 26, 2006. 53. “C4/Disney output deal expires,” Broadcast, August 6, 2007. 54. Chris Caradus (TVNZ), interview with author, November 9, 2006; “How C4 let Sky get Lost.” 55. We can be certain of this simply by looking at what happened to the prices when they came to be renegotiated in 2006, as discussed in the following two paragraphs. But I have also had this confirmed by sources at both TVNZ and Channel 4. 56. This is clearly a critical feature of the market under discussion: namely, the existence of a time lag, of varying length, between underlying changes in relationships of

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power and the potential for materialization of those changes in new economic contracts between buyers and sellers. Hence, when executives at the international television sales arms of the major US studios are asked about the short-term revenue prospects for their businesses, they will often reply that the short-term picture is misleading, or even irrelevant. “[W]hen you talk to us or the other majors,” says Jeffery Schlesinger, president of Warner Bros International Television, “it is not about selling month to month. We have big lumbering deals in place in most markets and occasionally they come up for air to be renewed.” Cited in “Q&A with Jeffery Schlesinger, president, Warner Bros. International Television,” Multichannel News, December 20, 2007. 57. Chris Caradus (TVNZ), interview with author, November 9, 2006. 58. “How C4 let Sky get Lost.” 59. “C4 pays £40m to keep Housewives,” Broadcast, October 26, 2006. 60. “Channel 4 statement of programme policy 2006,” available at http://www. channel4.com/about4/pdf/2006_spp.pdf (retrieved March 2007). 61. Schlesinger, “Trading in fictions.” 62. “Sky One steals Prison Break,” Broadcast, June 5, 2007. 63. “TVNZ pulls out of fight for Fox,” New Zealand Herald, May 27, 2008. 64. “Mediaset pays big for studio content,” Variety, September 11, 2007. 65. Matt Creasey, Endemol UK (Head of Sales, Finished Programs), interview with author, September 13, 2006. As we have seen in chapter 4, however, piracy concerns considerably complicate this issue. 66. Gill Hay (Channel 4), interview with author, August 31, 2006. 67. Gill Hay (Channel 4), interview with author, August 31, 2006. 68. Chris Caradus (TVNZ), interview with author, November 9, 2006. 69. Gill Hay (Channel 4), interview with author, August 31, 2006. 70. Interview with author, August 31, 2006. 71. See especially Steemers, Selling television; T. Havens, “Exhibiting global television: On the business and cultural functions of global television fairs,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 47, 2003, 18–35, and Global television marketplace, BFI Publishing, London, 2006; and D. Bielby and C. Lee Harrington, “Managing culture matters: Genre, aesthetic elements, and the international market for exported television,” Poetics, 32, 2004, 73–98. 72. Gill Hay (Channel 4), interview with author, August 31, 2006. 73. Matt Forde (BBC Worldwide), interview with author, August 31, 2006. 74. See especially Martin, “The new ‘geographical turn’ in economics”; E. Sheppard, “Geography or economics? Conceptions of space, time, interdependence and agency,” in G. Clark, M. Feldman and M. Gertler (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, 99–119); and N. Coe, P. Kelly and H. Yeung, Economic geography: A contemporary introduction, Blackwell, Oxford, 2007, chapter 1. 75. Martin, “The new ‘geographical turn’ in economics,” p. 83. 76. Sheppard, “Geography or economics?” p. 102. 77. Coe, Kelly and Yeung, Economic geography, p. 16 (my emphasis). 78. For example see, respectively, Havens, Global television marketplace, and A. Lotz, “How to spend $9.3 billion in three days: Examining the upfront buying process in the production of US television culture,” Media, Culture & Society, 29, 2007, 549–67.

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79. Hoskins, Mirus and Rozeboom, “U.S. television programs in the international market,” p. 56. 80. Hoskins, McFadyen and Finn, Global Television and Film: An Introduction to the Economics of the Business, pp. 70–71; T. Miller, N. Govil, J. McMurria, R. Maxwell and T. Wang’s Global Hollywood 2, British Film Institute, London, 2005, p. 24. 81. Matt Creasey, (Endemol UK), interview with author, September 13, 2006. 82. And, it should be noted, greatly increasing the risk to the buyer: very few piloted shows turn out to be long- or even medium-term successes, with some lasting just one season, and many more being cancelled by the US networks after only a handful of episodes. A recent example of the risks involved was ITV’s acquisition of Disney’s Six Degrees, which it announced with much fanfare in July 2006, as it was to be the first primetime US series ITV had aired in nine years (“Six Degrees to air on ITV1 primetime,” Broadcast, July 6, 2006). But the show rated poorly in the US right from its first airing in September 2006, and two months later ITV announced it would be leaving the show off its winter schedule for ITV1 (“Shaps backs away from US drama on ITV1,” Broadcast, November 24, 2006). Disney ultimately cancelled the show in May 2007 having aired just eight epiodes, and ITV eventually screened these episodes on ITV1 in 2008’s “low season” (May–July)—without, to the best of my knowledge, informing viewers that there would be no season two. 83. On the screenings, see the excellent report on 2007’s event in The Observer: “Are you sitting comfortably?” July 1, 2007. All the quotations in the next paragraph are taken from this report. 84. Although 2008 was an anomaly in this respect, with the 2007–2008 writers’ strike crippling the machinery for putting the normal pilot volumes on the table by May. 85. Gill Hay (Channel 4), interview with author, August 31, 2006. 86. Chris Caradus (TVNZ), interview with author, November 9, 2006. 87. For an exception to this general neglect, see E. Noam, “Media Americanization, National Culture, and Forces of Integration,” in E. Noam and J. Millonzi (eds) The International Market in Film and Television Programs (Ablex, Norwood, NJ, 1993). 88. On the fascinating political economy of New Zealand television sales to the Cooks, see D. Varan, “The dynamics of dependency: A Polynesian encounter with television,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 16, 1999, 197–225. 89. See especially D. Biltereyst and P. Meers, “The international telenovela debate and the contra-flow argument: A reappraisal,” Media, Culture & Society, 22, 2000, 393–413. 90. T. Varis, “The international flow of television programs,” Journal of Communication, 34, 1984, 143–52. 91. The factors that are seen to underpin US dominance of the US television market are, unsurprisingly, not so different from the factors to which US dominance of international markets are typically attributed. Richard Collins provides one of the more helpful, informed and balanced summaries of such factors in his “National Culture: A Contradiction in Terms?” Canadian Journal of Communication, 16, 1991, 225–38. 92. On film export, see especially L. Shelton, The selling of New Zealand movies, Awa Press, Wellington, 2005.

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93. “Taking on the world: The report of the Screen Production Industry Taskforce,” March 2003, available at http://www.nzte.govt.nz/common/files/screen-taskforce-report.pdf (retrieved June 2007), at p. 22. 94. Leigh Wilson, TVNZ (Content Licensing Manager), interview with author, May 15, 2007. In chapter 11 I look from a very different (but complementary) angle at the reasons for New Zealand’s limited television export trade. 95. “Taking on the world,” p. 22. 96. Leigh Wilson (TVNZ), interview with author, May 15, 2007. 97. I discuss some of the key differences between finished programs and program formats at greater length in chapter 11. 98. Arguably bro’Town and Outrageous Fortune could now be included in the same category as these two, but for reasons that bear explication I have chosen not to discuss them here. (Both do feature more centrally in chapter 11.) bro’Town is an adult-targeted animated series produced by Firehorse Films with funding from NZ On Air. Shown on TV3 in New Zealand, the series has been sold to broadcasters in countries including Australia, Canada and, most recently (since 2007), the US. However, in the US, the market with which I am primarily concerned here, bro’Town has achieved only very limited exposure in comparison to Popstars and The Chair: both The Chair and Popstars aired in the US on over-the-air, commercial broadcast networks available in all television homes—the former on ABC, the latter on the WB (now superseded by the CW)—whereas bro’Town was acquired and broadcast by Link TV, a non-commercial satellite network that reaches around only one in four US homes. (Indeed, the fact that Link TV is part of a not-forprofit organization, called Link Media, says much for the level of financial value that Firehorse likely realized from the US sale.) South Pacific Pictures’ Outrageous Fortune, meanwhile, may well go on to achieve much wider US exposure than bro’Town, yet at the time of this writing (April 2008) it had not yet seen the light of day in that market. In October 2007, ABC acquired the rights to develop its own version of the show (i.e. the show was sold into the US market as a format rather than as a finished program). But show co-creator James Griffin’s words of caution at the time the deal was struck remain equally apposite in early 2008, with no details publicly available either on progress with the local US adaptation or on a potential US transmission date. “There are no scripts to read or pilots to watch,” Griffin told the New Zealand Herald (“Outrageous Fortune to be adapted for American television,” 6 October 2007). “Certainly there are no vast sums of money flowing into my bank account.” 99. “TV companies eye Aussie,” New Zealand Herald, July 7, 2000. 100. “‘Popstars’ concept a hit with US giant,” New Zealand Herald, July 15, 2000. See also “WB tunes up for ‘Popstars’ reality skein,” Variety, July 12, 2000, and “Taking on the world,” p. 28, which noted of Dowling’s deal with Screentime: “That agreement did not favour the producer and today [2003] only a fraction of the revenues from exploitation returns to New Zealand.” 101. “Worldwide wannabe: The international Popstars phenomenon,” New Zealand Herald, May 4, 2002. 102. “Taking on the world,” pp. 27–28. 103. Quoted in G. Lealand, “An export/import industry: New Zealand in the global television format business,” in A. Moran and M. Keane (eds.), Television across

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Asia: television industries, programme formats and globalization (RoutledgeCurzon, New York, 2003, 185–96), at p. 195. 104. Ibid. 105. “From reality to movie queen,” Unlimited, 64, September 1, 2004. 106. “Reality queen,” New Zealand Listener, 204(3448), June 10–16, 2006. 107. “Taking on the world”; the quotations are from the foreword by Jim Anderton, then Minister for Industry and Regional Development (n.p.). 108. Ibid., p. 21. 109. “Drama King,” Unlimited, 80, March 1, 2006.

7 Circuits of Capital

One way of approaching relations of power, space, and economy is by considering the activities of the various different types of actors in economic space. To this point in the book, three different types of actor have figured most centrally. In the preceding chapters of Part II, far and away the most prominent actor has been the corporation—sometimes publicly owned (TVNZ, Channel 4, the BBC), sometimes privately owned (BSkyB, Disney, Sky Network Television). The second key actor we have encountered has been the state and its various regulatory handmaidens; the state apparatus loomed large in all three chapters in Part I of the book, for instance. Finally, and most peripherally, we have on occasion discussed as working individuals some of the individuals employed either by the state or by corporations in the media economy; in the terms of political economy, these individuals are laborers, and, drawing on a crude classification I mobilized in the Introduction to the book, my focus has been more on “creative” or “intellectual” labor than manual or technical labor. To corporations, the state and labourers, however, most accounts of actors in economic space would add one further group: consumers.1 As effectual participants in the media economy, individuals as consumers have barely featured in my account to this juncture. In this chapter and the next (the final two of Part II), therefore, I strive to reorient our envisioning of television and economic space so as to place the consumer much closer to the focal point of analysis. To this end, I begin here by describing one hypothetical consumption moment in the modern-day UK, which will then go on to serve as the unifying hook for all the remaining discussion in the present chapter. This consumption moment is reproduced here exactly as it appeared in the paper where I first wrote about it: 241

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Our subject arrives home—a nondescript terraced house in a suburb of what could be any large British city—at just before eight on a Monday evening. Tired from a long day at the office, she slumps down, according to a depressingly familiar routine, in front of the television. What to watch? Disinclined, by temperament, to simply “surf,” she wants to make a considered choice, and reaches for the remote control to bring up the electronic programme guide that comes with her new digital satellite service. She checks to see what is showing on her two favourite channels: old standby BBC1 (the country’s most popular channel) and new favourite Sky One (the country’s most popular non-terrestrial channel). The choice, at eight o’clock, is as follows: on the former, EastEnders, a long-running English soap opera; on the latter, Battlestar Galactica, a new science-fiction series, reimagined and remodelled from the original 1978 movie and television spin-off. She opts for the latter, puts down the remote, and finally sits back.2

My primary interest in this consumption moment is in the constellations of economic power that have made this particular moment possible. My approach to identifying and understanding these constellations is to effect a genealogy of our subject’s choice. I mean “choice” not only generically—the fact that she has a program choice, or even that her choice is between a channel available in all UK households with televisions and a channel available only to those who pay a monthly subscription for their television—but much more specifically: how to explain that she can watch a program such as Battlestar Galactica instead of EastEnders. This is not to claim there is anything especially interesting about the former from a creative perspective (although there may well be); but as an economic-geographical entity it is, I will argue, fascinating and instructive in a way that EastEnders is not, and that is why I have singled it out. Embodying very particular spatial and temporal configurations of financing, production and distribution, Battlestar is in many respects emblematic, though not uniquely so, of recent deep-seated changes in the geographical economy of UK and international television. Untangling its genealogy and situating its very availability is to unearth fundamental forces driving television today. In grappling with this genealogy, I have found Marx’s writings on the circulation of capital—and, more particularly, David Harvey’s efforts to theorize the geographies of the capital circuits identified by Marx—the most incisive and helpful interpretive and explanatory framework. The Marxian idea of the circulation of capital, then, is pivotal in what follows. The first section of the chapter is given over to explicating this theoretical scaffold as concisely and clearly as possible. It reprises Marx’s core concepts and Harvey’s endeavors to impart to them meaningful spatial flesh. In the remainder of the chapter I then proceed to put these ideas to work. My use of the term “genealogy,” it should be noted, is no more innocent or accidental than my specific empirical focus on Battlestar Galactica,

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and thus bears explanation at the outset. Although this term has various complex and indeterminate connotations, two are especially relevant in what follows.3 First, there is a compulsion, which I have tried to respect, to investigate events, issues or things that we tend to feel, instinctively, are without history—and also, critically, without geography. Second, there is a requirement to demonstrate the plural, unexpected, distant and typically unacknowledged connections between events, issues and things that are conventionally placed and interrogated in separate compartments or registers. As Timothy Mitchell puts it, we need to examine interactions between elements that often appear “somehow incommensurable,” involving “very different forces, agents, elements, spatial scales, and temporalities.”4 Some might argue that these two imperatives take us close to and possibly necessitate an entirely different theoretical tradition than the Marxism I draw on most heavily in this chapter—one in which the concept of genealogy is much more current.5 My own feeling is that this is not the case. Indeed, while Mitchell’s exemplary efforts along such “genealogical” lines are strongly and explicitly influenced not just by Foucault but also by the likes of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, he stresses his belief that Marx himself, long before the advent of more recent theoretical complexes, offered important and incisive ways to think about and analyze precisely these kinds of issues.6 This is not to say (and Mitchell, of course, does not suggest) that Marx alone can get us all the way. Yet for my purposes it seems clear, in thinking about television and its economic geographies, that working with the concept of capital circulation is not incompatible with questions of genealogy; rather, it can inform and structure such a genealogy, and that is the approach I take in this chapter. The genealogy I try to construct is, I emphasize, a genealogy of an historically and geographically specific moment in the capital accumulation process. The wording needs to be stressed because, as will become clear, the matter of how to derive just such a genealogy is the essential theoretical and empirical question that my analysis—purposefully grounded, at the outset, in the individual consumption moment—begs. Indeed, it is through the focus on this singular moment that this chapter takes the foregoing discussion of power “down and in” from the dynamics of international economic space to the level of the individual and his or her consumption within a national media economy. And yet the chapter simultaneously takes the discussion of power back, up and out: back to the questions about power and differential value capture that dominated chapter 6 (and which recur in Part III), and “up and out” to the economic relationships between corporations and countries, particularly between the US and the various territories of its global media empire.

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CAPITAL CIRCULATION AND ITS GEOGRAPHIES Capital, in Marx’s writings, is not primarily a thing (for example, money) so much as a social relation or, more often, a process: the continuous process of the expansion of value through the generation of surplus value. Capital is “value in process.”7 This process is manifested in various ways, most notably in the transformation of money into commodities and then, subsequent to wage-labor-based production that generates a profit, into a greater sum of money, some or all of which gets thrown back into production (and the creation of more surplus value) through the same process (Figure 7.1). When Marx writes, as he does at great length in Volume Two of Capital, about the circulation of capital, he is referring precisely to these repeated metamorphoses from one substantive form—one tangible materialization of the process of capital—to another.8 Indeed, “capital exists as capital,” Marx insisted, “only in so far as it passes through the phases of circulation, the various moments of its transformation.” Money and the commodity: each, then, is one such “moment in the circulation of capital”; both are “vehicles for the circulation [of the other].”9 David Harvey, in The Limits to Capital (1982), has advanced furthest the theorization of the geographies of capital’s circulation.10 Before considering later in the chapter the nature of such geographies specifically in the sphere of the contemporary television economy, it is, in my view, invaluable to summarize first the key tenets of Harvey’s theoretical arguments. My capsule summary in this section necessarily skips many of the specificities of his exposition (hopefully without too great a loss of theoretical force); but some of these, particularly concerning the role of credit, will surface in my empirically oriented discussions below. Harvey’s arguments about circulation are complex and hard to pin down, but they can usefully be broken down into three main stages, and that is how I describe them here. It is important to bear in mind that as we progress through these stages, we are gradually moving away from Harvey “simply” recapitulating Marx, towards Harvey articulating his own “original” insights—many of which he believes were inherent, if not explicit, in Marx’s work.11 Disaggregated circuits Harvey’s first step is to follow Marx in disaggregating circulation into three interlinked circuits or sequences of the overall process. These are the circuit of money capital, the “paradigm form of circulation,” starting and ending with capital in money form; the circuit of commodity capital, starting and ending with capital in commodity form; and the circuit of productive capital, starting and ending in the productive function (the source of surplus value) itself.12 This “unbundling” of the top-line process of circulation

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into three alternative sub-circuits is perhaps most readily and meaningfully conceptualized when represented visually (Figure 7.1), as the numerous abbreviated accounts of the three circuits have made clear.13 As the graphic demonstrates, these circuits are not materially separate or different; they are ultimately one and the same process, merely captured and configured with different starting and ending points in each case. This raises an obvious question, of course, and it is a question that unfortunately is often overlooked. (Unfortunate because the answers to the question are suggestive, and arguably even necessary, in guiding where we take the idea of disaggregated circuits.) The question is why look at three circuits when, as we have seen, all are part of a larger, unified process of circulation; indeed, when each is simply an alternate “window” on that single, larger process? Precisely because, Harvey says, “we see something different” through each of these windows; and because, as both Marx and Harvey emphasize, we cannot understand circulation as a whole without examining (all of) its component parts and the specialized roles taken on at different junctures by productive capitalists, merchant (commodity) capitalists, and money (finance) capitalists.14 There are two further important points about this disaggregation that I want to signal here because they foreground significant components of

Figure 7.1:

Marx’s three circuits of capital

Source: Author

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what follows. First, while each circuit does indeed need to be considered individually, we cannot ever leave it at that, since as Harvey, quoting Marx, reminds us, each circuit “has to be seen as just one link in ‘many such sequences’ constituting an ‘infinitely intricate network of such series of movements.’” We have to reaggregate, in other words, across circuits and across capitals. Second, and critically for the geographies of capital, these individual circuits (in Marx’s own words) “constantly end and constantly begin afresh at an infinite number of different points,” and the complementary transaction to each sale or purchase—for example, the purchase of commodities with money generated from the sale of other commodities—“does not need to follow immediately but may be separated from it temporarily and spatially.” It is, uniquely, money that allows this spatial and temporal distancing, for, as Harvey notes, “a person who has just sold is under no immediate obligation to buy but can hold the money instead.”15 Capital mobilities The second stage of Harvey’s argument is to consider the geographies of the physical entities that bookend and correspond to, respectively, each of the three disaggregated capital circuits: those entities being money, the commodity, and productive capital. Harvey uses the word “mobilities” to designate these geographies. Such mobilities make for instructive analysis because in each such physical incarnation, capital has, Harvey believes, “a special and uniquely defined capacity for geographical movement.” But these mobilities are not only interesting; they are fundamental, for they “interact in the context of accumulation and so build, fragment and carve out” distinctive “spatial configurations” of production and distribution.16 The geography of the capitalist economy is the complex product of the individual mobilities of innumerable circulating capitals. To what extent, first, is money mobile? Harvey’s basic observation here (and it is not revolutionary) is that different forms of money, from gold at one end of the spectrum to credit at the other, move with different levels of ease, at widely varying speeds, and frequently, but not necessarily, at extremes of geographical scale. Where credit monies are concerned, the only substantive limitations on mobility reside in communication systems and in the “social barriers posed by the existence of different national monies of varying quality.”17 Harvey’s high-level mapping of monetary mobility has been taken forward, beefed up and fine-tuned in two decades of subsequent research into “geographies of money,” often, but not always, drawing specifically on Marxian concepts of circulation.18 At its most powerful, this work tells us a great deal not only about money’s own specific geographies, but about the nuts and bolts of how those geographies are implicated in the wider dynamics of agricultural, industrial and post-industrial capitalism.19

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In The Limits to Capital Harvey’s discussion of the geographies of commodities, meanwhile, was relatively perfunctory. He emphasized that a commodity’s mobility depends on transport relations, as modified by the specific physical attributes of the commodity in question; but he did not venture much further than that.20 In the years since, however, Harvey has had considerably more to say about commodities and their mobility, arguing that it is a pressing analytical requirement to deconstruct what Marx called the “commodity fetish” and to expose not only the social relations of production but also the spatial relations of both commodity production and distribution.21 Such calls for further exploration of the geographies of commodities have heralded a flourishing body of work focused on precisely such matters, often researched and written from an explicitly radical political-economic (Marxist) viewpoint or motivation, though increasingly informed by other theoretical traditions such as commodity and supply chain analysis.22 The third physical incarnation or “fraction” of capital is productive capital. This is where Harvey, in The Limits to Capital, has most to say, although somewhat perversely he discusses here only the geographies of labor, despite having earlier insisted on a broader definition of productive capital as both constant capital (raw materials, machines and so on) and variable capital (labor power).23 Harvey’s main point of emphasis is that “labour and capital are forced into curious patterns of struggle and compromise over the geographical mobility of labour,” with capitalists on the one hand requiring labor to be mobile to enable it “to follow capital wherever it flows,” while on the other hand often needing to check such mobility in order “to keep labour reserves in place.”24 Such observations have, again, prompted the emergence of a rich and substantial body of research, drilling down into exactly those capital-labor-mobility problematics.25 Other work, meanwhile, has advanced thinking more on the side of constant capital, examining the geographies of productive activity rather than labor power, particularly insofar as such activity has internationalized in recent decades largely under the auspices of transnational corporations. The literature here is vast; but once more, much of it has been directly or indirectly inspired by Marxist thinking on capital circuits. Peter Dicken provides a very good introduction and overview.26 Integrating the motions The third, final and most important stage of Harvey’s argument is at once, I think, the most speculative, elusive and suggestive. This is where, having disaggregated the process of circulation and then sketched out (but no more) its component geographies, he focuses on “integrating the separate motions.” That is, he is concerned, as we noted earlier, to reaggregate and

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thus to be able to talk about the geographies of circulation in toto. More specifically, he asks whether there is any “underlying unity” to the “seemingly diverse and incoherent movements” of capital in its various physical incarnations.27 Harvey does not offer a conclusive or even particularly cohesive answer (nor pretend to), but he does furnish helpful clues for those levelling the same query in specific empirical contexts. It is a difficult and diffuse patch of writing, and one cannot attempt to capture it without dulling its richness, but I do want to try to identify some key themes, of which three, in my reading, stand out. First, Harvey argues that as capital circulates through its respective physical manifestations in money, commodities and productive activity, generating surplus value in the process, it is exposed to at least two forms of restraint on its overall geographical mobility. Thus, although the different physical incarnations of capital might individually display “divergent geographical mobilities,” they are ultimately subjected to “a common [spatial] discipline” by virtue of their incorporation into the macro-process of capital circulation.28 They are “disciplined” in the first place because the circuits to which they correspond must physically meet at the moment of transition; and they are disciplined secondly because to avoid devaluation, circulation must be completed in a certain time span, and hence space. The second key theme we can extract is Harvey’s advice that we use Marx’s analysis of differentiations within the overall unity of circulation to help us understand not only the complementarities between different kinds of mobility, and between the stakeholders in such mobility, but also the contradictions and tensions. And third, following Christian Palloix, Harvey notes that notwithstanding the necessity (ultimately) for complementarity in the movements of capital’s different fractions, these fractions have at different times assumed roles of varying importance in capital’s progressive surmounting of spatial barriers.29 I pick up on all three of these themes below in relation specifically to Battlestar Galactica and the genealogy I construct around it; but it is the third theme I turn to first at the wider contextual level of the UK and New Zealand television economies.

THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF CAPITAL IN TELEVISION The argument that Harvey derives from Palloix is essentially quite a simple one. Following the same Marxian disaggregation of capital circulation as Harvey, Palloix observes that the circuit of commodity capital was, historically, the first to be internationalized. What he means by this is that of the three different physical forms that punctuate the process of capital circulation, the commodity was routinely distributed transnationally, within the overall unity of circulation, before either money or productive activity were.

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Or, to put it another way, international commodity trade was an entrenched feature of the global economy before corporations began substantively investing overseas.30 When such international investments did begin to proliferate, Palloix goes on to argue, they took the form firstly of straight financial investment (thus expanding the circuit of money capital) and only later of investment—physical and monetary—in proprietary overseas production activities. In this section I use these observations as a framework for sketching out the rounds of internationalization of capital circulation in regard specifically to television in the UK and New Zealand. I do so not only to foreground the more detailed subsequent discussion of Battlestar, but also because my analysis in the book to this stage has been concerned predominantly with internationalization of the commodity circuit. I have discussed at great length program trade between different territories, mostly (but certainly not only) from the US to other markets. By contrast, my discussion of media corporations investing financially or building, controlling and operating productive businesses overseas has been limited to a few scattered comments.31 Where television in the UK and New Zealand (and indeed in the vast majority of other countries) is concerned, the commodity circuit of capital did indeed internationalize well in advance of the other circuits, as per Palloix’s more generic observation. If we take the UK first, while the BBC began broadcasting in the 1930s, videotape recording capabilities were not unavailable until the late 1950s, and thus neither an export nor import trade developed to any material degree until that time. Thereafter, however, the BBC soon developed into the country’s main exporter through its BBC Enterprises subsidiary, which “by the end of the 1960s had become one of the world’s largest television exporters.”32 On the import side of the equation, the BBC was in those years less important than its new commercial competitor ITV, which launched in 1955 and which soon became a major importer of US programming.33 In New Zealand, meanwhile, television’s program commodity circuit has been thoroughly internationalized from the moment that broadcasting began (in Auckland in 1960), though as we have seen at various points in this book the balance between import and export has always been heavily skewed in favor of the former. So it was in the 1960s, with screens dominated—though not entirely monopolized—by programming from the UK.34 (Media capital, in those early days, circulated extremely unevenly and slowly within New Zealand itself: there was no national broadcast network until 1969, meaning that for the best part of a decade both imported and domestically produced programming had to be flown between centers on tape prior to transmission, separate broadcasts having begun in Christchurch and Wellington in 1961 and Dunedin in 1962.35)

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If, by the early 1960s, New Zealand and the UK were both integrally bound up in rapidly growing international networks of television program trade, the circuits of money and productive capital running through these television economies remained much more tightly focused on the respective territories. This restriction was the more absolute in New Zealand’s case: programming was produced locally; broadcasters broadcast domestically; and, in general, money was neither invested into the national television economy from overseas, nor (aside from the very small outwards payments for program imports) invested overseas by those domestic entities generating surplus value within the national television economy. The boundaries were slightly more blurred where the UK was concerned—the BBC, for instance, was by that time already carrying out significant amounts of program production (news reports and natural history being the primary examples) outside of the UK, and trade-related money flows, in both directions, were more substantive than in New Zealand’s case. Nevertheless, the vast bulk of television’s financial and productive capital still circulated at the scale of the nation. Indeed, ownership of all domestic broadcasters was wholly UK-based until the launch of Sky Television (a forerunner of BSkyB) in 1989; and none of the UK broadcasters established proprietary foreign broadcast businesses until the launch of BBC TV Europe in 1987. To what extent, then, and when, have we actually seen internationalization of the circuits of money and productive capital pertaining to the television economies of the UK and New Zealand? I should say here that I focus below on Battlestar Galactica precisely because it epitomizes, and indeed pushes to the very limit, some of the most important and interesting developments in this regard. The detailed examination of one such economic entity and of the circuits ranged around it enables, in my view, those developments to be most productively and powerfully brought to light. Nevertheless, I also think it is important and helpful to provide, first, a brief, high-level overview of these developments. The circuit of money capital We can take money capital first, but we should immediately disabuse ourselves of any notion that this is a straightforward area for analysis. Let us start by thinking through the various types and sources of money with which circulation in television’s economy can begin. In the case of the paradigmatic (non-producing) broadcaster circuit—where the broadcaster uses money to buy and then distribute programming, with a view to clawing back a greater sum of money and hence realizing surplus value—that money can either be reinvested profits or some form of external financing (typically credit or equity, but sometimes also grants). The same generic sources apply for a producer’s monetary circuit, although here the money

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is being used to make programs. And if, in the case of the producer, the money received (thus completing the circuit of money capital) comes, as we have seen, from one or more broadcasters, the latter in turn generate revenue from two main sources: consumers (through direct subscription payments or government-allocated taxation receipts, perhaps in the form of a license fee) and advertisers. Figure 7.2 illustrates these circuits and their main linkages. My question here, therefore, concerns the degree to which foreign sources have come to contribute, in New Zealand and the UK, to the four main pools of money that sustain the circulation of capital in the television economy: equity and debt financing of both broadcasters and producers; consumer payments (direct or taxation based) to broadcasters; broadcaster payments to producers; and advertising.36 I ignore reinvested corporate profits in this discussion not because they are unimportant—clearly transnational media corporations do take profits realized in one territory and invest them in production or programming in other territories—but because such flows are essentially impossible to quantify even for an individual corporation, let alone at the level of wider collective economies. It perhaps makes sense to take consumer payments to broadcasters first, partly because such payments make for the simplest analysis, and partly because they have undergone the least internationalization. But what orders of magnitude are we concerned with here? In New Zealand, where the license fee was abolished in 1999, consumer payments are limited to paytelevision subscriptions (to Sky) and very small amounts of indirect taxa-

Figure 7.2: The circuit of money capital for television broadcasters and producers Source: Author

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tion (government grants to fund local program production), if we leave advertising to one side.37 These monies totalled just under NZ$500m (£190m, or an equivalent of £46 per capita) in the year to June 30, 2006, of which over three-quarters represented subscription payments to Sky.38 In the UK, meanwhile, the BBC’s license fee (currently £135.50 per household) makes for a much larger pie in both absolute and relative terms. However, quantifying total consumer payments is harder for the UK, largely because one of the main direct generators of consumer revenues (the cable company Virgin Media) offers its customers telephony and Internet services in addition to subscription television, and does not report these revenues separately. Nevertheless, it is possible to make meaningful estimates specifically for Virgin Media television; and, together, the relevant financial statements indicate that annual consumer payments to UK broadcasters, including the license fee, currently total in the region of £7bn (or £116 per capita).39 The key point to emphasize here is that these consumer payments to broadcasters derive exclusively from domestic consumers in the case of New Zealand, and almost exclusively so in the case of the UK—where BSkyB’s population of continental European subscribers, which I discussed in chapter 4, adds a relatively small foreign element. In short, where this first of our four funding sources is concerned, television’s circuit of money capital has barely internationalized at all. What, then, of advertising, the second main source of revenues for television broadcasters? The first matter to consider, as with direct consumer payments, is the quantum of such revenues. The amounts are widely published. In New Zealand, in the calendar year 2006, they totalled NZ$641m (£245m, or £60 per capita); in the UK, for the same period, they totalled £3.25bn (£54 per capita).40 This in itself allows us some interesting and important observations. Total broadcaster receipts in New Zealand (the sum of advertising and consumer payments) presently appear to be in the region of £106 per capita, of which advertising contributes 57%, and total commercial sources 90%. In the UK, the comparable headline figure, on the above numbers, is £170, with advertising accounting for only 32% and total commercial sources only 54%. The relative degree of commercialization of the two markets is clearly visible in these metrics. But if consumer payments to broadcasters are almost exclusively domestically sourced, is the same true of advertising monies? Unfortunately this question does not have a simple answer. To be sure, advertising has, since the 1960s, become increasingly internationalized or “globalized” in almost every conceivable respect—not just in terms of the companies doing the advertising, but also in terms of the advertising agencies themselves and the concepts and campaigns they create for their clients.41 Indeed, there is now a fascinating literature examining the myriad cultural, economic and political issues that arise from the fact that the companies trying to use lo-

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cal media to sell products and services to local populations are increasingly multinational companies retailing (aspirationally, at least) global brands.42 And yet I would argue that this does not necessarily mean that the circuits of money capital in which UK and New Zealand television are implicated have become equally internationalized. When a company pays a broadcaster to advertise on television in either of those territories, where is the money coming from? In most cases, I would argue, the money is—in terms of its immediate source—local. The brands, assuredly, are more and more likely to be global, whether the advertiser is a consumer goods company such as Unilever (e.g. Vaseline) or Procter & Gamble (Gillette), a food and beverages manufacturer or retailer such as Coca-Cola or McDonald’s, or a car manufacturer such as Toyota or General Motors. But the corporations that own and advertise such brands, while transnational, are in almost all cases structured and operated on a territorial basis. All the above six companies, for example, include not only discrete UK operating units—which would surprise nobody—but also individual operating divisions specifically for New Zealand.43 These units, typically, not only have their own chief executives and managers but also, more importantly, their own accountable revenue, cost and profit centers. If the managers of these units decide to invest money in television advertising in their respective national markets, they are ordinarily expected to fund such investment out of cash flow from local operations and to recoup that expenditure in the form of higher sales and profits in those local markets. This is not to argue, of course, that advertising finance is always locally sourced. Clearly, it is not. When a multinational company aims to penetrate a new national market, for instance, and it invests in local television advertising to drive this initiative, it cannot source the finance for this advertising from local operations for the simple reason that it does not have any; monies must be diverted from elsewhere in the company’s transnational economy.44 As a local business becomes established, however, it is increasingly expected to become self-financing. Indeed, if it fails to become selffinancing, and if it does not serve a wider strategic purpose for the organization as a whole, it will, more often than not, be closed down. Thus over time and in the long run, we can expect to see the bulk of money invested in television advertising—like consumer payments to broadcasters—coming from domestic sources. This leaves two further pools of money that sustain the circulation of capital in the television economy: equity and debt financing of both broadcasters and producers; and broadcaster payments to producers. I will take the latter first, and will start with the UK simply because better data are available. The specific question we need to answer concerns the proportion of revenue generated by UK-based producers from the sale of original programming to international as opposed to UK broadcasters. Significantly, despite the strong growth in UK television program exports in the last decade, and despite the

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fact that the UK is, by some margin, the second largest national exporter of television programming after the US, the answer to this question remains relatively little. In 2004 (the last year for which reliable, comparable data points are available), UK producers, including the in-house production arms of broadcasters, earned approximately £3bn from the sale of original programming to UK broadcasters.45 Meanwhile, in the same year, the (same) UK production community generated only £301m in program export receipts.46 In other words, foreign broadcasters continue to contribute less than 10% of total, global broadcaster payments made to UK production companies. Unfortunately it is not possible to provide a similarly detailed picture where New Zealand is concerned—to the best of my knowledge, there are no reliable data available for revenues generated from the sale of New Zealand-made television programming to overseas broadcasters. Total revenue from program sales by New Zealand producers (including the in-house production arms of broadcasters), across all geographies, amounted to NZ$361m in 2005.47 But no geographic breakdown is provided. Given what we know about the extremely limited nature of New Zealand’s television export trade (chapter 6), however, it is certain that the proportion of this revenue deriving from international broadcasters is less than the 10% achieved by UK producers—and is probably significantly less.48 The fourth and final primary source of money capital in the television economies of New Zealand and the UK is equity and debt financing of both broadcasters and producers. This, again, is not an especially easy area to summarize—as we saw in chapter 5, each territory has not only hundreds of production companies, but also, with the growth of digital multichannel television, many more channel broadcasters than used to be the case. We can hardly hope, then, to provide a comprehensive analysis of the geographical sourcing of corporate finance in New Zealand and UK television. What we can do, however, is look at a headline level at the financing of the key players in each market, which will in both places provide a useful surrogate for the wider picture, for, as I noted in chapter 3, these key players continue in each case to control a very large share of the domestic television economy. The two primary players in New Zealand television are, as we have seen, TVNZ and Sky Network Television. The former is financed entirely from domestic sources. For the most part this finance comprises government-held equity capital—historically, TVNZ did not take on debt. While the latter situation changed in 2006 after a review of the company’s capital structure, the debt that TVNZ has now taken on (NZ$49m) was borrowed from domestic banks.49 Sky, on the other hand, is majority owned by overseas investors: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp holds 44% of the equity, while two of the three other main shareholders (AXA Asia Pacific and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, with 15.5% of the company between them) are domiciled in Australia.50 And if we look to the next tier of operators in New Zealand television,

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the same feature—a preponderance of internationally sourced financing—is apparent. Thus the second largest free-to-air terrestrial broadcaster (TV3) is foreign owned.51 And so, too, are the country’s three most significant independent production companies, NHNZ (by News Corp), Eyeworks Touchdown (Eyeworks) and South Pacific Pictures (All3Media). Aside from TVNZ, therefore, equity and debt financing of New Zealand’s leading television companies increasingly appears to be dominated by international institutions. But it is important to note that this internationalization is a relatively recent phenomenon. Twenty years ago, after all, there was no Sky Network Television, TV3, or Eyeworks Touchdown; and NHNZ and South Pacific were both part of TVNZ. The change has since been marked and rapid, with both Sky and TV3 being launched in the late 1980s (and each has been overseas controlled from its beginning), both NHNZ and South Pacific being sold off to overseas trade investors in the late 1990s, and Julie Christie selling Touchdown Television to the Netherlands’ Eyeworks in 2006 (as discussed in the previous chapter). Similarly rapid change has occurred in the UK, and arguably to almost the same extent. Like TVNZ in New Zealand, the BBC is, of course, owned by the UK Government. The other two industry heavyweights identified in chapter 3, meanwhile, were BSkyB and ITV Plc. BSkyB, like New Zealand’s Sky Network Television, has News Corp as its largest shareholder (with 38% of the share capital), while other substantive shareholdings—most notably the 10% of the American fund management company Franklin Resources— take cumulative overseas holdings to above the 50% threshold.52 BSkyB’s heavy long-term borrowings, too, are predominantly sourced from outside of the UK (as we will see below). The complexion of ITV Plc’s ownership base, however, is slightly murkier: BSkyB itself is the largest shareholder with the 18% holding it acquired (highly controversially) in 2006, while the giant US fund managers Fidelity and Brandes Investment Partners are also known to be significant investors.53 What is clear is that ownership of ITV has become more international since it was formed from the merger of Carlton Communications and Granada Plc in 2004. And as in New Zealand, there is more consistent and widespread evidence of significant international equity investment in UK television if we look to the next tier of operator. In this second tier, the one notable exception is Channel 4—which, like the BBC, is still UK state owned. Elsewhere, however, we see a largely singular pattern. The country’s fourth free-to-air terrestrial broadcaster, Channel Five, is wholly owned by RTL Group of Luxembourg, which in turn is majority owned by German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Virgin Media (the UK’s number-two pay-television provider) has a relatively fragmented shareholder base, but after Virgin Entertainment Investment Holdings (effectively Richard Branson), with 10.5% of the equity, the next nine largest shareholders are all non-UK fund managers, based

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largely in the US and together owning in the region of 50% of the group’s shares.54 The geography of ownership of the five largest UK-based independent production companies is also instructive.55 Not one can be said to be owned and thus financed specifically out of the UK. Two (Endemol UK and Talkback Thames) are wholly owned by continental European media groups (Endemol and RTL respectively); the other three (IMG Media, HIT Entertainment and All3Media) are all owned by private equity firms, of which one (Forstmann Little, which acquired IMG in 2004) is essentially a US fund, the other two (Apax Partners and Permira) having thoroughly international investor bases. Where, then, does all of this leave our analysis of the degree of internationalization of the circuits of money capital that feed and sustain New Zealand and UK television? Given the extent to which each market, and New Zealand in particular, relies heavily on an internationalized (and largely Americanized) commodity circuit, it is, to my mind, striking how little such money circuits have themselves internationalized—except where the last “pool” of money (equity and debt financing) is concerned. In both countries, consumer-generated broadcaster revenues are almost exclusively domestically generated; the same is likely to be true, I have argued, of advertiser payments to broadcasters; and less than 10% of the revenues that UK (and, hence, New Zealand) production companies receive from broadcasters come from overseas. Equity and debt financing of both broadcasters and producers, however, tells a markedly different story. Thus, to the extent that the money circuit of media capital has internationalized from the perspective of the two territories that concern us here, it is overwhelmingly in terms of corporate (equity and debt) finance. And it is for this reason that where I discuss, below, Battlestar Galactica—and its availability in the UK on a BSkyB channel—as an example of some of the more radical contemporary developments in television’s internationalization, it is on corporate finance and its geographies that my discussion of money capital is focused. The circuit of productive capital Where television is concerned, we can look at the circuit of productive capital and the matter of its internationalization at a number of levels. In each case, however, the essential question is the same: how, when and to what degree has the productive function itself become a more internationalized phenomenon? Before trying to disentangle the different ways in which we can consider this question, however, three observations are particularly important. First, there is television “production” and there is Marxian (or more broadly economic) “production.” The latter is a very broad church: it encompasses all economic activities implicated in the process of generation of surplus value. Thus, specifically in the context of television, economic

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“production” spreads well beyond television program “production” in both directions—back into pre-production, and forward into post-production, packaging, and broadcast (or other) distribution. In discussing, here, internationalization of television’s “production” function, I am referring to production strictly in this wider economic sense, unless I explicitly indicate otherwise by identifying that my concern is with program production. Second, and crucially, it is more or less impossible to talk about internationalization of television production without also talking about internationalization of television finance—the two are fundamentally bound up with one another. How, then, do I distinguish between the types of internationalization addressed in the previous section on money capital and the specific developments I turn to now? Ultimately there is no clear divide, but for my purposes the difference can be put like this: above, I aimed to focus on instances in which the overseas activity of the corporate entity in question consisted largely or exclusively of monetary investment (in, for example, finished programming, advertising space, or company share capital); here, while monetary investment is almost inevitably involved, there is also something substantively more to the overseas activity, this most frequently comprising program production or channel broadcast operations. The third and final point we need to emphasize is that such internationalization can occur both inwardly and outwardly. In other words, we are interested not only in overseas corporations becoming active economic producers in television in the UK or New Zealand, but also in companies domiciled in those two territories becoming active economic producers elsewhere. New Zealand can be considered first because it presents much the simpler picture. There has, in short, been substantive—if intermittent—internationalization of the productive function into New Zealand but very little movement in the other direction. To be sure, a handful of producers, most notably NHNZ, carry out periodic location filming away from New Zealand. But no New Zealand broadcasters have sought to establish international broadcast businesses. And only a very small minority of New Zealand program production companies have attempted to secure permanent operational footholds overseas. Moreover, such footholds have typically comprised merely small, one- or two-person sales offices, designed to bolster international program distribution initiatives, as with Touchdown’s establishment of offices in London and Los Angeles prior to its acquisition by Eyeworks.56 Only one New Zealand producer—NHNZ—has set up and financed fixed-program production facilities abroad, doing so in two places (Beijing and Washington, DC) in 2002.57 In the other direction, meanwhile, the movement of productive activity has been more pronounced, although it has certainly been less marked and less enduring than the parallel inflow of equity capital discussed above. In terms of broadcast businesses, the usual suspects from the US all broadcast

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their own channels on the Sky New Zealand subscription network: Time Warner (e.g. CNN, TCM, Cartoon Network), Discovery (Discovery Channel, Animal Planet), Viacom (MTV), Disney (ESPN, Playhouse Disney), and News Corp (Fox News). These channels are joined on the Sky platform by the BBC’s UKTV entertainment channel and its BBC World News service. As for program production, while the level of international activity in New Zealand has certainly ebbed and flowed over time, the country has long been an important setting for foreign companies seeking to make cost-effective product for the international marketplace—even if this phenomenon of New Zealand–based “runaway productions” has enjoyed a considerably lower profile in regard to the television sector than the film sector, the latter dominated in recent years of course by production of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.58 Two international program production companies have had an especially important influence in New Zealand. One is Cloud 9 Screen Entertainment, a producer of family drama and children’s programming which was established in London in 1994 by an ex-BBC writer and is owned out of the UK by its founder and by Sanctuary Group Plc, but which established its main production base in Wellington, and which, despite an often fractious relationship with TVNZ, has continued to base the bulk of its program production activities (e.g. The Tribe, The Enid Blyton Adventure Series) in New Zealand.59 The other, better-known international production presence in New Zealand has been Universal Studios (part of NBC Universal), which through its local production arm Pacific Renaissance Pictures filmed six separate television productions—including the two long-running and internationally distributed series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess—in New Zealand over a period of seven years from 1995.60 If we turn now to the UK, the picture of both inward and outward internationalization looks quite different from New Zealand in all but one respect. The one common feature has been the local establishment of proprietary broadcast channels by the US studios: thus Warner, Discovery, Viacom et al have all launched proprietary channels in the UK as well as in New Zealand, albeit typically earlier and frequently in greater absolute numbers.61 In all other regards, however, we can discern a rather different set of developments. For one thing, UK television broadcasters and program producers have endeavored to establish overseas operations in a way that New Zealand companies (NHNZ aside) have not. On the broadcast front the BBC’s have been the solitary, but substantive, efforts. Over the past 20 years it has established a number of proprietary broadcast channels in various parts of the world.62 First, from 1987, there was BBC TV Europe, a pay channel available via satellite and cable in continental Europe. This was replaced in Europe in 1991 by the mainly entertainment-based BBC World Service Television (WSTV), with the same name being used for a (different) news

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and information channel launched in Asia on STAR TV in the same year. In 1995, the BBC initiated further rebranding and expansion, replacing WSTV firstly with the news and current affairs channel BBC World (now available in over 200 countries, carrying largely the same programming in each, and renamed BBC World News in 2008) and secondly with the entertainment channel BBC Prime (carried in approximately 120 countries, rebranded as BBC Entertainment from late 2006, and offering programming not only from the BBC but also from other UK production companies).63 BBC America was added to the mix in 1998, and BBC Food—available in Southern Africa, the Middle East and Scandinavia—followed in 2002.64 More recently, in 2006, the BBC announced that these four existing wholly owned international channels would soon double in number with the imminent international launch of BBC Knowledge, BBC Lifestyle, CBeebies and BBC HD; and the following year, plans were announced to introduce up to 14 additional channels across Europe.65 Cumulatively, “Global Channels” now constitutes a significant, valuable commercial business for the BBC, generating revenues of £78m in the year to March 31, 2007.66 In addition to its longstanding overseas broadcast operations, the BBC in recent years has also sought to develop an international program production presence, establishing BBC Worldwide Productions USA in Los Angeles in 2005, initially to produce Dancing with the Stars—the US version of the BBC’s UK format Strictly Come Dancing—for the American broadcaster ABC.67 Two years later Worldwide secured its first US drama commission when CBS picked up its Blackpool remake Viva Laughlin.68 (This latter “success” was painfully short-lived: CBS cancelled the show after airing just two episodes, and it lasted only one episode on Channel Nine in Australia.69) Meanwhile, the BBC was busy during 2007 preparing plans to launch production companies in a number of other important international markets. Starting with a modest partnership arrangement with the local production company Freehand in Australia, a vision had crystallized by late 2007 for substantive production operations to follow in France, Germany, India, Poland and Russia—Canada, Argentina, Brazil and Singapore also being touted as potential new locations.70 The first of these materialized in Paris the following year.71 Where international production is concerned, however, the BBC should be seen more as a follower than a leader, even if its current plans look more ambitious than those of the UK companies in whose strategic wake it is swimming. Most important among these has been ITV Plc, which in the past decade has developed a growing international production network that comprises Granada Productions in Australia (launched in 1998), Granada Germany (since 2000) and Granada America (from 2004)—the last of these reinforced in 2007 with the acquisition of a controlling stake in Los Angeles’s Jaffe/Braunstein Films, a producer of scripted tele-films and miniseries.72 (“Granada Sweden” or “Granada Scandinavia” may appear next,

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ITV having acquired the Swedish production company Silverback in May 2008.73) Other UK production companies currently bolstering their international presence, particularly in the critical US market, include All3Media, which, through its subsidiary Lion Television, has firmly established production divisions in both New York and Los Angeles, and which recently complemented this existing presence with the June 2008 acquisition of US reality producer Zoo Productions, to take the North American contribution to its annual turnover to a reported 14% on a pro forma basis; RDF, which established RDF USA (also with New York and Los Angeles offices) in 2005; and Elisabeth Murdoch’s Shine Productions, which launched its US arm in relatively cautious fashion in 2007 before stamping its place on the map with the early 2008 acquisition of the US independent production company Reveille (co-producer of Ugly Betty and the US version of The Office) in a deal reported to be worth up to $250 million.74 In terms of both channel broadcasting and program production, therefore, the leading UK television companies have internationalized their (economically) productive activities much more substantially than their counterparts in New Zealand—although, as I emphasize in the Coda to the book, it is important not to overstate the extent to which international markets (and the US market in particular) have been penetrated and value captured therefrom. But if this “outward” internationalization has been more marked, “inward” internationalization specifically of program production (as opposed to channel broadcast operations) has arguably been less of a feature in the UK than in New Zealand. To the extent that international production companies have developed a presence in the UK program production industry, it has been primarily through acquisition of controlling or minority-interest investments in existing UK production companies rather than through the organic establishment of proprietary businesses. Both Endemol UK and Talkback Thames serve as examples of such a lineage: the former started life as Broadcast Communications in the late 1980s, with Holland’s Endemol first taking a stake in the business (initially 50%) in 1998; the latter, originally consisting of the separate UK producers Thames Television and Talkback Productions, only became a single entity and part of a European corporation in 2000 when Luxembourg’s CLT-Ufa merged with the UK’s Pearson Television (which had acquired Thames in 1993) to form RTL, with the combined entity acquiring Talkback in the same year.75 This should not be taken to imply that no international production companies have established their own UK production operations. But the number that have, and their relative impact, has been small.76 Overall, then, the UK and New Zealand display somewhat divergent histories where internationalization of television’s productive circuit is concerned, even if elements of these histories (particularly the establishment of local broadcast channels by the US studios) are consistent—in terms of

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actual program production, as we have seen, internationalization has been primarily from the UK but into New Zealand. However, that cannot quite be the end of our discussion of the productive circuit of capital, for internationalization of this circuit within the television economy increasingly takes place in more complex ways, and is manifested in more ambiguous economic-geographical configurations, than I have examined so far. More specifically, internationalization is not always unilateral and wholly owned. The forms of internationalization discussed above all involve companies setting up proprietary, economically productive ventures overseas (program production operations, broadcast channels), but very often such ventures are undertaken in partnership with companies from elsewhere, those companies often, but not always, being located in the local territory that is being entered. In such instances, we are clearly dealing with a more hybrid and partial form of internationalization. In the world of television, such partnerships across space take innumerable different forms, and my intention is not to try to catalogue them but rather to give a flavor of what they typically entail. The BBC, while certainly operating, as discussed, a number of wholly owned international businesses, has also vigorously pursued international partnership opportunities. Some of these are pure broadcast-channel ventures, such as its two joint-venture channels with CW Media in Canada, BBC Kids and BBC Canada. The BBC (20% equity interest) provides the programming, through BBC Worldwide; CW Media (80%) markets and distributes the channels; and the two share advertising and subscription revenues.77 Other international partnerships are more wide ranging, most notably the BBC’s long-term co-venture with Discovery, created in 1998 and renewed in 2002, under which the two not only co-produce programming (The Blue Planet was one product of the venture) but co-program and share ownership of two channels distributed internationally by Discovery—Animal Planet and People+Arts.78 Most commonly, however, hybrid, partial internationalization occurs not under the umbrella of such wide-ranging, long-term ventures but in the shape of individual, project-based, program co-production initiatives, and this is where the literature on such internationalization has therefore tended to focus.79 Coproductions involve partners from different territories pooling not only financial but also, to varying degrees, technical, operational and human resources, while still allowing, in the “ideal” scenario, for each partner to individually realize any local inducements (such as tax benefits) or meet any local obligations (such as local content quotas) that might apply in its home territory. Co-productions are, to my mind, a fascinating and vital component of the contemporary global television economy. In fact, I regard them as in some ways symbolic, or at the very least symptomatic, of the wider tendencies towards internationalization that I have been discussing in this section of the chapter. It is, then, no coincidence that the individual program I focus

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on below, Battlestar Galactica, is itself a co-production, in its case between US and UK producers. If the preceding discussion has served to highlight the different geographies or mobilities of capital in its various fractions in the contemporary international television economy, then co-productions, I will argue, can be seen to epitomize specifically the “complementarities” between those geographies (and their respective stakeholders) that David Harvey wrote about in The limits to capital. But through the example of Battlestar Galactica, I will suggest that the tensions and contradictions between mobilities that Harvey also discusses are themselves never far from the surface, and that thinking about these tensions returns us, finally, to our underlying questions of geographies of power.

DIGITAL BOXES AND FICTITIOUS CAPITALS It may seem that the high-level discussion in the previous section has taken us a very long way from the individual consumption moment with which I opened the chapter, but in the remainder of the chapter I want to argue that we can only begin to understand the economics of that moment—and hence to elaborate its historical-geographical genealogy—in the context of precisely those wider developments in the internationalization of media capital. In this section, my focus is largely on money capital, and it is on the geographies of money’s circulation at very particular scales: for, before situating the availability specifically of Battlestar Galactica, I argue that it is important first to situate the availability, to our hypothetical viewer, of satellite-based subscription television, and in doing this we need to examine the circuits of money capital that frame not individual program economies in the short to medium term but corporate economies over a significantly longer term. Specifically, we need to go back to 1998 in order to situate meaningfully the availability of a digital satellite television service—and hence Sky One and Battlestar Galactica—to our viewing subject, even though she is herself, as indicated in the introduction, a relative newcomer to that platform. Her digital service is provided by BSkyB, which, as we have seen, is the UK’s only consumer-facing satellite television platform. BSkyB retails and broadcasts to its subscribers a package of both third party and proprietary channels, the latter containing programs produced both externally and in-house, and many of which are themselves carried, in turn, on competing digital platforms such as cable. Its annual revenues are a little over £4bn (slightly higher than the BBC’s), made up respectively of consumer subscriptions (81%), advertising on its proprietary channels (8%) and various other smaller, ancillary revenue streams (11% in total).80 Before it launched the UK’s first digital television services (Sky Digital) in October 1998, BSkyB’s own (analogue) subscriber population, which

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enjoyed strong growth in the early 1990s, had been more or less stagnant for the best part of three years: 3.2m subscribers at the end of 1995 had increased only marginally to 3.4m (between one in seven and one in eight of all UK television households) when digital was launched. And the early days of digital, despite offering consumers interactive functionalities and over 200 channels (to analogue satellite’s 60), were not much more encouraging—BSkyB’s total subscriber population (comprising analogue and digital) grew by a paltry 56,000 homes in the first nine months of digital availability, with growth in digital subscriptions broadly mirroring decline in analogue subscriptions.81 Faced with this sluggishness, and with a new rival in the shape of the digital terrestrial subscription platform ONdigital (later ITV Digital), BSkyB’s management took the radical step in mid-1999 of subsidizing the rollout of its digital service by giving away digital set-top boxes (decoders) both to new subscribers and to those of its existing subscribers yet to upgrade from analogue; people taking Sky Digital had previously been required to buy the box, which retailed at in the region of £200.82 The effects were dramatic: in the first month that the offer was available (July), sales of new subscriptions trebled. The subscriber population now resumed its earlier upwards trajectory, and the rest, as they say, is history: subscriber numbers climbed inexorably from 3.5m to 5m (by the end of 2000), 6m (by the middle of 2002), 7m (by September 2003), and then 8m (by December 2005); BSkyB had upgraded all of its analogue subscribers to digital by the end of 2001, allowing it to switch off its analogue transmissions (UK cable, by contrast, is still saddled with an analogue rump seven years later); and by 2002 it had emerged from several years of losses associated with funding the aggressive transition to digital, and securing market dominance in the process, to become one of Europe’s most profitable broadcasters.83 This history serves, amongst other things, to sharpen the terms of a debate that has rumbled on in various social scientific disciplines—not least economic geography—over the last two decades around the relationships between production and consumption. As Ray Hudson reminds us, the analysis of production was, for a long time and in many areas of research, separated from and very often prioritized over the analysis of consumption.84 Only in recent years have the two been seen as “necessarily interrelated” and analyzed as such.85 (A recognition that came remarkably late given that Marx had stressed in the introduction to the Grundrisse that “production is also immediately consumption” and vice versa.86) The example of BSkyB stimulating subscriber growth through technology subsidization simply underlines the folly of such a separation having been assumed in the first place. For if ever evidence were required that forms and levels of consumption are directly influenced by productive capitalists, there can be few more vivid examples. With BSkyB’s strategy bringing consumption of

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pay television to those who, in many if not most cases, would otherwise not have taken it, the story can perhaps best be described as the production of consumption.87 Our own viewing subject, a digital satellite subscriber choosing on a Monday in 2005 between programs on BBC1 and Sky One, is very much a part of this story; the set-top box that enables her to receive Sky One was paid for by BSkyB, almost certainly in return for a minimum 12-month subscription at between £15 and £45 a month (though possibly with the first three or even six months discounted, in yet another subscriber acquisition drive). But if this story is history, it is also, I want to suggest, geography. What do I mean by this? The key consideration here is the sheer scale of investment that BSkyB took on when deciding to subsidize digital rollout. Given that set-top boxes were retailing at approximately £200 in 1998, it does not take much mathematics to determine that going from zero to (now) nearly nine million digital subscribers constitutes an extraordinary capital expenditure. Even if we assume a modest average per-box cost to BSkyB over the period since 1998 of £80 (factoring in both a mark-up and price erosion), this would equate to an investment of approximately £700m to fund box subsidization alone.88 Where did this finance come from? The short answer is primarily elsewhere. The more involved answer is primarily from the US. To ready itself for the outlays to come, BSkyB raised approximately £900m in 1999 by way of three bond issues, two of them denominated in US dollars: first, in February 1999, a $600m ten-year bond; then, in July the same year, a further $650m of dollar bonds together with £100m of Sterling bonds, each with the same ten-year maturity.89 Reflecting on the placement and functioning of these bonds, I want to argue, is critical, for doing so can help us begin to understand several key dimensions of the circulation of money capital through the media economy inhabited by BSkyB, by Battlestar Galactica, and, of course, by our viewing subject. The first, obvious issue concerns the question of why BSkyB, operating as it does solely in the UK, raised the monies primarily in US dollars. It was clearly not a function of appetite for exposure to US interest rates—both dollar-denominated bonds were immediately swapped into Sterling.90 The main driver was, rather, the prevailing international geography of demand for corporate debt: the bulk of large international corporate bond deals remain US-centric for the simple reason that this is where the demand is, particularly for issues such as BSkyB’s that are considered of medium-high risk (where investment grade verges on junk), and for which European investors historically have not had the stomach.91 The geographical configuration and placement of BSkyB’s new debt burden, however, was not quite that straightforward, for the dollar-denominated bonds were not, in point of fact, straight “Yankees”—bonds

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denominated in US dollars, issued and sold in the US by foreign companies for purchase by US citizens or institutions. Rather, the bonds were “global bonds”—bonds issued simultaneously in different international markets and settling through various worldwide clearing systems. But the term “global” is, here, something of a geographical misnomer: most global bonds denominated in US dollars still find the bulk of their buyers in the US, and this was very much the case with the BSkyB bonds, where, for instance, only 25% of the $600m February issue ended up in the hands of non-US investors.92 BSkyB’s issue manager (Merrill Lynch) went with “globals” rather than “Yankees” not so much with a view to securing a broad geographical spread of investors, but to create the impression, if not the reality, of greater buyer competition.93 If the money used by BSkyB to provide new subscribers with set-top boxes came from the US, who in the US actually supplied it? The vast bulk of the money used to acquire BSkyB’s bonds will have come from large financial institutions managing pension and insurance funds; while retail investors today account, reportedly, for the majority of individual corporate bond transactions, most of the growth in retail fixed-income investment has occurred since the turn of the decade, and even now the value contribution of this retail investment lags well behind its volume share of transactions (since individual retail investments are, on average, considerably smaller than individual institutional investments).94 But if institutions were the principal direct investors in BSkyB’s debt, the ultimate source of this finance would clearly have been the US consumers whose savings and investments are managed by such institutions. This therefore gives us the odd state of affairs—odd, and yet highly typical of the distended financial circuits of contemporary capitalism—of US consumers indirectly funding, through their savings and pensions, UK consumers’ media consumption.95 How can we best conceptualize such complex financial linkages from US through to UK consumers? The answer lies in the circulation of capital, specifically money capital in the form of credit. But the credit circulating in this scenario is not just any type of credit—it is, more particularly, credit in the form of what Marx, and Harvey after him, calls “fictitious capital,” which is credit capital extended without the contemporaneous backing of “any commodity transaction” or “any firm collateral.”96 For BSkyB, after all, does not provide any product or service in return for the money it receives from the buyers of its debt, and nor indeed does it offer any meaningful contemporary collateral (such as a house in a home loan transaction)—its collateral is its future digital subscribers.97 It is, then, worth laying out and uncoupling the extended chain of fictitious capitals that applies here. The chain begins with US consumers lending vast sums of money to US pensions and insurance institutions, who lend a fraction of it on to BSkyB, which in turn effectively lends it on to the

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UK consumer. For the “free” set-top box is, of course, no free lunch; BSkyB fully expects to recoup its investment in each box by charging a subscription fee that exceeds its per-subscriber costs by a sufficient amount over a sufficient period of time. BSkyB, we ought to remember, is the only productive capitalist in this picture, the only generator of what Marx and Harvey call surplus value. But it is the singular genius of the credit system to facilitate the apportionment of this surplus value not just between capitalists but also over both space and time. Thus, in borrowing from money-rich US institutions, BSkyB is promising those institutions, in advance, a share of UK-originated surplus value not yet produced—a share that is then paid over the subsequent ten-year period of the bonds’ life (and the life, too, of BSkyB’s digital television subscribers) in the form of ongoing interest obligations. After deducting commissions, the owners of BSkyB’s debt pass on those interest payments to their retail investors, the original providers of capital. So the circle is squared. As Harvey puts it, surplus value is in this way “split between owners of capital who receive interest and the employers of capital [here, BSkyB] who receive profit of enterprise.”98 The circulation of fictitious capital, we can therefore see, anticipates but cannot ensure the creation of surplus value, and as such it is (Harvey once more) “ever a risky business,” especially where there is a potentially long time lag, as in the BSkyB example, between “fictitious values within the credit system and money tied to real values.”99 This risk was manifested in BSkyB’s poor credit rating at the time of the 1999 bond issues (Baa2/BBB, with a “negative outlook” from both Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s), requiring it to forego a large share of future surplus value in the form of a high interest rate (ranging on the three separate debt tranches from 6.875% to 8.2%).100 Meanwhile, tying subscribers to minimum 12-month contracts, at a monthly fee higher than was charged prior to the free box offer, was one important way for BSkyB to minimize such risk and hence guarantee the eventual creation of surplus.101 BSkyB’s financing of UK digital television, then, provides an important example of the trend noted earlier towards internationalization of circuits of equity and debt capital in the world of contemporary television. Understanding such circuits and their geographies, I have tried to show, is critical to an understanding of the subsequent development of digital television consumption patterns in the UK. But we must also be careful to keep in mind the circulation of BSkyB’s debt over the long term when we turn, as I do in the next section, to circuits of capital—commodity, productive and indeed monetary—that materialize in relation not to corporations and their balance sheets but to individual programs or production projects, and which are often “closed out” in a matter of months rather than years. How can we best conceptualize the connections between these two different types

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of circuit, with their different timescales, their different physical incarnations of capital, and the different investment entities to which they relate? We can begin to provide an answer to this question, I think, by asking why it might have been that BSkyB issued its bonds in 1999 with such a long (ten-year) maturity period. Partly, no doubt, it was a question of large, publicly quoted companies such as BSkyB simply preferring continuity of funding as this provides for a more settled trading environment. Indeed, in returning to the debt markets for the first time since 1999 towards the end of 2005, BSkyB announced three separate bond issues of which a 10year tranche represented the shortest maturity (the other two were dated at 15 and 30 years).102 In addition, BSkyB knew that its initial bet on digital would only repay itself—or, conversely, be proven to have failed—once several years had passed. Long-term financing both mirrored and allowed the long-term nature of the particular gamble being funded. I would argue, however, that there was more to it than that in two important respects. As we have seen, there must ultimately be a unity to the circulation of capital. Yet at the micro level, the television business is an inherently risky and unpredictable one, and companies such as BSkyB recognize that on individual programs or other discrete investment projects, there are likely to be radical discontinuities between the monies required to initiate circulation and the value realized at the “end” of the circuit of money capital; sometimes the product will be considerable surplus value, but sometimes, and perhaps more frequently, value will have been destroyed. In 2006, for instance, the leading US broadcast networks piloted a reported 46 new television shows, of which “85 per cent turned out to be failures.”103 Broadcasters such as these and BSkyB can only hope to smooth over such discontinuities, and live on to invest in further projects, if money is made to circulate “outside” of and “above” the microcircuits attached to individual programs. The second key factor underlying the long-term financing I have analyzed concerns discontinuities not in the generation of value but in the periodicity of capital’s circuits. The capitalist economy, Harvey observes, is characterized by a proliferation of “differential turnover times, circulation times, [and] production periods.”104 Thus, in the world of television, programs enter production at different moments, take different periods to produce, are aired after different periods of post-production and marketing, remain in circulation (as consumable commodities) for different lengths of time, and turn over the capital invested in their production not just with different degrees of success but also within different timeframes. How, when exposed, potentially, to a myriad such temporal discontinuities, can capitalists like BSkyB create unity in capital’s circulation? The solution lies with credit, for, as Harvey again notes, the fact that sellers of credit (here, buyers of BSkyB’s bonds) expect the bulk of their money back only at the end of a specified time period opens up in the meantime “all kinds of paths” to

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deal with individual capitals’ arrhythmic heartbeats. Long-term credit allows shorter-term discontinuities in circulation to be smoothed over and balanced against one another. More specifically, it “permits continuity in money circulation while embracing discontinuity in production, circulation and consumption of commodities.”105 It is to these discontinuities in the circuits of productive and commodity capital that I turn now.

SCIENCE FICTION AND MESHED CIRCUITS I indicated earlier in this chapter that my interest in Battlestar Galactica relates primarily to the circuits of capital ranged around it, and more especially to the spaces and times that those circuits inhabit. In this section I develop that argument. First, however, it is necessary to provide some basic details about the program, and about how it differs from EastEnders, which was the other program that our hypothetical viewer considered watching. Specifically, what are the key differences between EastEnders and Battlestar Galactica as economic-geographical entities? EastEnders is, basically, British and “free.” Funded (out of the license fee) and produced (in Hertfordshire) wholly by the BBC, and telling the stories of a community of Londoners (played by a suitably cosmopolitan cast), it was conceived in 1985 for a UK audience—though the BBC has subsequently profited from overseas sales to, inter alia, the US, Canada and New Zealand—among whom it was and remains universally available on the free-to-air analogue terrestrial channel BBC1. Its geographical economy is essentially that of the paradigmatic form of “non-commercial” UK public service broadcasting that has existed, in the shape of the BBC, for many decades, and which still coheres and thrives despite all manner of threats. Battlestar Galactica, meanwhile, is an altogether more complicated and elusive beast in every conceivable respect. Co-funded and co-produced in its first season (2004/5) out of both the US (by NBC Universal) and the UK (by BSkyB), it was conceived from the outset as an international product, is filmed in Canada, and, for good measure (but less relevant), is set both on earth and in space. In the UK, finally, it airs on Sky One, a BSkyB channel available only to subscribers of cable and satellite television, where during its lifetime to date it has been sponsored by two different video games publishers.106 My interest here is in the forces allowing and encouraging such an extraordinary economic-geographical entity to materialize; identifying such forces will serve to complete our genealogy of the “moment” in which the program was consumed by our viewer, a genealogy begun with the analysis above of the capitalization of BSkyB’s digital pay-television platform. What, then, is actually new about programs such as Battlestar Galactica and their economic geographies? It is not, I emphasize, the mere fact of co-

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production, since international co-productions have been a feature of the television industry for over 20 years.107 Where the UK-US axis is concerned, the history of co-production was for a long time dominated by the relationships between UK producer-broadcasters, especially the BBC, and two sets of partners in the US: first, the multichannel broadcast network A&E, and second, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and its larger member stations.108 Indeed, until the launch of BBC America in 1998, PBS and A&E were the two main US outlets for British or part-British programming. Since it began broadcasting in 1970, PBS in particular, and its celebrated Sunday night Masterpiece Theatre series, has become well-known as the home of lavish costume dramas co-funded and co-produced out of the UK and the US, including in recent years the 15-part Dickens adaptation Bleak House (2005), where the two main production partners were the BBC and the Boston PBS station WGBH (which itself produces nearly a third of PBS’s national prime-time programming).109 But these types of programs, which have long constituted the US-UK coproduction staple, are a far cry from entities such as Battlestar Galactica. For one thing, there is the contrasting identity of the production partners: on the one hand, two public-service producer-broadcasters (WGBH and the BBC); on the other, two thoroughly commercial and increasingly diversified media corporations (NBC Universal and BSkyB). More important, however, are fundamental differences in the respective rationales for and drivers of coproduction, and it is on these differences that I focus. Historically, US-UK co-productions have most often been pursued on expensive, one-off dramas on which individual UK producers dislike assuming exclusive risk, preferring instead to share any such risk—and, of course, any reward—with a US partner.110 (Bleak House, in this tradition, is reported to have cost in the region of £8m to produce.111) The primary explanation and justification for co-production, in other words, has been finance.112 And this rationale has certainly not disappeared from the market: indeed, if we switch focus momentarily to our other main territory of interest, it is notable that New Zealand producers now generate a large chunk of their own “local” programming through international co-productions, and a shortfall in domestic production finance is undoubtedly one of the main reasons for this. Trade commentary on the international co-production phenomenon makes it clear that, right from the early history of co-productions, money (or its absence) was the principal driver. “Originally,” one recent “state-ofthe-market” review observes, “co-productions were intended to help smaller companies pool their resources and better compete internationally.”113 Yet the same review notes that now, “all production companies are actively seeking out [co-production] partnerships.”114 Is this (still) a question of not enough money? Many commentators suggest that it is.115 But did NBC Universal need to enter into co-production on Battlestar Galactica? While the

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original inspiration for the 2004-5 series was the eponymous 1978 film and television spin-off, the more immediate trigger was a two-episode miniseries wholly financed in the US and broadcast on America’s Sci Fi Channel in December 2003 (and then subsequently on Sky One in the UK in February 2004); it was the success of this miniseries that inspired NBC Universal, Sci Fi’s owner, to commission a full 13-episode first season. Did a shortfall of available finance or an aversion to risk dictate NBC Universal’s decision to co-finance and co-produce that first series with the UK’s BSkyB? The answer to this question, unfortunately, is not entirely clear. Financial considerations do appear to have played a part, for Battlestar Galactica has never been cheap to produce, and commissioning the first full season was clearly seen to carry a risk.116 But I want to suggest that in the case not just of Battlestar, but also of other recent commercial co-productions involving US and UK partners, something quite different is also going on. For it is important to recognize, firstly, that Battlestar is not a lone example of the developments that concern me here. The UK co-production business has grown strongly in the past decade, most especially in the four-year period from 1999 to 2003, which saw the annual value of such co-productions increase almost threefold from US$40m to US$115m.117 The business remains dominated by US-UK co-productions, which continue to account for over 80% of UK co-productions by value.118 And this growth has occurred, it should be noted, despite one of the two main traditional sources of US-UK co-production finance—the A&E network—cutting back on this source of programming in favor of a stronger emphasis on indigenous “reality” fare.119 Much of the growth has instead come from the newer types of co-production of which Battlestar is an example. Others of this ilk include The Grid (Fox Televisions Studios/BBC, 2004), The 4400 (Viacom Productions/BSkyB, 2004), My Bare Lady (Fox Reality/Zig Zag Productions, 2006), Corkscrewed (Magic Pictures/Talent Television, 2006) and Meadowlands/Cape Wrath (Showtime Networks/Ecosse Films, 2007).120 If, as I suggest, a lack of sufficient domestic finance is not an adequate explanation for the proliferation of such co-productions, what is? There are, in reality, probably various important drivers. One of these almost certainly relates to the increasing competition in international markets, the UK included, for the newest and highest-profile US programming. We have already seen the main evidence for this in the previous chapter, in the shape of rapidly escalating prices for the acquisition of hit US franchises (Housewives, Lost, Heroes and so on). Interviews with industry executives indicate that BSkyB’s decision to enter into co-production agreements on shows such as Battlestar and The 4400 may constitute an attempt to secure invaluable competitive advantage in this marketplace: rather than being led around the US circuit at the annual LA Screenings, viewing pilots, and then bidding against all of the UK’s other potential buyers, co-production

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gives BSkyB upfront, exclusive access to a program.121 This strategy is highrisk, of course, because it only works if the pilot subsequently gets picked up; but with straight acquisitions themselves increasingly occurring at the pilot stage, the level of risk is arguably not much greater than pursuing the traditional acquisition route, as ITV’s scalding experience with Six Degrees (chapter 6) has amply demonstrated. This explanation for increasing co-production activity, however, is neither fundmental nor widely applicable; at best, it denotes some singular forward thinking by BSkyB. We can better and more deeply understand the growth and spread of co-production as an economic-geographical phenomenon if we think, once more, about circuits of capital, and the specific circuits that encompass a program such as Battlestar. As we have seen, it is frequently argued that increasing levels of co-production, in the UK and elsewhere, reflect growing pressure on domestic production budgets, manifested as an inability to finance independently the types of programs that used to be financed solely from domestic sources. My argument, by contrast, is that such “shrinking” budgets are more accurately seen as a symptom rather than a cause. It is by focusing on capital circuits and their spatial and temporal alignment that I will make my way to that conclusion. Let us start, however, by taking a program with a very simple economic geography: the short-lived New Zealand drama series Orange Roughies, which premiered on TVNZ’s flagship channel TV One in May 2006, but which was pulled after just eight episodes due to poor ratings.122 Roughies was made in New Zealand by an independent, New Zealand–owned and operated production company, Auckland-based ScreenWorks, with funding (NZ$8.9m) from NZ On Air, and was only ever distributed and aired in its home market. Thus, the circuits of commodity, productive and money capital that gave substance to Roughies as an economic entity were all purely domestic circuits. Now let us consider EastEnders. Its capital circuits and their geographies are somewhat more ambiguous. Like many other successful UK programs, it has been widely exported; as commodity capital, therefore, EastEnders is thoroughly internationalized. In contrast, its circuit of productive capital continues to be focused exclusively on the UK: the BBC remains sole producer of the show, and all stages of production occur within the UK. What, lastly, of money capital? I deal with this last because it is the most complicated but also the most important. To a degree, one can argue that the circuit of money capital, like productive capital, remains domestic, since no external, internationally sourced funding is—or ever has been— pumped into the show to enable its physical production. And yet the show has clearly generated large amounts of revenue from sales to international broadcasters, thus adding an additional dimension to its circuit of money capital. Specifically, through such international sales, the circuit of money capital can be seen to be reanimated, with the program essentially receiving

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incremental finance—to generate incremental surplus value—ex post facto. As the circuit of money capital internationalizes, in this manner, with the circuit of commodity capital, both such circuits disconnect spatially from the (domestic) circuit of productive capital. It is here that we can see the significance of Harvey’s work on capital circulation and its geographies, and his argument that capital relentlessly seeks complementarity in the mobilities of its respective physical incarnations. For there is, this argument suggests, a certain instability or incongruity in the circuits of commodity and money capital extending ever outward while that of productive capital remains fixed in place. The argument suggests that over time there will be a tendency for capital to work to harmonize its geographies of circulation. This, then, is how I prefer to interpret the growing and increasingly broadly based trend towards program co-production—as one particularly vivid manifestation of television’s circuit of productive capital “catching up,” spatially, with the circuits of commodity and money capital. By entering into co-production initiatives, producers in different territories are, quite simply, internationalizing the production of a program as well as its circulation as a commodity. They are also, notably, redoubling and foregrounding the internationalization of money capital by co-funding the program’s physical production: where programs such as EastEnders secure international finance, after all, it is after production, through the sale of the finished program; but with programs like Battlestar Galactica, where the upfront finance derives from (in its case) both the US and the UK, the circuit of money capital is international from the start. As such, it seems to me that entities such as Battlestar, internationally co-financed and co-produced, are examples of all three circuits of capital meshing not just spatially but temporally, with internationalization of each circuit inscribed into the fabric of the program from the very moment of its inception. In Figure 7.3, I sketch out this progression from, at one extreme, the thoroughly domestic Orange Roughies to, at the other, the fundamentally internationalized Battlestar Galactica. My argument, after Harvey, is that the latter, and co-productions more broadly, can be traced to capital’s restless propensity to seek complementarity in circulation—in space and time. I also show in Figure 7.3 that there is an important “halfway” stage between programs such as EastEnders and those such as Battlestar. If the latter meshes all three circuits from both temporal and spatial perspectives, program “presales” do so for commodity and money capital but not for productive capital—a “presale” occurring where program production finance is raised partly through the upfront sale of international rights to overseas broadcasters (or at least to international distributors), but where production itself remains a purely domestic affair.123 Presales, like co-productions, are an increasingly material feature of the international television landscape.

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One example from recent years was the BBC’s More Than a Game: The Story of the World Cup, which was pre-sold to broadcasters in more than thirty international markets.124 Another program successfully pre-sold out of the UK was the children’s animation series Gordon the Garden Gnome, commissioned by the BBC, produced by Collingwood O’Hare Entertainment, and acquired in advance by Cartoon Network in the US, TVO in Canada, ZDF in Germany and ABC in Australia.125 Anecdotal evidence suggests that such pre-sales account for a growing share of international revenues for the leading production companies of, among other territories, the UK, Australia, Canada and the US.126 Indeed, US executives suggest that the international distribution arms of the major US studios are themselves increasingly turning into financing arms through their role in the pre-acquisition (and, typically, pre-sale) of the international rights to new program concepts. In fact one estimate indicates that international markets are now generally looked at for as much as 20–50% of the overall production budget.127 All of which brings me back, somewhat circuitously (pun intended), to my suggestion that attributing the growth of co-productions to declining production budgets—an argument often heard in the UK—is to confuse symptom with cause. Production budgets, ultimately, can only be measured meaningfully in relation to revenues, and if UK budgets are indeed “shrink-

Figure 7.3:

Internationalization of television’s capital circuits

Source: Author

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ing” in relation to total revenues (global revenues) from UK programming, then could we not argue that this is a symptom merely, or primarily, of the growth of non-UK (export) revenues? For such revenues have indeed been increasing strongly—from US$504m (approximately £300m at historic prices) in 1998 to £593m in 2006, equating to a compound annual growth rate of 9%.128 And budgets, I would emphasize, have not shrunk: total programming spend by UK broadcasters increased at 3% per annum between 1999 and 2004, from £3.0 to 3.5bn, and this growth excluded the even stronger growth in spend on sports rights.129 My argument, in other words, is that to explain the rise of co-productions, we need to extend our analysis of the circulation of capital both spatially and temporally. More specifically, co-productions should be seen less as a function of a decline, domestically, in the monies with which the circulation of television capital begins (a decline which has not in fact happened), than of an increase, internationally, in the monies with which it ends; the co-production effectively acknowledges this latter trend and embeds the reality of an international market into the architecture of a program’s production and upfront financing.

UNITING CAPITALS AND DIVIDING CAPITALS In his theoretical elaboration of the geographies of capital circulation, as we have seen, Harvey asks whether we can discern any “underlying unity” when we come to integrate the separate mobilities or “motions” of money, commodities and productive capital. I have suggested that when we look at the individual circuits directly bound to the program Battlestar Galactica, the answer is a cautious yes—more spatial and temporal unity, at any rate, than adheres to programs produced and financed domestically, for domestic consumption, before being distributed internationally. But in suggesting that we look for evidence of unity, however, Harvey warns that we are also highly likely to find evidence of contradictory tendencies. Any such unity, he argues, is inherently fragile, because just as the capitalist economy more broadly is crisis-prone, so there will always be frictions between the mobilities of different capitals and—more transparently—between the capitalists with vested (economic) interests in those respective mobilities. As Harvey emphasized in Limits, “mobility of capital of one sort can constitute a threat to the value of capital of another sort.”130 And this threat, he suggested, will typically manifest itself in tensions between capitalist entities in different places—such tensions, then, are commonly territorial tensions. In this, the final section of the chapter, I will make some brief observations about Battlestar Galactica that serve as tentative speculations precisely on the forms of fragility and territorial tension to which Harvey alludes.

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What happened after production and distribution of the first, co-financed and co-produced series of Battlestar, I argue, indicates that the seeming economic-geographical unity I have described above was indeed brittle, and characterized by just such contradictory tendencies. I make this observation not as a caveat to the central argument I have developed—that co-productions and similar configurations of media capital reflect an impulse towards spatial and temporal complementarity of circuits—but, first, to insist that such an impulse is always ambiguous, and second, to explicitly connect the discussion of capital circuits and their geographies back to the key foregoing issues of relative economic power and the differential capture of value across economic space. The central matter of interest here is the fact that when America’s Sci Fi Channel announced in February 2005 that it was commissioning a 20episode second season of Battlestar, it soon transpired that this new series, unlike the first, was to be funded entirely from US sources. BSkyB, for its part, would revert to the status it enjoys on the majority of its US program acquisitions, namely that of a “mere” buyer.131 Thus on the second and subsequent series of the show (the fourth, it was announced in June 2007, would be the last), Battlestar became a “domestic” production (albeit filmed over the border in British Columbia), with money capital secured from international sources only on conventional (“post”) program sales rather than presales.132 The critical upshot for our analysis here, of course, is that the unified times and spaces of the circuits of productive, money and commodity capital, after a brief period of alignment, had now been fractured. What prompted this shift from co-production and co-financing to a more tightly focused US capital configuration? It is not entirely clear (hence why I describe my comments as tentative speculations), but it does seem that the status quo changed precisely because of the emergence of tensions between the US and the UK in relation to those “meshed” capital circuits.133 While many co-productions are known to be “co” productions much more in name than in reality, BSkyB had clearly enjoyed a considerable degree of influence on season one of Battlestar. We know this because, perhaps uniquely amongst television shows of full or part-US origination, the 13 episodes of that first season, as I noted in chapter 4, were actually aired in the UK before they went on air in America—and as we saw in chapter 4, seniority or “power,” in television’s commodity circuits, has long been embedded in sequence of transmission. My reading of events is that once it became clear that Battlestar Galactica was going to enjoy long-term success, a true balance of power between the US and the UK, as was manifested in co-production, in meshed capital circuits, and in earlier UK transmission, no longer sat easily with NBC Universal, the key US stakeholder in that precarious power relationship. The fact that—again, as discussed in chapter 4—rampant online piracy had seen all

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episodes of season one make their way “back” to the US well in advance of the US broadcast date, may or may not have played a part in this. Whether there was a specific “trigger” or not, BSkyB’s input and control was rapidly severed, and Sky One fell back on the conventional UK practice of broadcasting US acquisitions after US transmission (three months later in the case of Battlestar’s second series). NBC Universal had summarily reaffirmed its power and, one could argue, that of the US media more widely. While I have ranged in this chapter across issues that seemingly take us a long way from the individual viewer with whom I opened it, it is important to conclude by emphasizing what I hope should by now be very clear: that from an economic-geographical perspective, we can only properly understand the possibility of her specific consumption experience by situating it within an extensive, diverse and relatively complicated array of capital circuits. The configuration of such circuits both reflects and reproduces, I have further argued, the distribution of power within the global media, which is a central concern for me throughout this book. And though I have not broached the subject here, capital and its circulation are clearly fundamental to the power of the media, and of those who either control or have privileged access to the media. Those powers include the power to determine what programming we consume, and when; to begin to get a handle on how those determinations are structured and routed economically and geographically, my only observation would be that we need to understand media capital, and more specifically the process of its circulation. But, not forgetting our viewer, what about the power of the viewer? What power, if any, does the television consumer wield? The next chapter takes up that theme.

NOTES 1. E.g. J. Bryson, N. Henry, D. Keeble and R. Martin (eds.), The economic geography reader, Wiley, Chichester, 1999, Part Four (pp. 267–337); N. Coe, P. Kelly and H. Yeung, Economic geography: A contemporary introduction, Blackwell, Oxford, 2007, Part III (pp. 185–318). 2. B. Christophers, “Circuits of capital, genealogy, and geographies of television,” Antipode, 38, 2006, 930–52, at p. 930. I took this program choice from actual program schedules in November 2005. 3. See especially C. Prado, Starting with Foucault: An introduction to genealogy, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1995. 4. T. Mitchell, Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002, p. 27. 5. I am thinking here of critical social-scientific writing on economic history and on the histories of economies that is inspired much more directly and explicitly by Foucault on genealogy (and, more generally, by poststructural perspectives on the world and the creation of knowledge about it) than by Marx on historical

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materialism. This dualism, of course, is, in reality, a crude one, but it strikes me that the number of historically oriented scholarly studies that successfully transcend it remains tiny (Mitchell’s Rule of experts is one such). One recent example of work that falls squarely in the former camp is Marieke de Goede’s Virtue, fortune, and faith: A genealogy of finance, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2005. 6. Mitchell, Rule of experts, p. 30. 7. K. Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 536. 8. K. Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy. Volume II: The process of circulation of capital, ed. F. Engels, translated from the 2nd German edition by E. Untermann, Charles H. Kerr and Co., Chicago, 1910. On which, see C. Arthur and G. Reuten (eds.), The circulation of capital: Essays on Volume Two of Marx’s “Capital,” Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1998. Marx also wrote extensively about circulation in the Grundrisse (pp. 186–98, 401–743), and I rely here more on that account. 9. Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 546, 536, 186. 10. D. Harvey, The limits to capital, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1982. 11. The relationship between Harvey’s work, Marx’s work and “Marxism” more broadly is far from straightforward, and has been much discussed. See in particular N. Castree, “David Harvey: Marxism, capitalism and the geographical imagination,” New Political Economy, 12, 2007, 97–115; A Callinicos, “David Harvey and Marxism,” in N. Castree and D. Gregory (eds.), David Harvey: A critical reader (Blackwell, Oxford, 2006). 12. Harvey, The limits to capital; the quotation is from p. 69. 13. E.g. R. Hudson, Economic geographies: Circuits, flows and spaces, Sage, London, 2005, pp. 22–27; P. Dicken, Global shift: Reshaping the global economic map in the 21st century, 4th edition, Sage, London, 2003, pp. 200–201. 14. Harvey, The limits to capital; the quotation is from p. 70. 15. Ibid; the quotations are from p. 81. 16. Ibid; the quotations are from pp. 405, 416. 17. Ibid, pp. 385–87; the quotation is from p. 387. 18. For a good overview and retrospective, see R. Martin (ed.), Money and the space economy, Wiley, London, 1999. 19. In this regard, two books, for me at any rate, stand head and shoulders above the rest: George Henderson’s sophisticated examination of the circulation of capital—and much more besides—in late nineteenth-century California agriculture, California and the fictions of capital, Oxford University Press, New York, 1999; and Patrick Bond’s equally impressive study of the influence of financial markets on processes of uneven development in Zimbabwe, Uneven Zimbabwe: A study of finance, development and underdevelopment, Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ, 1998. 20. Harvey, The limits to capital, pp. 376–80. 21. I myself take up precisely these issues in the context of the television economy in the final chapter of the book. For Harvey’s key arguments along these lines, see his “Editorial: A breakfast vision,” Geography Review, 3, 1989, 1, and “Between space and time: Reflections on the geographical imagination,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 80, 1990, 418–34 (especially at p. 422). 22. Two good examples of work in the former vein are I. Cook et al, “Follow the Thing: Papaya,” Antipode, 36, 2004, 642–64, and B. Page, “Paying for water and

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the geography of commodities,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30, 2005, 293–306; in the latter vein, see the collection edited by A. Hughes and S. Reimer (eds.), Geographies of commodity chains, Routledge, London, 2004. And for a useful, retrospective thought-piece on geographers’ approaches to the geographies of commodities, see N. Castree, “The geographical lives of commodities: Problems of analysis and critique,” Social & Cultural Geography, 5, 2004, 21–35. 23. Harvey, The limits to capital. The discussion of productive capital’s mobilities is at pp. 380–85; the definition of productive capital is at p. 376. The question of why Harvey discusses only labor geographies is possibly answered—albeit indirectly—by Richard Bryan. Bryan argues that capital circulation really comprises only two, not three, physical geographies (by which he means movement of capital in a material form), because “capital does not move in the form of production,” as it clearly does in the forms of money and commodities; instead, he says, production is simply relocated “by changing the site of the productive process,” and that such movement is separate from the circulation process itself. It is an interesting, though moot, point—and clearly, the variable (labor) fraction of productive capital, as Harvey emphasizes, does move—but it suggests, I think, why Harvey engages exclusively with labor mobilities. See R. Bryan, “The state and the internationalisation of capital: An approach to analysis,” Journal of Contemporary Asia, 17, 1987, 253–75, at p. 259. 24. Harvey, The limits to capital; the quotations are from pp. 385, 381, 382. 25. See especially D. Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1996. 26. Dicken, Global shift, pp. 198–273. 27. Harvey, The limits to capital; the quotations are from pp. 376, 405. 28. Ibid., p. 407. 29. C. Palloix, “The self-expansion of capital on a world scale,” Review of Radical Political Economy, 9(2), 1977, 1–28. 30. It is worth noting that, while helpful, this concept of the progressive internationalization of capital, and its beginning with the circuit of commodity capital, is by no means as simple as first appearances might suggest. In particular, it is clear that only in some instances will the commodity circuit have internationalized without a concomitant internationalization of the circuit of either productive or, more commonly, money capital. This is because while early international commodity trade did often see commodities exchanged strictly for commodities—North American fur pelts, say, for European knives, fish hooks, blankets and so on—there were demonstrably other commodities which, when first traded internationally, were exchanged for labor (perhaps most obviously, textiles, iron ore, and salt for African slaves) or simply for money. In other words, internationalization of the commodity circuit frequently required simultaneous internationalization, however limited, of the money or productive circuit. These caveats notwithstanding, I still find Palloix’s schematic a helpful one for framing the international historical geography of television. The simple point I want to emphasize, and which will become very clear in the discussion that follows, is that we cannot and should not shoehorn that complex historical geography into a template that was never intended by Palloix as anything more categorical or rigid than an observation of interesting headline developments in capital circulation.

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31. For instance, my brief mention of the international channel empires of Discovery, MTV et al (in chapter 4) or of US media corporation investments in overseas producers such as NHNZ (in chapter 6). 32. A. Briggs, The history of broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995, p. 712. 33. R. Collins, “National Culture: A Contradiction in Terms?” Canadian Journal of Communication, 16, 1991, 225–38. 34. The earliest domestic productions included local news programming, talent shows (e.g. Have a Shot in 1962) and drama (e.g. All Earth to Love in 1963). New Zealand’s longest running television series, Country Calendar, which documents rural life in the country, made its debut in 1966. T. Dunleavy, Ourselves in primetime: A history of New Zealand television drama, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2005, is a good recent overview specifically of locally produced drama from its earliest days. 35. R. Boyd-Bell, New Zealand television: The first 25 years, Reed Methuen, Auckland, 1985; P. Day, A history of broadcasting in New Zealand, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1994. 36. While the vast majority of television advertising payments are made to broadcasters, it is important to remember that, as we noted in chapter 5, the growth of advertiser-funded programming and product placement means there is an increasing quantum of money being paid by advertisers direct to producers. 37. Ultimately, of course, the consumer pays for advertising too, in the form of premiums incorporated into the pricing of consumer products and services to cover corporate advertising costs. 38. Sky’s residential subscription receipts totalled $381 million—Sky Network Television, “Financial Information,” year to June 30, 2006, http://www.skytv. co.nz/files/Miscellaneous/Financials.pdf (retrieved June 2007), p. 53; NZ On Air TV funding totalled $73m—“Television programmes funded during the year ended 30 June 2006,” http://www.nzonair.govt.nz/files/television/Television_funding.pdf (retrieved June 2007); and Te Mängai Päho TV funding totalled $41 million—“Te Mängai Päho 2006 Annual Report,” http://www.tmp.govt.nz/about/TMP_annual_ report06.pdf (retrieved June 2007), p. 20. 39. Net BBC TV license fee income was £3.2bn in the year to 31 March 2007—“BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2006/7,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/annualreport/pdfs/financialoverview.pdf (retrieved June 2007), p. 83; BSkyB’s residential subscription receipts totalled £3.15bn in the year to June 30, 2006 (and I have estimated that 95% of these revenues were TV related)—“BSkyB Annual Review 2006,” http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/10/104016/ar2006/BSkyB_annual_ review_2006.pdf (retrieved June 2007), p. 36; Virgin’s residential subscription receipts totalled £2.6bn in the year to December 31, 2006 (and I have estimated that a third of these revenues were TV-related)—“Virgin Media 2006 Annual Report,” http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/13/135485/reports/AnnualReport06. pdf (retrieved June 2007), p. 57. Note that my estimate of £7bn broadly agrees with third-party estimates: the UK communications regulator Ofcom, for instance, gives a figure of £6.7bn; see Ofcom, “Public Service Broadcasting—Annual Report 2007,” http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/psb_review/annrep/psb07/psb07.pdf (retrieved July 2007), p. 19.

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40. Respectively: Advertising Standards Authority, “New Zealand Advertising Industry Turnover,” http://www.asa.co.nz/pdfs/media%20turnover_2006.pdf (retrieved June 2007); Ofcom, “Public Service Broadcasting,” p. 19. 41. See especially D. Leslie, “Global Scan: The Globalization of Advertising Agencies, Concepts, and Campaigns,” Economic Geography, 71, 1995, 402–26. 42. See especially W. Mazzarella, Shoveling smoke: Advertising and globalization in contemporary India, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2003, and A. Thomas, Transnational media and contoured markets: Redefining Asian television and advertising, Sage, London, 2006. 43. Unilever New Zealand Limited; Procter & Gamble New Zealand; Coca-Cola Amatil (NZ) Limited (which is the sole Coca-Cola and Schweppes licensee in New Zealand, and covers Fiji as well as New Zealand); McDonald’s Restaurants (New Zealand) Limited; Toyota New Zealand; and Holden New Zealand Limited (renamed in 1994 from General Motors New Zealand Limited). 44. Alternatively, working capital for establishing (and marketing) new international operations can be raised through public or private capital markets either locally (in the country being entered) or abroad, and in the latter case advertising finance is of course being sourced internationally. However, my preference is to view—and analyze—such instances simply as a variation on the theme of equity and debt financing of television broadcasters and producers (which I discuss below), for precisely the same issues are involved. 45. “Ofcom review of the television production sector,” 2006, available at http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/tpsr/tpsr.pdf (retrieved February 2007), pp. 46–47. In total, UK broadcasters spent £3.5 billion on original programming (excluding sports and movie rights), but £500m of this spend was on international acquisitions. 46. Department for Culture, Media & Sport, “TV exports 2005 statistical release,” http://www.culture.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/05694F2E-1C79-4570-98602F518C71DA24/0/TVExports2005StatisticalRelease.pdf (retrieved July 2007). The figure of £301 million is the sum of the respective values for finished programs (£220 million), formats (£26 million) and co-productions (£55 million). I discuss the last of these categories more fully when I turn to Battlestar Galactica later in the chapter. Formats feature centrally in chapter 11. 47. Statistics New Zealand, “Screen Industry in New Zealand, 2005,” November 2006, available at http://www.stats.govt.nz/NR/rdonlyres/7E7DAC2F-2087-42CB87A7-B9510CD428CF/0/screenindustryreport2005fullSO.pdf (retrieved March 2007), p. 11. 48. At first blush, therefore, it might seem difficult to reconcile this conclusion with the fact that—according to the same report (“Screen Industry in New Zealand, 2005,” p. 12)—international sources contributed fully NZ$667 million of the gross revenue generated by the overall New Zealand “screen production industry” in 2005. If only a small fraction (less than $30m) of this $667m can have come from the sale of television programming, what accounts for the lion’s share? The answer is, of course, film. 49. P. Norris, “Convoluted way to pay for digital TV,” New Zealand Herald, October 9, 2006; “TVNZ Annual Report FY 2006,” http://images.tvnz.co.nz/tvnz/ pdf/tvnz_annual_report_2006.pdf (retrieved July 2007), p. 29. A caveat may, of course, be in order here, since New Zealand’s “domestic banks” are almost all for-

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eign owned, meaning that the loans secured by TVNZ may ultimately have been financed, at least in part, offshore. 50. Information correct as of July 17, 2007. See http://www.skytv.co.nz/index. cfm?pageid=463. Sky is far more highly geared than TVNZ, with long-term borrowings of over NZ$500m on its balance sheet at the end of 2006 (“Sky Network Television Limited, Interim Report December 2006, http://www.skytv.co.nz/files/Miscellaneous/final-interim-2007.pdf, [retrieved July 2007], p. 8); it most recently took on debt in October 2006, raising $200m in ten-year bonds on the NZDX market. 51. Australia’s Ironbridge Capital owns 100% of the share capital. 52. As of July 17, 2007. See http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix. zhtml?c=104016&p=irol-mediafaq. 53. “BSkyB buys ITV stake,” The Guardian, November 17, 2006. 54. As of July 17, 2007. See http://investors.virginmedia.com/phoenix. zhtml?c=135485&p=irol-ownershipsummary. 55. I take this ranking from “IMG becomes UK’s biggest indie group,” Broadcast, June 1, 2006. Note that Talkback is a division of FremantleMedia (itself part of RTL). These five companies together generated 43% of UK independent television production revenues in 2007, when they remained the largest five players; see “UK producers see revenue jump,” Variety, February 20, 2008. 56. “Taking on the world: the report of the Screen Production Industry Taskforce,” March 2003, available at http://www.nzte.govt.nz/common/files/screen-taskforce-report.pdf (retrieved June 2007), at p. 21. 57. “NHNZ opens China office as part of global spread,” Television Asia, October 2002; “NHNZ finds success in China,” Multichannel News, December 20, 2007. 58. On “runaway productions” more generally—where television programs or films intended for initial broadcast or release in one country are actually shot in another—see G. Elmer and M. Gasher (eds.), Contracting out Hollywood: Runaway productions and foreign location shooting, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2005. 59. See especially “Disney fan inspired to be on Cloud 9,” New Zealand Herald, July 13, 2000, and “Kiwi TV ‘success’ is really British,” New Zealand Herald, May 24, 2003. 60. Investment New Zealand, “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys; Sector: Creative Industries—Screen Production,” http://www.investmentnz.govt.nz/section/14261. aspx (retrieved February 2007); “You have Xena for the very last time,” New Zealand Herald, August 13, 2002. 61. Numerous different examples of these two phenomena could be cited, but MTV is a case in point: it arrived in the UK in 1997 and has now spawned (as of July 2007) eight spin-off channels (on BSkyB’s Sky Digital platform); it took until 2006, however, for MTV to arrive in New Zealand, and at the time of writing only one MTV channel was available on Sky. 62. In many such countries, it is worth noting, some BBC content was already (and remains) available to viewers in the shape of acquired programming on existing, domestically owned channels. The BBC’s rationale for providing proprietary, BBC-branded channels in addition to this existing programming presence was manifold, but included, first, making more BBC content available; second, being able to offer the BBC’s news and current affairs coverage, which typically was not included in such acquired programming packages; and third, making available large

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parts of its archive, in addition to the up-to-date programming generally shown on the domestic channels. 63. On BBC World News, see especially S. Shrikhande, “Competitive strategies in the internationalization of television: CNNI and BBC World in Asia,” Journal of Media Economics, 14(3), 2001, 147–68. Note that in countries—including New Zealand—where BBC World News is available but BBC Prime/Entertainment is not, the programming that is elsewhere carried on the latter is typically available on other, customized subscription channels. In New Zealand and Australia, for instance, there is, as noted, the BBC’s wholly owned UKTV channel. 64. For just 16 months—late 2004 to early 2006—there was also a BBC Japan, but it had to close as a result of financial difficulties facing its local distributor. See BBC News, “BBC Japan set to close in April,” March 21, 2006, http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4830518.stm (retrieved January 2007). 65. Respectively: BBC News, “BBC to launch global TV channels,” September 7, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5325006.stm (retrieved December 2006); “BBC ramps up Euro channel business,” Broadcast, October 17, 2007. 66. “BBC Worldwide—Annual review 2005/06—Global Channels,” http:// www.bbcworldwide.com/annualreviews/review2007/channels.htm (retrieved July 2007). Two caveats about this revenue figure are important to bear in mind. First, the number excludes revenues for BBC World News, which is held and accounted for separately from the BBC’s other wholly owned international channels (all of which reside within BBC Worldwide). Second, the figure includes revenues for the BBC’s minority-owned international channels (which I discuss below), including two channels delivered in partnership with Discovery (Animal Planet and People+Arts), and two channels broadcast in Canada through a joint venture with CW Media (BBC Canada and BBC Kids). 67. “New US chief for BBC Worldwide,” The Guardian, February 14, 2007. 68. “Worldwide sets sights on a Frank Spencer hit,” Broadcast, October 18, 2007. 69. “Hugh Jackman’s show Viva Laughlin dumped by Channel Nine,” The Daily Telegraph [Australia], October 23, 2007. 70. See “BBC Worldwide global production network,” Multichannel News International, August 14, 2007; “BBC to launch global production network,” Broadcast, August 5, 2007. 71. “BBC sets up French production arm,” Variety, July 16, 2008. 72. “ITV Productions plans spending spree,” Broadcast, August 23, 2007. 73. “ITV acquires Scandi indie in £14m deal,” Broadcast, May 15, 2008. 74. Respectively: “All3Media buys US producer Zoo,” Broadcast, June 25, 2008; “Shine launches US production base,” Broadcast, November 2, 2007; and “Shine clinches Reveille purchase,” Variety, February 14, 2008. Elisabeth Murdoch is Rupert’s (News Corp) daughter. 75. “Pearson to create TV giant,” BBC News, April 7, 2000; “Pearson TV buys TalkBack,” BBC News, June 14, 2000. 76. One of the most prominent in recent years has been Sony Pictures Television International, which has worked with both the BBC and ITV, but which took “the better part of eight years . . . to become more than just a bit player in the UK production scene” (“Think global conglomerate—act local producer,” Television, 42(5), May 2005), and which has also explored the more conventional route

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to developing a presence in UK television production, acquiring a 15% stake in Elisabeth Murdoch’s Shine Television (“Sony Pictures Television International To Invest In Shine Limited,” June 16, 2005, http://www.shinelimited.com/about. jsp?id=4&aid=5, retrieved July 2007). Perhaps more significantly, the Hollywood studio NBC Universal opened a London-based international production division in 2007; see “NBC appoints UK production boss,” Broadcast, July 24, 2007. 77. “BBC launches in Canada,” The Guardian, September 4, 2001. 78. Discovery also manages distribution (in America) of BBC America and, since 2006, BBC World News America (“BBC World, Discovery pact,” Variety, January 25, 2006). I discuss the BBC venture with Discovery at greater length in chapter 10. For more on the deal, see J. Steemers, Selling television: British television in the global marketplace, British Film Institute, London, 2004, 124–25; C. Forrester, “Discovery Communications: ‘Growing, growing, growing . . .,’” Transnational Broadcasting Studies, 11, 2003 (Fall–Winter), http://www.tbsjournal.com/Archives/Fall03/Forrester. html (retrieved October 2005). 79. See especially J-L. Renaud and B. Litman, “Changing dynamics of the overseas marketplace for TV programming: The rise of international co-production,” Telecommunications Policy, 9, 1985, 245–61; C. Johnston, International television co-production: from access to success, Focal Press, Stoneham, MA, 1992; C. Hoskins, S. McFadyen, A. Finn and A. Jackel, “Film and television co-production: evidence from Canadian-European experience,” European Journal of Communication, 10, 1995, 221–43; S. Tinic, “Going global: International coproductions and the disappearing domestic audience in Canada,” in L. Parks and S. Kumar (eds.) Planet TV: A global television reader (New York University Press, New York, 2002, 169–85); and C. Hoskins, S. McFadyen, A. Finn, X. Zhou and D. Mitchell, “International joint ventures for television and film production: The role of cultural distance and management culture,” in I. Alon (ed.), Chinese culture, organizational behaviour, and international business management (Praeger, Westport, CT, 2003, 151–65). 80. “BSkyB Annual Review 2006,” p. 36. 81. From 3.404m to 3.460m; see, respectively, “BSkyB Results for the half-year ending 31/12/98,” http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=104016&p=irolnewsArticle_Print&ID=144629&highlight= (retrieved February 2006), and “BSkyB plc Annual Report 1999,” http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/10/104016/ reports/ar99.pdf (retrieved February 2006), p. 90. 82. “Digital TV price war looms,” BBC News, May 5, 1999. 83. D. Thussu, “Taming the Dragon and the Elephant: Murdoch’s Media in Asia,” Media Development, 2004(4), http://www.wacc.org.uk/wacc/content/pdf/384 (retrieved July 2006). 84. R. Hudson, Economic geographies: Circuits, flows and spaces, Sage, London, 2005, p. 2. Consumption, in David Morley’s words, was treated “as a ‘secondary’ or inconsequential matter.” See his “So-called cultural studies: Dead ends and reinvented wheels,” in his Media, modernity and technology: The geography of the new, Routledge, London, 2007, p. 31. 85. Hudson, Economic geographies, p. 2. 86. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 90. 87. As Stuart Hall argued as long ago as 1973 in his famous reading of Marx’s introduction to the Grundrisse, not only does production produce consumption but “con-

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sumption produces production,” first “because the production’s object (the product) is only finally “realised when it is consumed” and second because it (consumption) creates “the need for new production.” See his “A ‘reading’ of Marx’s Introduction to The Grundrisse,” Stencilled Occasional Paper, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham; the quotations are from p. 21. A shortened version of Hall’s paper was subsequently published as “Marx’s Notes on Method: A ‘Reading’ of the ‘1857 Introduction,’” Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 6, 1974, 132–70, and this latter version was later reprinted in Cultural Studies, 17, 2003, 113–49. 88. Over the past decade BSkyB has introduced various upgraded iterations of its basic digital decoder, so actual price erosion will have been considerably less than if the original generation of decoder had been distributed throughout the period. We should also recognize, however, that in recent years many new BSkyB subscribers have opted to take not a basic digital decoder but a decoder with an integrated personal video recorder (PVR)—branded Sky+—and that in such cases the subscriber has been required to make an upfront payment for that box. Nonetheless, BSkyB has, from the start, heavily subsidized rollout of Sky+ (the box currently (August 2007) costs the newly subscribing consumer only £99, but would retail for far more than that as a stand-alone consumer electronics product), so the long-term assumption of an average box subsidy of approximately £80 for each new subscriber—whether taking Sky+ or a “free” basic decoder—strikes me as appropriate and defensible. 89. “BSkyB plc—Report of Foreign Issuer (6K) Item 6: Supplemental Guarantor Information,” March 18, 2005, http://sec.edgar-online.com/2005/03/18/00011569 73-05-000338/Section7.asp (retrieved November 2005). In its annual report for that year BSkyB reported that the Sterling proceeds of the twinned July issue amounted to £512m; “BSkyB plc—Annual Report 2000,” http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/10/104016/reports/ar00.pdf (retrieved November 2005), p. 14. 90. An interest rate swap is a popular form of derivative financial instrument whereby the two parties to the transaction exchange streams of interest but not the underlying loan (principal) amounts; such swaps are used by companies to re-allocate their exposure to interest-rate fluctuations and/or foreign exchange rate fluctuations. In BSkyB’s case, during the ten-year term of its dollar bonds, it will pay annual interest expenses in Sterling, but when the bonds mature in 2009 the principal amounts will remain repayable in dollars. 91. A comparable geography characterizes international equity markets, as noted by M. Pagano, A. Röell and J. Zechner, “The geography of equity listing: Why do companies list abroad?,” The Journal of Finance, 57, 2002, 2651–94. 92. “On the way out,” Euroweek, July 1, 1999. Given that BSkyB’s bonds were considered high risk, commentators expressed surprised that even this modest share of the overall issue was successfully placed outside of the US market; see “BSkyB dollar bond finds perfect global reception,” Euroweek, February 19, 1999. 93. “On the way out.” This strategy ultimately proved successful as the resultant price tension enabled Merrill to increase the value of the February issue from an original $500 million to $600 million. 94. “Capital Ideas: Big Issuers, Small Investors,” CFO Magazine, October 21, 2004, http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/3307315/c_2984367/ (retrieved January 2007); X. Zhao, “Determinants of flows into retail bond funds,” Financial Analysts Journal, 61(4), 2005, 47–59.

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95. On the conditions under which pension funds and institutional investors have assumed such an important role in the global financial system, see G. Clark, Pension fund capitalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. 96. Harvey, The limits to capital, pp. 265, 267. The term “fictitious capital” is now frequently used interchangeably with “credit” (or worse, money capital more broadly), but Marx clearly distinguished it from credit that does have physical collateral against which it is advanced—for example collateral in the form of already existing—but unsold—commodities. 97. In this respect it is highly ironic that the bonds issued by BSkyB in 1999 were so-called “guaranteed notes,” which are bonds whose principal and/or interest payments are guaranteed by a corporation other than the issuer. In this case the issuer was BSkyB plc (the holding company) and the twin guarantors were its two operating subsidiaries, British Sky Broadcasting Limited and Sky Subscribers Services Limited! (See “BSkyB plc—Report of Foreign Issuer (6K) Item 6: Supplemental Guarantor Information.”) In other words, BSkyB was in reality acting as its own guarantor, in an attempt—by my reading—to give an appearance of collateral. 98. Harvey, The limits to capital, p. 257, original emphasis. 99. Ibid., p. 266, original emphasis. 100. “BSkyB dollar bond finds perfect global reception”; “BSkyB plc—Report of Foreign Issuer (6K) Item 6: Supplemental Guarantor Information.” 101. BSkyB reported in mid-2007 that the average payback period on its new customers (the time taken for those customers’ payments to offset the monies invested in their acquisition, factoring in the time-value of money) was, indeed, 12 months. See “BSkyB Business Update Presentation, 11 July 2007,” http://library.corporate-ir.net/library/10/104/104016/items/253037/Business_update_11_07_07.pdf (retrieved August 2007), p. 29. 102. “Sterling: corporates needed to complete sterling jigsaw,” Euroweek, January 13, 2006. 103. “Are you sitting comfortably?” The Observer, July 1, 2007. 104. Harvey, The limits to capital, p. 258. 105. Ibid., pp. 258, 264. 106. Firstly Digital Jesters, and latterly EA. See “EA to sponsor all Sky TV science-fiction programmes,” Marketing Week, July 12, 2007. Note that since early 2007, Sky One has not been available on cable, with BSkyB and the cable operator Virgin Media having been unable to reach agreement on a carriage fee for the channel. 107. A 1989 survey listed 442 co-productions in progress or recently completed worldwide, of which 82 were UK co-productions. See “Co-productions: A guide to who’s doing what,” Television Business International, October 1989, pp. 126–34. 108. PBS is a not-for-profit public broadcaster owned collectively by its over 300 member stations, and funded in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a separate entity financed by the US government. See L. Jarvik, PBS: Behind the screen, Prima Publishing, Rocklin, CA, 1998. 109. A third partner on the production was the London-based company Deep Indigo. “Bleak House,” Variety, January 18, 2006. 110. Steemers, Selling television, pp. 114–17. 111. “I’m too old for romantic leads,” The Daily Telegraph, October 11, 2005.

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112. As in the film sector, on which see especially N. Morawetz, J. Hardy, C. Haslam and K. Randle, “Finance, Policy and Industrial Dynamics—The Rise of Coproductions in the Film Industry,” Industry & Innovation, 14, 2007, 421–43. 113. “The state of co-productions,” Video Age International, 25(1), January 2005, p. 34. 114. Ibid., my emphasis. 115. E.g. R. Collins, From satellite to single market: New communication technology and European public service television, Routledge, London, 1998, at p. 27; J. Ellis, “Television production,” in R. Allen and A. Hill (eds.), The television studies reader (Routledge, London, 2004, 275–92), at p. 280; T. O’Regan and S. Ward, “Experimenting with the local and the transnational: Television drama production on the Gold Coast,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 20, 2006, 17–31, at pp. 22–23. 116. D. Bassom, Battlestar Galactica: the official companion, Titan Books, London, 2005, p. 41. 117. Steemers, Selling television, p. 45. 118. The proportion in 2006 was 82%, down from a peak of 93% in 2003. See, respectively, Department for Culture, Media & Sport, “PACT UK television exports survey 2006,” April 11, 2007, http://www.culture.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/AFFC3C9B8BFD-4AEB-B027-981F05C0AF91/0/TVExports2006StatisticalRelease.pdf (retrieved August 2007); “BTDA UK television export statistics 2003,” http://www.culture.gov. uk/NR/rdonlyres/750CFA98-6566-4387-969B-0A30EFADA473/0/APPENDIX1.pdf (retrieved January 2006). 119. “Changing identity: A&E viewers prefer reality shows,” Broadcasting & Cable, August 2, 2004, p. 8. 120. The last listed is a drama series that airs as Cape Wrath in the UK and Meadowlands in the US. Note that in many of the cases listed, one or more additional producers may have been involved, but I have sought to identify the two main production partners. Note also that in each case, I have listed the US production partner first and the UK production partner second, but this does not mean that the US entity was the senior partner in all cases, or that the program or series in question aired in the US first. 121. And see, for a similar reading, “Baker blasts bidding wars,” The Guardian, August 29, 2005. 122. “Orange Roughies dead in the water,” New Zealand Herald, July 9, 2006. 123. Presales have not received scholarly analysis specifically in relation to television, but in film—where the phenomenon is essentially the same—they have been examined. See F. Rusco and W. Walls, “Independent film finance, pre-sale agreements, and the distribution of film earnings,” in V. Ginsburgh (ed.), Economics of Art and Culture: Invited Papers at the 12th International Conference of the Association of Cultural Economics International (Elsevier, London, 2003, 19–32). 124. BBC Worldwide Press Release, “BBC Worldwide’s More Than a Game: The Story of the World Cup Continues to Score,” January 19, 2006, http://www.bbc. co.uk/pressoffice/bbcworldwide/worldwidestories/pressreleases/2006/01_january/ world_cup.shtml (retrieved October 2007); “BBC’s more than a game kicks-off in Asia,” Television Asia, April 2006. 125. “Asia Deals for Southern Star Kids Shows,” World Screen, August 17, 2005.

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126. See, for e.g., on the UK: “Pukka pre-sales for Jamie’s Dinners,” Televisual, February 7, 2005, p. 13; on Australia: “Trade in audiovisual royalties: Trends and issues,” http://www.afc.gov.au/gtp/atradeanalysis.html (retrieved May 2007); on Canada: “Canadians Turn to Co-Finance, Pre-Sales for TV Prod’n Coin,” Variety, January 19, 1998; and on the US: “Drawing up coin: Producers look to backend, pre-sales to shore up budgets,” Variety, September 30, 2002. 127. Pascal Volle (independent strategic advisor to a number of leading US broadcasters), interview with author, December 6, 2006. 128. See, respectively, Steemers, Selling television, p. 45; Department for Culture, Media & Sport, “PACT UK television exports survey 2006.” 129. “Ofcom review of the television production sector,” pp. 46–47. 130. Harvey, The limits to capital, p. 411. 131. On the renewal, “Sci Fi Renews Battlestar Galactica,” Multichannel News, February 23, 2005. That BSkyB did not contribute financially has become widely accepted, even though, to the best of my knowledge, the company itself has never announced this. The most “authoritative” source I have found for this fact is (oddly) the “official” webpage for Battlestar at MySpace, http://profile.myspace.com/index. cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=120285373 (retrieved June 2007), which states: “Sky did not contribute financially to the second season, although UK Broadcasts credit the company at the end of every episode because many of the sets from the first series were co-funded by them.” 132. “Next ‘Battlestar’ season will be the series’ last,” The Hollywood Reporter, June 1, 2007. 133. On occasion those tensions surface—and fracture potential “unity”—before the capital circuits in question even have the chance to mesh. This is what appears to have happened in 2007 on the planned remake of the UK cult classic The Prisoner: BSkyB had been scheduled to co-produce with the US cable channel AMC (owned by Cablevision), but pulled out of the show before shooting began, citing “creative differences trying to share [the project] with an American partner.” “AMC loses U.K. partner on The Prisoner,” Broadcasting & Cable, September 12, 2007.

8 Mirrors, Meters, and Media Power

It has increasingly become received wisdom that where media consumption is concerned, consumer power—the “power,” that is, of individual consumers such as the hypothetical television viewer introduced in the previous chapter—is on the increase. This wisdom rests on various assumptions, but perhaps the key word is “choice.” As the cost of digital and networked technologies plummets and the penetration of such technologies advances in lockstep, consumers once faced with limited media choices (a handful of newspapers and television channels, and perhaps slightly more radio stations and magazines) increasingly have access, at a price, to a dizzying array of media platforms, products and services. And greater choice, the argument goes, means greater power. Hence The Economist’s bold “Power at last” headline for its 2005 survey of contemporary consumerism; hence, too, the theme of the 2007 annual meeting of the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM): “Power to the People.”1 The discourse of “consumer power” assumes different guises in different contexts, but my specific interest here is in how it has materialized in the world of television. It has, we should first observe, long permeated that world, most particularly in the US, where channel proliferation and the accompanying expansion of consumer choice has a longer history and a wider public purchase than in any other major national television market. And while various different images have been enlisted to envision such “consumer power,” the idea of television as a “mirror” on society or culture has long been, and remains, central and emblematic. “Television, whatever else it does,” wrote the late, influential Washington Post columnist Judy Mann as far back as 1983, “is a mirror of society.”2 Television mirrors the people who watch it and the culture they inhabit—merely and unreflexively. Thus 289

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it is not television’s institutional producers and distributors, this narrative has it, that determine what we watch on television; we do; it is “we” who ultimately have power. This power vests precisely in being who we are and choosing what we watch accordingly, for television’s programmers—and this is the critical assumption—simply respond to our expression of choice. The mirror metaphor has proliferated to the extent that it can now be found almost anywhere one cares to look in television. It may remain most pronounced in the US.3 But with the number of television channels and consumer access to multichannel television having both increased rapidly in recent years across large parts of the world, the greater choice in such markets has been accompanied by greater appeal to the idea of television as mirror. Whether the market in question is the UK or New Zealand, Finland or South Africa, the same image tends to be invoked. Sometimes the metaphor is applied umbrella-like to television en masse. At other times it is applied more narrowly—to particular programs (both The Simpsons and Big Brother have been influentially characterized in precisely this way) or to particular technological innovations in television’s delivery and consumption (as most recently has occurred with YouTube). Approaching and writing about television as a geographer, the mirror metaphor appears strikingly misplaced on one very obvious front: namely, the geographies themselves of program origination and program content. How likely is it, after all, that the place—and hence, to one extent or another, the society—one inhabits will be the place and society depicted on one’s living room screen? The answer to this question will of course vary greatly, with residents of California, for instance, perhaps seeing more of a social-geographical mirror in the television they consume than residents of New Zealand, where the preponderance of imports radically skews the spatiality of the societies purportedly being mirrored. Such issues of cultural representativeness are of course the central grist of the longstanding controversies over cultural imperialism and related debates. And nor, we should emphasize, is this merely a question of international trade and hence international representativeness. There are also important and highly charged questions about internal geographical representativeness within nations. Such questions have assumed a very high profile in the UK in the last two years, where the amount of programming produced in London is vastly out of proportion with London’s contribution to the national population. Just because programming is produced in London, of course, does not mean that its content is London-centric, but despite quibbles at the margins, there is little disagreement about the fundamental fact of geographical unevenness in representation. This unevenness has persisted, moreover, despite all the English public-service broadcasters having minimum annual quotas for out-of-London production spend, which are currently 50% for ITV, 30% for Channel 4, 10% for Channel Five, and 30% by value (but 25% by vol-

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ume) for the BBC. Indeed, part of the problem is that these quotas have not consistently been achieved, and ITV, in particular, came in for extremely hostile criticism in 2008, having failed for two years running to meet its target, its out-of-London spend having amounted to 46% of total UK commissioning spend in 2006 before falling to 44% in 2007.4 In short, it is widely accepted that London has a disproportionate influence on UK national television, with the capital representing in the region of just 12.5% of the population, but with approximately 65% of all UKproduced programming currently being made there. And in the discussion of this unevenness, the mirror metaphor is almost inevitably brought to bear. “Does British TV reflect life in Britain today?” it is asked. The answer typically given is an unequivocal “no.” Despite roughly seven in eight Britons living outside London, and despite the fact that, according to Ofcom, they watch on average more television than Londoners, “British culture is reflected back to them on television via the prism of London.”5 I return specifically to this question of regional representation in the following chapter, where I focus on one of the recent initiatives pursued by a UK public-service broadcaster—in this case the BBC, and not ITV—to increase its out-of-London production presence. Here, however, my engagement with the mirror metaphor and with the associated inference of consumer power will take us in another direction, and requires us to engage a different set of critiques of the language and underlying tenets in question. For a number of high-profile commentators have noted and pondered the discourse of mirroring and have closely questioned its accuracy from a range of perspectives. Todd Gitlin’s Inside Prime Time was a seminal critical text.6 Much of Robert McChesney’s work has pursued similar objectives.7 And most recently one can point to Eileen Meehan’s Why TV Is Not Our Fault (2005), an unequivocal and polemical rejection of the mirror metaphor.8 Such critiques, which form the main theoretical context for this chapter, have attacked the notion of mirroring on two principal fronts. Both of these fronts, however, are centrally concerned with a singular feature of the television economy, namely the audience measurement figures (America’s eponymous “ratings”) that theoretically capture “our” likes and dislikes and allow programmers to commission and schedule accordingly—actualizing, in the process, our consumer “power.”9 The first critique is essentially this: ratings do not automatically or unproblematically determine subsequent program content. For one thing, a host of other considerations (individual and collective; political, cultural and economic) inevitably impact all program-related decisionmaking— and mercifully so. Moreover, not all ratings are treated equally by those who commission, acquire and schedule: in an economy supported in part or in full by advertising, some eyeballs are inevitably deemed more valuable than others, and hence the process of using ratings to guide programming

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necessarily involves weighting and selectivity. Ratings may function as a mirror, therefore, but the mirroring is partial and it is always supplemented by other considerations. The second critique, meanwhile, concerns not the uses of ratings but their construction and content. Ratings, it is claimed, are in fact an inaccurate and unreliable weathervane for what “we” as a society want to watch. And again, there are several different dimensions to this critique. One issue is that it is not possible to measure that which does not exist, by which I mean that “we” cannot say whether we like or dislike a particular type of program if such a program is never shown; the “universe” of program choice, in other words, is, by its very nature, constrained. There is also the vastly significant matter of marketing, and the fact that audience volume and composition (and hence ratings) will always be substantially influenced by different forms and levels of promotion. Lastly, and perhaps most crucially, critics suggest that the actual measurement techniques are flawed. The mirror itself, then, is cracked—for no existing ratings system, it is said, can hope to accurately report actual patterns of viewership. In this final chapter of Part II I draw on and extend these critiques of the mirroring metaphor and of the related presumption of the television consumer’s “power.” I do so in order to make two central arguments, each bound up with television’s ratings systems or—in more generic terms—its technologies and practices of audience measurement. The second argument, which I turn to below, constitutes in my view the primary contribution of the chapter, and is thus where I place most emphasis; but this second argument relies upon and is informed and foregrounded by a prior argument. This first argument is simply that the existing critiques of television ratings have not been radical enough. What do I mean by not “radical” enough? I mean two different things, and I deal with these in the first two sections of the chapter respectively. First, I consider the issue of how ratings data are mobilized by the broadcasting executives who commission, pay for and analyze them. Critics, as noted, have argued that such executives are selective in their use of ratings; my research supports this observation, but extends it by arguing that the use of ratings to guide programming decisions is in fact significantly more partial and selective than has typically been allowed. I also seek to explain more specifically why the use of ratings is so selective, focusing in particular on the economics of that selectivity. In the next section I turn from the mobilization of ratings to the ratings themselves, and suggest that critiques of their “accuracy” can also be pursued further than they have been. My argument here, I should emphasize, is not so much that “we” the viewing public do not get the programming “we” want; it is that the “evidence” proffered for the fact that we do get “what we want” (ratings data) is considerably more problematic than critics have tended to admit.

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If previous critiques of ratings have not been sufficiently radical, my (second) argument is that they have also been too negative. This is the nub of the chapter, and the point of departure for its third and main section. But, vitally, “negative” should not be taken here to imply critical. Rather, my argument is that in focusing on what ratings do not do—they do not automatically dictate programming decisions, and they no not objectively record overall viewing patterns—previous critics of ratings have had curiously little to say about what ratings do do. In other words, what has been underplayed is not the negative side of ratings, or their various failings and fallibilities, but the altogether more important matter of their positive or productive side: specifically, the question of what they enable. The argument I make here is, at heart, an argument about the role of knowledge in the constitution and day-to-day reproduction of the economy. It carries distinct echoes, in this regard, of the three chapters in Part I of the book. But it is at the same time an argument about the productive nature of power. I argue that technologies of audience measurement need to be situated and understood in the context of the institutional power relations that buttress and are in turn reproduced by such technologies. And it is these technologies, whose implementation and operationalization are veined through with relations of power, that ultimately render the television space coherent, calculable and orderly—and hence investable. In short, I claim, it is through such technologies that the “television economy” is envisioned and is made available and “safe” for capital accumulation.10 In making these arguments, I draw upon and extend a series of powerful political-economic writings on capitalist commodification in television. Two figures, in particular, stand out, and in some respects the argument I develop can be seen as an attempt to meld their perspectives. First, there is Dallas Smythe, who has famously described the process of commodification of television’s audience, or more precisely, of viewers’ attention.11 What Smythe fails to address, however, are the fundamental conditions of existence of that “attention economy,” or what allows it to be. Eileen Meehan, meanwhile, has identified commodification less at the level of the audience than at the level specifically of the ratings that purportedly represent audience behaviors.12 And yet for her part, Meehan fails to demonstrate how ratings and their commodification are implicated in enabling an attention-based advertising economy. Both Smythe and Meehan tell part of the story of this economy, therefore, but leave other parts unmapped. I argue that by virtue of their own commodification, ratings permit the commodification of attention and thus allow an advertiser-financed television economy to exist. Finally, before proceeding, a word on empirical context is necessary. I make the above arguments specifically in relation to the UK television industry. I focus on one such territory, and its particular institutions and practices, in order to give as much flesh as possible to the themes I explore and the claims

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I develop. Clearly it would be rash (not to mention wholly speculative) to suggest that what is true of UK television and its audience measurement practices is essentially true of all other advanced national television markets. For one thing, the ownership and operation of television audience measurement in the UK is far more closely and transparently entwined with the commanding heights of broadcaster power than it is in most other markets. However, I do think that the main premises of the chapter are generalizable, to one degree or another, beyond the strict geographical confines of television-UK. Certainly, the productive or “enabling” role of ratings practices is, it seems to me, more or less the same wherever one might care to study them. And if the UK’s ratings technologies fall short of the accuracy and objectivity standards to which they aspire, most other audience measurement systems would likely be judged frailer still. As Bjarne Thelin, chief executive of the UK’s Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (BARB), says, not unjustifiably but also not disinterestedly: “Just as our television industry is the envy of many in Europe, so is our ratings system.”13 Thelin’s UK television audience measurement body—its role and responsibilities, its structure, its practices, its products—is, then, the primary empirical focus in what follows.

THE POWER OF ONE Just vote with your feet. Watch what you want, don’t watch what you don’t, and let the ratings speak for themselves.14

To most viewers at home, the detailed machinations of the UK television economy would likely appear opaque and uninteresting. But the headline dynamics of that economy are well understood. Economically speaking, there are two main types of channel—those for which the viewer pays (the licence-fee-funded BBC channels, and subscription-based pay-television channels) and those for which advertising pays (ITV1, Channel 4, and Five).15 In both cases, most viewers would go on to tell you, audience tastes matter. Essentially, if viewers shun a show, it will not be long for this world: because advertisers do not pay to not be seen, and because the consumer will not continue to pay for what she does not watch. All channels, then, are seen to be driven by ratings—some more than others, assuredly (though the idea of the BBC as somewhat aloof from ratings was definitively scotched during the period of Greg Dyke’s leadership), but all of them in the final reckoning. And from here flows, directly, the theory of viewer power. “Just vote with your feet… let the ratings speak for themselves.” Everyone has the power to decide because everyone’s attention counts—and is counted. This first section of this chapter aims to demonstrate the distance between this image of democratic, universal, individualized power and the reality of

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viewer materiality in the television economy. I argue, following other critics, that in actuality some eyeballs (and therefore some viewer ratings) are always more valuable than others. In other words, the broadcast industry does take ratings seriously, but it does so selectively. But I hope to push these arguments further by considering actual valuation metrics and advertising transaction economics and by showing, in the process, quite how pronounced this selectivity has now become. I do so in relation to the UK market in general and then, more specifically, in relation to one of its leading broadcasters (Channel 4) in particular. My focus here—and indeed in the bulk of the rest of the chapter—is on the advertiser-supported channels which dominate the UK television industry both numerically and financially. Eileen Meehan has usefully summarized the key elements of the argument I build upon here, and it is important to first establish these basic foundations.16 Advertisers, she notes, pay television channels for access to consumers, who are “people with disposable income, desire, and retail access to buy brand name goods.” Inevitably, therefore, programmers focus on attracting those viewers most in demand by advertisers. This has various ramifications. The most important is that there will always be some people who are “part of television’s viewership but not part of television’s commodity audience”—people who watch television, but whose eyeballs are not valued. Over time, the tendency is for advertiser-funded television to increasingly neglect such people. (Meehan suggests that this neglected cohort can represent anywhere from a small section of the overall population in times of general prosperity to a much larger group during economic recession.) Another important implication is that relatively popular programs may earn relatively little revenue (and even be cancelled) while less popular programs that deliver the most valued audience segments earn higher revenues. In all of this, of course, the idea of audience “value” is critical. How then is this value calibrated? As Meehan shows, most advertiser-funded television economies rely on splitting the audience into different “demographics,” where viewers—and their respective ratings—are differentiated and priced by the key parameters of age, gender and income.17 Research in the last two decades has added considerable texture to this basic, well-established picture. Six key findings stand out. First, and in a deep irony, it appears that, as Philip Napoli puts it, the “neglected segments of the audience tend to be those who consume media most frequently.”18 Second, it is clear that relative demographic valuations change over time as the makeup of the population changes and as advertisers’ perceptions of the value of different demographic segments change.19 Third, although ethnicity is not measured and explicitly valued, and although it usually correlates to a certain extent with income, research has suggested that ethnicity appears to have a downward effect on audience value that is independent of income.20 Fourth, program choice economists have shown that content

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providers only begin to offer content to less-valued audiences once the level of competition for higher-value audiences more than offsets their higher relative value; thus highly valued audience segments will always have more content available to them.21 But it is the final two sets of findings that I focus on here and seek to deepen, precisely because it is these that demonstrate most clearly the restricted nature of the supposed power to “vote with one’s feet.” The first of these findings is that the differences in value assigned to different media audiences are typically larger than would be suggested by actual differences in product and service purchasing habits.22 The second is that the importance of relative audience valuations in driving content decisions appears to have increased, over time, with the number and range of television channels.23 I will focus on the former finding first. The recognition that differences in audience value cannot be fully explained by variations in consumer spend has, inevitably, led researchers to suggest that other factors must also contribute to such valuations. Those that might make young television audiences more valuable than older audiences (independent of relative purchasing habits), for example, are thought to include the presumed potential to change a consumer’s brand allegiance (easier for the young); the length of time that an audience member has in front of them as a potential customer (longer for the young); and the presumed level of television consumption (lower for the young, making them harder to reach, and hence more valuable). Who, then, among television viewers, has “power” in the UK television economy—and how sharply is such power graduated? The differences in the perceived value of different audiences are, recent data indicate, much greater than might commonly be supposed. These data are summarized in Figure 8.1, which shows a number of important things. One is the specific market feature mentioned above—the fact that younger audiences are most highly valued, with adults aged 16–34 valued nearly four times higher than an all-adult audience. But the more specific the audience cohorts (when gender or income is added to age), the greater the value differentials. Hence the most valued of all enumerated cohorts was men aged 16–34, who were priced one-third higher than women of the same age range, but fully five times higher than the “housewives” category, and nearly nine times higher than all adults. The meaning of these data is simply this: advertisers will pay a great deal more to reach some audiences than others, and hence any broadcaster aiming to maximize advertising revenues will—all other things being equal—seek to attract and to deliver to advertisers predominantly the most valued audiences. When such a broadcaster analyzes its programs’ ratings, it is therefore inevitable that some audience ratings will be deemed more material than others, and will be factored more centrally into subsequent programming decisions. Young, male, affluent audiences are accorded the highest value; and to the

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UK television advertising—average spot prices by demographic (2005)

Source: Author, based on Channel 4 Television data

extent, then, that the viewer does “power” television content, the viewer with the most power is specifically this type of individual. This observation leads directly into the final pertinent finding from previous audience valuation research, which, to repeat, is that the importance of audience valuations in driving content decisions appears to have increased. As Napoli argues, the reason for this seems to be that the number and range of television channels has increased, and that this in turn has increased the degree to which formerly single, large, heterogeneous audiences can now be disassembled and “distributed” between media properties (in this case, television channels) according to their demographic type.24 In days gone by, this argument suggests, it was only minimally significant that men aged 16–34 were much more valuable than housewives, because most of the large audiences delivered by mass-market broadcasters—particularly in the channel-scarce UK of the 1980s—contained sizeable numbers of both. What mattered was audience volume. What has changed in the last two decades is that average audiences have diminished in size, but with this fragmentation has come greater audience definition (or “profile”), allowing broadcasters and advertisers to exploit audience targeting opportunities far more concretely than in the past. In the last part of this section I explore this particular premise by focusing on one UK broadcaster, Channel 4, and on its evolution from being a singlechannel to a multi-channel operator. One critical reason for doing so is that there is a demonstrable difference between audiences valued (the emphasis of previous research, and of the data presented above) and audiences sold. In the UK market (like many others), broadcasters typically sell individual program inventory to advertisers as individual demographics—Friends as a 16–34 adults

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sale, for example, or The West Wing as an ABC1 adults sale. What this means, in essence, is that while such programs clearly deliver a whole range of different viewers, only the eyeballs of those viewers in the stipulated demographic are actually being sold.25 The other eyeballs are, in this sense, “waste.”26 This, it seems to me, has significant implications for our analysis, for, not only are some audiences valued relatively lowly, but furthermore they might not (often, or even, perhaps, ever) actually be sold to advertisers—unsettling still further the notion that such audiences “have power.” Channel 4 offers an excellent institutional context in which to explore this idea because in the last decade it has gone from being a single-channel, analogue-terrestrial broadcaster (Channel 4, the core channel) to being a multi-channel provider. Not only that, but the key new digital channels it has launched are specifically targeted at highly valued demographics—E4 (launched in 2001) at 16–34 year-olds and More4 (2005) at ABC1 viewers.27 In other words, the company has explicitly tried to funnel its most valued audiences to discrete channel destinations in order to be able to monetize (through advertising sales) each of them rather than having to choose between the sale of one or the other. How successful has this strategy been? It has, data suggest, been extremely successful. Arguably the best way to gauge the success of Channel 4 (the company) in optimizing its audience profile across its channel portfolio is by examining the proportion of its advertising revenue derived from the sale of its targeted demographics. For 2005, this share was an extraordinary 84 per cent—specifically, 84% of its advertising revenue came from the sale of either the 16–34 or ABC1 demographics (or the two combined).28 Or, to put it another way, only around one-sixth of Channel 4’s advertising revenue was generated from the sale of demographics other than 16–34s or ABC1s (the old, the less affluent)—demographics that account for nearly half of overall Channel 4 viewership. While historic data for these same proportions are not readily available, industry sources make it clear that the share of sales contributed by the targeted demographics has increased strongly over time, particularly since the launch of the company’s digital channels. The main points to emphasize from the brief foregoing analysis of television audience valuation and sale are, I think, these. The differences in value assigned to different audience cohorts are large. And because of these differentials, broadcasters seek to offer programming that will attract the most highly valued viewers. So far, so unexceptional. But what the Channel 4 data show is that the most efficient television advertising sales houses—and Channel 4’s team is widely recognized as one such—are increasingly able to constrict even further the pool of viewers whose eyeballs actually, in direct monetary terms, matter. It is only the focus on audiences sold rather than valued—the latter having been the subject of previous research—which enables us to see this. In fact it is not unimaginable that as digital penetration

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increases and the ability to segment audiences across portfolio channels continues to improve, there will come a time when more or less all eyeballs sold will be “high-value” eyeballs. And in such a scenario, of course, the idea of the average viewer voting with her feet, and hence exercising consumer power, is an increasingly tenuous one.

“ON THIS MODEST SET OF ARRANGEMENTS . . .” Many others, as noted earlier, have questioned ratings’ accuracy. The relationship between measured audience and actual audience, such critics insist, is always “imperfect” due to shortcomings both in sampling methodologies and in viewing behavior measurement technologies.29 My aim in this section is to carefully but firmly extend this critique. For, suggesting that existing practices are “imperfect” implies, it strikes me, that a “perfect” or accurate system is both possible and desirable. My argument, which segues directly into the last and main section of the chapter, consists of contesting this presumption. Not only do ratings systems never objectively and neutrally “record” viewing behavior; but also we should discard the (extremely powerful) premise that they can. Only in doing so can we see that it is this very premise that allows the television economy to exist, cohere and reproduce itself in its current form. Given that it is well recognized that all existing audience measurement statistics offer problematic surrogates for actual viewing patterns, I do not want to spend a great deal of time here in substantiating that observation. To my mind, it is most clearly and readily evidenced in the fact that when actual, live measurement methodologies and technologies are changed, the recorded viewing behavior patterns also, typically, demonstrate substantive change, significantly above and beyond the “normal” movement that might be expected with real underlying audience fluctuations.30 Since the UK market is the focus of this chapter, a UK example is appropriate; and it is an example drawn upon at various points later in the chapter.31 Thus, at the beginning of 2002, BARB replaced its existing system with a new one—a brand new consumer panel (which would ultimately be 5,100 strong) substituting for the 4,500 homes monitored by the legacy system—and among other immediate and unexpected impacts, ITV1 (the leading advertiserfunded channel) saw its overall audience fall by fully 25 percent. Six months (and one two-week ratings blackout) later, the whole ratings architecture was widely considered to be “still in chaos.”32 In trying to explain such deviations, problems with accurately capturing viewing behavior in the home are usually cited, and I return to these below. But there are any number of other reasons—aside from “local” in-home factors—for questioning ratings’ “accuracy.” For one thing, not all content

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that is broadcast and watched is actually audited by audience measurement bodies such as BARB—usually because there is a cost attached to initiating such auditing. In the UK, for instance, many of the newer television channels targeting ethnic minorities are not covered by BARB.33 For another thing, BARB does not track viewing that occurs outside the home, which for some genres, sports in particular, can be considerable. Thus when England played Turkey at soccer in October 2003, an alternative audience measurement system that factored in viewers in public houses and clubs suggested that the total UK audience for the telecast was 5.7 million—nearly two million more than BARB’s “official” 3.9 million.34 And finally there are all manner of questions about whether the viewing “panel” is ever even nominally representative of the nation at large. Again, a UK soccer example is helpful: television insiders speculated that when ITV1 recorded a “disastrous performance” for its broadcast of England against Denmark in June 2002, under-representation of the BARB panel in the north of England—“a football heartland”—might be to blame.35 But rather than citing endless examples of apparent inaccuracy, it seems to me more productive to take the opposite tack—that is, to ask how modern ratings systems can even hope to begin to offer accuracy given the bewildering (and increasing) complexity that now characterizes the television consumption experience. In the days when most UK families had just one television, with three channels, perhaps this was not a pipe dream. But picture a fairly typical household today: one television in the living room, with a digital paytelevision subscription providing not only some 300 linear channels, but also a digital video recorder enabling time-shifting and advertisement skipping, not to mention video-on-demand to complement traditional linear broadcast programming; a second television in the kitchen, this one with a cheap digital set-top box delivering in the region of 40 channels without the need for a monthly subscription; and then another television in the children’s bedroom, this with “only” five analogue terrestrial channels (but also hooked up to a gaming console). And this, remember, is just one possible permutation; there are (literally) hundreds of others. Measuring actual viewing content and quantities in such a home is challenging enough.36 Selecting a panel of homes that satisfactorily represents these proliferating technological combinations is another thing altogether.37 With this in mind, let us focus on one final television ratings example from the world of UK soccer, and think closely about its meaning, derivation and connotations. In January 2002, a match between Sheffield Wednesday and Blackburn Rovers rated, according to BARB, 105,000 viewers for the (now defunct) ITV Sport channel.38 What I am keen to stress above all else here is the distance between the simple, spare and numerical cleanliness of such numbers and the inextricably messy, complicated and lived local worlds that ostensibly generate them.

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Households in the BARB panel have meters on top of their televisions that track the programs they watch. People living there—and also guests—are expected to push a remote-control button every time they start, or stop, viewing. And that, essentially, is that; and yet on “this modest set of arrangements,” The Guardian observes with only slight exaggeration, “rests the whole operation of modern British television.”39 What sort of modesty or “messiness” do the lived local worlds exhibit? Panellists can forget to record what they watch; bored of the entire process, they can choose not to record what they watch; they can fail to report faults with the measuring equipment; they can move house without telling BARB; they can install a new television without telling BARB; they can take a television-addict lodger; they can leave the television on and flick through a magazine, have a conversation, listen to the radio, go to the bathroom, surf the Internet. In short, the scope for gaps between actual and recorded viewing behavior is so large and varied that the very premise of potential “accuracy” surely needs to be jettisoned. It is in this light (or perhaps better, murkiness) that we should consider the bald assertion that 105,000 viewers—or anywhere close to that precise number—actually watched the football match mentioned above. With a panel of just 5,100, each home monitored by BARB effectively represents approximately 12,000 viewers.40 A total audience of 105,000, then, means a grand total of about nine BARB panel member households. With what confidence can it be said that the number of BARB homes in which the match was watched was in fact nine—and not twenty, or five, or even (at certain moments) zero? Clearly, given the nature of the measurement system, one’s level of confidence could not be very high. And above and beyond this, can nine homes truly be considered representative of any larger, varied population—let alone of a whole nation? The answers to these questions are so obviously problematic that one is minded to query, most importantly, the legitimacy widely accorded to such ratings and the faith invested in them. In the next section of the chapter, therefore, I go on to argue that the television industry continues to display faith in ratings not because of any real belief in what they purportedly represent (actual, underlying viewing behaviors), but because of what they allow.

POWER-KNOWLEDGE IN THE ENVISIONING OF ECONOMY Economy’s being One of the most fascinating aspects of the “crisis” in UK television ratings triggered by BARB’s introduction of a new panel in early 2002 was that many industry insiders considered it a storm in a teacup. Despite the fact that the ratings for several channels suddenly experienced unfathomable

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step changes, very few broadcasting executives openly questioned the very fabric of the UK’s television audience measurement system.41 Rather, there was a collective shrug of the shoulders, leaving BARB to try to paper over the cracks between its pre- and post-transition numbers. It is, in my view, highly significant and revealing that such an apathetic response to the evident shortcomings of audience measurement architectures is neither new, nor unique to the UK. Harry Skornia noted a comparable mindset among the US broadcast networks some forty years ago—in the very early days, in other words, of commercial broadcast television.42 Somewhat more recently, in 1983, Todd Gitlin observed that the US broadcast industry continued to essentially ignore the problems associated with its own (A. C. Nielsen) ratings data. His analysis was illuminating. “Executives,” he argued, “functionally forget what they were taught in elementary statistics: that all survey statistics are valid only within predictable margins of error. . . . Once managers agree to accept a measure, they act as if it is precise. They “know” there are standard errors—but what a nuisance it would be to act on that knowledge.” And thus these same executives, noted Gitlin, in an observation I return to below, were only “mildly interested” in a competing—and potentially superior—ratings technology being trialled at that time.43 The central question I address in this section of the chapter is why the television industry seemingly overlooks the very real fallibilities in ratings data. Skornia suggested one possible reason: that the specific inadequacies of such data, in and of themselves, can be useful to the leading broadcast networks, insofar as the data obfuscate as well as illuminate.44 But as I have indicated above, this strikes me as too “negative”—and hence limited—a reading. The fuller answer, I argue, relates to what ratings data productively allow. I build to this conclusion accretively, starting by thinking about the very conditions of possibility of an advertiser-funded television economy. The work of the Canadian political economist and communications scholar Dallas Smythe, as noted in the introduction to the chapter, is a vital building block here. In the late 1970s, he sought to lead research into the mass media in new directions by recasting the terms of its political economy. His argument, which has proven enduring and influential, was that we should regard audiences—and not television or radio programs or newspapers—as the most important or “principal” product of the mass media.45 The mass media, he said, existed primarily to create and package audiences for sale to advertisers. The raw, underlying media commodity, then, was consumer attention—an insight underlying much of the more recent burst of writing on the so-called “attention economy,” where it is argued that the proliferation of distribution channels in the transition to digital media has further fragmented consumer attention and thus compounded its scarcity and economic value.46 Smythe, and those writing in his stead, have had much of interest to say about the importance of this audience or attention economy. Indeed, for

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Smythe, it plays, through demand management, a fundamental role in the functioning of modern capitalism more widely. But if the importance of the attention economy has been widely discussed, the conditions of its existence have not. What, precisely, allows the attention economy of the media to exist? From the standpoint of television, I will argue here for the pivotal importance of our technologies of audience measurement. In doing so, it is helpful first to introduce the argument of writers such as Susan Buck-Morss and Timothy Mitchell that “the economy” per se is itself a relatively recent creation or—in Buck-Morss’s words—“invention.”47 For both Buck-Morss and Mitchell, it is incorrect to suppose that “the economy” as we have come to understand it can or does exist independently of the statistics, models and theories that we use to identify, describe and analyze it.48 The economy needs to be envisioned in order to be. “A new space of economic processes,” in Mitchell’s words, “to be imagined and organized as the economy,” does not pre-exist the science of economics because, as BuckMorss remarks in direct deference to Foucault, “every new science creates its object.”49 Because the economy is not a tangible, discrete object that can be seen and touched, it can only be perceived as “an economy” through a process of what Buck-Morss calls “representational mapping.”50 By this she means the formulation, production and display of quantitative information, of which statistics represent the most important form. This argument is critical because just such “representational mapping” underpins the existence and functioning of the television economy more specifically. My principal suggestion in this chapter is that if it were not capable of being rendered visible, orderly and quantifiable, the television economy could not exist; television could not be capitalized in the way that it currently is (primarily through advertising finance) if technologies of audience measurement were unavailable. In this context, the words of Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller are highly instructive. Information and statistics such as television ratings data, they stress (though without mentioning ratings specifically), are not “the outcome of a neutral recording function”—which is the way, as we have seen, that ratings are commonly conceived. Rather, such numbers are methods “to make the domain in question [here, television] susceptible to evaluation, calculation and intervention”—and, I would add, investment.51 Ratings data make television disciplined, tangible and calculable; they create a space for capital to inhabit; they allow, ultimately, Smythe’s commodification of audience attention. This argument, I emphasize, is different from and stronger than the ratings-related argument developed by Eileen Meehan in the 1980s, and which she has continued to evolve in the years since. She, too, argued that there was something missing from Smythe’s audience commodification thesis, and she, too, placed audience measurement technologies front and center. But her argument did not extend beyond the statement that ratings

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set “the broad parameters” that “bound” the production of both audiences and program “messages” as capitalist commodities.52 My argument is that audience measurement technologies do considerably more than “set broad parameters.” They license, fundamentally, the materialization of describable and monetizable audiences, and thus of an advertiser-funded economy. Thus, if we turn back now to the question posed at the start of this section, concerning the reasons why the television industry largely overlooks the problems associated with ratings data, it seems to me that the kernel of the answer is this: the problems are ignored because the economy in question could not exist without these numbers. It is these numbers that enable television to be constituted as, and to continually reproduce itself as, an advertiser-financed economy. Hence, in one veiled illustration of this, an extremely revealing comment from an executive at BSkyB (the UK’s leading digital television platform operator) in January 2002 in relation to the confusion caused by the introduction of BARB’s new panel—“BARB,” the spokesperson first noted, “provides the only common currency to measure ourselves against.” Those grumbling about BARB’s particular technical complications, the executive therefore concluded, were missing the much bigger point: “If you got rid of BARB you would have to create a new BARB, which would be pretty much like the current one.”53 The exact numbers produced by BARB are less important than the fact that there are BARB numbers, and that they enable the economy to subsist. Indeed, Gitlin himself hinted at this factor in his Inside Prime Time, specifically when musing on the fact, noted earlier, that at the time of his writing, the US broadcast industry was showing little interest in a new, experimental ratings system that some thought could be superior to Nielsen’s existing architecture. Executives, Gitlin concluded, were uninterested simply because they already had numbers—the precise merits of those existing numbers being less important than their incumbency, and what they supported. It was in this sense that he felt, tellingly, that “the number system has an impetus of its own.” In sum, the two great sources of power of ratings numbers such as BARB’s and Nielsen’s are that they already exist, and that they are numbers. Again, Gitlin: “numbers have the great virtue of being there, looking radiantly exact.” In chapter 1, it may be recalled, I described the UK regulator Ofcom’s reliance on complex econometric models as a classic example of what Ted Porter calls “trust in numbers.” The hegemony of ratings, it strikes me, is clearly another.54 Situating broadcaster power The answer to the question of why ratings’ shortcomings are effectively neglected can be extended and deepened further if we consider, once more, the fact that one cannot talk about knowledge (here, numbers and statistics)

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and its productive function without also talking, in the same moment, about power. Like all economies, the UK television economy is suffused with relations of power that are ultimately inseparable from the knowledges that constitute—and are produced within the context of—that economy. And if the knowledge that is BARB’s ratings data allows the ongoing reproduction of the television economy, I suggest here that the constellations of power-knowledge within which BARB is enmeshed allow that economy to be reproduced largely in its existing form. In other words, the relations of power structuring UK television tend to be tightened, rather than loosened or reworked, through the production, dissemination and digestion of BARB’s numbers. The ownership of BARB is almost certainly not incidental in this respect. Established in 1981, BARB is a non-profit-making limited company whose shareholders consist of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising on the one hand, and on the other the five major forces in UK television broadcasting: the four owners of free-to-air analogue terrestrial channels (the BBC, ITV, Channel Four, and Channel Five), plus the satellite platform operator BSkyB. This ownership structure, it needs to be emphasized, clearly distinguishes BARB and the UK market from A. C. Nielsen and the US market. The Nielsen Company, whose ratings system has long been “the only one that finally counts” in the US, is an independent, privately held company with commercial shareholders operating outside of the US broadcast space.55 Indeed, it was precisely Nielsen’s ostensible independence that prompted Meehan to reject its previous characterization as “a mere slave” of the broadcasting industry—or indeed of the advertising industry—and to study, in detail, the internal political economy of the ratings industry.56 But the UK context is markedly different from the one that Meehan examines. BARB is, to all intents and purposes, part of the UK broadcast industry—if not a slave of its leading players, then at the very least a handmaiden. This recognition is crucial here because despite two decades of rollout of multichannel television in the UK, which have seen over three-quarters of UK homes take some form of multichannel television (with proportionately more homes now taking digital than any other country except Sweden) and the launch of literally hundreds of new channels from a host of different providers, the terrestrial broadcasters remain, as we saw in chapter 5, overwhelmingly powerful. Moreover, and most pointedly, the data produced over the course of a quarter of a century now by BARB have done very little to unsettle this dominance and its quantitative foundations: notwithstanding the plethora of new channels now widely available, the numerically few channels wholly owned by the four terrestrial broadcasters still account, reports BARB, for nearly 80% of all adult viewing.57 With such reassuring data to bolster the terrestrials’ ongoing dominance in the advertising market, it is arguably unsurprising that BARB faces little pressure to change from within its shareholders’ ranks. Indeed, interviewed

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just shortly before the problematic panel switchover in early 2002, BARB’s then-chief executive Caroline McDevitt made the stark admission that while BARB is notionally accountable to a monthly board meeting of its shareholders, she could not recall there having “ever been a vote” during her two-and-a-half years in charge.58 No wonder, then, that BARB had come to acquire by this stage—and still very much maintains today—the reputation of a “secretive, unaccountable body.”59 The events of early 2002, when the new BARB panel was being introduced and the confusing and conflicting new viewing data began to be released, are particularly revealing in this regard. For, given what we know of BARB’s ownership and of these entities’ collective grip on industry power, it was perhaps inevitable that it was these very shareholders who urged calm—and this despite some of their own audiences (temporarily, at least) being slashed. ITV, the worst hit, was reported simply to be “hoping” that its numbers and the quality of the data improved. BSkyB, as we have seen (and on whom more below), indicated that there was no real alternative to BARB, brushing off what it called “teething problems” and concluding simply that “these things happen.” The BBC, for its part, claimed that its own “internal research” continued to generate numbers that were “remarkably” similar to BARB’s.60 It was, given the magnitude of the discrepancies between “new” and “old” BARB, a remarkably limp collective response; and as late as August 2002, seven months after the first problems occurred, the BARB shareholders issued a statement emphasizing that they remained fully united in support of the company. Indeed, the only substantive fallout from the debacle of the panel switchover was the departure from BARB of Chairman Nick Phillips—very much, observers noted, in the guise of a sacrificial lamb.61 Instead, it was left to one of the many broadcasters fighting desperately to loosen the grip of the terrestrials (and BSkyB) on market power—namely Universal Studios Networks UK, the owner of the niche Sci-Fi Channel—to argue that an alternative to BARB should now be seriously considered.62 But such dissenting voices were and are few and far between in UK television, and the possibility of a meaningful, substantive critique rapidly dissipated. In fact, one needs to look to the parallel world of UK radio broadcasting for evidence of a more sustained assault on existing audience measurement technologies. Here, too, the main questioning has come from organizations outside of the central networks of incumbent, institutional power. Most notably, the TalkSPORT radio station and its erstwhile chief executive Kelvin MacKenzie waged a long campaign to force RAJAR—BARB’s equivalent body in radio—to adopt a new, electronic measurement technology in place of its existing paper diary method, claiming that the latter consistently under-reported talkSPORT’s audience. But despite a significant amount of publicity and eventually taking its case (unsuccessfully) to the high court, TalkSPORT failed to effect any change.63 RAJAR awarded a new, two-year au-

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dience measurement contract to its market research contractor Ipsos MORI in May 2006, with the diary method retained.64 Returning to television, meanwhile, and as a final observation in the consideration of the networks of power within which the production and dissemination of UK television ratings occurs, the position specifically of BSkyB merits further, individual comment. As discussed, BSkyB, as a platform provider, is something of an anomaly among BARB’s shareholders. But BSkyB is not only a platform provider: it also operates a number of wholly owned digital channels (including Sky One, which was until recently the UK’s most watched digital channel), available not only on its own platform but also, in some cases, on other (terrestrial and cable) multichannel platforms. Why, then, has BSkyB adopted a conservative, protectionist stance on BARB’s numbers, when other channel providers contesting the terrestrials’ dominance—and this is assuredly a major part of BSkyB’s agenda—have expressed strong concerns? The fact that BSkyB is a shareholder in BARB may have contributed to its reluctance to question the company’s methods and output, but more likely the cause is basic economics. For, in recent years, BSkyB’s headline profitability has been driven less by the performance of its own channels than by its ability to drive relentlessly downwards the prices it pays to carry the dozens of other (third-party-owned) UK digital channels that it offers to its customers.65 In such a financial context, any additional negotiating leverage that BSkyB can secure against the owners of those third-party channels is, inevitably, aggressively pursued and defended—and the consistently low ratings reported by BARB for such third-party digital channels constitutes perhaps the strongest leverage of all. Thus, when BSkyB trialled its own audience measurement technology in 2006, it was quick to scotch talk of a challenge to BARB. “We are not in competition,” a spokesman stressed. “BARB is still the measurement tool for TV advertising.”66

FROM POWER TO GEOGRAPHY AND POWER-KNOWLEDGE The real importance of television ratings resides not in what they do not do—they do not neutrally, accurately and consistently represent actual viewing behaviors—because, as Rose and Miller usefully remind us, numbers such as ratings are never a mere, passive “outcome” of a recording function. Ratings are important, rather, primarily for what they actively do—which is to render the television space coherent, calculable and orderly, and hence investable. In short, it is through such technologies that the “television economy” is envisioned and framed, and is made available and safe for capital. Inevitably, therefore, the strongest defence of such technologies tends to be mounted by those who have most at stake financially and oper-

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ationally in ensuring the ongoing orderliness of this economic space. In the UK, I have argued, this means the terrestrial broadcasters and, increasingly, BSkyB. We can only begin to understand these organizations and their institutional relationships and operational economics if we seek to capture and illuminate the technologies of power-knowledge that produce and nurture them: technologies of which audience measurement is a prime example. I began the chapter with the popular metaphor of television as a “mirror” on society or culture. This metaphor is allied to, and indeed depends upon, some very specific ideas about power: what it is, where it is located, and how it is exercised. Television can be considered a mirror on society because it is ultimately viewers—each and every one of them—who have the power to determine what broadcasters air. And in this chain, audience measurement technologies constitute the primary lubricant, telling broadcasters what people like and dislike, and hence what content to commission and schedule. Ratings, in other words, enable and actualize viewer power. This viewer power, lastly, is a capacity: it resides at the level of the individual; and it is exercized automatically, in the process simply of being a consumer of television. As much as anything else, I have tried in this final chapter of Part II to move us from one notion of power to another. For the concept of power with which we ended the chapter was power in an entirely different guise from the individualized power-as-capacity with which we began it. If we think of ratings as making television available to measurement and capital, then it is possible to conceive of power not so much as an individualized capacity, but as a much wider and more diffuse field of forces that produces more than it effects—rather than a viewer effecting change through behavior, then, we have institutions generating and realizing economies through the production of knowledge. This, it seems to me, is a more accurate and insightful way of conceptualizing ratings and comparable statistics: as technologies implicated not in the exercise of consumer power but in the reproduction and legitimation of economic and social power relations. Such economic power relations have of course been the linking, overriding theme of Part II, and we have examined the materialization and negotiation of these power relations in various different forms and at a number of different, interlocking scales. Power, naturally, does not “disappear” in Part III of the book, but my central focus shifts now to the third and final “leg” of the conceptual and empirical triad of knowledge, power and geography that I have used to frame and guide my overall argument.

NOTES 1. See, respectively, “Power at last,” The Economist, March 31, 2005; “CTAM: ‘Power to the People,’” Broadcasting & Cable, July 30, 2007. At least one commentator

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who attended the CTAM meeting noted something of an irony in said theme: under many of the “Power to the People” signs plastered all around the convention center was another message—“CTAM Corporate Fund Members Only.” The commentator in question observed, “Power to the people? In this case, power to the corporate fund…” See “Power to The People?” Multichannel News, 27 July 2007. 2. Cited in M. Sanders and M. Rock, Waiting for prime time: The women of television news, University of Illinois Press, Champaign, IL, 1994, at p. 147. 3. See especially H. Moore, The classic television reference: A mirror of societal changes, via the tube, Skyward Publishing, Dallas, 2005. 4. “Culture secretary damns ITV regional quota failure,” The Guardian, June 17, 2008. 5. “A national issue,” and “Regionals make a stand,” The Guardian, June 23, 2008. 6. T. Gitlin, Inside Prime Time, Pantheon, New York, 1983. 7. See especially his Telecommunications, mass media and democracy: The battle for the control of US broadcasting, 1928–1935, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993; and (with E. Herman), Global media: The new missionaries of corporate capitalism, Continuum International, New York, 1997. 8. E. Meehan, Why TV is not our fault: Television programming, viewers, and who’s really in control, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2005. 9. For a basic introduction to the relationship between media content and audience measurement figures, see B. Barnes and L. Thomson, “The impact of audience information sources on media evolution,” Journal of Advertising Research, 28(5), 1988, Special Section, 6pp. For two early US-based critiques of the methodological adequacy and industry uses of ratings data, which prefigure some of the later arguments of Gitlin, McChesney and Meehan, see H. Skornia, Television and society: An inquest and agenda for improvement, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1965, and B. Shanks, The cool fire: How to make it in television, Vintage, New York, 1977. 10. For an influential statement on the importance of studying how economic markets are constructed and maintained (which is what, I argue, ratings do), see M-F. Garcia-Parpet, “The Social Construction of a Perfect Market: The Strawberry Auction at Fontaines-en-Sologne,” in D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa and L. Siu (eds), Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2007, 20–53). 11. D. Smythe, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 1, 1977, 1–27. 12. E. Meehan, “Ratings and the Institutional Approach: A Third Answer to the Commodity Question,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 1, 1984, 216–25; and see, more fully, her “Neither Heroes Nor Villains: Toward a Political Economy of the Ratings Industry,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1983. 13. Cited in “Missed opportunities,” The Guardian, December 4, 2006. 14. Message posted by anonymous UK reader, March 7,2007, at http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/12875/ (retrieved April 2007) in relation to an original article entitled “BBC plans to take on Apple’s iTunes with ‘iPlayer.’” 15. Obviously there is overlap here: while some subscription-based channels do not carry advertising, most do.

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16. Meehan, Why TV is not our fault. 17. Ibid. The quotations are from pp. 23, 28. 18. P. Napoli, Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the Audience Marketplace, Columbia University Press, New York, 2003, p. 97. 19. J. Turow, Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1997. 20. J. Webster P. Phalen, The Mass Audience: Rediscovering the Dominant Model, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, 1996. 21. E.g. B. Owen S. Wildman, Video Economics, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992. 22. See, for instance, M. Koschat and W. Putsis, “Who wants you when you are old and poor: Exploring the economics of media pricing,” Journal of Media Economics, 13(4), 2000, 215–32. 23. E.g. Napoli, Audience Economics. 24. Ibid. 25. The decision as to what demographic a program should be sold “as” is based on a number of factors, most notably relative viewing shares and relative audience values. 26. While “waste” is, indeed, the term used in the industry, there is an extremely important caveat to this observation. For, while unsold audiences may not be directly monetized when a particular program is sold to an advertiser, such audiences do nonetheless contribute to the overall annual advertising revenues generated by the broadcaster in question. This is because a significant component of UK television advertising is pre-sold by way of so-called “share deals” that see major consumer goods companies and media buyers commit a minimum share of their annual television advertising budgets to each of the main terrestrial broadcasters, and which are negotiated in large part on the basis of the shares of overall adult viewing achieved by those broadcasters in the previous year. For information on such deals, see especially the report of the UK’s Competition Commission into the proposed merger between the main ITV shareholders (Granada and Carlton Communications): “Carlton Communications Plc / Granada Plc: A report on the proposed merger,” 2003, http://www.competition-commission.org.uk/rep_pub/ reports/2003/482carlton.htm#full (retrieved December 2006). 27. See the website of Channel 4’s advertising sales arm for confirmation of this targeting, e.g.: http://www.channel4sales.com/advertising/our_brands/m4 (retrieved March 2007). 28. Private communication from Channel 4 Television. And see also L.E.K. Consulting, “Ofcom Financial Review of Channel 4,” http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/ psb_review/c4review/lek/lek_full_report.pdf (retrieved April 2007), p. 47. 29. E.g., Napoli, Audience Economics, chapter 3. 30. E.g., ibid., p. 77. 31. Examples are also abundant in other markets. In the US, for instance, many local channels experienced dramatic changes in ratings performance when Nielsen replaced one electronic metering technology (set-top meters) with another (its Local People Meters, which track who in the household is watching as well as which channel is on) in the geographic market in question. “Public TV programmers in the largest TV markets,” in particular, “say they learned to live with a sudden drop

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of at least 20 percent in audience estimates after the ratings company installed local people meters in their cities.” See “PubTV worries as Nielsen shifts rating method,” Current, June 25, 2006. 32. “‘5m viewers lost’ as TV ratings in chaos,” The Guardian, June 20, 2002. 33. “Missed opportunities,” The Guardian, December 4, 2006. Comparable examples can be cited from the US market. One concerns the effects of Nielsen’s new “active/passive meters” that track time-shifted viewings of television programs through DVRs (PVRs) and similar devices. To ensure that the delayed viewings are credited to the correct channels, the meters collect “metadata” that channels must encode in their broadcast signals. However, put off by one-off costs of $5,000–7,000, only a small number of the country’s public television stations have actually purchased and installed the Nielsen Audio Video Encoders (NAVE) required to enable such encoding, even though Nielsen is reported to have predicted that ratings could drop as much as 40% if channels do not encode their local signals. See “PubTV worries as Nielsen shifts rating method.” 34. “MacKenzie ratings boost for Sky,” The Guardian, November 26, 2003. 35. “‘5m viewers lost’ as TV ratings in chaos.” In the US, the issue of regional representability is arguably even more problematic. Nielsen tracks and reports audience ratings in 210 separate geographic markets (“Designated Market Areas”), but the technologies and methodologies it uses are not the same in each one. Cost-benefit trade-offs are the major issue here. Thus, when it announced in September 2007 that it was planning to introduce upgraded electronic metering technologies to all of the 56 markets currently metered, “Nielsen said it is also working on ways to replace [manual viewing] diaries in [the 154] smaller markets where the economics aren’t there to justify 24/7 metered marketing.” “Nielsen: Metered markets to Local People Meters by 2011,” Broadcasting & Cable, September 20, 2007. 36. BARB has certainly not shirked from the challenge of responding to and seeking to accommodate developments in broadcast and viewing technologies. It does attempt to distinguish and measure audience viewing according to the nature of the broadcast platform (terrestrial, satellite, cable, etc.) and the location of the set in the household (living room, other). It also now tracks delayed viewing on VCRs, PVRs and DVD recorders; will extend its coverage to television-based video-on-demand services from January 2010; and has announced plans to trial video-to-PC monitoring via both fixed meters and software metering (“BARB to measure new platforms,” Broadcast, December 18, 2007). Nevertheless, given the inordinate complexity involved and, more significantly, the rate at which this complexity is mutating and increasing, one cannot help but think, when considering BARB’s efforts, of a finger being stuck in a hole in a dike. 37. It is vital to emphasize that the notional home I have pictured is by no means exceptional or unusual. Two television sets per home is the average in the UK; a large percentage has three or more. Nearly 11 million UK homes (out of a total of approximately 25–26 million) now subscribe to digital cable or satellite television (from Virgin Media or BSkyB respectively) offering hundreds of channels. Many of these pay-television homes—just under 30% in the case of satellite, which has more than twice as many subscribers as cable—have digital video recorders on the primary set. And such has been the recent growth in penetration of digital terrestrial television that Ofcom, the UK regulator, estimates that there are now approximately

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15m UK television sets with installed free-to-air digital capacity, of which roughly 50% are not primary sets. 38. “TV ratings system is a bad joke, says broadcaster,” The Guardian, January 21, 2002. 39. “Numbers game,” The Guardian, November 20, 2001. 40. Based on a UK population of 60 million. 41. One who did was Janet Goldsmith, then managing director of Universal Studios Networks UK, which owns the Sci-Fi Channel. See “View from where?” The Guardian, January 21, 2002. I discuss her critique later in the chapter. 42. Skornia, Television and society. 43. Gitlin, Inside prime time, pp. 53–54. 44. Skornia, Television and society. 45. Smythe, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism.” See also his Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness and Canada, Ablex, Norwood, NJ, 1980. 46. See especially M. Goldhaber, “The Attention Economy and the Net,” 1997, http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/ (retrieved February 2005), and T. Davenport and J. Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 2001. 47. S. Buck-Morss, “Envisioning capitalism: Political economy on display,” Critical Inquiry, 21, 1995, 434–67; T. Mitchell, “Fixing the Economy,” Cultural Studies, 12, 1998, 82–101. 48. For a fascinating but somewhat different perspective on the same issue, see E. Didier, “Do Statistics ‘Perform’ the Economy?” in D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa and L. Siu (eds.), Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2007, 276–310). 49. Mitchell, “Fixing the Economy,” p. 94; Buck-Morss, “Envisioning capitalism,” p. 439. 50. Buck-Morss, “Envisioning capitalism,” p. 440. 51. N. Rose and P. Miller, “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of government,” British Journal of Sociology, 43, 1992, 173–205; the quotations are from p. 185. 52. Meehan, “Ratings and the Institutional Approach,” p. 223. 53. “TV ratings system is a bad joke, says broadcaster,” The Guardian, January 21, 2002. 54. T. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1995. 55. The quotation is from Shanks, The cool fire, p. 245. While it would be fair to say that Nielsen’s ratings system remains “the only one that finally counts,” recent years have seen more concerted and (arguably) more material attempts to break its monopoly. Meaningful emergent competitors now include Rentrak, which provides multi-platform audience measurement products, and, with its new TV Ads service, Google. However, Nielsen is clearly alive to the competitive dangers, and sought to dampen the threat that Google, in particular, represents, by striking an alliance in October 2007 to improve and co-operate with Google’s TV Ads platform. See “Nielsen, Google team up to track TV ads,” Broadcasting & Cable, October 24, 2007; also “Google’s TV Ad Plan,” Broadcasting & Cable, February 25, 2008.

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56. Meehan, “Neither Heroes Nor Villains” and Why TV is not our fault; the quotation is from her “Ratings and the Institutional Approach,” p. 221. 57. The exact figure in 2006 was 77.5%. This number is as reported by BARB, whose data are available on a subscription basis. 58. “Numbers game.” 59. “Who’s watching what?” The Independent, January 15, 2002. 60. “TV ratings spat rumbles on,” BBC News, January 31, 2002. 61. “Walmsley gets top job at TV ratings board,” The Independent, August 9, 2002. 62. “View from where?” 63. “MacKenzie faces £700,000 legal bill over RAJAR lawsuit,” The Guardian, December 17, 2004. 64. “RAJAR reveals new audience measurement contract to start January 2007,” May 22, 2006, http://www.rajar.co.uk/bulletinShow.cfm?uid=061102030130&bullet inid=96&part=two (retrieved February 2007). 65. As a proportion of its annual revenues, BSkyB’s total programming costs have declined from over 50% in the 2002–2003 financial year to only 35% in 2006–2007. Management emphasizes that the negotiation of improved terms with third-party channel suppliers has been largely responsible for these increasing cost efficiencies. I have extracted these numbers from the Sky earnings releases available at http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=104016&p=irol-news&nyo=0. 66. “BARB code test for interactive television measurement,” May 24, 2006, http://informitv.com/articles/2006/05/24/barbcodetest/ (retrieved January 2007).

Conclusion to Part II

“Forget Warner Brothers, Universal and Disney,” gushed one excitable, Los Angeles-based UK journalist in the midst of the US film and television writers’ strike of 2007–2008. “Say goodnight and good luck to CBS, NBC and Fox,” he went on. “The Hollywood studio model is about to be turned upside down.” How was this going to come about? It would happen, he suggested, because the core creative forces behind today’s most recognizable Western television programming—US-based actors, directors and, most immediately and publicly, writers—had clearly reached an impasse in their relationship with the leading corporate institutions that package and distribute that programming to American and global audiences. Having historically relied on and fed the broadcast networks and the wider studio system, top “talent” would now make and retain its own product and take it straight to the public. “Leading film and TV writers, accompanied by actors, directors and Silicon Valley investors, are poised to announce the creation of new ventures aimed at bypassing the studios.” As one writer explained to said journalist, “It’s a whole new model to bring content directly to the masses.”1 Media power, this prognosis intimated, is inherently mutable. And its mutability reflects the form in which it exists. For power, in this account, is fundamentally something possessed. The studios and their broadcast arms currently “have” power, but if writers and fellow creatives were to fully and selfishly leverage their unique talent, they could effectively take that power from the studios and exercise it themselves through a series of “new ventures”. By exploring in Part II of the book something of the fabric and flow of power relations in the international television economy, as seen and experienced from the UK and New Zealand markets, one of the things I hope to have effectively shown is why this idea of a simplistic but dramatic transfer 315

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and reapplication of power is so very far-fetched. In order for the existing television economy to be dissolved and a new economy, characterized by new sets of power relations, to materialize in its stead, what would need to be supplanted and replaced is not merely a particular configuration, in a particular time and place, of institutional capital. For “studio power,” if indeed we can call it that, has never been just about the companies themselves. It is, more meaningfully, an entire global distribution architecture and a multi-dimensional matrix of monetization of intellectual property. The singular mistake here is to imagine that you can simply take the studios away—management, buildings, contracts with suppliers and customers— and replace them with different economic agents, leaving everything else as it is. This is a mirage because the global media economy could not exist in its present form without the Hollywood studios, just as the studios could not exist in their current incarnation except in the context of the existing media economy. It is meaningless to discuss one without the other. What else do we need to factor in, then, when considering the nature of power and its exercise in today’s television economy? Part II has been an attempt—inevitably a highly partial one—to try to progress an answer to that question. To understand the complex patterns of capture of economic value in global television (one of my main stated objectives for the book as a whole), it certainly helps to identify who is making and distributing today’s most sought-after programming—the incumbents seemingly waiting to be knocked off their perch. But we also need to consider entrenched, statesponsored systems of copyright recognition and protection; vast studio libraries of proprietary, reusable content; international trade deals that lock in program distribution rights not for days or weeks but for years; dispersed networks of buying and selling programming built on a myriad long-term, localized personal relationships; embedded national and regional cultures of funding of media distribution and consumption; the vested interests of massive, sometimes affiliated, consumer electronics manufacturers; a dizzying proliferation of corporate co-ventures of varying scope and durability, and with varying degrees of exposure to the circuits of money, productive and commodity capital; and hugely complex systems for producing and codifying statistical, audience-based data to facilitate the investment and apportionment of advertiser finance. In short, we need to understand the wide array of interlocking forces that maintains the incumbents’ status as incumbents. All of this, moreover, before we even mention the matter of media consumption habits. The whole idea that the studios—and everything they bring with them—can be bypassed is ultimately predicated on one great hope, namely the Internet. The vision for the predicted “new [talent-based] companies,” we are told, is “to create programmes and films and distribute them via the internet,” inspired by the revelation that “you can create con-

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tent directly for the internet and find an audience.”2 And, to be sure, one can. But for one entire economy and its deep-rooted structures of powerknowledge to be washed away by another, it needs to be the case not only that the new model is viable, but also that the “old” model is broken and demonstrably unable to co-exist with the new. It is here that the idea of a profitable webcast economy superseding a profitable broadcast economy, in anything like the near term, falters. Consumers are watching video online. But it will not be clear for some time how many of them are prepared to pay for the privilege, or to what extent, or in what relation to expenditure on “traditional” television; as NBC Universal chief executive Jeff Zucker succinctly put it in a recent speech, the “economics around these digital properties are not yet fully formed—that’s five years away.”3 What is clear, conversely, is that a decade after the Internet became mass market, and several years into the age of streamed and downloaded video, we are still watching broadcast television, and we are still seemingly happy to pay large and increasing amounts of money—directly or indirectly—to do so. Daily household television viewing in the US increased steadily over the period in question, reaching eight hours and 11 minutes in 2005.4 In 2006 there was another increase, to eight hours and 14 minutes. This figure remained exactly the same in 2007.5 Recent research showed similar trends in the UK, and predicted that overall viewing of “traditional” linear television in that market will rise by approximately 5% over the next five years.6 Not surprising, then, that NBC’s Zucker should arrive at the following conclusion: “We can’t trade today’s analog dollars for digital pennies.”7 Perhaps the main argument I have tried to develop in Part II is that to come to grips with this existing international television economy, with the power relations criss-crossing it, and with its underlying dynamics of capital accumulation and capture, it is critical to understand its geographies. This is because those geographies are material in all manner of different respects. The profound importance, to Hollywood, of strict market and rights territorialization, is only the most vivid example of this. Another is the fact that economic outcomes vary from place to place in part because economic processes are themselves spatially differentiated. And a third concerns capital’s circulation: the degree to which the different circuits of capital have internationalized, and the degree to which they are aligned with one another at a range of geographical scales, plays a major role in the stability of the circulation process in general. The third and final part of the book deepens this emphasis on the geographical, but the geographies I explore are substantively different to those traced out in Part II. In Part II, as my brief preceding summary intimates, we were concerned primarily with relations of, or across, space: spatial structure; spatial differentiation; and spatial scale. Granted, it was necessary at points, most notably in chapter 5, to drill down into the specifics of place,

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but the purpose of doing so was in part to illuminate, in turn, spatial relations, the argument being that we cannot understand how places—or the institutions located there—are related to one another unless we understand the unique characteristics of those individual places themselves. Part III, by contrast, examines “place” more for place’s own sake. If, then, one of the primary objectives of Part II was to elucidate spatial formations of media capital, the main aim of Part III is to demonstrate the importance of the fact that in its various global peregrinations, media capital always ultimately touches down in place.

NOTES 1. “Strike hiatus prompts Hollywood writers to go it alone,” The Guardian, December 28, 2007. 2. Ibid. 3. “Zucker offers insight to NBC’s future,” Variety, February 27, 2008. 4. “Couch potatoes,” The Economist, July 19, 2007. 5. “In TV Versus Internet, TV Still Wins,” The New York Times, October 18, 2007. 6. “The death of linear TV has been exaggerated,” Broadcast, February 7, 2008. 7. “Zucker offers insight to NBC’s future.”

III FROM SPACE TO PLACE

9 Geopolitics

If everything goes according to plan, the center of gravity of the UK’s BBC will shift substantively northwards in 2011, the year presently earmarked for the relocation from London to Salford, Greater Manchester, of five departments and in the region of 1,600 employees.1 Initially advocated by ex-Director General Greg Dyke, and driven more recently—and with some zeal—by his successor Mark Thompson, the move to Salford is the cornerstone of the BBC’s wider “Out of London” initiative, its endeavor to shape a BBC that is less focused on London and more representative of, and engaged with, the rest of the country. It will see the construction of new northern headquarters for the BBC in the shape of a state-of-the-art “media city,” at an estimated cost to the BBC of approximately £250m. The headline rationale for the move is a simple one. The BBC is paid for by licence-fee payers across the whole of the UK. Hence, the argument goes, the programs it shows should reflect the lives and experiences of people and places throughout the UK, not just of a geographical minority. To this end, in turn, the BBC itself—as a living organizational entity—needs to become more national in several critical respects: in its making of proprietary content; in its staffing; in its development of talent; and in its investment both in physical infrastructure and in independent programming. The move to Salford is regarded not as the be-all and end-all of this spatial transformation (“Out of London” contains a series of ancillary initiatives), but certainly as the linchpin individual project.2 In this chapter I consider the geographical political economy of that project. In examining this geopolitics, the chapter is situated at the nexus of three rapidly evolving and increasingly overlapping literatures. The first of these literatures comprises research into the locational geographies of the 321

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media industry: specifically, the questions of where the organizational entities that constitute the media industry are located, and why. As I noted in chapter 4, such questions have traditionally accounted for the vast bulk of explicitly geographical writing—and, indeed, of writing by geographers—on the media economy. In the first section of the chapter I provide a summary overview of that literature, and I situate what follows in relation to it; essentially, this relation boils down to a consideration of the significance of the simple fact that the BBC’s proposed move is away from, and not into, the established media capital that is London. In this first section of the chapter I also provide a capsule summary of the proposed move and of its evolution to date: how it originally materialized, key stages in its formalization, and where it stands at the time of writing. The second literature is one we brushed up against back in chapter 1: namely the burgeoning literature on the creative industries and, more specifically, on the purported role of these industries in driving urban and regional economic development. In recent years, as we saw earlier, some bold economic claims have been made for such industries, not least by Richard Florida in his influential The Rise of the Creative Class (2002).3 My interest here is in the fact that strikingly similar claims have been advanced for the likely impact of the BBC’s move to Greater Manchester on local and regional economic fortunes. The thrust both of Florida’s thesis and of the case propounded by the main architects of the BBC-Salford plan (at the BBC and, increasingly, in Salford itself) is that “creativity is king,” and that only by making themselves attractive to the “creative class” can today’s cities stimulate economic growth and urban development more generally. Housing the BBC in Salford, then, will implant creativity in the northwest and will catalyze the wider region’s development. The second section of the chapter amounts to a critique of these claims. I draw explicit parallels, first, between the BBC’s proposals and Florida’s widely discussed “creative class” prescriptions, and then borrow from critiques of Florida’s work in developing my own arguments concerning the BBC and Salford. The first part of my argument is that the link between creativity and growth is presumed but not substantiated. It is asserted that the BBC’s arrival in Salford will kick-start economic development at a range of geographical scales (from the very local to the macro-regional), but nowhere are the precise causal mechanisms specified. Rather, the thesis appears to be an article of faith—its advocates are, as one knowingly put it, “selling futures”—and, in the process of being recycled by various key actors in the project, this thesis has not only acquired credibility and self-momentum but can even be seen to have “snowballed,” with the professed positive externalities mounting, inexplicably, in successive accounts.4 The third and final literature I engage here is the literature on “entrepreneurial” or, increasingly commonly, “neoliberal” urbanism. This literature

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argues that the last thirty years have seen a profound shift in urban policy and governance, away from a concern with the delivery of services, towards an emphasis on attracting business investment and driving growth through entrepreneurialism. I say much more about this literature below, in the third section of the chapter, where the main question I pose is—how can we understand the BBC’s move to Salford, which is increasingly owned and impelled by decisionmakers in Salford, as urban policy? Once again, I draw, in answering this question, on critiques of Florida, which suggest that for all its apparent newness, the creative-class script ultimately reproduces and reinforces neoliberal urban development agendas. Much the same can be concluded, I argue, about the BBC-Salford proposals. For, while the emphasis on “creative” practices is suggestive of a different kind of economy, particularly when grafted onto the BBC’s public-service remit, the Salford plans in fact continue a tradition of market-oriented and property-led urban development strategies framed around place-marketing, interurban competition, and gentrification. In short, the plans amount to a form of neoliberal urban policy designed “to mobilize city space as an arena both for market-oriented economic growth and for elite consumption practices.”5 There follows a relatively short fourth and final section. Here I reflect that while the BBC move is fundamentally a question of geography, it is also very much a question of power—and, indeed, of power’s own geographies. In deliberations and decisionmaking around the future of the UK’s media industries, not to mention its major cities, where does power reside, and at what scales is it exercised? To address these issues I return to the literature on creativity and economic development, for that literature—but by no means only that literature—explicitly emphasizes the increasing concentration of power and decisionmaking at the local level. While not directly disputing such arguments, I suggest that the case of the BBC’s move to northwest England demonstrates that we cannot overlook powers situated at the national level, and particularly the powers of the national state.

PLACING THE MEDIA ECONOMY Agglomeration and “media capitals” It is on industrial location—where productive industry participants are located—that most geographical research into media economies has focused, especially where the media in question are “old” media such as television, radio, music, film and print publishing. This literature has been developing in earnest for at least twenty years, and as a result it is now large, dense, and extremely rich. However, in amongst the variety and volume, it is possible

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to extract several key sets of findings, and these provide useful context not only in the present chapter but also for the rest of Part III. First and foremost, it has been demonstrated that media production activities, particularly those of film, television and recorded music, have a tendency to agglomerate or “cluster” in major cities, with Los Angeles (i.e. Hollywood) being the archetypal example. Such agglomerative tendencies are of course not unique to the media or cultural industries; but various authors have argued that these tendencies are demonstrably more pronounced in the media sector than in other areas of the economy.6 Numerous studies have analyzed this clustering phenomenon, with perhaps the most notable and influential contributions having been made by Susan Christopherson and Michael Storper, Allen Scott and—outside the discipline of geography itself—Michael Curtin.7 The central theoretical thrust of this overall literature has been that there is a profound spatial logic to such agglomeration, effectively consisting of the enhanced competitive and creative performance that is seen to derive from such proximity. The other sets of noteworthy findings can all be seen essentially as variations on, or amendments to, this core geographical thesis, and they can be usefully partitioned into those with an old-media or new-media focus. With regards to the former, five main sets of refinements have been developed. First, while clustering of media production activities occurs extremely widely, such clusters by no means exhibit the same internal characteristics or levels of economic performance.8 The second refinement emphasizes that while much production activity remains focused in these large, primary media agglomerations, a number of important subsidiary or satellite production locations have also emerged over time to complement them.9 The so-called “runaway” production phenomenon that we touched upon in chapter 7, when discussing US producers shooting television drama on location in New Zealand, is the most frequently discussed manifestation of this trend.10 Canada’s Vancouver, in turn, is typically regarded as the classic example of such a runaway production location.11 A third and related thread of tributary research questions the long-term inevitability of Hollywood’s global dominance of the movie and television industries, and wonders whether the growing role of non-US “media capitals” such as London, Paris, Milan and Tokyo might be viewed as a portent, potentially, of changing patterns of industrial location.12 The fourth important recognition has been that different global media centers increasingly work together on individual projects to share the risk and capital investment: again, we have seen evidence of this already, with the observation in chapter 7 that international film and television co-productions are an increasingly common feature of the media economy. Fifth, and lastly on “old” media, there have been increasing efforts—with this book positioned very much as another—to temper somewhat the heavy traditional emphasis of researchers on media production in-place, stressing that productive ag-

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glomerations are almost always embedded in wider geographical networks of finance and distribution.13 If the quintessential agglomeration model no longer fully captures oldmedia locational patterns, neither does it quite fit the world of “new” media. Certainly, some specific places are widely recognized to be pivotal to the creative forces of the new media economy—most notably, Silicon Valley in California.14 But the nature of these clusters has been shown to differ quite substantially from the more familiar old-media agglomerations, particularly in regard to their employment patterns, the factors contributing to their evolution (proximity to research institutions often being a key one), and their social and economic linkages with other places and spaces.15 Furthermore, there is much less of a “media capital” phenomenon here: while major world cities such as London and New York do, inevitably, feature significant new media production activities, so too, for instance, do San Francisco in the US and Brighton in the UK.16 Salford, 2011 What, then, of the BBC’s forthcoming move to Salford in 2011? London, as we noted in Chapter 8, is widely recognized as the creative and commercial center of the UK’s media industries; all of the terrestrial television broadcasters are headquartered there, as are all of the major independent television production companies. How much significance should we therefore invest in the fact that the BBC, in moving large parts of its operations to Greater Manchester, is in this sense bucking the predominant geographical trend? It strikes me that the move is, quite clearly, highly significant, but the point I want to emphasise here is in fact a very basic one: merely, that in locational terms, big capital’s relentless agglomerative logic does not always win out. Indeed, the BBC move is far from being the sole example of this—there are plenty of existing “satellite” centers of media activity in the UK, just as there are in (to take my other main territory of interest) New Zealand. In the former, Bristol, Birmingham and indeed Manchester have long boasted important second-tier media industry clusters, including both BBC and commercial operations, and the residency in Manchester of, for instance, a high-profile production company such as Red Productions (Queer As Folk, Clocking Off) and an even higher-profile production such as Coronation Street (from ITV Productions), itself merits recognition; in the latter, meanwhile, Wellington and environs may lack the critical industry mass of Auckland, particularly in terms of broadcast organizations, but the city is a material industry location and houses, not insignificantly, SPADA (the Screen Production and Development Association). What seems worth emphasizing above all is that we cannot appeal to a single common factor in explaining the emergence and durability of such

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secondary centers. In some cases, the location is essentially fortuitous, an accident, as it were, of historical geography—as we will see in the following chapter, for example, with NHNZ’s Dunedin home. In other cases, there can be shown to be compelling, if idiosyncratic, market forces at work. And in still other cases, locational outcomes reflect, above all, cultural politics—and this, it seems to me, is the best way of interpreting the BBC move north. That the BBC remains, today, a largely London-centric organization has been recognized for many years. Certainly, the BBC has regional production outposts and offers local programming (primarily news and current affairs) for local transmission—both for the “Nations” (e.g. Scotland) and for the “Regions” (e.g. the southwest). But all of the corporation’s core operating entities are based in the capital city: the national television and radio channels; the BBC’s Worldwide commercial arm; the BBC World Service. It had, then, been some time coming when plans were initially hatched under Greg Dyke—Director-General from 2000 until his Hutton-associated demise in early 2004—to try to make the BBC a more nationally representative and nationally based organization. Moving selected central activities to Greater Manchester was part of this plan from the start. “The BBC has been a south of England-based institution for too long,” Dyke more recently reiterated, “which is why we planned the move to Manchester in the first place.”17 To understand more fully the BBC’s geographical imperative—its national broadcast competitors, notably, feel no comparable compulsion to reduce their own London bias—we must understand a little of the unique political, economic and cultural context. The BBC is, critically, the UK’s only “true” public-service broadcaster, in the sense that it is both state-owned and (largely) publicly funded (out of the licence fee); Channel 4 is state-owned and has significant public-service commitments, but it is commercially funded; while the public-service commitments of the other two free-to-air analogue broadcasters (ITV and Five, both of which are privately owned) have gradually been whittled away over the years. Pointedly, this latter relaxation of public-service obligations has most recently taken the form of a reduction in ITV’s required output of non-news regional programming.18 In other words, part of the very essence of being a national public-service broadcaster is being regionally representative—in a variety of different respects.19 Geography, then, is critical. “For the BBC,” Chief Operating Officer Caroline Thompson stressed in a January 2007 speech in Salford, the move north “represents a hugely symbolic and significant shift of emphasis from the capital to the regions.”20 It is about burying the lingering impression that the whole fabric of the organization remains, in the words of a 2008 Guardian article, “hideously White City.”21 But the move has clearly always been about politics as well as symbolism and perceived obligations to the public at large. It is almost certainly no

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coincidence that Dyke’s successor at the BBC, Mark Thompson, brought the Manchester plans to a pitch, in 2005, at the same time as submitting to the government the BBC’s case for an increased licence fee settlement over the period of the next Royal Charter (2007–2013).22 The intended message was clear—we will better fulfill our public-service obligations, and hence warrant more public funding, partly by way of geographical expansion—and it was forcibly underscored in late 2006 by a public spat over Salford between Thompson and selected members of the government, which I return to in the last part of the chapter. The wheels had been set in motion for the move northwards, albeit initially very tentatively, almost as soon as Thompson became DirectorGeneral in June 2004. In that month the BBC released, in preparation for charter renewal, a document entitled “Building public value,” which set out a “vision” for the future of the BBC, and which contained a number of central proposals.23 One was to take the BBC “from London to the whole UK,” promising that by 2013 half of the BBC’s public-service staff would be based outside London (c.f. approximately 42% in 2004), and that the BBC would spend more than £1bn per annum (over a third more than in 2004) on programs outside London. The cornerstone of these proposals—headlined, significantly, “A vision for the BBC in the north of England”—was “to make Manchester the UK’s largest broadcasting centre outside London.”24 Further flesh was added to these plans towards the end of 2004: the moving departments would include children’s television and radio (including the two national BBC children’s television channels, CBBC and CBeebies), BBC Sport, New Media and R&D; nothing would be confirmed until “the financial picture for the next Charter period, including the licence fee, is clear”; and, in the face of accusations that the move would be merely cosmetic, it was confirmed that “real money and decision making power” would be transplanted. Substantial progress has been made since early 2005. First came a progressive narrowing of the potential sites for the new BBC “media city,” which is envisaged as housing not just BBC staff but also “a cluster of independent producers, technology companies and possibly other broadcasters,” and which would be developed and run by the relevant local city council.25 In October 2005 an initial “shortlist” of 18 possible locations in the Greater Manchester region was narrowed down to four (two in the City of Manchester itself and two in Salford, which abuts Manchester), with the field reduced to a final two—Manchester’s Central Spine and Salford’s Quays Point—in January 2006. Then, in June 2006, the BBC’s Board of Governors selected the Salford Quays site as the preferred location. But it was not until January 2007, and the announcement of the new BBC license fee settlement, that the new BBC Trust (which has replaced the Board of Governors) finally signed off on the move.

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All the while, an extraordinary mélange of entangled public and private bodies has been active behind the scenes in Salford, working alongside—or sometimes, across the table from—the BBC North Project team to formulate increasingly detailed proposals (Figure 9.1): the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce (GMCC); the Manchester Investment and Development Agency Service (MIDAS); the Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA) (which will ultimately develop and operate the “media city” in tandem with Salford City Council); North West Vision (one of the UK’s nine regional media development agencies, set up to promote and build the regional audio-visual industries, and financed from a variety of sources including lottery, the UK Film Council, EU Regional Development funding, and the NWDA); Salford City Council (SCC) itself; the Central Salford Urban Regeneration Company (URC) (established in early 2005 and funded by Salford City Council, the NWDA, and the government’s national regeneration agency English Partnerships); and Peel Holdings (property developers, and owners of the undeveloped Quays site, as well as, inter alia, Manchester’s well-known Trafford Shopping Centre). The successful Salford bid was coordinated—and continues to be managed—by a consortium (mediacity:UK) containing the last three of these, and it was fronted by the chair of the URC (and, until August 2007, the chief executive of mediacity:UK), a former BBC journalist named Felicity Goodey.26

Figure 9.1:

Local/regional bodies involved in Salford bid and mediacity proposals

Source: Author

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CREATIVITY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT The BBC, Salford and the “creative class” Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class has proven to be an immensely popular and influential book in academic, business and government circles. At its core, it is a book about the concept of creativity and about the impact of creativity on the economic development of cities. Elaborated in a little over 400 pages, the argument is grounded in academic research but leads to very deliberate policy recommendations, and runs essentially as follows. We have entered, Florida argues, a new phase of capitalism in which creativity—a specifically human attribute—has become the central motor of economic development. Thus, he identifies the combined efforts of his “creative class” (nearly 40 million Americans, in his primary national example, and including groups ranging from high-tech workers to artists and musicians) as the main source of economic growth in the modern economy. This, he says, has profound implications for today’s cities: their economic and social fortunes rest on their ability to attract and retain members of this highly mobile class of creatives; only by securing creative human capital can cities ensure future growth and prosperity. If they fail to develop attractive “people climates,” cities will—in one of Florida’s most frequently cited expressions—“wither and die.”27 It seems to me that we can helpfully understand the BBC-Salford initiative specifically in the terms delineated by Florida. Indeed, Florida himself would doubtless approve of the link, and possibly even inspired those working locally on the proposals: on visiting Manchester in October 2005 to speak at the National Competitiveness Summit (where the NWDA was a co-host), Florida claimed that Manchester was already the UK’s most “creative city”—“the UK’s San Francisco”—when ranked on the basis of three key metrics that he used in his original US analysis (patent applications per capita, ethnic diversity, and “friendliness to the gay community”). “Talented people—across gender and lifestyle—look for a visible gay community like Manchester’s,” he claimed, “as an indication that a city is likely to be an exciting and tolerant place to live.” Such openness, Florida reiterated, is intrinsically tied to the capacity for economic growth.28 My own argument that we can usefully frame the BBC move to Greater Manchester in Florida’s terms is based, fundamentally, on the rationalizations offered for the move by its main champions: as we shall see, for Salford, for Greater Manchester, for the NWDA, for the UK government, and increasingly even for the BBC itself, the relocation imperative has become an argument not simply about the BBC and its obligations, but about wider urban and regional development in the north of England, and one couched expressly in terms of the catalytic power of creativity.

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While drawing specific parallels between the BBC-Salford proposals and Richard Florida’s “creative class” prescriptions, it is important to recognize, as we did in chapter 1, that a wider, government-originated UK “creative industries” agenda predated the publication and dissemination of Florida’s ideas. In other words, both the BBC’s proposals and Florida’s own work were developed against the backdrop of an existing UK creative industries script. Two other high-profile New Labour initiatives, moreover, provided equally pertinent political-economic context for the formulation of the BBC move, in the shape firstly of the “urban renaissance” agenda and secondly of the regional devolution program.29 In focusing here on the The Rise of the Creative Class, I do not mean to downplay the contextual importance of these latter two initiatives, nor, in particular, of the UK government’s longstanding creative industries push. (A push which, it is worth noting, remains very much alive, with the creative industries made the centerpiece of 2008’s “New Talents for the New Economy” program, and with Culture Secretary Andy Burnham describing the government’s associated vision for Britain as one “where the local economies in our biggest cities are driven by creativity.”30) Rather, I use Florida’s work specifically because it sharpens aspects of the creative industries script that are particularly relevant to the BBC example. The crux of the premise I question in this part of the chapter is that installing the BBC in Salford will drive regional economic growth by attracting to the city not only the BBC’s own creative personnel but a much wider and larger—and economically essential—creative class. Such a vision was, and remains, at the heart of mediacity:UK’s successful pitch to the BBC, first publicly unveiled in May 2006.31 “A thriving media hub at Salford Quays: Manchester’s Waterfront would not only see the relocation of the BBC to the area,” the team emphasized. “Affordable space and support will ensure that other media and creative industries relocate or start from scratch to create a dynamic, stimulating and diverse environment where new ideas and innovations can be nurtured and realised.” The vision was of a “creative hub”: “Media City allows this creative energy to explode into a thousand applications and has the space to nurture hundreds of businesses and thousands of talented people for the future.” Signalling the footloose nature of the creative class and the environment required to entice its members, the language could almost have been crafted by Florida himself: The kind of creative people who drive the media and digital industries can go anywhere in the world. Water is a magnet; we have spectacular sunsets and 11 million people live within just one hour’s drive. But it’s the quality of the whole environment which counts. We want our media and creative industries to be world-class [and] that’s why we are building them a world-class envi-

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ronment . . . Media City is designed to encourage those great “conversations” which stimulate new ideas. Narrow streets, squares, roof gardens and waterside bars will create a sense of intimacy while wi-fi technology keeps people in touch with the world. Cutting edge digital technology will unlock creativity in Media City: UK.

As the URC says of its regeneration plans for Salford more generally, “We can make Salford a beautiful, vibrant and prosperous city where people will want to live, work and study for generations to come.”32 If the local actors are the most forceful proponents of the proposition that an attractive Salford begets a creative class, begets economic growth— and of the central link the BBC can form in this chain—then they will have been heartened to see the BBC itself peddle much the same line.33 This is, it must be said, extremely fertile terrain in the first place: “Creativity,” the BBC’s website insists “is the lifeblood of our organisation,” and the corporation’s vision “is to be the most creative, trusted organisation in the world.”34 “Floridian” style economic theory meshes comfortably with this worldview. Thus, from the early stages of the planning process, the BBC has insisted its new northern headquarters should be regarded as a “creative quarter” in which it would be merely the “anchor tenant,” whose presence “would then attract other tenants.”35 Various senior BBC personnel have emphasized the importance for wider economic development of the BBC establishing creative scale in Salford, with, for instance, Helen Bullough—Managing Editor for BBC Entertainment Manchester—speaking explicitly of “creative critical mass.”36 But perhaps the primary purveyor of the “creativity and growth” line is the most important BBC player of all, Director-General Thompson. He set out his personal views on the Salford move most directly in a speech to the Royal Society for Arts at Manchester University in March 2006.37 The story he would tell, he said at the outset, was in large part one of “creative opportunity,” and he enthused that “creative and cultural energy in cities like Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle, Birmingham is palpably higher than it was five or ten years ago.” Leveraging these extant creative resources, and adding its own creative power to the mix, the BBC move promised to engineer wholesale regional transformation. Thus, on “the reasons why,” Thompson was crystal clear: First, we believe that this initiative could have a transformational impact on the creative industries and the media talent base across the North of England . . . I see our vision for the North as an opportunity to create a multimedia digital broadcasting factory from scratch with new, more flexible, more creative ways of working, far greater porousness and collaboration with partners and external providers, and a workforce developing entirely new skills to meet the challenges of the next decade and beyond.

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Growth, creativity and causality The first set of critical observations I develop in this chapter takes up directly on this latter theme: namely, the premise that increasing the weight of creativity in Salford (in the specific shape of a new BBC regional headquarters) will stimulate wider economic growth.38 The same premise has provoked some of the strongest critiques of Richard Florida’s work, and I draw directly on those criticisms here. The essence of this critique has been that in positing links between levels of creativity and rates of economic development, Florida offers us little in the way of evidence.39 And there are, in turn, two related aspects to this argument. First, and as argued most stridently by Steven Malanga—Senior Fellow at the conservative US think tank, Manhattan Institute—Florida fails to actually demonstrate any significant correlation between creativity and growth.40 In fact, Malanga claims, the strongest growing US cities of the past decade have been those ranking low on Florida’s creativity indices (Las Vegas, Oklahoma City, Memphis); for Malanga, traditional economic arguments (low taxes, business incentives, less government) remain the best way to account for outperformance in urban economic development. Second, and as noted by Jamie Peck and Allen Scott amongst others, it is also the case that even if a correlation between creativity and growth could be satisfactorily demonstrated, correlation does not imply causality. Florida fails to specify causal mechanisms, and fails to acknowledge that traits of creativity “may just as easily be consequences of economic growth, rather than causes of it.”41 This critique is important and relevant because a positive impact on wider economic development—both sectorally and spatially—has been largely assumed, and consistently pegged to creativity, in public discussion about the BBC’s proposed move to Salford. But the specific mechanisms of such an impact have not been detailed. How, exactly, will the BBC’s creative presence serve to grow the wider economy? To be fair to Director-General Thompson, his has been one of the few voices to express any concern about the inevitability and simplicity of such an effect. “We would not claim,” he told the Royal Society, “that ‘trickle down’ from the Manchester project is all we need to do to ensure adequate investment in network production”—not to mention growth in the regional economy at large—“in other parts of the North.”42 And yet as we will see, such a claim is implicit in much of the advocacy around the project, especially in Salford itself. It is important, I think, to question such a claim, not least in view of the fact that even within the BBC there is reported to be significant resistance to the idea of geographical expansion beyond the boundaries of Greater Manchester. Perhaps most notably, there was the resignation in May 2006 of Ruth Pitt—Creative Director for the BBC’s “Out of London” initiative—citing precisely such “resistance” and the frustration it caused her.

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Pitt was reported to have believed that there was little appetite for “Out of London” beyond the move to Manchester, including a lack of enthusiasm for growing network production in other regions.43 If, then, the BBC faces its own obstacles in achieving more broadly based growth, how realistic is the prospect of spin-off growth for other media players—or, more distantly, for the non-media economy? In asking this question, two key features of the Manchester project advocacy are particularly revealing. One concerns the specific geographies in question, and the scales at which the knock-on economic effects are claimed to be pertinent. While some supporters of the move have been modest enough to herald its economic significance strictly to the immediate Manchester region—“fantastic news for Greater Manchester,” in the words of Angie Robinson, chief executive of the GMCC—other accounts envision the economic development upsides rippling outwards in waves taking in the entire northwest, and even the whole of northern England.44 Quite how the BBC move to Manchester (a move, we must not forget, only of a handful of departments, and of none of the analogue terrestrial television channels) will spark broadly configured economic growth in, say, Newcastle, remains to be seen. But the presumption that it will has become entrenched. Firstly, the NWDA has, not surprisingly, repeatedly hailed the importance of the move to the northwest in general, Chief Executive Steven Broomhead declaring in October 2005 that the development of a strengthened BBC presence would be “hugely important to the region’s economy.”45 But it is not only the NWDA that has claimed as much. Sir Richard Leese, leader of the Manchester City Council, argues that the Salford move is not merely important but “absolutely crucial” for “the economy of the northwest.”46 Meanwhile others, particularly those working at a national level, have extended the spatial ramifications further still: the BBC’s Mark Thompson insists there are credible benefits “for the economy of the North of England”; an October 2006 motion signed by 110 MPs in support of the move likewise asserted its importance “to the whole of the north of England.”47 And upon the move finally being greenlit in January 2007, its protagonists ratcheted up the rhetoric yet another notch, one (Goodey of mediacity: UK) lauding its significance to all the people of the North and to the whole country’s creative industries, another (Broadcasting Minister Shaun Woodward) identifying the BBC’s decision as no less than “a historic moment in the evolution of Britain’s economy.”48 Given the fact that none of these accounts offers any substance as to causality, the second feature I highlight here is perhaps even more revealing. This is the tendency for the presumed economic benefits of the BBC move to snowball over time. We can trace this snowballing quite precisely. The first reported figures were made available in late 2005, when the NWDA, based on a report by “independent consultants,” estimated the “knock-on

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benefits of the move” at 4,400 jobs and—over a 10-year period—£1.5bn (averaging out at £150m per annum).49 The details of the consultants’ report, and hence the basis of these calculations, were not made available. But not only have the figures been taken at face value; they have subsequently inflated. By June 2006, the benefits predicted by the NWDA, and reported in turn by the BBC, had grown mysteriously (and without explanation) to “up to 10,000 jobs” and £170m per annum.50 A further metamorphosis then occurred between June and October, when the MP motion in support of the move said it would “create up to 15,500 jobs and bring £200m to the economy every year.”51 If a key line of critique of Richard Florida’s work has been that it assumes, but does not demonstrate, the centrality of creativity to economic growth, then exactly the same charge applies to those championing the BBC move to Salford—where wider growth effects have not only been assumed, but have been applied to (most charitably) “challenging” geographical scales, and have been escalated without explicit foundation.

BBC SALFORD AS URBAN POLICY Salford—and Salford Quays A second important thread of criticism around Florida’s “creative class” thesis concerns its partiality. Florida, according to Jamie Peck, largely disregards issues of intraurban inequality. It is vital to capture here the detailed lineaments of this critique, for in itself such a claim is not necessarily material: one could argue that Florida has no need to consider inequalities because that is not what the book is about; it is about a specific group (or “class”) of people being integral to wider economic growth. But Peck’s argument, drawing on a long tradition of urban political economy, is that Florida’s absence (the non-creative class) is a constitutive one: in paying scant attention to “the divisions of labor within which [creative] employment practices are embedded,” Florida evades the possibility that a growing working class may be a necessary side effect of a thriving creative economy.52 As Peck notes, Florida has more recently acknowledged such linkages, but without modifying his arguments or policy prescriptions in any shape or form.53 Certainly, the stark fact that America’s “creative capitals are actually more unequal than the rest of the United States” remains veiled.54 More pointedly, says Peck, Florida has little to say about how creativity-(cor)related inequalities might be tackled, advocating merely—and opaquely—“a form of creative trickle-down, with the lumpen classes of noncreatives eventually learning what the overclass has already figured out.”55 Given this critique of Florida, some salient characteristics of the city selected by the BBC for its new premises—Salford—bear highlighting. Salford

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is, overall, one of the most economically deprived areas of the UK, ranking 12th out of 354 local authorities on the government’s Indices of Deprivation in 2004.56 But perhaps more pertinent, in view of the depth of economic disparities within America’s creative cities, is the extreme unevenness buried within this overall picture of deprivation in Salford. Thus, in the far west of the city is Worsley, with its affectionately known “Millionaires Row.” At the other extreme are the neighborhoods of Blackfriars, Langworthy, Broughton, Pendleton and, perhaps most notoriously, Ordsall, the last of these ranking in 2000 as the UK’s 16th most deprived ward (out of 8,415) on educational criteria and the 12th most deprived in terms of child poverty. There is, in the local championing of the BBC move, no discussion of this striking (and very immediate) economic-geographical context. For, if the spin-off benefits of the move are expected somehow to circulate smoothly out across the northwest and northern England more generally, the development script itself remains tightly focused, by contrast, on Peel Holdings’s 200-acre site at Salford Quays near the end of the Manchester Ship Canal (a fact which has raised concern even among supporters of the move).57 This area of the city has already enjoyed substantial dockland regeneration under public-private partnerships since the mid-1980s, with landmark properties including the Lowry arts center and the Imperial War Museum North. All of which begs the question of which Salford—or which Salfords—the BBC move is intended to profit; and which Salfordians. It is, for instance, both revealing and deeply ironic that at the same time as the lure of the BBC’s “creative” potential has motivated local public and private bodies to muster millions of pounds in anticipatory financing, insufficient monies could be raised to continue to support the community-anchored Salford Film Festival, which, despite the backing of such native luminaries as Sir Ben Kingsley, was axed in January 2007 (the very month that the BBC Trust signed off on the BBC move north)—Salford City Council citing an underwhelming “business plan,” and prompting the community-produced Salford Star to rage at the “disgrace” of the NWDA and SCC funding the city’s BBC bid while not providing “the pittance of twenty thousand quid it needs to give the whole of the city a free festival and showcase all the creative talent that’s here already.”58 It is also noticeable and significant that among the many local organizations involved in promoting and scoping the BBC move, none explicitly represents local communities. Perhaps most notable by its absence has been Salford’s Local Strategic Partnership, Partners IN Salford.59 Amongst this group’s other objectives are to provide “a common voice for the area” and to find “ways to tackle poverty and deprivation.”60 Yet it has not figured in the BBC project. And while idealistic media narratives may sound very promising—the Manchester Evening News enthused that the BBC’s arrival in Salford “will mean a new era for Ordsall after decades of taking

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hard knocks,” hopefully bringing “hundreds of jobs to the area and the opportunity to carve careers in the media and showbiz”—the fact remains that Ordsall is not Salford Quays.61 Indeed, the head teacher of an Ordsall primary school was perhaps more realistic in her prognosis of the likely “knock-on effect” of the BBC move, forecasting that “it will provide jobs in the service industries as well.”62 Certainly, and as Rosemary Mellor has argued, the poorer people of Greater Manchester have had “no role” in previous rounds of redevelopment of the urban core (including Salford Quays itself), but rather have been “edged out of sight” as the new arterial roads designed to improve city-center accessibility came to “scythe through old neighbourhoods” such as those in Salford.63 Thus, when one reads the fine print of the Salford URC’s wider plans (to which the BBC move is now central) to “regenerate” the city, it is hard to avoid the images bequeathed by that historical geography. “By 2025 Salford will have undergone a magnificent metamorphosis,” we are now told. “Green boulevards will link the northern, southern and western parts of Salford, along a succession of high quality urban squares and green spaces, to the buzzing regional centre.”64 Perhaps more important still, however, is the fact that the UK’s primary large-scale urban development projects of the last two decades—in Greater Manchester and elsewhere—have not only tended to exclude the poor; they have typically exacerbated existing socio-economic inequalities.65 As Swyngedouw et al report, such projects are generally poorly integrated—at best—into the wider urban process; they have an ambiguous impact on the cities they are intended to benefit; and they normally accentuate socioeconomic polarization through the working of real-estate markets and changes in the priorities of public budgets.66 One might object here that references to historical geographies of urban regeneration in the UK in general and Manchester in particular are interesting and important, but have no relevance to the BBC move; that the absences such projects displayed, and the disparities they aggravated, belong to another economic-geographical register entirely. I want to suggest otherwise: that the contents and outcomes of such projects are in fact highly pertinent, because although the BBC-Salford proposals—and, similarly, Richard Florida’s “creative class” policy prescriptions—may look and feel quite different, they ultimately replicate the selfsame (neoliberal) urban development agenda. Neoliberalism in the city This, then, is the third and final important critique levelled at Florida’s work that I draw upon in the present chapter. Again, I am guided here substantively by Peck, for whom Florida’s creativity-led growth directives should be read most fundamentally “not as alternatives to extant market-, consumption- and property-led development strategies, but as low-cost,

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feel-good complements to them.”67 They work expressly “with the grain,” Peck says, of neoliberal urban development programs—as extensions to and refinements of those historical programs, not as a meaningful departure from them. Drawing on the main elements of Peck’s analysis, I argue that the BBC-Salford project slots into the same established lineage. But before casting the BBC move in these specific terms, a few words are needed on what I understand by “neoliberal” urban development strategy. Economic-geographical writing on neoliberalism and urban governance owes much of its inspiration to David Harvey’s late-1980s arguments about the transition from “managerialism” to “entrepreneurialism” under late capitalism.68 Whereas urban policy had previously been preoccupied with the provision of services, facilities and benefits to urban populations, it became in the 1970s and 1980s much more focused on driving local economic development and employment growth through more “entrepreneurial” strategies, frequently with an expanded role for unelected decisionmakers such as private companies or “arms-length” development agencies.69 Indeed, as Gwyn Williams writes, Manchester’s use of public-private coalitions to facilitate economic growth has made it, in many eyes, “the national model in transforming the physical character and market potential of urban core areas”—with Salford Quays being one such flagship project.70 Over the course of the 1990s, critiques of the “entrepreneurial” city gradually segued into critiques of the “neoliberal” city, and while the precise contours of such critiques have mutated in ways that it is beyond the scope of this book to address, the overall development agenda they pinpoint remains broadly consistent.71 “Shop fronts,” Kevin Ward writes, “have been renovated, new street furniture has been introduced into the public squares and spaces, canals have been cleaned up, restored and made into “urban features,” and redundant buildings have been reclaimed for private-sector developers through the process of gentrification.”72 And hence, also, the familiar structural retinue of that agenda: regeneration schemes, enterprise zones, property development projects, tax inducements, urban development corporations, public-private partnerships. Even the most cursory review of the successful local mediacity:UK proposals for BBC-Salford provides a sharp jolt of recognition. “Close to the Lowry arts center and Imperial War Museum,” it was reported of the new “media city” at the time of the bid being won, “it will include shops, apartments, public squares and another bridge across the Manchester Ship Canal.”73 The mediacity:UK website, meanwhile, boasts the latest iteration of the consumptionist dream.74 “A new iconic building for the BBC . . . a huge scallop shaped piazza dipping down into the water . . . a floating stage . . . narrow streets, tiny squares, roof gardens and waterside bars . . . a vast two-storey glass enclosed public space where anyone and everyone can eat, drink, play with new technologies, shop, visit exhibitions or just enjoy the atmosphere.” In short,

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“media city” is “for people of all ages to live, to work, to learn, to create, to think, to relax, to visit, to enjoy . . . and to dream.” But framing the BBC-Salford project in explicitly neoliberal terms requires, of course, far more than just glib surface comparisons. Three linked considerations are critical. First, ever since Harvey’s seminal 1989 paper, the literature on entrepreneurial or neoliberal urbanism has emphasized the centrality of interurban competition—such competition intensifying in lockstep, as Harvey noted, with the increasing alignment of urban governance with the imperative of capital accumulation.75 Thus, from the very earliest mooting of the Manchester move, competition between possible sites and their respective champions—and between, in Salford and Manchester, cities with a history of tension specifically around attracting (and attracting finance for) redevelopment schemes—was inscribed in the planning process.76 When, in October 2005, the original shortlist of 18 was reduced to four, of which two were in Manchester and two in Salford, talk of a direct “battle”—of the two cities “going head to head”—began in earnest.77 Such talk only intensified in January 2006 when the final two (now down to one in each city) were announced, pitting “central Manchester against Salford Quays in a battle to secure the corporation.”78 The second important consideration concerns the effects of such interurban competition. As Peck (together with Adam Tickell) has emphasized elsewhere, cities have little choice but to compete for signature development projects such as the BBC’s because such projects are in short supply and there is little else on the table.79 But the primary outcome of such competition is to facilitate, subsidize and accelerate the very factor that renders cities vulnerable to disinvestment and underdevelopment in the first place: namely, the geographical mobility of capital, which allows and engenders uneven geographical development at the interurban scale. The underlying dynamics and drivers of this process can be helpfully illuminated by returning to Neil Smith’s influential theorization of the importance of the “rent gap” in urban gentrification.80 For Smith, residential gentrification tended to occur in areas demonstrating large gaps between actual and potential land value (“value” as expressed in ground rent, not house prices). Thus, one can posit that Salford Quays ultimately proved more attractive than Manchester’s Central Spine in part due to the presence of a greater “rent gap”; that the existence of such a gap reflected the unevenness of previous rounds of urban investment; and that the closing of this gap, driven by interurban competition, would further lubricate capital mobility by opening up new gradients in interurban rent landscapes. The evidence for such a thesis needs to be collated from a number of different sources, but, cumulatively, it is strong. Most directly, a July 2006 report by Sir Howard Bernstein, chief executive of the Manchester City Council, claimed that cheaper rent was, indeed, one of the two main reasons for

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Salford having beaten out Manchester (the other was security-related).81 It is notable, further, that in January 2006, when another prominent UK corporation—British Telecom—announced it was moving from Manchester to Salford (citing “cost effectiveness”), a similar move was made by the property group Contour Housing, which took 17,845 square feet at Salford Quays at a rent of £16.50 per square foot—“little more than half,” it was reported, “the top rent in central Manchester.”82 One suspects, too, that the matter of rent (and rent gaps) was to the fore when Caroline Thompson, at that point the BBC’s Director of Policy, Strategy, Legal and Distribution, admitted that “the corporation had got a ‘fantastic deal’ out of Salford.”83 And if the initial deal was indeed economically attractive, it became even more “fantastic” in January 2007 after “tough negotiations” by the BBC reduced its own projected cost burden from £400m to £250m.84 The third consideration in framing the BBC-Salford initiative in terms of neoliberal urbanism is that neoliberal development ventures have typically depended on supply-side and promotional “place-marketing” strategies; this, then, is how cities “compete.” Greater Manchester, of course, is no stranger to such strategies, with Cochrane, Peck and Tickell describing the city’s Olympics bids of the 1980s and 1990s as central components of “the local politics of place-marketing.”85 And hence 2005 and 2006 saw Salford engage in a sustained “charm offensive” to woo the BBC, with Manchester responding in kind—each trying to sell its “unique” local qualities.86 The style and format of presentation was considered a critical element of this competitive marketing, and the Salford bid was recognized for its presentational “polish,” with “BBC bosses” being “‘wowed’ by a presentation cleverly staged in the Compass Room on top of the Lowry arts centre.”87 But what Peck and Tickell describe as the “economic fallacy” of interurban competition—that “every city can win”—belies the fact that this is in fact a zero-sum game: local supply-side and promotional strategies do not grow the aggregate amount of available investment.88 Thus it is not hard to sympathize with Simon Ashley, Manchester City Council’s Liberal Democrat opposition leader, who—abetted, of course, by the wonderful benefit of hindsight—claimed that the £1m spent by the council in trying (and failing) to lure the BBC “had gone down the drain” and [that] council officers had made mistakes in trying to win the race for the BBC’s northern base.”89 In conceptualizing the BBC/Salford venture—as Peck does Richard Florida’s “creative class” prescription—not as something “new,” but as a variation on extant neoliberal urban development programs, we can perhaps think of the project as a form of “corporate gentrification.” The rent-gaprelated mechanics remain largely the same as with residential gentrification; but shopping, restaurants, cultural facilities, open space, and various other elements are now yoked to housing.90 Indeed, for Smith, “gentrification has been generalized as a central feature of [neoliberal urbanism],” whereby

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“real-estate development becomes a centrepiece of the city’s productive economy, an end in itself.”91 Hence the disbelief (but also, one imagines, the resignation) with which Peck greets Florida’s suggestion—one, Peck says, of “almost breathtaking circularity”—that gentrification-friendly creative-city strategies should be evaluated “not according to hackneyed metrics like job creation” but “more relevant measures like . . . increased house prices!”92 Perhaps the same metric would be appropriate in Salford post2011, with the BBC’s choice of Salford having immediately triggered talk of a “property boom” and “rocketing prices” as “TV executives from London look to relocate to the leafy suburbs within commuting distance of Salford Quays”—and with local estate agents “already planning to travel to London to hold presentations for the 1,500 staff who are likely to be included in the massive relocation.”93

THE IMPRINT OF STATE POWER The bulk of academic discussion of the creative industries internationally, as Rantisi et al observe, has been focused on local agencies and actors.94 Florida’s work is, once more, emblematic. Like so many other accounts of contemporary power, policy and governance, whether critical or prescriptive in nature, Florida’s urban creativity script operates (in Jamie Peck’s words) “on the presumption of a distant, dysfunctional, largely irrelevant, if not terminally hollowed-out national state.” Marginalizing the salience and efficacy of the nation-state in the political economy of urban redevelopment, Florida’s is a fundamentally “scalar” narrative that privileges “the local and bodily scales as the locations both of determinate processes and meaningful social action.”95 In sum, the nation-state is deemed to have lost much of its purchase on urban space—an argument that tallies with the conclusions of a growing body of academic research on urban policy, creativity-led or otherwise.96 In this last short section of the chapter, I emphasize, against the main current of this literature, and just as I argued in chapter 1, that national institutions—as Rantisi and co-authors remind us in respect of the creative industries, and as scattered others have continued to insist in regard to urban development policies more generally in countries ranging from the UK to Australia—“still matter.”97 Indeed, the BBC itself constitutes the most transparent evidence of this. The BBC is a national institution; and the Manchester relocation, after all, is avowedly about making it more, not less, national. The BBC’s origination and pursuit of the Salford project demonstrates, if nothing else, that publicly funded national media institutions can and do play a material role in creativity-led urban development schemes. But the more important point to be made is that the BBC’s influence in this particular field is materially circumscribed by that of yet another

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national player: the state. It is the power of the UK national government in determining, ultimately, the very possibility of the BBC’s Salford move, which interests me here. Again, others have pointed to comparable features of modern regimes of power and of their bearing on urban governance. Peck, for instance, argues that entrepreneurial urbanism frequently requires or attracts more, not less, intervention at the scale of the nation-state. And Kevin Ward has made this case specifically in respect to developments in East Manchester.98 Thus, while it is clear that in Salford, just a few kilometers west of Ward’s point of focus, locally based entities have played a variety of substantive roles in bringing the BBC’s plans for a new northern headquarters to their current juncture, it is also clear that the nation-state remains—for all such localism—an overwhelmingly important scale of reference for understanding the political economy of the BBC move. This became particularly apparent in late 2006 when the BBC, through Director-General Thompson, warned that it might not be able to afford the Salford move if it received a “low” license fee settlement from the government.99 Thompson had, in effect, laid his cards on the table, and his threat—or at least, what was perceived as a threat—drew a stinging rebuke from the government, first in the form of a petition by 110 MPs, and subsequently with a direct admonishment by Broadcasting Minister Shaun Woodward, who warned that suggestions that the BBC may not move were “extremely unfortunate” and that abandoning the move would be a “huge mistake for the BBC’s long-term success.”100 Salford, then, and specifically the further redevelopment of Salford Quays, had become a major political bargaining chip, as the BBC and the government entered the final stages of reckoning on license fee negotiations. In this standoff, Salford and its local representatives were now little more than bystanders—victorious over their neighbors in Manchester, but ultimately dancing to the larger tune of a decisively national political economy. And the standoff ended with the power of the state vis-à-vis the BBC being unambiguously reaffirmed, in January 2007, when the latter was obliged to accept a disappointing license-fee settlement—and to honor its commitment to moving to Salford.

NOTES 1. Plans for the actual number of posts to be moved will likely change over the coming years—the figure 1,600 (specifically, 1,620) was announced in January 2008, and represented an 8% increase on the previous estimate (1,500). See “BBC boosts Salford staff numbers,” Broadcast, January 11, 2008. 2. For a recent update on the BBC’s proposed decentralization more generally, see “BBC makes major regional pledge,” Broadcast, January 22, 2008. 3. R. Florida, The rise of the creative class, Basic Books, New York, 2002.

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4. “Ultimately we’re selling futures” was the perceptive observation on the BBC move of Chris Moll, head of funds at the media industry development agency North West Vision. “Salford Media City—the beginning,” Broadcast, July 19, 2007. 5. N. Brenner and N. Theodore, “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism,’” Antipode, 34, 2002, 349–79, at p. 368. 6. E.g. most recently E. Currid and J. Connolly, “Patterns of knowledge: The geography of advanced services and the case of art and culture,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 98, 2008, 414–34. 7. See especially S. Christopherson and M. Storper, “The city as studio, the world as backlot: The impact of vertical disintegration on the location of the motion picture industry,” Environment and Planning D, 4, 1986, 305–32; Storper and Christopherson, “Flexible specialization and regional industrial agglomerations: The case of the US motion-picture industry,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 77, 1987, 260–82; A. Scott, “The US recorded music industry: On the relations between organization, location, and creativity in the cultural economy,” Environment and Planning A, 31, 1999, 1965–1984, “The other Hollywood: The organization and geographic bases of television-program production,” Media, Culture & Society, 26, 2004, 183–205, and On Hollywood: The place, the industry, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2005; M. Curtin, “Media capital: Towards the study of spatial flows,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6, 2003, 202–28, and Media Capital: The Cultural Geography of Globalization, Blackwell, Oxford, forthcoming. These contributions all focus on the aforementioned media (film, television, music), but others have reported similar spatial patterns in print publishing; e.g. S. Driver and A. Gillespie, “Information and communication technologies and the geography of magazine print publishing,” Regional Studies, 27, 1993, 53–64. 8. E. g. G. Cook and N. Pandit, “Service industry clustering: A comparison of broadcasting in three city-regions,” The Service Industries Journal, 27, 2007, 453–69. 9. E.g.: J. Lent, “The Animation Industry and Its Offshore Factories,” in G. Sussman and J. Lent (eds.), Global Productions: Labor in the Making of the “Information Society” (Hampton Press, New Jersey, 1998, 239–54); C. Lukinbeal, “Reel-to-Real Urban Geographies: Top Five Cinematic Cities in North America,” California Geographer, 38, 1998, 64–77. 10. G. Elmer and M. Gasher (eds.), Relocating Hollywood: Runaway Productions and Foreign Location Shooting, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2005. 11. N. Coe, “The view from out West: Embeddedness, inter-personal relations and the development of an indigenous film industry in Vancouver,” Geoforum, 31, 2000, 391–407, and “A hybrid agglomeration? The development of a satellite-Marshallian industrial district in Vancouver’s film industry,” Urban Studies, 38, 2001, 1753–75; A. Scott and N. Pope, “Hollywood, Vancouver, and the world: Employment relocation and the emergence of satellite production centers in the motionpicture industry,” Environment and Planning A, 39, 2007, 1364–81. 12. See especially A. Scott, The cultural economy of cities: Essays on the geography of image-producing industries, Sage, London, 2000, pp. 208–9. 13. N. Coe, “On location: American capital and the local labour market in the Vancouver film industry,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 24, 2000, 79–94; S Krätke, “Network analysis of production clusters: The Potsdam/Babelsberg film industry as an example,” European Planning Studies, 10, 2002, 27–54; Coe

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and J. Johns, “Beyond production clusters: Towards a critical political economy of networks in the film and television industries,” in D. Power and A. Scott (eds.), Cultural industries and the production of culture (Routledge, London, 2004, 188–204). 14. M. Luger and H. Goldstein, Technology in the Garden: Research Parks and Regional Economic Development, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1991. 15. S. Christopherson, “Project work in context: Regulatory change and the new geography of media,” Environment and Planning A, 34, 2002, 2003–15; A. Pratt, “Creative clusters and Networks: Toward a critical practice,” Media International Australia: Culture and policy, 112, 2004, 50–66. 16. On New York, A. Pratt, “New Media, the New Economy and New Spaces,” Geoforum, 31, 2000, 425–36; on San Francisco, Pratt, “Hot jobs in cool places: The material cultures of new media product spaces; the case of the South of the Market, San Francisco,” Information, Communication and Society, 5, 2002, 27–50; and on Brighton, D. Perrons, “Understanding Social and Spatial Divisions in the New Economy: New Media Clusters and the Digital Divide,” Economic Geography, 80, 2004, 45–62. 17. Cited in “Dyke urges BBC move,” Broadcast, October 19, 2006. 18. “Ofcom publishes statements on programming for the Nations and Regions and ITV Networking Arrangements,” 2005, http://www.ofcom.org.uk/media/news/2005/06/nr_20050609 (retrieved October 2006). Note that ITV has also been busy unilaterally reducing its commitment to regional news programming, chairman Michael Grade announcing in September 2007 that the budget for such programming would be cut by a third (£40m), and with the broadcaster’s regional affairs staff being slashed the following year. See “ITV in talks to lay off regional affairs staff,” Broadcast, February 6, 2008. 19. Indeed, ITV has been widely attacked for its regional cutbacks, for example by the government’s former Culture Secretary James Purnell, who warned ITV in October 2007 that “it should take account of public anger before proceeding with its regional cutbacks.” “Purnell warns ITV over regional cuts,” Broadcast, October 30, 2007. 20. “Caroline Thompson, Chief Operating Officer, BBC: Speech to Television From The Nations And Regions Conference, Salford,” January 11, 2007, http://www. bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/speeches/stories/thomsoncaroline_nations.shtml (retrieved September 2007). 21. “Is the BBC hideously White City?” The Guardian, June 16, 2008. White City is in west London. 22. On which see “BBC launches case for new licence fee settlement,” October 11, 2005, http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2005/10_october/11/lf.shtml (retrieved March 2006). 23. “Building public value: Renewing the BBC for a digital world,” http://www. bbc.co.uk/thefuture/pdfs/bbc_bpv.pdf (retrieved June 2005). 24. The quotations and relevant sections are at pp. 18–19 and 108–10. 25. The quotation is from “BBC a step closer to Manchester move,” The Guardian, October 22, 2005. 26. Goodey stepped down from mediacity:UK in August 2007, but continued to work on the BBC Salford project in her ongoing role as chair of the URC. “Salford co-ordinator steps down,” Broadcast, August 13, 2007.

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27. Florida, The rise of the creative class, p. 13. It should be noted that Florida was by no means the first commentator to posit links between “creativity” and economic development. Indeed, the linkage has a long, rich genealogy—Bernard Miège cites the then French President François Mitterand, in a speech as far back as 1983, proclaiming that “creativity is becoming a development factor” (The Capitalization of Cultural Production, International General, New York, 1989, p. 38)—but a critical history of this coupling remains to be written. 28. Cambridge-MIT Institute News, “Manchester tops creativity pops,” 2005, http://www.cambridge-mit.org/cgi-bin/default.pl?SID=6&SSSID=494&NewsID=31 8 (retrieved June 2006). Note that Manchester’s near neighbor Liverpool has also “benefited” from the same powerful “creative northwest” discourse, being made “European Capital of Culture” for 2008. See “Liverpool named Capital of Culture,” BBC News, June 4, 2003. 29. See, respectively, C. Johnstone and M. Whitehead (eds.), New Horizons in British Urban Policy: Perspectives on New Labour’s Urban Renaissance, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004; Regional Studies, “Devolution and the English question,” 36, 2002, 715–810. 30. DCMS, “Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy,” February 2008, available at http://www.culture.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/096CB847-5E32-44359C52-C4D293CDECFD/0/CEPFeb2008.pdf (retrieved March 2008), p. 6. 31. “Press release. Media City: UK—The future of the media industries in the North unveiled,” 22 May 2006, http://www.centralsalford.com/site/news_pictures_ 1.php (retrieved October 2006). 32. http://www.centralsalford.com/site/index.php (retrieved October 2006). 33. The UK government, as noted, subscribes to precisely the same view of the potential impact of the BBC move, and the central mechanism of creativity. “Media city will nurture a vibrant, independent sector of creative companies and attract global operators in the new media industries to the UK,” claimed an October 2006 motion signed by 110 MPs in support of the BBC move (“MPs demand BBC move north,” Manchester Evening News, October 18, 2006). As such, the media city is seen by government to have “the potential to stimulate the regional media industry enormously, with benefits for the wider economy” (DCMS, “A public service for all: the BBC in the digital age,” 2006, http://www.bbccharterreview.org. uk/have_your_say/white_paper/bbc_whitepaper_march06.pdf (retrieved January 2007), page 45). 34. http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/purpose/ (retrieved September 2006). 35. “Beeb’s new HQ in ‘creative quarter,’” Manchester Evening News, November 17, 2005. 36. Cited in “Manchester united?” Broadcast, October 19, 2006. 37. “Mark Thompson, BBC Director-General—Speech given to Royal Society for Arts (RSA), Manchester University,” March 9, 2006, http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/speeches/stories/thompson_rsa.shtml (retrieved October 2006). 38. Indeed, one is minded to ponder a series of arguably even more basic questions: If creativity is indeed the font of economic growth, and if—as both Mark Thompson and Richard Florida have alleged—“creative energies” are already strongly evident in Greater Manchester (more so than in any other UK city, according to Florida), why is robust economic development in Manchester and the northwest not already apparent? Why do the various local champions of the BBC

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move regard its creative presence as a singularly necessary—and qualitatively different—complement to these existing creative components? 39. There has, of course, also been academic work that is largely supportive of Florida’s arguments, and it would be wrong not to signal that here. In the UK context which interests us here, see especially Nick Clifton’s “The ‘Creative Class’ in the UK: An initial analysis,” Geografiska Annaler B, 90, 2008, 63–82. 40. S. Malanga, “The Curse of the Creative Class,” City Journal, Winter 2004, 36–45, available at http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_the_curse.html. See also Kate Oakley’s critique of the same assumed links in the UK context: “As the rhetoric and expectations grow, the evidence base on which they rest seems to shrink and we are currently stumbling, fairly blindly, in the belief that the creative industries have a well-understood role in economic development.” In “Not so cool Britannia: The role of the creative industries in economic development,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7, 2004, 67–77, at p. 69. 41. J. Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29, 2005, 740–70; A. Scott, “Creative cities: Conceptual issues and policy questions,” Journal of Urban Affairs, 28, 2006, 1–17. The quotation is from the former, p. 755. 42. “Mark Thompson, BBC Director-General—Speech given to Royal Society.” 43. “BBC ‘Out of London’ chief quits,” Broadcast, May 11, 2006. Elsewhere it has been suggested that even the move to Manchester faces deep internal opposition—The Guardian (“BBC execs ‘deeply opposed to move north,’” October 18, 2006) reporting that “a small core of BBC executives are ‘emotionally’ opposed to the relocation of key services to Salford, and would be happy if the plan was scuppered altogether.” 44. Robinson cited in “Battle for Beeb HQ,” Manchester Evening News, October 22, 2005. A 2005 report buried deep in the website of the SCC intimates that some council members have, or at least had, even more limited geographical expectations. The report suggests that the benefits of the BBC move are likely to be focused on “area’s [sic] close to the regional centre such as Chapel Street and the creative sector.” See “Report of the Leader of the Council to the Cabinet, on Economic Development Strategy 2004–2007,” 2005, http://services.salford.gov.uk/solar_documents/CELM250405C1.DOC (retrieved July 2006), at p. 3. 45. Cited in “Battle for Beeb HQ.” 46. Cited in “City chief: BBC move ‘crucial to us all,’” Manchester Evening News, October 13, 2006. 47. See, respectively: BBC, “Out of London: Statement by the Board of Governors,” June 15, 2006, http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2006/06_june/15/manchester.shtml (retrieved September 2006); “MPs demand BBC move north.” 48. Respectively, mediacity: UK, “Press release. January 18, 2007,” http://mediacityuk.co.uk/pr_licenseresponse.html (retrieved March 2007); “BBC: More departments may come to Salford,” Manchester Evening News, January 19, 2007. 49. “Battle for Beeb HQ”; “BBC move will have ‘historic impact,’” Manchester Evening News, January 12, 2006. 50. “Salford ahead in BBC move north,” BBC News, June 15, 2006. 51. “MPs demand BBC move north.” 52. Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” p. 756.

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53. R. Florida, “The new American dream,” Washington Monthly, March 2003, 26–33. 54. Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” p. 758. See also Scott, “Creative cities,” p. 4. 55. Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” p. 759. 56. http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination/ (retrieved September 2006). 57. The danger that the BBC move would benefit Salford Quays but nowhere else was highlighted in July 2007 by Colin Sinclair, the chief executive of Manchester’s inward investment agency MIDAS, who admitted that the BBC move was “a great selling point” for the City of Manchester, but whose concerns were evident in the reminder that “it’s important to attract companies to the whole of greater Manchester area rather than just the 200-acre Salford Quays site.” “Salford Media City—the beginning.” 58. The SCC quote is from “Anger as curtain falls on Salford film festival,” Manchester Evening News, January 22, 2007. “Disgrace” etc. is from http://salfordstar. blogspot.com/, January 16, 2007 (retrieved March 2007). 59. Local Strategic Partnerships are single non-statutory bodies that bring together local public, private, community and voluntary organizations, and which are intended to work with local communities to identify and tackle issues such as crime, unemployment, education, health and housing in a “co-ordinated” manner. See http://www.neighbourhood.gov.uk/page.asp?id=531. 60. See http://www.partnersinsalford.org/about_us.htm (retrieved October 2006). Even its “vision,” it should be noted, while stressing “a commitment to social inclusion and to reducing exclusion among neighbourhoods and communities,” is riddled with Florida-isms geared to “creating a city where people choose to live and work”: such as fostering “the creative life of the city”; increasing numbers employed in the “creative industries”; and even promoting “cultural and creative opportunities” specifically to “enhance community cohesion” (“Partners IN Salford: Making the vision real,” 2005, http://www.partnersinsalford.org/cp_full-29.11.pdf (retrieved November 2006)). To put such language in context, it is clear that the private-sector influence on this “Partnership” is very strong: the 2006/7 “Activity Plan” of the Salford Local Chamber Council, the voice of local businesses, noted enthusiastically that Partners IN Salford was chaired at that point in time by the chief executive of the GMCC (Angie Robinson) and that the GMCC therefore “plays a key role within the [P]artnership and makes sure that local policy decisions are ‘business friendly.’” See “Salford Local Chamber Council Activity Plan 2006/7,” 2006, www.chamber-link.co.uk/docs/Salfor d%20Activity%20Plan%2006-07.doc2006 (retrieved December 2006). 61. “Residents have their say,” Manchester Evening News, June 16, 2006. 62. Ibid. 63. R. Mellor, “Hypocritical city: Cycles of urban exclusion,” in J. Peck and K. Ward (eds.), City of Revolution: Restructuring Manchester (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2002, 214–35), at pp. 216, 234. 64. “City will become ‘green garden,’” BBC News, July 14, 2005, http://news.bbc. co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/4681447.stm. 65. G. MacLeod, “From Urban Entrepreneurialism to a ‘Revanchist City’? On the Spatial Injustices of Glasgow’s Renaissance,” Antipode, 34, 2002, 602–24; E.

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Swyngedouw, F. Moulaert and A. Rodriguez, “Neoliberal Urbanization in Europe: Large–Scale Urban Development Projects and the New Urban Policy,” Antipode, 34, 2002, 552–77; K. Ward, “The limits to contemporary urban redevelopment: ‘Doing’ entrepreneurial urbanism in Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester,” City, 7, 2003, 199–211. See also, for an international context, H. Leitner and E. Sheppard, “Economic uncertainty, inter-urban competition and the efficacy of entrepreneurialism,” in T. Hall and P. Hubbard (eds.), The Entrepreneurial City: Geographies of politics, regime and representation (John Wiley, Chichester, 1998, 289–308). 66. Swyngedouw, Moulaert and Rodriguez, “Neoliberal Urbanization in Europe.” 67. Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” p. 761, original emphasis. Comparable critiques of Florida have more recently been offered by A. Pratt, “Creative cities: The cultural industries and the creative class,” Geografiska Annaler Series B, 90, 2008, 107–17, and E. Stam, J. de Jong and G. Marlet, “Creative industries in the Netherlands: Structure, development, innovativeness and effects on urban growth,” Geografiska Annaler Series B, 90, 2008, 119–32. 68. D. Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Geografiska Annaler Series B, 71, 1989, 3–17. 69. See especially B. Jessop, “The Entrepreneurial City: Re-Imaging Localities, Redesigning Economic Governance,” in N. Jewson and S. MacGregor (eds.), Realizing Cities: New Spatial Divisions and Social Transformation (Routledge, London, 1997). 70. G. Williams, “City building: Developing Manchester’s Core,” in J. Peck and K. Ward (eds.), City of Revolution: Restructuring Manchester (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2002, 155–75), at p. 163. 71. On the “entrepreneurial” city, see T. Hall and P. Hubbard (eds.), The Entrepreneurial City: Geographies of politics, regime and representation (John Wiley, Chichester, 1998); on the “neoliberal” city, J. Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2006). 72. Ward, “The limits to contemporary urban redevelopment,” p. 201. 73. “Salford bid wins BBC move north,” Manchester Evening News, June 15, 2006. 74. http://www.mediacityuk.co.uk/ (retrieved February 2007). 75. Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism,” p. 15. 76. On the history of the Salford-Manchester competitive axis, see, for instance, B. Robson, “Mancunian ways: The politics of regeneration,” in J. Peck and K. Ward (eds.), City of Revolution: Restructuring Manchester (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2002, 34–49), at p. 42. 77. “Battle for Beeb HQ.” 78. “Two cities battle for BT giants,” Manchester Evening News, January 24, 2006. 79. J. Peck and A. Tickell, “Neoliberalizing space,” Antipode, 34, 2002, 380–404, at p. 393. 80. N. Smith, “Gentrification and Capital: Practice and Ideology in Society Hill,” Antipode, 11, 1979, 24–35, and “Gentrification and the rent-gap,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 77, 1987, 462–65. 81. “Security fears ‘critical’ in battle for the Beeb,” Manchester Evening News, July 27, 2006.

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82. “Two cities battle for BT giants.” 83. “City chief: BBC move ‘crucial to us all.’” 84. “Confirmed: BBC is moving north,” Manchester Evening News, January 18, 2007. 85. A. Cochrane, J. Peck and A. Tickell, “Manchester plays games: Exploring the local politics of globalisation,” Urban Studies, 33, 1996, 1319–36, at p. 1321. 86. “£125,000 to tempt Auntie,” Manchester Evening News, December 9, 2005. 87. “How Salford won BBC battle,” Manchester Evening News, June 16, 2006. 88. Peck and Tickell, “Neoliberalizing space,” p. 393. 89. “£1m cost of Manchester BBC bid,” Manchester Evening News, July 31, 2006. See also “Failed bid costs Manchester £1m,” Broadcast, August 18, 2006. 90. See J. Hackworth and N. Smith, “The changing state of gentrification,” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 92, 2001, 464–77. 91. N. Smith, “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy,” Antipode, 34, 2002, 427–50, at pp. 430, 443 (original emphasis). In the UK this urban tendency squares with a significant national economic trend, with the Office of National Statistics reporting in 2006 that the primary driver of the UK economy over the previous 15 years had been the letting of residential dwellings. As The Guardian (“On reflection,” August 26, 2006) caustically observed, “In modern Britain, it seems, putting up the rent is somehow regarded as economic growth. The US dominates in technology, Germany makes millions of cars, Japan still makes consumer electronics. Britain produces buy-to-let landlords.” 92. Peck, “Struggling with the creative class,” p. 764. And c.f. T. Miller, “A view from a fossil: The new economy, creativity and consumption—two or three things I don’t believe in,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7, 2004, 55–65, at p. 60. 93. “Victory could trigger house price boom,” Manchester Evening News, June 16, 2006. 94. N. Rantisi, D. Leslie and S. Christopherson, “Placing the creative economy: Scale, politics, and the material,” Environment and Planning A, 38, 2006, 1789–97. 95. Peck, “Struggling with the creative class,” p. 765. 96. As noted by K. Ward, “Entrepreneurial urbanism, state restructuring and civilizing ‘New’ East Manchester,” Area, 35, 2003, 116–27. 97. Rantisi, Leslie and Christopherson, “Placing the creative economy,” p. 1793. More generally, see, on the UK, M. Jones and G. MacLeod, “Towards a Regional Renaissance? Reconfiguring and Rescaling England’s Economic Governance,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24, 1999, 295–313; and on Australia, P. McGuirk, “Neoliberalist planning? Re-thinking and re-casting Sydney’s metropolitan planning,” Geographical Research, 43, 2005, 59–70. 98. Ward, “Entrepreneurial urbanism.” 99. “Delivering Public Value: The BBC and public sector reform. Smith Institute Media Lecture, given at Westminster, London, by Director-General Mark Thompson,” October 11, 2006, http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/speeches/stories/thompson_smith.shtml (retrieved December 2006). 100. See, respectively, “MPs demand BBC move north”; “Minister: ‘BBC move essential,’” Broadcast, November 9, 2006.

10 Putting Television in its Place

Like so many of the core geographical terms we use liberally and largely unreflexively in everyday life, “place” is assuredly a complex, slippery concept.1 Chapter 9 was, clearly, bound up centrally with matters of television and place in one form or another. Our concern there was, specifically, with the place or location of television qua industry—with place, in the convoluted but nonetheless helpful words of Allen Scott in his work On Hollywood, “as a unit of social and economic organization and as a concentrated locus of conventionalized human practices.”2 But we saw in that chapter that the place of the television industry is far more than “merely” a socio-economic consideration. For, not only is it also unavoidably cultural and political; but these respective socio-economic, cultural and political dimensions of place are themselves cut across both by one another and by what are frequently highly symbolic and emotive factors. As if this were not complicated enough, we must also recognize that where television is concerned, there is considerably more to the question of place than the above picture allows. Television is not only located, or found in-place, as an industry. It is secondly, and tangibly, a place-based technology. From a consumer perspective, this is most obvious in respect to the hardware paraphernalia that we use to consume broadcast audio-visual fare: remote controls, decoders and, of course, television sets and screens themselves. (Witness the oft-cited line from Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise: “For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set.”) Such technology, we should remember, is far more widely distributed in contemporary life than is typically recognized, as has been shown most persuasively and thoroughly by Anna McCarthy in her Ambient Television, a book “about television’s presence in the routine loca349

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tions we move through when we leave the house—the store, the waiting room, the bar, the train station, the airport.”3 Nevertheless, there clearly remains an intimate connection between television and domestic space.4 A third place-related aspect to television, however, is the one that concerns me most, both in this chapter and in the book more generally. The main reference point here is not television in the guise of either industry or technology—but television as programming. Thus, large chunks of Part II were devoted to identifying and thinking through the implications of the various places that television programming inhabits in the course of its life cycle: where it is financed, where it is produced, where it is sold, where it is viewed. And yet although television as programming has featured prominently in much of what has gone before, and although questions of place have been of central importance in my discussions of such programming, the content of this programming has remained largely hidden from view. In this chapter and the one that follows it, I seek to redress the balance somewhat. I do so by considering precisely this matter of the content of television programming, and, in particular, some of its key place-related themes. I should emphasize immediately, however, that my concern is not with the type of textual critique that has become a common feature of critical media-content analysis from so-called “cultural studies” perspectives. I do not, then, interrogate programming and its reception for what these might “say” about the cultures that generate and consume that programming. As throughout the book, my focus is, rather, on television’s economy. Nor, in the present chapter, do I have much to say about how “place” and particular places are framed and depicted in the programming that dominates today’s television. This is a concern of the book, but I take it up explicitly only in the next (final) chapter—where, indeed, I discuss not only the materialization of place on television, but also its periodic erasure; and where I examine the economics and, to a lesser extent, the cultural politics of these varying degrees of presentment. As opposed to place in programming, the subject of this chapter is programming in place. The argument I make is for a materialist reading of the content of television programming and of its relationship to worldly places. In so doing, I am writing broadly against the grain of a literature that sees television as an isolating or disconnecting medium—as, in the words of Samuel Weber, “the most detached type of vision and audition” in the sense that it enables viewers to “see things from places . . . where his or her body is not (and often never can be) situated.”5 It is within this latter tradition that we have seen evolve the idea of television as a “place without a location,” the direct corollary of which, it seems to me, is the notion that with television there is “no sense of (real) place.”6 My argument, by contrast, is that in thinking critically about television programming and its content, we should consider it squarely in the context of the actual physical, geographi-

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cal locations where it crystallizes.7 Moreover, and in line with the economic emphasis of the book as a whole, it is the economic characteristics of place that I prioritize in examining such contexts. If all of this remains a little abstract, some meat on the bones will help clarify where the chapter is heading, and why. Specifically, I explore the possibilities for a geographically grounded consideration of television programming content in what I believe to be a particularly fruitful and revealing empirical context: that is, the representations of “nature” offered by the natural history genre of television programming. I argue that such televised “natures” can be productively understood and interpreted in the context of the three connected, place-bound geographies in and through which they are created: sites of capture, spaces of production, and networks of distribution. We need to consider carefully all three such geographies, I suggest, and in particular their economic parameters, if we want to come to terms more fully with the conditions of construction of televised natures, and the implications of such conditions for the natures we consume. A section of the chapter is devoted to each of these three categories of “place.” First, however, is a short section elaborating the wider theoretical moorings for my arguments.

NATURE, REPRESENTATION—AND EMPIRE The last two decades have seen the proliferation of an extraordinary quantum and range of writings on “the matter of nature.”8 If the conclusions of such writings display any thread of commonality, it is that places, environments or physical forms once considered “natural” and, as such, external to human culture and economy, are in fact always imbricated with cultures and economies in complex and often contradictory ways. Nature, in other words, is necessarily and inherently social.9 This broadly based critical engagement with what we call nature has grappled with representations of nature as much as with nature’s material essences; and indeed, in the works of those such as Bruce Braun, it has vigorously and thoughtfully contested the very distinction between nature’s physicality and its representation.10 The exegesis and interrogation of representations of nature has ranged across a broad swathe of society’s institutions, discourses and artefacts, including mainstream politics, academic science, the environmental lobby, the arts and, of most relevance in what follows, the mass media.11 And some such studies have gone further yet, seeking to uncover the effects of such representations on those who consume them.12 Investigations into how nature is represented have shown that just as nature itself is something produced, and increasingly under conditions of capitalist economy, so its representations are grounded equally in material processes of production and distribution—again largely, but not exclusively,

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of a capitalist hue.13 A key theme of such studies has been that the empirical details of a representation’s context (its “who, where and when”) inevitably impact on its substance and form (the “how and what” of representation). There has been an emphasis, then, on uncovering, accounting for, and delineating the implications of the situated nature of nature’s representations. But this emphasis has been far stronger in some areas than others. A great deal, for example, has been written on the conditions of construction of scientific representations of nature, partly no doubt in recognition of, and opposition to, the positivist (and somewhat caricatured) image of science as neutral, objective and, hence, unsituated.14 Much less, however, has been said about the materiality of representations of nature in the mass media, which seems at once surprising and troubling given that it is arguably through the media in general, and television in particular, that most of us enjoy the bulk of our consumption of represented natures. Simon Cottle and Gail Davies, from different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives but with a largely equivalent empirical concentration, have both sought to address this lacuna.15 Each has analyzed the ways in which the institutional settings of television program production—television’s “production ecologies” (Cottle) or “institutional geographies” (Davies)— have substantively influenced the development of the natural history genre (television’s broad and internally variegated “nature” offering). In this chapter I seek to move this work on. I do so through the lens of a dual focus on two of the world’s largest non-US producers of natural history programming: the BBC’s Natural History Unit (NHU, based in Bristol, England)—the primary subject of analysis for Cottle, and the exclusive subject for Davies—and NHNZ (based in Dunedin, New Zealand).16 In the course of this analysis I develop two main arguments. The first, I have already foregrounded. This is that if we want to try to understand nature programming in its worldly place, there are arguably three main geographical contexts that we need to consider. In this specific light, I suggest that Davies and Cottle’s shared emphasis on institutional spaces is limited and limiting because such spaces (spaces of production) constitute just one link in a chain of interconnected geographies, all bearing on the representations of nature that appear on our screens. This chain, as I have intimated, begins “on location” at sites of capture, and then moves through the spaces of production to often far-flung networks of program distribution.17 Second, I argue that in the cases of the NHU and NHNZ, these interlinked geographies, and the natures they propagate, can be usefully understood in terms of geographies of imperialism. It has been an increasingly prominent theme of the literatures outlined above that both nature and its representations have been produced, historically and today, in the context relations of power that frequently reflect and reproduce strategies and architectures of empire. For one thing, material nature’s production and reproduction

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has entailed various forms of direct exploitation of indigenous peoples and the lands they inhabit.18 For another, our most powerful representations of nature not only issue from those with the imperial privilege of speaking “for” nature, but tend to “place” indigenous peoples in highly restrictive ways—typically as either external from, or folded into, physical nature.19 I make the case here that the geographies underpinning NHNZ and the NHU’s representations of nature are framed by two different imperial constellations: first, the formal, historical British Empire (with the NHU on one side, NHNZ on other) and its vestigial economic and cultural inscriptions; and second, what is commonly referred to as the empire of the contemporary US media. I sketch out some of the key nodes and networks of these respective empires—one current and one residual—as they pertain specifically to the NHU and NHNZ, showing that their geometries of power are sometimes aligned, sometimes in tension with one another. And in doing so, I suggest that the interrelations between these empires, as much as their individual attributes, play a critical constitutive role in the resulting visions of nature.

SITES OF NATURE’S CAPTURE Both NHNZ and the NHU shoot footage for their programming all over the world: their sites of capture are, quite literally, global in scope. Indeed, just one recent NHNZ production, Equator, gives a flavor of the geographical lengths to which these producers go in order to capture the natures they subsequently disseminate. This six-part series examined animal and plant life in six of the world’s equatorial “hotzones”: the peaks of the Andes; The Rift Valley in Africa; the Amazon Basin; the rainforests of Borneo in southeast Asia; coral reefs of the Indo-Pacific; and the Galapagos Islands. The series began filming in May 2004, with film crews set to travel more than 63,000 kilometers over a period of just under two years, in the process capturing 350 species in 21 countries over three continents and three oceans, and recording over 200 hours of high-definition footage.20 And even this logistical nightmare pales besides geographical monstrosities such as the NHU’s first mega-series, Life on Earth, shot from 1976-1978, on which the film crew covered more than two million kilometers to film over 650 species in 39 countries.21 What is it about these diffuse sites of capture that we need to examine here? I want to be clear, first, about what it is not: for there are worthy and interesting issues that fall outside the direct scope of the book, but which do need to be understood in outline as collateral considerations. My focus is not, then, on how nature is “staged” for capture at these sites. Perhaps the most famous instance of this—the interventionist production of nature for human consumption—occurred nearly half a century ago, with Disney’s White Wilderness. The film, shot in Canada, contains a sequence

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supposedly showing local populations of lemmings leaping to their death into the Arctic; but the lemmings were not local (the producers bought wild-trapped lemmings from Inuit children in Manitoba and transported them to the set), and their “suicide” entailed the captive lemmings being herded over a cliff into a river. The myth of lemming suicide, of course, persists to this day. 22 But we would be wrong to assume either that other examples of nature’s staging are less significant for being less egregious, or that such activities are a thing of the past. Indeed, NHNZ producer Alison Ballance has recently described how, in order to be able to capture and offer up to viewers “pure nature,” her camera team sought to avoid filming local people and their intrusions into the landscape when shooting footage for the Deserts episode of the series Wild Asia.23 (Ironically, when they returned from filming, they found that it was precisely these local people, of whom they had very little footage, that viewers wanted to see.) Such critical issues of what is captured (and how), and what is excluded, have been discussed elsewhere.24 My interest, rather, is in the nature—political, cultural and especially economic—of the sites at which such staging occurs, and in the extent to which the details of these material contexts are articulated in nature programming itself and in the marketing that envelopes such programming. Given the range of content produced by NHNZ and the NHU (the former creates over 70 hours of finished product each year, the latter over 180 television and radio programs) and, as I alluded to earlier, the wide variety of sites at which filming takes place, it would be impossible—and of debatable value—to document fully the historical-geographical empirics of all such places. Instead, I want to do two things. First, I think it bears making a very simple, but nonetheless important, observation: namely, that as the Equator example illustrates, it is striking that many of the sites of the most popular natural history films are found in territories previously colonized by Europeans. There are probably a number of reasons for this, which need not detain us here: the large-scale erasure of wild species from the heavily industrialized and urbanized regions of the world that ultimately constituted the metropoles of empire;25 the predilection of the world’s most powerful, Western (and especially American) consumers for “natures” found not at hand but in more “exotic” locations;26 and the fact that in popular Western culture, colonized peoples are so often pictured as close to, or part of, nature, making their homes the natural habitat for nature. Secondly, I turn now to explore in depth the specific siting of one particular natural history product filmed in an ex-colony—the NHU’s Big Cat Diary. I do so in order to point up some important, wider themes in respect of the conditions of capture of the programs we consume.

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Big Cat Diary The first episodes of Big Cat Diary were filmed in 1996 and aired weekly in the UK on BBC2, the BBC’s second terrestrial channel. The series offered a new slant on the wildlife sub-genre, following particular groups of big cats (lions, leopards and cheetahs) and giving the program a soap-like feel. After the initial series, updates followed approximately every two years, in which new cats were introduced and previous individuals revisited. In 2004, the BBC amended the format of Big Cat, for what was now its fifth run: on this occasion BBC1 hosted nightly programs for a week, turning the program into more of a one-off event than a weekly series. In addition, there have, in the years since Big Cat first aired, been several spin-off programs featuring particular “characters” or the different species (e.g. Bella and her Cubs). Finally, in 2005, the BBC began putting audio and video footage onto the dedicated Big Cat Diary page of its website specifically in order to add context and detail to the television-viewing experience.27 “Go on a guided tour behind the scenes”; “reacquaint yourself with your favourite cats”; “explore the cats’ homes”; and so on—all such features are intended to enhance and expand the consumption experience. Big Cat Diary is filmed in Kenya’s Masai Mara game reserve. Named for the Maasai peoples, the long-term inhabitants of the area, and for the Mara River that divides it, the 1,672 square-kilometer Masai Mara is renowned for its outstanding population of wildlife, and while it is not the largest game park in Kenya, it is probably the most famous. And the BBC is quite explicit about this setting: the website offers a topographical map of the region and invites visitors on video tours of particular sites or to learn more about such sites by reading capsule summaries of each one. What is hidden from viewers of the BBC’s programs and from visitors to the website, however, are the specific sites within the Masai Mara of much of the shooting of Big Cat. At least four of the series, it transpires, have been filmed from a family of four private, luxury safari camps collectively referred to as Governors’ Camp, which is widely recognized as one of Africa’s most exclusive safari destinations. And Governors’ Camp has an immaculate colonial pedigree. The first camp in the family was built in 1972 on a spot once reserved exclusively for Kenya’s colonial governors and their royal guests (hence the name), and the current owners are keen to emphasize a sense of direct continuity with the colonial past, in form as well as title. As the website proclaims, “We kept the name and the best of the traditions of those times: every desire is catered for, no luxury overlooked.”28 Various authors have written suggestively about the role of safari in the intertwined historical geographies of nature and empire, and its centrality to their respective representations and motifs. Donna Haraway describes safari as “a complex social institution where race, sex, and class came together in-

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tensely” and relates how “the camera and gun together are the conduits for the spiritual commerce of man and nature.”29 Catherine Russell, meanwhile, identifies the safari as “a crucial site of the discipline of looking as an explicitly colonial practice . . . implicating the viewer in a structure of voyeurism, violence and subjugation.”30 We should be mindful of such observations when thinking about Governors’ Camp and the BBC.31 But my own specific argument in respect of the luxury safari setting of Big Cat Diary, its colonial history, and the BBC’s failure to publicly disclose these material geographies, is twofold. I argue firstly that the BBC is able to conjure its desired representation of nature only by effectively masking such place-bound geographies; and secondly, that the BBC and its programming are themselves directly implicated in the ongoing material reproduction of such geographies. The first argument turns on the fact that the BBC not only fails to divulge the Governors’ Camp connection, but essentially disallows the associations that such a connection might cast upon the “nature” it represents. It does so by emphasizing, in the ancillary materials collected together on its website, the privations endured by its crew in filming the program—in stark and curious contrast to the actual comforts and luxuries that clearly lie at hand. Thus, while the Governors’ Camp website and brochure regale the indulgences afforded to paying clients—“Air services bring you to your camp effortlessly, and ingredients for gourmet meals are flown in daily”—the BBC is at pains to stress its crew’s hardships: Wherever we pitch our camp, we’re at the mercy of this wild territory and its weather . . . To ensure that the films are created with a sense of reality, each programme is recorded and edited in the field, using the latest high-tech computer systems powered by generators. Indeed, almost every stage of the Big Cat Diary project is completed in the depths of the African bush and the whole production team of over 35 people will live under canvas for the two months of filming in the Mara.

These are not neutral words, of course. Visitors to the BBC Big Cat website are being encouraged to visualize the crew as being close to, or even part of, nature and its physical adversities, and to thus imagine the crew locating and retrieving a real bush “wilderness.” We should not be under any illusions as to the innocence of such texts. As writers on documentary filmmaking have demonstrated, the process of being explicit about a film’s constructedness typically only serves to enhance the apparent veracity of its truth claims.32 The problem, of course, with the specific text in question here is that it is, at best, substantially misleading. In fact it is the effacement of the actual materialities of the sites of capture, and the installation, in their place, of a context which is at least partially airbrushed, that together enable the creation and representation of the BBC’s desired vision of nature. This disjuncture between text and (actual) context

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was underscored even more dramatically when the BBC announced in 2008 that it was to install a comprehensive network of cameras across the Masai Mara for three weeks of live video streaming. Thus, on the one hand, we had the project’s executive producer proudly boasting of a quintessentially modern regime of “nothing less than 24-hour surveillance throughout the Masai Mara.” At the same time, however, the precept of capturing (nothing less than) “the heart of wild Africa” remained entrenched.”33 That the BBC is negotiating a precarious balancing act in perpetuating the idea of bravely shooting a mythic, untamed wild is clear enough. Two other broadcasters of nature programming came under critical scrutiny in 2007 for purportedly deceiving viewers about the conditions under which filming took place. The program in question was Diverse Productions’ Man vs. Wild, broadcast by Discovery in the US and, as Born Survivor: Bear Grylls, by Channel 4 in the UK. With red faces all round, both Discovery and Channel 4 were forced to defend the program’s credibility after it was reported in the press that the survival expert featured in the show actually slept in motels when viewers were led to believe he slept in the bush.34 My intention, to be clear, is certainly not to suggest that the BBC is actively and willfully deceiving viewers of Big Cat Diary. My point is that the authenticity of its chosen imagery of “wild territory” and a “deep African bush” is demonstrably not hampered by a silence on the Governors’ Camp setting. More fundamentally, perhaps, our contemporary broadcasters’ ongoing collective investment in the concept of a wholly unpeopled, untouched wilderness testifies to the enduring hold on the popular imagination of the nature-culture divide that is so often associated with the experience of modernity.35 Hence the revealing words used by Discovery in apologizing for the Man vs. Wild “deception,” with its admission that isolated elements of the show were, indeed, “not natural to the environment”—as if the “environment” can ever be defined and set apart by its “naturalness.”36 My second argument about the BBC and Governors’ Camp concerns the ways in which local and international participants in the luxury safari industry invoke the cachet of the former to bolster the status of the latter. In other words, not only does the BBC use Governors’ Camp, but Governors’ Camp uses the BBC—thus inserting the BBC and its programming into circuits of space, knowledge and power centered on the Camp’s economy. The Governors’ Camp website proudly trumpets its links with the NHU and Big Cat Diary (and why would it not?), and quotes the head of the NHU describing the Camp’s property as the “prime wildlife real estate in the world.” Such plaudits, of course, are among the factors that allow the Camp’s operators to charge guests premium rates (for the 2008 season) of up to US$860 per night.37 And the mobilization of the BBC name extends much further afield. As just one example, Kuoni, amongst the world’s largest international tour operators, also emphasizes the BBC link in promot-

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ing its own “Big Cat” trips to the Masai Mara, and in fact includes in such tours an on-site wildlife presentation from Jonathan Scott, one of the lead presenters of the BBC series.38 It has long been established that television programs and films, and the ways they are retailed, marketed and consumed as products of place, have substantive implications for the material consumption of those places of origin; as, in recent years, large parts of New Zealand could assuredly testify in respect to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Several writers have noted such effects in a variety of contexts: Mordue, for example, has shown how the UK television series Hearbeat instigated not only an increase in tourism to the area (Goathland) where it is set, but also unforeseen changes in the ways the local environment is consumed by those visitors.39 But the issue I want to stress here is not just that Big Cat Diary will have influenced the number of visitors to the Masai Mara, and the expectations they will have had of their visits. It is, more pointedly, that we have here a previously colonized space, now demarcated for an activity—luxury safari—that many would argue perpetuates the dynamics, divisions and diversions of empire. (The Maasai participate, but primarily as junior staff at the Camp or as spotters for tourists and, indeed, for the BBC’s crews.40) The BBC may veil its connections with the Camp, but by filming there, it becomes implicated in circuits of knowledge (international marketing) that directly augment the Camp’s economy, and which thus reproduce the relations of power that circumscribe that space. In short, the BBC’s representations impact not only on the consumption of place but also on its political-economic reproduction. As David Harvey has observed more generally, “The political-economic possibilities of place (re)construction are . . . highly coloured by the evaluative manner of place representation.”41 Many of these themes were sharpened, in the case of the BBC in Kenya, in an interview that Big Cat presenter Jonathan Scott gave to the magazine Travel Africa in 2003.42 Scott acknowledged, first, the fact that Big Cat Diary has indeed boosted the number of tourists visiting the region. “Big Cat Diary is an incredible advertisement for the Masai Mara,” he agreed. “As we are filming, people come up to us all the time and say, ‘We’re here because of your programme.’” To Scott, it is important to emphasize, this is a wholly positive association, “because it proves the series promotes tourism, which in turn promotes conservation.”43 But how does this latter connection obtain? “Wildlife conservation,” Scott went on, “depends very much on the tourist dollar, which pays for national parks and reserves to be maintained as wilderness areas. If this didn’t happen, many local people would question why large chunks of land were set aside for wildlife”. Thus, in raising, unlike the programme he presents, the issue of “local people,” Scott openly betrayed the relations of power and space that I am keen to place front and center. “Conservation,”

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for him, ultimately depends upon the protection of nature and its profitable economy from local people.44 In making this observation, however, it is vital to acknowledge that there are undoubtedly many ambiguities to the local situation, and that these render a neat “neo-colonialist exploitation” narrative hopelessly oversimplistic. For one thing, there have long been a range of schemes in place to recycle a share of the profits from private Masai Mara game reserves to local communities. Moreover, there is evidence of increasing efforts in recent years to provide more work in conservation and “ecotourism” to young Maasai.45 Nevertheless, there remain some stark local realities that cannot be overlooked. The colonial era did see the Maasai forcibly removed by the British from their best land, and the contemporary political economy of the region can only be understood in this context.46 Furthermore, it seems increasingly clear that there are considerable incompatibilities between Western conservationism—and its underlying nature and wilderness aesthetics—and Maasai worldviews and practices.47 And, last but not least, it also appears that the bulk of the tourism-based revenue that is set aside for the Maasai peoples never actually makes its way beyond local elites.48 It strikes me therefore that we should consider the BBC’s programming, and Jonathan Scott’s defense of the tourist economy in which it is rooted (and which the BBC, of course, reinforces in turn), firmly in the light of this historical and contemporary picture of economic and social marginalization. For this picture throws into especially sharp relief Scott’s impassioned defense of the protection of private enclosures such as Governors’ Camp from land-hungry Kenyans. “With a population clamouring for land,” Scott observed in reference to the precarious “conservation imperative,” “the first sign of tourism failing to produce the cash could be the death knell.”49 Big Cat, and the powerful nature narratives it weaves, helps to maintain the flow of such cash and thus keep the restless natives at bay. In exploring this materiality of the places of filming of Big Cat Diary, my objective is to raise wider themes that bear consideration when thinking about the sites of capture of televised “nature,” and about the implications of the character of such sites for the representations that are subsequently broadcast. In particular, we need to be aware that the natures we consume cannot be abstracted from such sites; they are, rather, products of those sites and of their unique (and very often imperial) historical geographies. In addition, the true disposition of such places will rarely be made explicit—and will sometimes be actively muddied. Finally, there is, I have suggested, a critical “reciprocity” to the place-representation dualism: just as representations are rooted in place (even if they deny it), so the biographies of those places are frequently impacted, in turn, by the circulation and mobilization of such representations.

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SPACES OF THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE Before examining the grounding of televised representations of nature in the institutional spaces of production constituted by the NHU and NHNZ, one obvious and acutely geographical question springs to mind, particularly in view of the subject matter of the preceding chapter: why Bristol, and why Dunedin? As we saw in that chapter, a longstanding tradition of research into the geographies of the cultural industries has repeatedly emphasized the tendency towards urban agglomeration, whereby the institutions that comprise such industries become—in Allen Scott’s words—“more and more concentrated in a privileged set of localized clusters of firms and workers.”50 In New Zealand, television industry activity is centered primarily in Auckland and to a lesser extent in Wellington. In the UK television industry, the main “cluster” is in London; indeed, the industry’s overwhelming concentration in London explains why the BBC, at least prior to the initiation of the Salford project, almost invariably fell back on the NHU itself when pressed to demonstrate a commitment to “the regions.” If, as noted in chapter 9, there is believed to be an inherent spatial logic to such agglomeration, a question immediately arises: might there be a different spatial dynamic at work with NHNZ and the NHU and their own removed locales, perhaps tied to the specific subject—”nature”—that each takes as its primary production matter? The answer would appear to be a resounding “no.” The explanations for their locations in Dunedin and Bristol are no less interesting for lacking a common underlying driver, but ultimately each boils down to pure contingency. NHNZ was born in the days of the state monopoly broadcaster (and TVNZ’s forerunner), a New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, which maintained a small production studio in Dunedin where programs such as Play School and Spot On were produced. When populations of kakapo were found in Fjordland in southwest New Zealand in the 1970s, Dunedin staff, the closest at hand, were called on to report; and within a relatively short space of time, five-minute news items about wildlife became 15-minute specials, and then full-length documentaries under the aegis of a discrete natural history unit.51 The NHU’s location, meanwhile, has as much to do with radio as with television. The earliest wildlife programs in Britain, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, were radio programs made in Bristol, which happened to be a focal point of BBC radio production activity. When the first wildlife television programs were produced in 1953, Bristol became their “natural” home; and as the pace and scale of production picked up, the NHU was formally established in Bristol in 1957.52 It is clear that the televised natures we consume are “produced” in studios such as those in Bristol and Dunedin as much as they are “retrieved” from the field. Some fascinating examples of such production, underscor-

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ing its distance from concepts of simple, neutral presentment of nature, are worth rehearsing here. Christopher Parsons, historian of the NHU and its former head, cites two from the series Life on Earth. Footage of the unique reproductive processes of Darwin’s frogs, Rhinoderma darwinii, from South America, was actually captured not in South America but at Paignton in the UK, a batch of specimens having been flown in, and with the production crew then maintaining a 14-day, 24-hour vigil to ensure they did not miss the birth—which lasted one second. Filming the birth of a small kowari marsupial brought similar difficulties. Again, the site of capture was a studio (on this occasion in Sydney), but this time requiring construction of a subterranean set—the kowari gives birth below ground—and no fewer than six separate filming attempts (on the first, the mother stubbornly resisted “capture” by releasing mucous fluids onto the glass floor from below which the camera was filming).53 And the manipulation, of course, does not stop there: which footage is selected, and how it is framed, themselves represent critical spaces for further transformation of the “nature” originally captured. Derek Bousé, for instance, relates the delicious example of BBC contempt for the trailer that Time-Life ran on US television in the early 1990s to market videos of the NHU series The Trials of Life. The source of dismay? That the advertisement’s exciting montage of action shots and intense close-ups misrepresented the BBC’s own more measured representation of nature, not that it misrepresented nature itself.54 My particular concern in this section of the chapter is with the ways in which the institutional conditions of production of televised natures might influence the form and content of those natures. Bousé’s example helps us to begin to broach such issues, alerting us, as it does, to the fact that different institutional entities will frame and present the same “nature” in very different ways. My specific argument, in turn, is that where the NHU and NHNZ are located, not so much in absolute terms (Bristol and Dunedin) but in relative terms—their respective positioning in wider international webs, or global economic geographies, of audio-visual production—is materially significant to the natures they produce and disseminate. And as with the sites of capture I discussed above, there are demonstrable imperial dimensions to such geographies. NHNZ These issues are perhaps most clear in respect to NHNZ. As I noted earlier, this entity was born in the days of the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, which was replaced by Radio New Zealand (RNZ) and Television New Zealand (TVNZ) in 1988. The biggest shift in NHNZ’s history, however, came in 1997, when 80% of its shares were sold by TVNZ to News

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Corporation of the US—making it part of Rupert Murdoch’s international media empire.55 (News acquired the remaining 20% of NHNZ in 1999.) The headline effects of integration into News Corp, and specifically its Fox Television Studios subsidiary, have been clear to see. At the time of change in ownership in 1997, NHNZ employed fewer than 50 staff, annual program hours were fewer than 15, and annual revenues were approximately NZ$10m. Three years later, headcount had topped 100, program hours had more than tripled, and the annual value of productions flowing through the company had reached between NZ$40m and $50m.56 Less readily accessible, but more important for my purposes, is the impact of acquisition by Fox/News Corp on the “natures” that NHNZ produces. The first thing we can say is that the change of ownership required NHNZ to become vastly more commercial, beholden as it became to an extremely demanding, financially focused shareholder. Above all else this has meant becoming more attuned to market demand, producing only content required by the market, rather than producing content for which, say, certain NHNZ producers have a particular passion, only to find that its market is limited. As current Director of Production Neil Harraway said, very simply, in 2000: “We’re very client-driven.”57 Interestingly, Harraway went on to contrast NHNZ’s customer-facing mentality with the approach of the BBC’s NHU—“They’ve tended to be quite arrogant because they’ve had the confidence of a big home market behind them, and so they’d say, ‘This is what we’re making—take it or leave it’”—but I will argue below that such a distinction, which was never as clear-cut as the quotation implies, certainly no longer pertains. Given that NHNZ’s market is primarily the US market, with the US channel Animal Planet (owned by Discovery Communications) its largest single customer, producing for customers has meant, increasingly, producing for the US.58 What does such a focus entail? This seems a critical question at a number of levels, and I want to situate it explicitly as a question of empire. I do so for the reasons I identified in chapter 6. Scholarly discussions of America and its “media empire” remain focused on the influence of the US and its media products in other places—what I called the “centrifugal” forces of empire. Much less examined, and my main point of interest here, are the effects of increasing integration into that empire on those from the periphery, such as NHNZ, who increasingly produce content for the metropolis; in other words, the centripetal forces of media empire. In the case of NHNZ, I argue, there have been discernible effects on style, range and, most important, substance. Stylistically, NHNZ producers have found that US customers require, above all, a strong story or narrative—a feature of the US nature programming market that has been stressed elsewhere.59 Again, here is Director of Production Harraway:

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America places huge emphasis on writing and they’re excited by pictures that paint a vivid word picture. If that follows through to the script, and the script itself is vivid—or what we might call “purple”—then they can be really satisfied. . . . The writing needs to be distinctive, well-crafted, artistic; also big, bold and bright—what we might call “comic book television”; you know, the way television’s going more and more. . . . But it struck me that often words matter more than pictures.60

If producing for the US demands telling a good story, it has also required NHNZ to branch out from its original, exclusive focus on wildlife programming. Both to mitigate the risks of exposure to a single genre and to enable access to the more diversified programming markets covered by key customers such as Discovery (whose US channels include Discovery Health, Travel Channel and The Science Channel in addition to Animal Planet and the original Discovery Channel), NHNZ has added health, science, adventure, travel, archaeology and “people” documentaries to its portfolio. This diversification largely explains why “Natural History New Zealand” became, simply, NHNZ shortly after the company’s acquisition by News Corp, for as NHNZ began to morph into more of a generalist documentary producer from the late 1990s, its original, full name rapidly became a misnomer. Where it continues to produce “nature” documentaries, the substance of NHNZ’s products has, critically, come to be tightly circumscribed by the tastes of the US market into which the company is now deeply enmeshed. As Bousé has observed, US nature programming usually steers clear of “real social and environmental issues” since they could “alienate some viewers, or make it difficult to sell a film overseas, or worst of all, prevent crucial rerun sales by dating the film.”61 NHNZ producers have themselves openly acknowledged the potentially limiting effect of audience preferences. “You run the risk of showing everything is okay when it isn’t,” says Alison Ballance, for example, in reference to the tendency for producers to impart a positive spin to natural history documentaries in not wanting to downhearten audiences who seek uplift.62 As to what the wider nature and extent of such limiting effects might be, we can offer some speculations through an examination of NHNZ’s current slate of commissions—programs commissioned and fully funded by specific customers for their exclusive purchase.63 Dominated by the US market, whose broadcasters account for 22 of the 28 commissions identified (the other six are split equally between TVNZ and Discovery Asia), the only hint of potential controversy, negativity or politics surfaces in a single commission for TVNZ lying outside of the nature domain: namely, the eight-part series What Lies Beneath, which looks back on the earliest stages of Mäori and Pakeha—white European—occupation of New Zealand. The US commissions on the list, natural history and otherwise, are uniformly positive and anodyne.

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In considering these various programming-related effects of NHNZ’s folding into the US media empire, it is important to emphasize, lastly, that despite belonging to the News Corp family, NHNZ does remain very much on the periphery of such empire. To be sure, it has received financial support from its US parent, including US$3 million for capital investment in the first two years under new ownership.64 But it is not subsidized in any way on an ongoing basis, being expected, rather, to turn a profit of its own account.65 And critically, on most productions not fully funded by individual broadcasters, this almost invariably means seeking out international co-producers to piece together the necessary finance. For NHNZ, unlike vastly better capitalized US-based natural history producers, cannot independently fund ventures with the high-end production values required of programming that will attract high-profile international buyers. Thus, on recent projects, NHNZ has found itself co-producing with, inter alia, France 5 (Equator), Discovery India (Wild Asia), China’s Xinjiang TV (Wild Horse—Return to China) and Japan’s NHK (Equator and Wild Asia). The NHU NHNZ frequently points to its need to co-produce as a clear point of distinction from the BBC’s NHU. “Co-productions are absolutely fundamental,” says NHNZ Managing Director Michael Stedman, because “unlike some of our bigger competitors [for which read “the BBC”], we do not have any government subsidies.”66 In reality, however, the NHU now lives in a broadly comparable world, despite the undoubted benefits of the licence fee (the “government subsidy” to which Stedman refers). In this section I flesh out this claim, starting with some important historical context. In his influential The Anglo-American Media Connection (1999), Jeremy Tunstall argued that the positioning of the UK’s leading media institutions in global geographies of media power varied considerably by genre. In entertainment, he said, the UK was essentially a colony in an unambiguous American media empire. In certain other areas, however, the UK was deemed globally influential and a clear number two to the US. Significantly, natural history and factual programming more generally was identified as one of five such areas (the others were news, music, book publishing and advertising agency).67 But the book was written largely in 1996 and 1997, and much has changed in the decade since. I will argue that while the UK, and in the NHU its leading natural history producer, may remain number two to the US in nature programming, its ability to exert a global influence independently of US institutions and markets has been substantially eroded.68 This change has been epitomized in the far-reaching, long-term joint venture that the BBC formed with Discovery Communications in 1998 through its commercial subsidiary BBC Worldwide, on which a ten-year extension

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was signed in 2002. Under the terms of this deal, the BBC and Discovery coventure in three key areas. First, they co-produce factual programming for the global marketplace. Second, they co-program and share ownership of two channels distributed internationally by Discovery, Animal Planet and People&Arts—the former now available to more than 150 million subscribers in 160 countries, the latter restricted to Latin America. (The deal did not include Animal Planet in the US.) And third, Discovery distributes (and for many years sold advertising on) BBC America, the BBC’s wholly owned US digital channel launched in 1998.69 Predictably, forming such a close relationship with Discovery has influenced the type of nature programming produced by the NHU, which has served as one of the principal interfaces, from the BBC’s side, of the wider joint venture relationship. Both in this section and in the following section on distribution, I try to tease out some of the broad contours of this effect.70 Before doing so, however, it bears emphasizing that we should avoid advancing naïve claims about BBC “subordination” to or strangulation by the US and its media corporations’ imperial tentacles. Commercially, the Discovery deal was, and remains, extraordinarily attractive for the BBC. Discovery, motivated by the international stature of the BBC brand, reportedly paid the BBC US$175 million to produce new programs during the first five years of the venture, contributing a further US$360 million to finance the international co-venture channels; and on the day the original deal was signed, the BBC’s share in international Animal Planet was valued at approximately US$600m.71 Moreover, the BBC received the latter chunk of funding riskfree—it was protected from any losses incurred by the international channels. And in the years that the venture has been in place, BBC Worldwide revenues and profits have increased strongly, from £514 million and £9 million respectively in 1999 to £916 million and £118 million in 2008 (year-end March 31).72 While all manner of international BBC successes have contributed to this growth, including entertainment formats such Weakest Link and children’s programs such as Teletubbies, NHU/Discovery co-productions have been pivotal and have been widely reported as such. Turning to the consequences of the Discovery-BBC co-venture for the NHU’s content, we need to remember that, as we saw earlier in the book, the US television market has had a longstanding historic resistance to UK imports.73 Where the US has taken UK output, it has tended to be either material that serves as a caricature of British history and culture—most notably costume dramas and odd-ball comedy—or content where the British origin is masked by, for example, exotic filming locations or the ability to re-voice and/or re-cast.74 The recent taste for UK-originated program formats, I argue in the next chapter, represents merely a new form of such masking. As Tunstall has noted, the very last thing the US has wanted, historically or today, has been gritty social commentary.75

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Given this historical context, it is hardly surprising that industry observers and insiders have been wary as to the potentially limiting effects of the Discovery deal on the NHU’s nature programming. As one example, Paul Hamann, former BBC Head of Documentaries and History (who now runs his own independent production company, Wildfire Pictures), fired the following warning: Discovery is a fantastic brand in celebrating the world around you and that’s an important part of the role that the BBC has to play to its viewers. But another important part is having programmes challenging politicians, investigating the world and the government around us. I don’t see many of those programmes on American television as a whole.76

Arguably, the three highest-profile and most commercially successful BBC/ Discovery co-productions of the last decade have been The Blue Planet, its follow-up Planet Earth, and the various instalments of the Walking with . . . franchise. The Blue Planet, subtitled “a natural history of the oceans,” consisted of eight episodes presented by Sir David Attenborough, cost approximately £7 million to make, and first aired in the UK on BBC1 in 2001, subsequently selling to over 50 countries; Planet Earth (2006) comprised 11 episodes, was shot over the course of five years, and cost almost twice as much. The Walking with . . . franchise, meanwhile, began life in 1999 as Walking with Dinosaurs— a six-part series using computer-generated imagery and animatronics to recreate life in the Mesozoic, and reported to be the most expensive documentary per-minute ever made—and has since added Walking with Beasts, Walking with Cavemen and, lastly, Walking with Monsters: Life Before Dinosaurs.77 Other significant co-productions between Discovery and the NHU have included The Life of Mammals, Dragonfly—Beauty or Beast? Nile—Land of Crocodiles and Kings, Missing—Presumed Eaten and Dune. In all such productions, nature assumes a thoroughly conventional guise. Typically, this is a nature devoid of culture—Attenborough’s opening narration of Planet Earth, for instance, promises to take viewers to the world’s “last wildernesses,” those remaining “places barely touched by humanity.” Alternatively, in the few instances where it is peopled, the BBC/Discovery’s nature is a nature populated only by Hollywood-like characters—crooks (Missing—Presumed Eaten), for example, or kings (Nile). As Davies has noted of The Blue Planet, what this all amounts to is basically “pure escapism.”78 Thus, while both The Blue Planet and Walking with Dinosaurs have been widely heralded as pathbreaking programs, there is in reality nothing pathbreaking or new about the substance (rather than form) of their representations of nature.79 And yet it would be wrong to assume that outside of the Discovery joint venture, the NHU is making controversial, illuminating programs that seek to offer different, non-traditional perspectives on nature; or that the

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Discovery deal brought to an end an existing NHU tradition of such radical film-making. Both assumptions would be fundamentally misguided. In the first place, programs such as Big Cat Diary—and other recent, highprofile solo NHU productions such as British Isles: A Natural History—are hardly models of an “alternative” natural history that engages seriously with difficult or sensitive questions. Where they confront human-environment questions at all, for example, as in the second half (episodes five to eight) of British Isles: A Natural History, they fail to venture beyond a basic “human impact on the environment” perspective, eschewing more delicate matters such as the environment’s imbrications (physical or otherwise) with social relationships of, say, class, race or gender.80 As for the pre-Discovery era, it is clear that the NHU had a long history of avoiding these difficult questions. (To the extent that it was tackled, “difficult” meant, rather, the technical challenges of biological or geological science). Reviewing the Unit’s many landmark titles demonstrates this. But so, more poignantly and persuasively, do the recollections of ex-employees. One, George Monbiot, has gone on to become one of the UK’s most influential political commentators and environmental activists. He recalls: I came to see that the BBC’s Natural History Unit would not and could not engage with environmental issues. I produced two major investigative documentaries there. One of them won a Sony Award, both of them made a big splash in the other media, but as far as the unit was concerned, they were a major liability, principally because they took up so much staff time and cost so much money. It became abundantly clear to me that the second one was the last I’d be able to make. Since the BBC was occupied by enemy aliens (John Birt became directorgeneral a few years after I left), it is striking that the word “investigative” has been all but expunged from the vocabulary of senior management.81

Another, Jamie Hartzell, who went on to produce environment-focused programming for Television Trust for the Environment (TVE International), has had this to say of his time at the NHU: I remember how afraid the producers were that if they started introducing serious messages into their films, the audience would simply stop watching. The result was that you would get all the way through a 50-minute documentary on the White Rhino, and in the last 30 seconds, the presenter would warn that the animal was under threat from poachers and if nothing was done very fast the animal could be extinct. From the BBC’s point of view, of course, this was a very safe option, because 10 million viewers would find it very difficult to get up out of their armchairs, walk across the room and turn off the TV in the time before the end credits began to roll. But what was the audience to think?82

I quote these criticisms at length to emphasize that even before the BBC’s formal alignment with the US media in the shape of Discovery Commu-

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nications, the NHU’s penchant was for conservative programming that seldom rattled cages. The Discovery co-venture merely makes even less likely a type of product—nature represented as anything other than a traditional artefact—whose germination was already severely restricted within the space of production constituted by the NHU. But if, prior to the Discovery deal, the UK and the BBC had managed to avoid, in natural history, the American colonization attending television entertainment and its various sub-genres, what is clear is that co-venturing with Discovery will have eaten into some of their former independence. Programming-wise, not much would appear to have changed since 1998, but arguably only because NHU output was already well tailored to the mores of the US market.83 In future, however, should it want to stray from such mores, the NHU will find it considerably harder to do so than it would have in the past. Both NHNZ and the NHU, then, are part of and embedded into a global media empire centered on the US, and the natures they produce can only begin to be understood when placed within the fabric of this wider economic geography. In the final section of the chapter I turn to the flows of their nature programming through the trade circuits that stitch that geography together.

NETWORKS OF DISTRIBUTED NATURES I have argued that the material details of the spatial contexts (sometimes local, sometimes global) in which nature programming is captured and produced impact directly on the substance of the natures we consume in our respective homes. Clearly, however, there is a further spatial filter that applies: for we do not all receive, and thus have the potential to consume, the same bundles of televised natures. Invariably, in any individual country, the greatest range of “natures” is available to those who receive (and typically pay for) some form of multichannel television: be it analogue or digital, cable or satellite. In the UK, for instance, homes with only the basic bouquet of five analogue free-to-air terrestrial channels (BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel Five) will periodically receive nature programming, primarily the landmark NHU titles on the two BBC channels; but those with satellite or cable subscriptions can watch nature programming more or less throughout the day, every day, on the various niche channels offered by key players such as Discovery and National Geographic. And complementing and complicating these intra-national differences in availability are, of course, considerable variations between territories. Nature, then, is created in its distribution as well. It is therefore instructive to briefly examine where—in which countries, and on which channels—the natures captured and produced by NHNZ and the NHU are ultimately aired. And my argument, again, is that we cannot

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understand these distribution maps without reference to the historical and contemporary empires that infuse and mold the economic geographies of international television. I make this argument through a series of four linked observations. The first concerns the circulation internationally of NHNZ programming. Managing Director Stedman proudly asserts that his leading products are distributed globally. “Panda Nursery has been screened in all the major markets in the world, as will Diva Mummy before the end of this year,” Stedman reported in 2004.84 But it is important, it seems to me, to interrogate the micro-sites of such distribution; and the UK is a significant place to look, given both New Zealand’s colonial heritage and the location in the UK, in turn, of the NHU. There, Panda Nursery and Diva Mummy were, indeed, screened, but both on a niche digital channel—National Geographic UK, which achieves an all-home viewing share among all adults of less than 0.1% (2004)—rather than on one of the leading terrestrial channels such as BBC1 (26%), ITV1 (23%) or BBC2 (10%).85 So, while NHNZ nature programming does sometimes make its way to the UK, it is more or less invisible once there. This contrasts markedly, of course, with the home-market distribution of the NHU’s core programming, the bulk of which airs on BBC1 or BBC2. It also contrasts, I secondly want to observe, with the distribution in New Zealand of the NHU’s leading output. While TVNZ’s TV One, the country’s most viewed channel and the traditional home of nature programming on free-to-air terrestrial television, has cut back on wildlife hours in general in recent years (with Prime TV picking up much of the slack, including the rights to Planet Earth), it—TV One—nonetheless purchased and screened all installments of the Walking with . . . franchise. In other words, top-end NHU content is not confined to multichannel niches in New Zealand in the way that NHNZ material is in the UK. But a third observation, I think, is more striking still: the fact that NHNZ itself appears to encounter as much and possibly more difficulty than the BBC’s NHU in getting TVNZ (its former parent, we should not forget) to take its output. As a recent article on NHNZ, and its producer Alison Ballance, asked, “So are we [i.e. New Zealanders] seeing the documentaries made by NHNZ? Generally not. NHNZ professes to having great difficulty in getting TVNZ to screen its documentaries, and those that are screened often end up in graveyard slots.”86 There are shades here—though I do not want to force the analogy—of what so often happened with the interpolation of cultures under conditions of formal British Empire. For a variety of reasons, the indigenous arbiters of “national culture” frequently indulged in metropolitan cultures—be they “cultures” of religion, literature, dress, language or whatever else—at the expense of existing indigenous cultures. There might be something of this dynamic in New Zealand’s TV One acquiring programming from the

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(former) Mother Country while apparently shunning competing local content. But, to be sure, there are good reasons for not pushing the argument: all such decisionmaking could well boil down to a simple cross-evaluation of production qualities; and, as I noted above, TVNZ does continue to commission from NHNZ to a limited degree. The point I want to make is simply that the skewed power relations between metropolis and colony that defined formal Empire still, clearly, persist in many realms, one of which is the distribution economy of international television. My fourth and final observation concerns distribution of both NHNZ and NHU nature programming in the US market. This, indeed, is where my main interest lies, given my headline concern to consider the impact of assimilation into America’s media empire on the output of production entities originating, geographically and culturally, elsewhere. Not surprisingly, given the close affiliation of both the NHU and NHNZ with corporate America, substantial chunks of each of their respective portfolios do get aired in the US, ordinarily on channels owned and operated by either Discovery or National Geographic. Perhaps most revealing, however, has been the fate of the US market for NHU content produced outside of the Discovery co-venture since that deal was formalized in 1998. For, while ongoing NHU series whose first installments pre-date the Discovery tie-up, such as Big Cat Diary, continue to be screened in the US (in its case on Discovery’s Animal Planet), it is notable that the highest-profile non-Discovery NHU series of recent years—British Isles: A Natural History, Europe: A Natural History (co-produced with Austria’s ORF and Germany’s ZDF), Wild in Your Garden and Britain Goes Wild with Bill Oddie—have not been distributed in the US market. One imagines that this absence is due, in large part, to the single obvious attribute shared by these programs, and which differentiates them clearly from the landmark NHU-Discovery co-productions. Focused on the UK and, in one case, Europe, their content is parochial—or what much of consumer and corporate America, at any rate, would consider parochial—and this dramatically reduces their attractiveness in the US. (It was deemed necessary, after all, to replace David Attenborough’s narration of Planet Earth with the voice of Sigourney Weaver—of Alien and Ghostbusters fame—for that series’ US transmission.87) It is of course quite possible that the shrinking of geographic scope of independent NHU programming has been a deliberate NHU management strategy: in other words, produce “global” content with Discovery and UK/European content without Discovery. But deliberate or not, the upshot is that only NHU material produced in conjunction with Discovery now seems assured of a US audience.88 I would argue that this development, in turn, is symptomatic of the NHU’s formal insertion into the lattice of the US media empire, and of the fact that the terms of such incorporation are proving restrictive in powerfully geographical ways.

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NOTES 1. For excellent introductions to the geographical concept of “place,” see N. Castree, “Place: Connections and boundaries in an interdependent world,” in S. Holloway, S. Rice and G. Valentine (eds.), Key Concepts in Geography (Sage, London, 2003, 165–86); and T. Cresswell, Place: A short introduction, Blackwell, Oxford, 2004. 2. A. Scott, On Hollywood: The place, the industry, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2005, p. xii. 3. A. McCarthy, Ambient television: Visual culture and public space, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2001. See also, for a helpful recent update, “Out-of-Home TV: Now It’s Everywhere,” Broadcasting & Cable, January 19, 2008. 4. For critical commentaries on this “intimate connection,” see especially D. Morley, Family television: Cultural power and domestic leisure, Routledge, London, 1986; and L. Spigel, Make room for TV: Television and the family ideal in postwar America, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992. 5. S. Weber, Mass mediauras: Form, technics, media, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA, 1996, p. 116. 6. I take “place without a location” from P. Adams, “Television as gathering place,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 82, 1992, 117–35, and see also more recently his The Boundless Self: Communication in Physical and Virtual Spaces, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 2005, for further developments of this argument. “No sense of place” is from the influential J. Meyrowitz, No sense of place: The impact of electronic media on social behaviour, Oxford University Press, New York, 1985. 7. A similar argument is developed by Björn Bollhöfer in his “Télévision et images géographiques : La ville de Cologne dans les séries policières,” Géographie et cultures, 60, 2006, 39–56. 8. M. Fitzsimmons, “The matter of nature,” Antipode 21(2), 1989, 106–20. 9. K. Eder, The Social Construction of Nature: Sociology of Ecological Enlightenment, Sage, London, 1996; N. Castree and B. Braun (eds.), Social Nature: Theory, Practice and Politics, Blackwell, London, 2001. 10. B. Braun, “Producing vertical territory: Geology and governmentality in lateVictorian Canada,” Ecumene, 7, 2000, 7–46. In what follows I treat the distinction between nature’s physical forms and representations largely unproblematically, but I do so while mindful of the critique that queries such a dualism. 11. For a range of useful critiques of representations of nature in the mass media, consult the following (by no means exhaustive) list: R. Silverstone, “Putting the natural into natural history,” Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 10, 1986, 89– 92; A. Anderson, Media, Culture and the Environment, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1997; B. Crowther, “Viewing what comes naturally: A feminist approach to television natural history,” Womens Studies International Forum, 20, 1997, 289–300; S. Allan, B. Adam and C. Carter (eds.), Environmental Risks and the Media, Routledge, London, 1999; J. Lerner and L. Kalof, “The animal text: Message and meaning in television advertisements,” The Sociological Quarterly, 40, 1999, 565–86; G. Mitman, Reel Nature, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999; D. Ingram, Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema, University of Exeter Press, Exeter, 2000; D. Bousé, Wildlife Films, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2000; G. Davies, “Science, observation and entertainment: Competing visions of

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post-war British natural history television, 1946–1967,” Ecumene, 7, 2000, 432–59; and K. McComas, J. Shanahan and J. Butler, “Environmental content in prime-time network TV’s non-news entertainment and fictional programs,” Society and Natural Resources, 14, 2001, 533–42. 12. E.g., in the case of the media: J. Shanahan and K. McComas, Nature Stories: Depictions of the Environment and Their Effects, Hampton Press, Cresskill, NJ, 1998; R. Holbert, N. Kwak and D. Shah, “Environmental concern, patterns of television viewing, and pro-environmental behaviors: Integrating models of media consumption and effects,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 47(2), 2003, 177–96. 13. The former is an observation propounded most forcefully by a Marxist tradition running through N. Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford, 1984; Fitzsimmons, “The matter of nature”; N. Castree, “The nature of produced nature: Materiality and knowledge production in Marxism,” Antipode, 27, 1995, 13–48, and “Marxism, capitalism and the production of nature,” in Castree and Braun (eds.), Social Nature (189–207); D. Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996; and P. Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1999. 14. David Demeritt provides a good introduction to the literature on scientific representations of nature in “Science, social constructivism and nature,” in B. Braun and N. Castree (eds.), Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium (Routledge, London, 1998, 173–93). 15. S. Cottle, “Producing nature(s): On the changing production ecology of natural history TV,” Media, Culture & Society, 26, 2004, 81–101; G. Davies, “Narrating the Natural History Unit: Institutional orderings and spatial strategies,” Geoforum, 31, 2000, 539–51, and “Researching the networks of natural history television,” in A. Blunt, P. Gruffudd, J. May, M. Ogborn and D. Pinder (eds.), Cultural Geography in Practice (Arnold, London, 2003, 202–17). 16. NHNZ was previously short for Natural History New Zealand, but the former became the company’s legal trading name shortly after it was acquired by News Corp of the US. On the NHU and NHNZ’s “ranking” among global natural history program producers, note that in the mid-1990s, approximately 50% of natural history hours available for world sale originated in the US (mainly from Discovery and National Geographic), with the UK accounting for approximately 25%, and the rest of the world the other 25% (“Wildlife Programming,” Television Business International, July/August 1997, 18–27). The rest of the world’s contribution is now probably somewhat higher, as NHNZ in particular has grown markedly, but the US and, to a lesser extent, the UK remain dominant. 17. Cottle touches briefly on the international networks of distribution of nature programming (“Producing nature(s),” pp. 86–87), but this discussion is largely descriptive and lacks the empirical and interpretive substance of his analysis of production spaces. Davies (“Narrating the Natural History Unit”), meanwhile, does point up the importance to television’s natural history genre, and its human participants, of animals’ “natural habitat” (p. 543) and of the film-makers’ engagement with these animals “in the field” (p. 544), but her self-professed emphasis is on the spaces of the NHU as a production institution; she does not discuss the material geographies of filming locations (nor, indeed, the international spaces of consumption to which NHU programming is distributed), though elsewhere she offers some illuminating

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thoughts on other geographies of (non-televisual) representations of nature. See, for the latter, her “Virtual animals in electronic zoos: The changing geographies of animal capture and display,” in C. Philo and C. Wilbert (eds.), Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations (Routledge, London, 2000, 243–67). 18. E.g. W. Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, Hill and Wang, New York, 1983; R. Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalayas, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1989. W. Beinart and L. Hughes, Environment and Empire, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007, offer a useful, up-to-date and balanced perspective on “empire and nature,” emphasizing histories not only of exploitation but also of conservation, and discussing not just empire’s environmental impacts but the nature of the environment in a post-colonial era. 19. See especially D. Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996; M. Gandy, “Visions of darkness: The representation of nature in the films of Werner Herzog,” Ecumene, 3, 1996, 1–21; B. Braun, The intemperate rainforest: Nature, culture and power on Canada’s West Coast, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2002; also D. Gregory, “(Post)Colonialism and the Production of Nature,” in Castree and Braun (eds.), Social Nature (84–111); D. Trigger and G. Griffiths (eds.), Disputed Territories: Land, Culture and Identity in Settler Societies, Hong Kong University Press, Aberdeen, HK, 2003. 20. “Equator,” http://www.naturalhistory.co.nz/moremediareleases.html (retrieved October 2005). 21. C. Parsons, True to Nature: Christopher Parsons looks back on 25 years of wildlife filming with the BBC Natural History Unit, Patrick Stephens, Cambridge, 1982, p. 20. 22. D. Chitty, Do Lemmings Commit Suicide?: Beautiful Hypotheses and Ugly Facts, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996. 23. “Wild Times,” Massey News, April 2005, http://masseynews.massey.ac.nz/ magazine/2005_Apr/stories/focus-1.html (retrieved October 2005). 24. See especially M. Jeffries, “Niche broadcasting,” Ecos, 20(3–4), 1999, 70–76; K. Scott, “Popularizing science and nature programming,” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 31(1), 2003, 29–35. 25. J. Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, Vintage, London, 1998. 26. J. Tunstall (with D. Machin), The Anglo-American Media Connection, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, p. 95. 27. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/programmes/tv/bcd/ and the various linked sub-pages. 28. See the homepage and various sub-pages at http://www.governorscamp. com/, including the downloadable e-brochure; unless stated otherwise, all quotations cited here from governorscamp.com and from bbc.co.uk/nature/programmes/ tv/bcd were retrieved October 2005. 29. D. Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936,” in her The Haraway Reader (Routledge, New York, 2003, 151–98), at pp. 168, 162. 30. C. Russell, “Zoology, pornography, ethnography,” in her Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1999, 119–56), at p. 125.

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31. See also J. Ryan, “‘Hunting with the camera’: Photography, wildlife and colonialism in Africa,” in Philo and Wilbert (eds.), Animal Spaces, Beastly Places (203–21). 32. J. Corner, The art of record: A critical introduction to documentary, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1996. 33. “Big Cat Live: BBC to film lions, cheetahs and leopards in Kenyan reserve,” The Guardian, July 17, 2008. 34. “How Bear Grylls the Born Survivor roughed it—in hotels,” Daily Mail, July 23, 2007. See also “Discovery’s ‘Wild’ storm: Authenticity questioned,” The Hollywood Reporter, July 24, 2007. 35. On which see B. Latour, We have never been modern, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993. 36. Cited in “Discovery to assess Bear Grylls show,” Broadcast, July 24, 2007. 37. http://www.governorscamp.com/main%20tariffs.htm (retrieved October 2007). 38. http://www.kuoni.co.uk/countryinformation/ke/htlk222005.shtml (retrieved November 2005). 39. T. Mordue, “Heartbeat country: Conflicting values, coinciding visions,” Environment and Planning A, 31, 1999, 629–46. On the ways in which television manufactures expectations of local “natures,” see also M. Frith, “‘Are there any monkeys living here?’ Nature, television and expectation,” Ecos, 26(1), 2005, 73–80. 40. Only approximately 15% of staff in the various Masai Mara tourist camps, it has been reported, are Maasai. See R. Mannering, “Guiding the Masai into ecotourism,” Geographical, 75(7), 2003, 67. 41. D. Harvey, “From space to place and back again: Reflections on the condition of postmodernity,” in J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam, G. Robertson and L. Tickner (eds.), Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change (Routledge, London, 1993, 3–29), at p. 22. 42. “On Location in Big Cat Country,” Travel Africa, 23, Spring 2003, available at http://www.travelafricamag.com/content/view/506/56/. 43. See also Scott’s own piece, “African pride,” Geographical, 72(9), September 2000, 32, where he reiterates largely the same argument. 44. For an evocative look at various dimensions of the relationship between the Maasai and conservation-based tourism, see G. Monbiot, No Man’s Land: An Investigative Journey Through Kenya and Tanzania, Green Books, Dartington, 2003. 45. Mannering, “Guiding the Masai into ecotourism.” 46. L. Hughes, Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure, Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke, 2006. 47. See especially J. Igoe, Conservation and Globalization: A Study of National Parks and Indigenous Communities from East Africa to South Dakota, Wadsworth, Riverside CA, 2003; also, R. Neumann, Imposing Wilderness: Struggles Over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1998. 48. M. Thompson and K. Homewood, “Entrepreneurs, Elites, and Exclusion in Maasailand: Trends in Wildlife Conservation and Pastoralist Development,” Human Ecology, 30, 2002, 107–38, at pp. 124–29; also M. Walpole and N. Leader-Williams, “Masai Mara tourism reveals partnership benefits,” Nature, 413, 2001, 771. 49. “On Location in Big Cat Country.” 50. A. Scott, The Cultural Economy of Cities: Essays on the Geography of Image-Producing Industries, Sage, London, 2000, p. 4.

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51. “Wild Times.” 52. Parsons, True to Nature, remains the only history of the Unit, with pp. 21–69 tracing the early years. Interestingly, the NHU’s formal establishment in Bristol has had the effect over the years of inducing a mini-clustering in the city of other natural history producers, with Granada Wild (ITV) and a large number of smaller independents also located there—a similar tendency to the one observed by Scott et al on a larger, more generic scale. See K. Bassett, R. Griffiths and I. Smith, “Cultural industries, cultural clusters and the city: The example of natural history film-making in Bristol,” Geoforum, 33, 2002, 165–77. 53. Ibid., pp. 318–22. 54. Bousé, Wildlife Films, pp. 1–2. 55. On this empire, see J. Tuccille, Rupert Murdoch: Creator of a Worldwide Media Empire, Beard Books, Washington, DC, 1989, and W. Rohm, The Murdoch Mission: The Digital Transformation of a Media Empire, John Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, 2001. 56. “Natural selection,” Onfilm, February 2000, available at http://www.archivesearch.co.nz/default.aspx?webid=ONF&articleid=4823. 57. Ibid. 58. “Digital planet,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 5, 2005. 59. Bousé, Wildlife Films; P. Bagust, “‘Screen natures’: Special effects and edutainment in ‘new’ hybrid wildlife documentary,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 22, 2008, 213–26. 60. Cited in “Natural selection.” 61. Bousé, Wildlife Films, p. xiv. 62. Cited in “Wild Times.” 63. This slate retrieved and collated November 2005 from http://www.naturalhistory.co.nz/commissions.html and from the attached PDF document http://www. naturalhistory.co.nz/pdf/NHNZ%20Commissions.pdf. 64. “Natural selection.” 65. Hence why News Corp did not throw NHNZ a lifeline in 2007 when appreciation in the New Zealand dollar pushed NHNZ into a $1 million annual loss. NHNZ’s management were expected to turn the company’s fortunes around without external assistance. “Staff rush to save film firm,” New Zealand Herald, August 3, 2007. 66. “Interviews: NHNZ’s Michael Stedman,” World Screen, April 2003, available at http://www.worldscreen.com/interviewsarchive.php?filename=0403stedman. txt. 67. Tunstall (with Machin), The Anglo-American Media Connection. 68. And it is hard to imagine that the NHU’s market “power” will be enhanced by the planned laying off of 57 out of 180 full-time staff, announced by DirectorGeneral Mark Thompson in 2007—a move which has sparked considerable protest. See, for example, “Outrage at NHU cuts,” Broadcast, October 24, 2007. 69. In November 2007 it was announced that BBC America would move its advertising sales function in-house from April 2008. “BBC America Moves Ad Sales In-House,” Broadcasting & Cable, November 28, 2007. 70. Other authors have asked the question of whether aligning with Discovery has influenced the style and content of the nature shows produced by the NHU (e.g. Davies, “Researching the networks of natural history television,” p. 202); but they have failed to try to answer it.

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71. C. Forrester, “Discovery Communications: ‘Growing, growing, growing . . .,’” Transnational Broadcasting Studies, 11, Fall–Winter 2003, available at http://www. tbsjournal.com/Archives/Fall03/Forrester.html. 72. Data retrieved July 2008 from annual reports collected together at http:// www.bbcworldwide.com/aboutus/corpinfo/annualreps/. 73. This resistance applies to imports from all countries, of course—the US has traditionally imported less than 2% of all its programming (T. Varis, “The international flow of television programs,” Journal of Communication, 34, 1984, 143–52)—but it is perhaps most surprising in respect to material from the UK, given the common language, strong cultural connections, and heavy US imports from the UK in parallel areas such as recorded music. 74. E.g. Tunstall (with Machin), The Anglo-American Media Connection, pp. 8, 95 respectively. 75. J. Tunstall, Television Producers, Routledge, London, 1993, pp. 27–46. “Do you know what foreigners say about our drama programmes?” Colin Jarvis, director of programs and formats at BBC Worldwide, recently asked, in pondering the difficulties encountered in selling such programs overseas. “That they are too gritty and don’t have beautiful people in them.” Cited in “British drama needs more attractive actors,” Broadcast, March 22, 2006. 76. Cited in “Deal of the decade,” Broadcast, April 5, 2002. 77. J. van Dijck, “Picturizing science,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 9, 2006, 5–24, is a fascinating reading of, among other programs, Walking with Dinosaurs, and of the ways in which digital animation techniques are deployed to convince viewers of the plausibility of scientific theories in the fields of paleontology and physics. 78. Davies, “Researching the networks of natural history television,” p. 202. 79. Tellingly, two separate programs about marine conservation produced by the makers of The Blue Planet were relegated, in the UK, to BBC2, while the core series—resolutely “issue” free—aired on BBC1. See ibid. 80. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/britishisles/prog_summary. shtml#7 (retrieved January 2006). 81. G. Monbiot, “Land, Genes and Justice, an Interview with George Monbiot,” Imprints 3(2), 1998, available at http://www.monbiot.com/archives/1998/12/01/ land-genes-and-justice/. 82. Cited in “Can Television Tell the Environmental Story?” Report of the Seminar “Visual Media and the Environment.” CEP Technical Report No: 28. UNEP (CAR/RCU), 1993. 83. I say “not much” because, as I discuss in the following section, there have been some discernible changes. 84. “Chinese Lady Dai leaves Egyptian mummies for dead,” China Daily, August 25, 2004, available at http://www2.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-08/25/ content_368631.htm. 85. Viewing share data is from BARB. 86. “Wild times.” 87. “Planet Earth,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 23, 2007. 88. Moreover, such co-produced material seems likely to contribute an increasing proportion of the NHU’s overall output if the planned job cuts in Bristol, noted above, go through as planned. See “Outrage at NHU cuts.”

11 The Political Economy of Place in Programming

Where the main objective of the previous chapter was to approach television programming, critically, in place—to consider that programming in the material context of the places it is captured, the places it is edited and packaged, and the places to which it is distributed—this final chapter of the book reverses the coupling, to focus on place in programming. The shift in emphasis can perhaps best be captured like this: for most of the book I have been discussing geographies of the media (where media institutions are located, where media products are bought and sold, and so on), whereas now I turn to the representation of geographies in the media. How, why, and with what implications, are different places depicted in different ways in different types of programming? Such questions have been the subject of a longstanding and tremendously rich body of scholarship. Nearly 20 years ago, the geographer Leo Zonn edited a seminal collection of essays on precisely the matter of Place Images in Media—no doubt a response, in part, to claims in the mid-1980s that the media remained too much “on the periphery of geographical inquiry.”1 Subsequent research has continued where that collection left off, with the result that many excellent studies are now available demonstrating how the city, the home, the desert, the jungle, the nation, and all manner of other spaces and places are represented and framed for us in cinema, in literature, in music, on television, and, now, on the Internet.2 This chapter sits on the edges of that literature. Its emphasis is different from the main thrust of that literature in two main respects. The first concerns the “axis” along which I read and interpret the materialization and significance of “place” in programming. Typically, it has been questions of “culture” that have interested researchers in this area: what the media’s rep377

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resentations of place say, or might say, about underlying issues of identity, experience, meaning, and difference. Often, but not always, such cultural questions are also explicitly political questions, making these, fundamentally, studies of media, place and cultural politics.3 Seldom, however, are questions of economics or political economy put center stage. This, then, following the bearing of the rest of the book, is the main direction I take in the following pages: to assess specifically how television’s political economy might be impacted by representations of place in programming. The second important difference in what follows relates less to my theoretical terms of reference than to the actual empirical questions I pose. Studies of place images in the media usually start from a consideration of the detail of the images themselves, addressing such matters as what place is represented, how it is represented, the style used, what is not shown, and innumerable other questions of this ilk. I offer no such detail or “deconstruction” thereof. I am interested, rather, in degree and not kind—in the degree to which place is or is not embedded in programming, as opposed to the ways in which place might be posited therein. For, as we shall see, some programming is suffused with place while other types of programs are, by their very nature, placeless. To what extent, I ask, is it politically and economically significant that place is either present or not? In the first part of the chapter I examine a discrete political project constructed specifically around the matter of place-heavy programming. This project in many ways takes the book full circle, for I return, as I did briefly in chapter 9, to the UK’s “creative industries” program of the late 1990s. I show that of all the creative industries, it was television that soon came to most centrally occupy the government, and that within the world of television the main political focus fell on the topic of exports. In short, the government came to believe that there was potential for a considerably stronger UK television exports business, and it sought, albeit briefly, to catalyze this potential. The government was interested in exports, I argue, for a number of reasons, but a key one was the question of place: what British programming said about Britain when watched in other parts of the world. There was, to be sure, a profound cultural politics to this belief and to the associated political initiative, and I trace this politics out. But there were also significant economic issues and implications, revolving around precisely the Britishness of the programming in question, or the specificity of the place it depicted. Ultimately, I argue, it was these economics that proved most problematic, and which were largely responsible for the export push fizzling out. There follows a relatively short second section that acts effectively as a segueway into the third and final part of the chapter. In this section I move to New Zealand, and show that economically (and politically), the issue of place in programming has been even more problematic than it has been in the UK. Local New Zealand television producers, I argue, find themselves in

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a classic Catch-22 situation—caught between countervailing sets of forces which on the one hand require programming to be explicitly place-based, but which on the other hand militate against precisely that embedding of the local. I discuss how the country’s leading production companies have sought to confront such contradictions, and argue that among the more successful have been those entities increasingly focusing on the production and distribution not of finished programs but of program formats. Formats are the focus of the third and final section, where I argue that if the development and export of formats has offered something of a route to economic success for selected New Zealand producers, the same business has, of course, proven even more important, in recent years, for the UK’s television production community. I examine here, briefly, the growth of the formats business and the UK’s leadership position in the formats market, before going on to ask what it is that makes formats readily exportable— more so at any rate, it seems, than finished programs, certainly where one is dealing with non-US exporters and the US import trade. The answer, I suggest, is relatively simple, and brings us back to the issue of place: for place of origin is effectively hidden in the format in a way that it rarely is in finished programming, and this differential inscription and visibility of place can be seen to be critical to the potential for a US-inclusive export economy. These arguments about formats and their distribution economy are illustrated by specific reference to the example of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? which has arguably been the most successful format of all time. I conclude by suggesting that these characteristics of the format in many ways make it a quintessentially capitalist commodity in precisely the way Marx described that entity: that is, as enabling an exchange economy through the veiling of relations of production. The difference in this case, I suggest, is that the production relations being concealed are primarily spatial rather than social.

EXPORTING PLACE Building a global audience In mid-1997, as we saw in chapter 1, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) commissioned a team of industry consultants, David Graham and Associates, to analyze and report on the UK’s television export performance. The brief was “to highlight opportunities for UK distributors, thereby enabling them to compete more efficiently and effectively in the world program market.”4 Work began in October 1997 and the report, entitled “Building a Global Audience,” was completed and published in January 1999.

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The David Graham report—again, as discussed earlier—ended up as a robust critique of historic export performance by the UK television industry. Chris Smith, then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, set the overall tone by noting in his foreword to the report that overseas success “has till now been fairly limited.” “Proof” of this poor performance lay in headline figures such as the UK’s “significant trade deficit in television— £272 million in 1997.” Meanwhile, the main explanation for the alleged underperformance was identified not as exporter inefficiency or uncompetitiveness, but rather as, baldly stated, “a lack of suitable programs to sell.”5 These conclusions, and the often heated debate they provoked, prompted Smith to commission a further report into exports, this time under the auspices of the Creative Industries Task Force (which of course was responsible for the Mapping Document), and tasked “to take forward the provisional recommendations made by David Graham’s team.”6 This report, published in November 1999, comprised three sub-reports by, respectively, an Overseas Markets Group (looking at how export efforts might be better supported by government and trade bodies), an Investment Group (focused on barriers to investment), and a Right Product Group (examining the nature of the UK’s television product), each containing representatives from across the spectrum of the UK television industry. My concern with these two reports in this section of the chapter is twofold. First, I seek to explain why the government placed so much emphasis on television exports. Second, I examine why the bold vision that the government articulated for the television export industry never materialized, and, indeed, rather rapidly disintegrated. In both cases I argue that the answer revolves around the cultural politics and political economy of place—around the “work” that place, embedded in programming, was supposed to perform in the government’s vision, but for which it was ultimately shown to be ill-equipped. Before setting out these arguments, however, two related observations seem worthwhile. The first is that the export drive was not only about place, its materialization in programming, and the expectations conferred upon it. The government’s emphasis on boosting exports was, to a degree, a simple revenue growth agenda, grounded in rather dubious theories of trade and comparative advantage: the UK, it was claimed, had a demonstrable competitive edge in the “creative industries” in general, implying that television program exports could and should be boosted to claw back some of the historic trade deficit in this product category. As I argued in chapter 1, this was a specious argument on even the most cursory examination, but its importance as a policy driver was no less important for that. My second observation is that the focus on exports represented a highly partial perspective on the overall television trade picture. For, if exports were important, what of imports? The trade data cited both by David Graham

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and by the subsequent report of the Creative Industries Task Force showed that UK television exports had actually been increasing very strongly—by 15.6% (compound) per annum from 1993 to 1997, which was significantly stronger than growth in the international television market as a whole. The UK’s much-maligned trade deficit in television was increasing only because imports were growing even faster than exports: from £268m in 1993 to £595m in 1997 (a compound annual growth rate of 22%).7 And yet the government did not ask any “experts” to account for the UK’s increasing reliance on imports, or to explore ways to curtail this reliance. Partly, no doubt, this reflected the Labour government’s firm neoliberal emphasis on free trade: imposing import tariffs or quotas simply did not fit its wider economic agenda, and the idea of quotas was hence given short shrift in the David Graham report.8 But one wonders too about the wider network of influences within British politics. The main reason for the growth in imports was the increasing demand for content among the UK’s growing number of non-terrestrial (multichannel) channels, the main broadcast platform for which was, of course, the satellite broadcaster BSkyB—in which Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp was and is the largest shareholder. By the late 1990s, as noted in chapter 5, BSkyB itself was reported to be importing from the US more than 100,000 hours of programming per annum. Raising these growing import volumes as an economic policy problematic, and thus potentially confronting Murdoch, was, one assumes, no-go territory. Imaginative geographies and the rebranding of Britain New Labour’s television exports drive was intimately bound up, I argue, with that government’s wider efforts to “restyle” Britain in the late 1990s. Captured in the famous “Cool Britannia” slogan and advanced through the establishment of various high-profile working groups such as “Rebranding Britain” and “Panel 2000,” Labour’s avowed agenda was to make Britain dynamic, culturally diverse, progressive, entrepreneurial, and, perhaps above all else, creative. The new government, says Peter Taylor, was one of “selfascribed modernizers” for whom “Cool Britannia” amounted to “the very opposite of traditional,” and who sought to affirm and buttress Britain’s place “at the cutting edge of new styles and fashions in a high-tech world.”9 Labour wanted Britain not just to be, but to be seen to be, ultra-modern.10 Television per se, not just exported television, was considered critical in this respect. Recall the central metaphor that was unpacked back in chapter 8: that of television as a “mirror” on society. If Britain were to be accepted as “cool” or creative, then it was clearly imperative that such characteristics were apparent in British television programming, for such programming merely reflected—the metaphor tells us—the underlying social reality.

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Hence, in waxing lyrical about television’s importance, the David Graham exports report emphasized this particular belief that the medium had become, over the previous half-century, “a mirror in which the British examine themselves.”11 This discourse placed television at the very heart of British notions of national self-identity. To recognize this is to echo the headline conclusions of a proliferating literature on the media, place and identity creation. Television, it has been argued, is a crucial forum for the configuration and reconfiguration of scale-based social identities, the “nation” foremost among them. It is implicated in this negotiation of “the nation” in myriad and complex ways, as recent writing on, inter alia, Indian and Egyptian mediated nationhoods has shown.12 Perhaps surprisingly, no such study of television and national identity, to the best of my knowledge at any rate, currently exists for Britain.13 Nevertheless, it would be difficult to contest the materiality of television’s role in shaping British national cultures. To demonstrate this, it is worthwhile taking a brief detour from the main narrative of this section, and examining how issues of British national identity and the media have been primarily manifested in more recent years—several years since, that is, the export emphasis that concerns me here melted away. For if the export dimension specifically has essentially disappeared, debate around “Britishness” on television has emphatically not. In fact, it has probably intensified, with the government, in particular, keen to see the production and broadcast of programming that can help foster a sense of national identity and cohesion. As the eminent historian Linda Colley argued in a keynote speech to a “Broadcasting Britishness?” conference held in mid-2008, such concerns have, not surprisingly, “magnified conspicuously since 9/11 and 7/7.”14 Television has been enlisted as a critical forum for examining and enunciating Britishness, for its power in this regard is increasingly clear to see. Here, however, I focus not on this basic relationship between television and national identity, but on the reasons why exports, in particular, might have been thought especially important in this connection by the Labour government of the late 1990s and early 2000s. That exports were prioritized specifically in view of their link to questions of identity is quite clear: both of the government-sponsored reports into UK television exports placed British “image” and “identity” issues high on the list of reasons for analyzing and seeking to improve export performance. My objective, then, is to give a subtle, spatial inflection to the basic aforementioned argument that national identity is forged, in part, through the national media. For this basic argument is a limited argument in a strictly geographical sense: it says that prevailing, hegemonic representations of “nations”—national peoples and places—are materially influenced by the ways in which such peoples and places are depicted on television within

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the countries in question. The relationship is invariably rooted: in situ, place-based, bounded. But television, and the images it contains, travels. In Britain, television viewers are not only exposed to images of Britishness—they are bombarded with images of many different nations, both on British-produced television and in programming imported from elsewhere. Equally, British television’s pictures of “Britain” and of “Britishness” are not only accessible in Britain; they are distributed more or less worldwide. The importance of exports lay in precisely this mobility of mediated imagery, and in the recognition thereof. Television was critical to governmental ambitions around “brand Britain” because it represented one of the main conduits, if not the main conduit, for disseminating, internationally, positive images of Britain and Britishness. And how Britain was seen overseas mattered—indeed we had here an implicit recognition that neither “Britain” the imagined place, nor “Britishness” the imagined identity, was confected in Britain alone. Thus, each of the reports into export performance demonstrated a clear concern with international perceptions. As the David Graham report succinctly put it, television is “a powerful medium for promoting Britain on the world stage” since “our television programs are the image of Britain that most viewers overseas will continue to see.”15 One point that bears emphasizing at this juncture is that the distribution map craved by the UK government and television industry—where, in particular, they wanted television’s positive images of Britain to be downlinked and consumed—almost certainly was, and is, a highly uneven patchwork. If these powerful stakeholders care deeply about visions of Britain within America, how Britain is popularly perceived in other countries is seemingly considered of less moment. In this respect, the overwhelming emphasis within the two television export reports on America in general, and US audience preferences in particular, speaks volumes.16 What we are essentially dealing with, in this championing of an export trade in the service of a national cultural politics, is a discourse on the production and propagation of imaginative geographies of Britain and Britishness. By “imaginative geographies,” I refer to the complex ways in which representations of place (a geography or territory) and people (a nation or culture) are bound up with one another, infuse one another, and even enable one another. But, interestingly, the notion of “imaginative geographies” has typically been invoked to expose and critique Western representations of the non-West under conditions of formal or informal empire.17 Moreover, not only have such examples generally involved the West representing “others,” but the West itself has remained very much a “shadowy presence” (a Said term) in those representations, deliberately and steadfastly seeing “without being seen.”18 Britain relying on television exports to circulate and substantiate positive self-representations clearly involves both imaginative and material geographies of an altogether different kind.19

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Effectively, we have a reversal of the geographies in question. Thus, on the one hand, it has been shown by various scholars that the media, and television in particular, are frequently used to frame, “here,” images and understandings of a spatialized “other” that is physically, and often ideologically, there—all the while veiling the “self.”20 But in this instance, television was being posited as a mechanism for placing, (over) “there,” positive and impactful representations of Britain and Britishness and of the relationship between them. If this appears to have been asking a great deal of a single, albeit powerful, medium, we would do well to note that British television has long been held in high regard—at least, that is, within Britain itself. To expect television exports to produce and reproduce sympathetic, material impressions of Britain and Britishness overseas would not have seemed unreasonable to anybody steeped in British television’s long history of self-valorization. Indeed, for anybody who fully subscribed to that valorization, British television would likely have seemed the ideal medium for exporting the “best of Britain” and hence the best of Britishness. To appreciate this presumption, we need to remember that the whole concept of “best” has been pivotal to British broadcasting and its public-service nucleus since the earliest days of the BBC and its first head, John Reith. As Andrew Crisell writes, “While there have always been many who have attacked Reith’s notion of “the best” as starchy, tendentious and patronizing, there are many more who have been grateful that because his values have coloured all sections of it, British broadcasting has not followed the paths taken by other countries.”21 This observation arguably remains as true today as ever before. What is indisputable is that the UK government was investing in British television’s reputation for superior quality and innovation when it singled out television exports as a vehicle for exporting positive national identity. “Our national values and image,” the David Graham report affirmed, “can be effectively portrayed in modern, mainstream, commercial projects that generate international interest.”22 Not best—and not even modern But there were, it emerged, two fundamental problems with this view of things; and if we understand these problems, we can understand in turn why the “exports question” slipped rather rapidly off the government’s policy radar. For the upshot of these two problems—each of which was identified in the course of the two expert reports on export performance—was that “place” imagery, in the context of exported British television programming, was found to be unable to perform the considerable cultural work that the government expected of it. First and foremost, there was the primary, highly sobering conclusion of the first (David Graham and Associates) report: “Britain,” it revealed, “is

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not perceived by people in other countries to produce “the best television in the world.””23 This was, and is, an interesting finding and statement in two respects. It is interesting because this conclusion would naturally have unsettled the plans and prescriptions of those who saw television as a primary instrument for “promoting Britain on the world stage.” But it is also interesting for the inherent presumption that the statement discloses: that the report’s opening revelation should be “Britain is not best” suggests that the government, the report authors, and large sections of industry and the public had truly and genuinely believed—and had been operating on the assumption—that it was “best.” Second, not only was British television not “best,” but also it did not necessarily display the characteristics—”modern, mainstream, commercial”— that the government trusted would be exported with British programming and attached in the process to international images of Britishness. Perhaps to the government’s surprise, then, the actual content of British television became a major issue in the David Graham analysis and in the Creative Industries Task Force “response” that it precipitated. The basic problem was that the image of “Britain” being exported in its television programming turned out to look rather unlike “Cool Britannia.” The word “gritty” cropped up repeatedly in both reports, and is emblematic of this disjuncture. In the one corner, gritty; in the other corner, the contrary concepts of modernity, creativity and style valued by the government of the time. “Time and again,” David Graham reported of interviews with international television buyers, “we are told that our [British] drama is too dark; too slow; unattractive; too gritty or socio-political.”24 This was especially true, it transpired, of buyer perceptions in the all-important US market—a gritty imaginative geography just did not sell there, it seemed, unless of the very highest quality. The problem, in other words, was the substance of British television: “modern” programming might effectively popularize, internationally, a “modern” Britain, but in the world’s largest market at any rate, the idea of “modernity” was quite at odds with the British programming that historically had been made available for sale there. In pure export potential terms, therefore, British programming’s economy was compromised by “place.” Perhaps most revealing of all is the fact that the UK debate around content-for-exports—a debate crystallized in the title and remit of the third sub-group on the second report, namely “Right Product” (what was the “right” product for export?)—ultimately developed into a wider debate about whom, and where, British television was actually for. For the bulk of the twentieth century, British television had unequivocally been conceived and produced for the British. Britain was its primary and essential market; if it were subsequently acquired elsewhere, so much the better. But was this clear-cut market hierarchy still applicable or appropriate at the dawn of the twenty-first century?

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It was the perception that the David Graham report had fundamentally questioned this hierarchy that prompted some of the strongest countercritique in the Creative Industries Task Force response, specifically in the report of the “Right Product” group. This group comprised heavy hitters from across the spectrum of UK television: chaired by Rupert Gavin, then head of BBC Worldwide, its other four members were the head of planning and strategy at ITV; the head of the indie producer Wall to Wall (e.g. Who Do You Think You Are?); a senior director of the Independent Television Commission (one of Ofcom’s predecessors); and head of business affairs (essentially, legal) at Channel 4.25 David Graham, this group felt, appeared to want to re-scale “British television”—to make British television, by its very nature, international television; its “natural” geographical market the world rather than merely the UK. For the “Right Product” group, however, “right” had to remain a thoroughly local concept. “Developing the international business is important for the industry,” it admitted, “but serving the UK audience is essential.” In short, “international demands rightfully take second place in the industry’s considerations.”26 In point of fact, the David Graham report, read closely, actually remains somewhat ambivalent about who and where should come first in the spatial hierarchy of audience—more ambivalent, at any rate, than the “Right Product” report intimates. “If “gritty” British drama is a problem,” it speculated, “that does not necessarily mean we abandon it, even for overseas markets.” Yet it “might mean that we adapt it” and “turn it from a liability into a positive strength.”27 For the “Right Product” group, clearly, even this hedge was going too far. This particular debate soon faded away, however, as the wider problems facing UK television exporters became apparent to the government, and as the whole issue of UK television exports correspondingly came to lose its high-profile political salience. But the terms of the debate are very much worth reiterating and emphasising, for they arguably epitomize the geographical, economic and cultural issues confronted by governments and industries alike in today’s highly globalized television economy. Simply stated, an investigation into how to leverage British television to promulgate positive representations of Britishness had mutated into a debate about whether, and to what extent, British television was “for” Britain in the first place. If anything, I suggest in the next section, such issues are even more material in New Zealand than in the UK.

BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE We have already seen, in chapter 2, that “local” television programming is a subject of great historical and contemporary significance in the world of

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New Zealand media. The fact that producing television locally costs considerably more, in terms of upfront investment, than importing programming from the US, UK or Australia, has had a wide range of implications for the indigenous television economy and has stimulated all manner of politically and culturally inflected debates. Making television locally is, in short, economically challenging; but it is culturally popular and, for the most part, it has been politically supported. I suggest in this short section that the upshot of these various debates is that locally based television producers are, quite literally, caught between a rock and a hard place—with “place” being the pertinent word. Far and away the largest single source of finance for program production in New Zealand is NZ On Air, which, as we have seen, offers contestable funding to producers for projects pre-approved by local broadcasters. It alone contributes in the region of 25% of local production finance (chapter 5). But this finance comes with strings: most notably, it is available only for programs “about New Zealand and New Zealand interests”—programs that reflect and celebrate “our unique culture, our stories, our music and our identity.”28 As Leigh Wilson, Content Licensing Manager at TVNZ, observes, to have a realistic chance of NZ On Air funding, at least a New Zealand “setting and story-line” are required.29 Fundable programming, in others words, is place-based programming; and New Zealand television, recalling the terms of the “Right Product” debate in the UK, is demonstrably television for New Zealand. But herein, it appears, lies a significant problem. That is, New Zealand programming’s predominant localness seems to work against it in the international marketplace. Those charged with selling this programming to foreign buyers repeatedly emphasize this factor.30 Very often it is the story-line that is considered too local, but this is not always the limiting consideration. Steve Browning, previously Senior Manager in the Digital Television Group at TVNZ, notes that various historic attempts to boost TVNZ’s program export earnings came up with the local Kiwi accent as the most significant “problem” overseas.31 This may seem unlikely, or even, some might say, preposterous; but it is a fact that one of New Zealand’s most successful program exports, Greenstone Pictures’ Motorway Patrol, is re-voiced even for the country’s Antipodean neighbor, Australia.32 This fundamental dilemma ensnaring New Zealand producers is manifested, for instance, in the historical geography of the long-running, NZ On Air–funded soap opera Shortland Street, which first aired in 1992, is still very popular domestically, and which is co-produced by South Pacific Pictures and TVNZ.33 At one point, Shortland Street was being sold into 26 export markets.34 Over time, however, its level of international success has markedly fallen off. Countries that were customers are no more, most notably the UK (in a handful of ITV regions), Australia and Canada. Furthermore, one of the original co-production partners, Australia’s Grundy Television

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(most famous for Neighbours, and now part of FremantleMedia Australia), which was initially excited by Shortland Street for its international potential, is no longer actively involved, having been disappointed by its export performance.35 Most pointedly of all, Shortland Street’s decline in international markets coincided precisely, according to TVNZ’s Wilson, with a substantive change in the story-line—which became, she says, “more local.”36 One could argue that one of New Zealand television’s more recent export successes—the adult-targeted, NZ On Air–funded animated series bro’Town—represents counter-evidence to the argument that infusing programming with the substance of local place tends to militate against commercial success in international export markets for New Zealand producers. bro’Town has been sold to broadcasters in countries including Australia, Canada and, most recently (since 2007), the US. But if we look at both the specific nature of bro’Town’s localness, and the identity of the broadcasters that have acquired the show in those Anglophone export markets, a more complex story emerges. The series follows five Polynesian teenagers growing up in Auckland, and was born from a stage play first produced in 1998 by a group known as the “Naked Samoans.”37 It is centrally concerned, amongst other things, with minority culture, and is heavy on local vernacular. Now, if bro’Town had been acquired overseas by mass-market commercial broadcasters with wide popular appeal, it would of course be hard to sustain the argument about localness constituting limiting baggage in the mainstream, US-dominated, global television economy. But it has not. In the US, it is aired by Link TV, which, through “giving voice to people without a voice, from communities under-represented in conventional media and unknown to most Americans,” aims laudably to “humanize the “other” and counter the tendency to make enemies out of the unknown.” Given this mission, bro’Town’s specific appeal is entirely understandable; localness is not a barrier but a selling point. Similarly in Australia and Canada, in the former, the local broadcaster is the Special Broadcasting Service, the “principal function” of which “is to provide multilingual and multicultural radio and television services”; in the latter, it is the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network.38 My argument remains, then, that in the mass-market international television economy, explicit signs of “place” in New Zealand programming are less of a help than a hindrance. For New Zealand producers, the wider point is that there is a contradictory constellation of political-economic forces that essentially leaves them—in Wilson’s words—“hamstrung.” To secure NZ On Air funding, they have to make their programming substantively local; but it is this very localness that constitutes a millstone in international export markets. “Place” may be fundable, but it is not extensively monetizable. In this regard it is, to my mind, notable that many of the most successful New Zealand television exports of the past decade have been formats as

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opposed to finished programs such as Shortland Street or bro’Town. Perhaps the three highest-profile exported formats, as we saw in chapter 6, have been Treasure Island, The Chair and Popstars. Indeed, in the last few years, even the traditionally conservative TVNZ has sought to tap this market potential, enjoying its first success with the sale of the reality format The Big Experiment, produced domestically by Rogue Productions, into Italy, Belgium and France.39 In the final section of this chapter I consider the growth of the formats business in much greater detail, and to do so I return to a focus on the UK, where the increasing contribution of formats both to the domestic television scene and to the sector’s export revenues has been even more noticeable—and certainly more widely discussed—than in New Zealand. I also return to the central issue of “place.” For if, as we have seen, the specificity of place—British “grittiness,” Kiwi accents—can reduce programming’s saleability overseas, and especially in the US market, I argue that it is precisely the evacuation of place of origin that makes formats so sellable. We can helpfully foreground this argument by briefly considering, before moving to the UK market, one last New Zealand program property. That property is the drama series Outrageous Fortune, which is particularly relevant here because in terms of its international distribution dynamics it occupies a complex and fuzzy middle ground between finished programs (our objects of concern to this point) on the one hand and program formats on the other, having been sold overseas as both. Australia (Nine Network) and Canada (Super Channel) bought the program, which follows the exploits of a (very) West Auckland crime family; the US (ABC) has acquired, though not yet fully developed, the format; and in the UK, meanwhile, Outrageous Fortune materialized first in its original form (on LivingTV) and later, entitled Honest (on ITV1), as a local adaptation of the exported format. Outrageous Fortune is especially fascinating to consider because, perhaps exclusively among New Zealand–produced shows, it is held up as an example of how the place-related Catch 22 situation I described above can be and has been transcended. Thus John Barnett, chief executive of the show’s producer South Pacific Pictures, intriguingly describes it as both “specifically local” (which qualified it for NZ On Air funding) and as “absolutely international in its theme and structure.”40 But is it; and has the “hamstrung” dilemma afflicting New Zealand producers really been resolved? Barnett would argue that the show’s successful international sales in its original broadcast form mean “local,” place-bound New Zealand content can also flourish in the international mass market; but again, as with bro’Town, we must examine the identity of the acquiring broadcasters and the show’s fate in those export markets. Canada’s Super Channel, for instance, is a very new and very niche premium-television service with, to date, very limited carriage.41 In the UK, the finished program was acquired, similarly, by the limited-coverage pay channel LivingTV; and although the

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first series aired from January 2007, it did so in a late-evening timeslot and there remained, at mid-2008, no word on whether the second series (four have been produced so far) would follow. Only in Australia has the show been picked up by one of the leading free-to-air networks, season one having aired on the Nine Network (and, in one of the many great geographical ironies of the contemporary international television economy, causing a veritable uproar among Australian producers and screenwriters when Nine announced that it was to include the program in its own “local” drama quota).42 But even in Australia, Outrageous Fortune can scarcely be considered a resounding mass-market success: the first series was screened by Nine at 10.30pm, outside of the critical ratings period; and for its second series the show slipped down the Australian broadcasting hierarchy, airing on Network Ten (the third most-watched channel) rather than Nine (generally the most watched). In common with bro’Town, then, it seems to me that Outrageous Fortune, the place-saturated original show, has failed to make a substantial mark in the international commercial television market. Yet as an economic property conceived and exploited by South Pacific Pictures, the show may yet prove a significant source of internationally generated revenues, specifically through its sale as a format rather than in the shape of the finished program itself. In the UK, the leading commercial broadcaster, ITV, acquired the format and, in early 2008, broadcast its own local adaptation, the six-part series Honest, on its flagship channel ITV1. And in the US, yet another first-rank free-toair commercial broadcaster—ABC—has acquired the rights to remake the show. While the US version has yet to actually materialize, South Pacific Pictures has reported that if and when it does so, it will be financially “very significant” to the New Zealand company.43 But, vitally, it will no longer be a program about, or based in, New Zealand the place. Place of origin is “removed” in a program’s distribution as a format, and this removal, I now argue, often makes a significant difference to international distribution prospects—for leading UK program properties, as for Outrageous Fortune.

PLACE AND PROGRAM FORMATS International television trade: a short primer on programs and formats Historically, the bulk of television trade has consisted of trade in finished or “ready-made” programs: programs produced and (normally) broadcast in their country of origin before being sold into other territories in their completed form. The program is then shown in the importing country in precisely that form, albeit sometimes with subtitles added or voices dubbed into the local tongue. Television formats, by contrast, are not finished

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programs but program concepts or frameworks with distinct, identifiable elements. These formats, as we have seen, are licensed to production companies or broadcasters for local adaptation in different geographic markets. Sometimes formats are exported without a program adaptation having been produced and aired in the country of origin; more often, however, the format is sold abroad having been tested in its domestic market. The contents of the exported format—like the contents of a program— can vary greatly. In the early days of the business, a format consisted solely of a program name and a headline concept. Nowadays, it can contain any combination (but will always include the first) of four sets of components: first, the program definition or contents, such as rules, catch-phrases and prizes for game-shows, or narrative structure, story-lines and character summaries for situation comedies or drama series; second, physical production aids such as copies of artwork, décor designs, and software for computer graphics and program titles; third, the so-called format “bible” with information on how the program was scheduled, what its target audience was, and the ratings it achieved when it was broadcast in its country of origin; and fourth, services ranging from consultancy—for example, a senior producer from the original production overseeing and advising on the early production of the overseas adaptation—to full-scale local production or co-production.44 Three other important aspects to the trade in formats should be borne in mind. First, the business is dominated in volume and value terms by game shows and so-called reality television, although there are examples of successfully exported formats in almost all genres, including, among UK exports, drama (e.g. Queer As Folk), factual entertainment (e.g. Changing Rooms), and situation comedy (e.g. Men Behaving Badly). Second, the format is usually, but not always, licensed for a fee that is calculated as a proportion of the local production budget. And third, the whole area of format trade and exploitation is a legal minefield, with countless accusations of unsanctioned, unlicensed “copycat” programs rippling through the world’s courts, and a trade body—the Format Recognition and Protection Association (FRAPA)—having been established in 2000 specifically to combat piracy. Evolution of the formats business The trade in formats is not new: in the 1970s, the US shows All in the Family and Sanford and Son were American translations of the British programs Till Death Do Us Part and Steptoe and Son. A brief glance at the 2007 fall primetime schedules of the four major US broadcast networks, however, demonstrates the extent to which the format business has recently taken hold, in the US as well as in many other major television markets. ABC had, inter alia, its own production of Wife Swap (a reality television format origi-

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nated by the UK indie RDF Media and first aired in the UK on Channel 4 in 2002); NBC had an American version of The Office (a BBC situation comedy first shown in the UK on BBC2 in 2001); CBS had America’s Big Brother (a copy of the Dutch reality show created by Endemol and first aired in the Netherlands in 1999); and Fox had American Idol (based on the Pop Idol format, a creation of the English music impresario Simon Fuller, and the first incarnation of which appeared on ITV1 in the UK in 2001). Each of these formats was developed in Europe. Other European-originated formats that have been remarkably successful in the US and elsewhere include Weakest Link, Hell’s Kitchen, Deal or No Deal, Got Talent—and, of course, the game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? originally broadcast on ITV1 in 1998, and exported to and first broadcast in the US in August 1999. With as many as 106 countries having screened their own version of the show, Millionaire is widely regarded as the most successful format in history.45 Since the late 1990s, Europe in general, and the UK in particular, have increasingly occupied the center of gravity of the global format development and export industry. In 2004, the UK originated 29% of all worldwide industry-recognized program format titles and 32% of all broadcast format hours.46 The UK’s dominance of the truly top-end formats (defined here as formats that are locally adapted in at least two new territories in the period in question) is stronger still: in 2005 it accounted for half of such formats, this share falling slightly to 43% in 2006.47 The Netherlands, home to Big Brother creator Endemol (historically the world’s largest single originator, distributor and producer of formats), ranks as number two in Europe, having generated 19% of all global formatted shows in 2004, and fully a third of top-end formats in the first four months of 2007. In 2006, Europe’s combined share of origination of the world’s top-end formats was 70%.48 Aside from its distinctive, European-centered geography, the other most notable feature of the format trade has been its rapid and sustained growth. Internationally collated statistics for the format market are only available for the period from 2002 to 2004, but these show extremely strong growth in the value of production under format from €1.78bn in 2002 to €2.36bn in 2004, equating to a compound annual growth rate of 15%.49 By 2002, however, the most explosive period of growth—marked by the inception, original production and subsequent overseas dissemination of Millionaire (from 1998), Big Brother (1999) and Weakest Link (2000)—had arguably passed. Nevertheless, UK format export statistics for the period 1998-2002 can give us a flavor of the wider market growth that was occurring at that time. The UK’s format export fees totaled just £7m in 1998; by 2002, this export trade had grown to US$39m (approximately £25m at historic prices), at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 40%.50 Within this overall picture of European and UK-centered growth, Millionaire was indisputably in the vanguard. First broadcast in the UK in 1998, it

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was watched, at its domestic peak in March 1999, by an audience of 19.2 million, or roughly one in three of the British population.51 Four years later, in its thirteenth series, it was still pulling in eight million UK viewers on a Saturday night. The computer-game version became the first to top the PC, PlayStation, Dreamcast and all-formats charts at the same time; the board game became an instant Christmas best seller; and interactive mobile (“Walk Away”) and even on-stage versions followed.52 The franchise, not surprisingly, utterly transformed the fortunes of the format’s developer and UK producer Celador, whose immediate parent Complete Communications Corporation Limited, founded in 1981 and nearly bankrupt by the mid-1980s, went from just breaking even in 1997 to generating operating profits of £18m in the ten months ended 30 September 2001.53 The value of the Millionaire franchise continued to grow in the years that followed as local versions remained on air worldwide; and at the end of 2006 Celador International, and with it the ongoing global rights both to Millionaire and to a number of lower-profile formats (e.g. You Are What You Eat), was sold to the Dutch production company 2waytraffic for £106m.54 Formats and the “disappearance” of place The rapid rise to prominence of the formats business in the last decade has inevitably attracted a considerable amount of discussion, both among trade commentators and among scholars interested in, broadly speaking, globalization and cultural economy. A number of different factors have been invoked in explaining the market’s growth, and in particular the question of why acquiring broadcasters appear to increasingly prefer formats to finished programming. Formats are popular, it is argued, because they have already been proven in other territories; because actual episodes can be seen on “tape” (unlike a mere program concept pitch); because they save time and money in the development process; because above-the-line talent costs are frequently markedly lower; because they can fuel “local” production volumes (a key issue in New Zealand, for instance) and hence help meet domestic production quotas; and because they often generate additional revenue streams beyond the broadcast window (merchandizing, phone-ins, etc).55 Formats are also popular because their very standardization accords, it is suggested, with the increasing standardization and integration of the global television business more widely.56 The sources of consumer appeal and commercial success of Millionaire more specifically, meanwhile, have clearly been manifold. Matthew Warshauer, discussing the format’s vast popularity in the US market—a subject I explore more fully in the Coda—argues that the show’s very title “capitalizes on the core of the American Dream: wads of cash,” and that “what at times seem to be amazingly easy questions” appear to render that Dream

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“easily accessible.”57 Among other explanations is that the show “makes you care about the contestants in a very personal way.”58 No doubt there is an element of truth in both suggestions (and countless others besides). But the argument I develop here is less about the specific attributes that have made Millionaire and other formats such successful export propositions, and more about the absence of an attribute that would likely have made them much less successful in television export markets. This attribute is, quite simply, the bundled signs and substance of place of origin: signs such as the “grittiness” of UK drama, or substance such as the much-maligned New Zealand accent. A key driver of the format’s blossoming distribution economy is the fact that because the acquired format is only a program skeleton, it is very easily—in fact, by its very nature—given local flesh. It comes stripped of the trappings of place, allowing it to be invested instead with the specificity of the place where it is being imported and reproduced. It is, in short, domesticated. This attribute distinguishes formats from the bulk of the finished programming that is traded between territories, although we should be careful not to draw this line too rigidly. In most instances, we know just by watching a program more or less where it comes from: news reports are a good example and so, too, are sports events. Fiction, to be sure, is less transparent; but even in territories where dubbing of foreign voice is preferred, viewers can see that the program is dubbed and can see from the content and context of the program, if not whether it comes from (say) the US or the UK, at least that it is not locally originated. Clearly, recent trends in production geographies have confused this terrain somewhat, with the US studios, as we have seen at several points in the book, seeking out lower-cost locations for filming. The classic example of this is the so-called “runaway” production phenomenon, whereby many Hollywood films and television programs are filmed away from southern California, most notably in Vancouver. In such cases, one might argue that a program’s place of origin is less transparent; that The X-Files was actually “from” Canada, not from Hollywood. But this would be to privilege the physical site of shooting over the many other components of “place of origin.” If a production is conceived, scripted, financed and edited in the US, and if the cast speaks American English and plays out (and in turn, creates a piece of) American culture, then arguably it remains, to one extent or another, an American product—particularly if the profits from such a production flow to American companies. It certainly looks American to most consumers of the product (though not to Vancouverites), wherever they might be located. But the question of where exactly such programs “come from” is, in a sense, beside the point. The point is that, watching the program in most places in the world, it is clear—indeed, it is inscribed in the fabric of the product—that it is not from here, explicitly not local. And it is in this crucial respect

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that formats differ from completed programs. Whereas programs come from somewhere in the sense that their content and form is fixed, a format is only that, a format; wherever it is exported to, it becomes a local product, produced according to a generic framework which, in the most successful cases, evacuates any sense of the place from which the format originated. The importance of this de-placing and re-placing of the television program should not be underestimated. Even the most successful of conventional program exports, after all, typically fail somewhere because they are culturally specific and because their properties of place—language arguably being the most obvious but, with dubbing ever an option, not necessarily the most material—cannot always be accommodated. The classic US soap Dallas, for instance, was acquired and enjoyed across a very broad range of television cultures but ultimately met its match in the shape of the Japanese market, where it failed dismally.59 Yet formats have the potential to work anywhere. This potential derives, to use the preferred terminology of international television trade economists, from a minimization of what Colin Hoskins and Rolf Mirus famously called a program’s “cultural discount.”60 Television programs, Hoskins and Mirus argued, progressively lose value (are “discounted”) as the cultural distance between the exporting and importing market increases. Formats shrink or even annihilate this distance. There is something of a parallel here with the more abstract argument about globalization advanced by George Ritzer. When he writes of “the globalization of nothing,” he means, by “nothing,” entities devoid of “distinctive substantive content.” Formats—merely program shells—can certainly be envisioned in this way. But the more interesting parallel is in Ritzer’s particular explanation for the proliferation of various forms of such nothingness. They proliferate, he argues, precisely because they contain nothing—or at least nothing specific or local that can be readily identified and opposed.61 Serra Tinic has suggested something comparable of modern television programming in general (rather than program formats specifically), arguing that international producers seeking US export sales increasingly see a need to “universalize [i.e. Americanize] the culturally particular” and to develop program stories that “de-emphasize place.”62 Within the English-speaking television world, the “disappearance” of place specifically from UK program formats has, it seems, been especially important to their commercial success in the US—which, as noted repeatedly in this book, has traditionally been, and remains today, an exceptionally challenging market for international program exporters. For in many other Anglophone markets, of course, the UK’s “foreignness” has never been anything like as significant an obstacle to the import of British programming; and consequently, where the formats business is concerned, one often finds in such markets that broadcasters will import the original program instead of, or as well as, acquiring the program format and remaking it locally. New Zealand, where British

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programs such as Coronation Street consistently rate among the country’s most popular, would be a classic case in point. Very few of recent years’ landmark formats having been remade locally, partly in view of the perennial production cost considerations (chapter 2) and partly because audiences have happily lapped up versions not just from the UK but also from America and Australia. Even where local New Zealand versions have been made—as with, for example, Idol and Dragons’ Den—these have struggled to compete with the foreign renderings, and in neither of the two aforementioned cases is the local version currently in ongoing production. The US market, as we have seen, has long constituted a different proposition entirely. Major UK producers, who rank second (admittedly a very distant second) to the US studios in global television trade volumes—and who, in targeting the US market, reap the invaluable relative benefit of a shared language—have always struggled to make any kind of substantive inroads into US television schedules with the export of finished programming. The extent of that struggle is well documented in the two government-commissioned reports we encountered earlier into the UK’s historic television export performance.63 Conversely, unencumbered, as David Graham and Associates might have put it, by “grittiness” and other unwelcome marks of Britain and Britishness, British formats have succeeded in the US market en masse, as have a smaller number of formats from various continental European territories.64 And this success has clearly been enabled, if not caused, by the fact that viewers have no reason to believe that these are not wholly American shows. Certainly, there is anecdotal evidence that many American viewers believed Millionaire, returning to our main example, to be home-grown.65 Its UK origins were not widely publicized, and in both form (the quiz show) and objective (wealth) it seemed an archetypal American product. But place, in television, can be an endlessly complex and contradictory phenomenon, and on this note one final irony merits comment. For if Millionaire arrived place-less in the US, it tended to travel elsewhere in the world saturated with place-based connotations. And yet, tellingly, the place it was now associated with tended to be the US, and not Britain. Take, for instance, India, where the impact of the show (Kaun Banega Crorepati) was perhaps more dramatic than anywhere else: completely transforming the market position of broadcaster Star TV (which had just two of the country’s top 50 shows prior to the first transmission of KBC in 2000, and the whole top 50 six months later); prompting extraordinary numbers of premiumrate phone calls by aspiring contestants (18 million in 12 days in July 2005); spawning at least two copycat versions (Zee TV’s Sawal Dus Crore Ka and Sony ET’s Chapar Phadke); and even being blamed for a nationwide slump in cinema box office returns.66 That, in India, KBC was to be described as “an exact imitation of the American show” says much for the

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pervasive effect of the US media’s global dominance more generally; that American (KBC was “an Indian clone of the American program”) and even British (KBC was “modeled on the hugely popular American show”) media should reproduce the same charge fully emphasizes America’s domestication specifically of the Millionaire franchise.67 Formats, fetishism, and commodity capitalism In one of the most famous and elegant sections of Volume One of Capital, Marx delves into the nature of the commodity form under the capitalist mode of production. Suggesting the commodity is “at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing,” Marx cheerily (and typically) dashes such presumptions in the next sentence, alluding instead to its “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” What does he mean by this? Wherein lies the commodity’s “mystical character”? Not, Marx claims, in the commodity’s use value (its simple role in satisfying human wants), but rather in the fact that it is a commodity, whereby the products of limitless forms and sources of human labor are all thrown into the singular capitalist melting pot of exchange value. For, in this process, laborers become alienated both from the products of their labor (which become instead bearers of value) and from one another (with relations between producers replaced, effectively, by relations between things). Ultimately, then, the commodity form “conceals” the “social relations between the individual workers” (the so-called social relations of production), and workers come to relate to one another through commodities and the values they embody. This concealment and alienation, which he saw as somehow metaphysical and mystical, Marx terms fetishism.68 Why should this rumination concern us here? What has this to do with television and its programming, and still less the question of place? To answer this question, I suggest, we need to focus on television, program formats, and the nature of commodities. Since the beginning of the boom in format trade in the late 1990s, few writers have tried seriously to grapple with the economic peculiarity of the program format. Des Freedman is an exception, arguing that format developers and exporters “are selling no tangible product, no material commodity, but simply a good idea.”69 This observation is intriguing. In the sense that the format is, arguably, less tangible than a finished program, Freedman is perhaps right; but he is wrong that there is no “commodity” here. Indeed, my argument in this closing part of the chapter is that the format is, in many respects, a quintessentially capitalist commodity. To appreciate this, the concept of commodity fetishism will be pivotal. There is, we should note first of all, a longstanding literature on political economy, commoditization and the media.70 This literature, however, has largely looked in another direction, as I indicated relatively briefly in chapter 8. Following the seminal work of Dallas Smythe, political econo-

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mists have identified one of the main strategies of the media industries as the transfer of the nexus of commoditization from the product to the consumer (and, more specifically, her attention), whereby the audience is constituted as a commodity for sale to advertisers, and the media product itself, as Nicholas Garnham put it, “merely acts as a free lunch.”71 Television programs have been seen to be archetypal examples of such products—at least where their broadcast is free-to-air—and television audiences as paradigmatic media commodities. Much less has been said of media products themselves as commodities. To be sure, the work of Sut Jhally is notable—indeed, he explicitly deployed the Marxian idea of fetishism to progress and refine Smythe’s earlier work. But for Jhally, the commodity fetish referred not to the programs being bought, sold and broadcast, but the consumer products advertised alongside those programs: his interest, as he wrote, was “in seeing to what extent advertising attempted to give back some of [the] history which is stripped from commodities . . . the history of the social relations of their production.”72 (His answer: not very far.) While political economists working in Smythe and Garnham’s stead have certainly insisted on treating television programs as capitalist commodities—produced by waged labor, typically for profit—the specific nature of this commoditization has not often been broached. My argument here is that the type of commoditization involved—and hence the form of economy that coheres around the commodities in question—is subtly but substantially different when one considers finished television programs on the one hand and program formats on the other. The former, I suggest, give rise to what Wlad Godzich calls an economy of “representation.” The latter, meanwhile, are associated with an economy of “repetition.”73 Identifying the natures of these economies and of the commodity types that characterize them will bring us back, in the end, to the central concept of the commodity fetish. Godzich introduced these ideas in his assessment of Jacques Attali’s Noise and of the political economy of music it describes. Attali, Godzich shows, distinguishes between two key economic agents, a musical composer and a basket weaver. The two main points of differentiation highlighted by Attali, Godzich goes on, concern firstly the different stages of readiness or completeness of their respective products, and secondly the varying capacity for these products to be reproduced in new forms. Thus, the basket is a unique, finished product, ready for consumption—much like a conventional television program, one could argue. But a musical composition is something quite different. Here is Godzich: Unlike the [basket weaver], the composer does not really sell an artifact that is a finished commodity. Rather, he produces a program in an almost cybernetic

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sense, for further investment of labor power. In fact, this program is taken over by capitalist production, which purchases labor power from salaried individuals to realize it. The composer is then not an artisan but what Attali calls a “designer” and he enjoys a status more akin to that of a rentier than that of an artisan.74

If the musical composition is not a “finished commodity,” nor, it should be clear, is a program format; for it, too, requires further local investment of labor power in a subsequent round of capitalist (program) production. And those international format buyers who undertake such activity pay the format owner and developer, of course, a license fee—just as the rentier or composer, in Attali’s picture, is paid a royalty. It is on this basis that Godzich goes on to distinguish his two economic “modes of production.” First, as noted, there is the “mode of representation,” where every object (such as the basket) has a unique design, and where “the product represents the labor that has gone into its production.”75 In contrast, where a single design is “used over and over again” to produce new, derivative forms, we are dealing with the “mode of repetition.” If ready-made television programs belong to the former mode (that of representation), television formats belong unequivocally to the latter. With a single template used “over and over again” to create unique local adaptations, the format epitomizes an economy of repetition. Following Marx, Godzich argues that while the mode of representation is endemic to capitalism, it nonetheless “does little,” in itself, “to sustain the latter’s appetite for profit.” It is too limited, and does not scale. It is the mode of repetition that, ultimately, lies at capitalism’s core, and which drives its ongoing and relentless pursuit of surplus value. And it is, crucially, to the mode of repetition that the phenomenon of commodity fetishism belongs. For if under the mode of representation, as Godzich says, a product represents the labor through which it was created, a product of the mode of repetition “no longer stands in relation to the labor that has produced it.”76 It has been divorced, or alienated, from those social relations. After Godzich, then, I have argued that finished television programs and program formats represent two different types of capitalist commodity, and that the latter is characteristic of what Godzich calls an economy of repetition (“used over and over again”). And if Godzich is right that the economy of repetition is both the seedbed of commodity fetishism and the driving force of capitalist accumulation, then formats can indeed be regarded as quintessentially capitalist commodities. But there remains, I want to argue, one missing link in this analysis, which is a link “back” to the question of place, and more particularly the evacuation of place of origin from the program format. That link can be disclosed relatively simply through the work of David Harvey on, once more, commodity

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fetishism. Harvey has long argued that capitalist commodities typically conceal not only the social relations of production but also the spatial relations of production: where such commodities were produced, as well as by whom and under what social conditions.77 In fact Harvey is famous for his opening question to geography students in undergraduate lectures: where did your breakfast come from? Harvey’s point is that the products we consume—our coffee, our cereal, the spread on our toast—originate from but (normally) hide a complex, often globally extended network of spaces of production and distribution, as well as complex social relations of production. By his question, he encourages students to think about the social and economic geographies, or the spatial biographies, of the commodities they consume.78 Godzich argues that products of the mode of repetition do not “stand in relation” to the labor that produces them. This is basic Marxian commodity fetishism. But commodity fetishism is also inherently spatial, and the television format signally demonstrates this: formats, as we have seen, do not “stand in relation” to the places where they are produced, either. I have argued that this “spatial fetishism” contributes substantially to explaining the recent success of European formats in penetrating international markets in general and the US market in particular—just as, for Marx, it is commodity fetishism (the concealment of social relations of production) that enables and lubricates the market exchange economy more widely. Contra Freedman, then, the format appears to be an archetypal commodity, in Marx’s terms “enigmatic” and “elusive”—an elusiveness which undoubtedly contributes to the difficulties in legally defining it and the legal difficulties in protecting it from imitations. It epitomizes the commodity fetish: it is at once a program, but not a program; and more importantly in the present context, it is at once from somewhere (it has a legal place of origin, even if that place of origin is sometimes mistaken and, in innumerable court cases citing plagiarism and trademark and copyright infringement, frequently contested) and from nowhere (in the sense that arguably its key property is a denial of roots). Just as the generic capitalist commodity alienates laborers from the products of their labor, so the format alienates the program from its place of origination, and thus loosens the constraints on its potential for physical and economic circulation.

NOTES 1. L. Zonn (ed.), Place Images in Media: Portrayal, Experience, and Meaning, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 1990. The argument I cite on the media being peripheral to geographers was made by Jacqueline Burgess and John Gold, “Introduction: Place, the media and popular culture,” in Burgess and Gold (eds.), Geography, the media and popular culture, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1985, 1–32, at p. 1.

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2. The literature, as I say, is now vast, but five good (and very varied) places to begin are: S. Aitken and L. Zonn, (eds.), Place, power, situation, and spectacle: A geography of film, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 1993; R. Haynes, Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999; S. Barber, Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space, Reaktion Books, London, 2004; E. Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema, Columbia University Press, New York, 2004; and V. Johnson, Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity, New York University Press, New York, 2008. For a particularly interesting recent exemplar of this work, specifically in the New Zealand context, and demonstrating just how sophisticated and complex this work has now become, see L. Millward, “New Xenaland: Lesbian place making, the Xenaverse, and Aotearoa New Zealand,” Gender, Place and Culture, 14, 2007, 427–43. And for a recent review of this type of “media geography” see C. Rosati, “Media geographies: Uncovering the spatial politics of images,” Geography Compass, 1, 2007, 995–1014. 3. E.g. H. Naficy (ed.), Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place, Routledge, New York, 1998. 4. DCMS, “Building a Global Audience: British Television in Overseas Markets,” 1999, http://www.culture.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/731796CA-0930-4984-AFBCD531BA193B3D/0/globalaudience.pdf (retrieved June 2006), p. 6. 5. Ibid. The quotations are from pp. 3, 8. 6. DCMS, “The Report of the Creative Industries Task Force Inquiry into Television Exports,” http://www.culture.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/2BAEF3D8-C46B-43C7918D-5B63B27BF56D/0/dcmstvexports1998.pdf (retrieved June 2006). The quotation is from p. 2. 7. “Building a Global Audience,” p. 14; “The Report of the Creative Industries Task Force Inquiry into Television Exports,” pp. 9, 37, 40. 8. “Building a Global Audience,” p. 36. 9. P. Taylor, “Which Britain? Which England? Which North?” in D. Morley and K. Robins (eds.), British Cultural Studies: Geography, Nationality, and Identity (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, 127–44), at p. 136. See also J. Harris, Britpop!: Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004. 10. The zeal for “Cool Britannia” as a specific slogan dissipated sharply from 2001 onwards (e.g. “Life and death of cool Britannia,” The Sunday Times, May 13, 2001), but its central, underlying principles arguably remain in place. For a searing critique of the inherent conservatism and market-orientation of the “cool” political agenda, see T. Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1998. 11. “Building a Global Audience,” p. 12. 12. On India, see P. Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1999; M. Butcher, Transnational Television, Cultural Identity and Change: When STAR Came to India, Sage, London, 2003; and U. Zacharias, “The Smile of Mona Lisa: Postcolonial Desires, Nationalist Families, and the Birth of Consumer Television in India,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 20, 2003, 388–406; on Egypt, L. Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2005.

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13. C.f. two studies focused on film and British/English national identity: J. Richards, Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to “Dad’s Army,” Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999; P. Dave, Visions of England: Class and Culture in Contemporary Cinema, Berg, Oxford, 2006. 14. L. Colley, “The ‘Britishness’ Debate,” talk delivered at the “Broadcasting Britishness?” conference, June 17, 2008; cited in T. Griffin, “Broadcasting Britishness” June 19, 2008, available at http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/ourkingdomtheme/tom-griffin/2008/06/19/broadcasting-britishness (retrieved July 2008). 15. “Building a Global Audience,” pp. 12, 36 (my emphasis). 16. See ibid., pp. 25, 32–33; and “The Report of the Creative Industries Task Force Inquiry into Television Exports,” pp. 3, 16, 46–47. For insightful discussion of the tendency for the British to view their own national identity through an American lens, and of the mass media’s implication in this relationship, see J. Wiener and M. Hampton (eds.), Anglo-American Media Interactions, 1850–2000, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2007. 17. See especially E. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Random House, New York, 1978, at pp. 49–72, and Culture and Imperialism, Vintage Books, London, 1993, at pp. 3–14; also D. Gregory, “Imaginative geographies,” Progress in Human Geography, 19, 1995, 447–85, and The Colonial Present, Blackwell, Malden, MA, 2004. 18. T. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1991, p. 26. 19. For a useful paper that not only trades on Said and “imaginative geographies” but which also specifically involves television and the circulation of national identities (including British national identities), see S. Holloway and G. Valentine, “Corked hats and Coronation Street: British and New Zealand children’s imaginative geographies of the other,” Childhood, 7, 2000, 335–57. 20. See especially E. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, Pantheon Books, New York, 1981; E. Shohat and R. Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, Routledge, New York, 1994; I. Roy, “Worlds apart: Nation-branding on the National Geographic Channel,” Media, Culture & Society, 29, 2007, 569–92; D. Morley, Media, modernity and technology: The geography of the new, Routledge, London, 2007, pp. 133–95. 21. A. Crisell, An Introductory History of British Broadcasting, Routledge, London, 1997, p. 14. 22. “Building a Global Audience,” p. 12. 23. Ibid., p. 8. 24. Ibid., p. 24. On this reputation see also J. Tunstall, Television Producers, Routledge, London, 1993, pp. 27–46. 25. “The Report of the Creative Industries Task Force Inquiry into Television Exports,” pp. 55, 57. 26. Ibid., pp. 47, 37. 27. “Building a Global Audience,” p. 13. 28. http://www.nzonair.govt.nz/about_us.php (retrieved October 2007). 29. Interview with author, May 15, 2007. 30. Author interviews. 31. Interview with author, December 16, 2005.

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32. Leigh Wilson (TVNZ), interview with author, May 15, 2007. 33. On the early years of which, see especially A. Moran, “National Broadcasting and Cultural Identity: New Zealand Television and Shortland Street,” Continuum, 10, 1996, 168–86; and B. Cairns and H. Martin, Shortland Street: Production, text and audience, Macmillan, Auckland, 1996. More recently, see two articles by Tricia Dunleavy: “A Soap of Our Own: New Zealand’s Shortland Street,” Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 106, 2003, 18–34; and “Coronation Street, Neighbours, Shortland Street: Localness and Universality in the Primetime Soap,” Television & New Media, 6, 2005, 370–82. 34. Leigh Wilson (TVNZ), interview with author, May 15, 2007. 35. Dunleavy, “Coronation Street, Neighbours, Shortland Street,” pp. 376–79. 36. Leigh Wilson (TVNZ), interview with author, May 15, 2007. 37. “Bro’ Town looks to world domination,” TVNZ News, February 2, 2007, available at http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/976246 (retrieved January 2008). 38. The quotations are from http://www.linktv.org/whoweare/mission (retrieved January 2008) and http://www20.sbs.com.au/sbscorporate/index.php?id=378 (retrieved January 2008). 39. “Formats: Aquisition Strategies,” Miracle Screenings: International magazine covering the business of television and film, 16, April 2007, available at http://www. miraclescreenings.com/16/form_a1.htm. 40. “Outrageous Fortune to be adapted for American television,” New Zealand Herald, October 6, 2007. 41. “Canada gets its own Super Channel,” Variety, October 2, 2007. 42. “Screenwriters vow to repel NZ incursion,” Sydney Morning Herald, January 8, 2007. Following a 1997 High Court decision, New Zealand programs may count as “local” content in Australia under Australian Communications and Media Authority regulations. 43. “Outrageous Fortune to be adapted for American television.” 44. I draw heavily here on A. Moran, Copycat TV: Globalisation, program formats and cultural identity, University of Luton Press, Luton, 1998, pp. 13–15. More recently, Moran has updated many of these basic introductory arguments in his Understanding the Global TV Format (with J. Malbon), Intellect Books, Bristol, 2006. 45. FRAPA, “The global trade in television formats: main findings,” 2005, http:// www.frapa.org/news/screen_digest__und__frapa_report/index.html (retrieved September 2005). 46. Ibid. These, I should say, are the most conservative estimates I have found. Another report suggests that in 2003, UK exporters accounted for 45% of the international format market by hours and 49% by the number of titles. See Television Research Partnership, “Rights of passage: British Television in the Global Market,” 2005, http://www. pact.co.uk/uploads/file_bank/1698.pdf (retrieved October 2007), at pp. 16–17. 47. “UK banks 40% of global TV formats market,” Broadcast, August 2, 2007. 48. “The global trade in television formats: main findings”; “UK banks 40% of global TV formats market.” 49. “The global trade in television formats: main findings.” 50. Respectively: “Rights of passage,” p. 25; “BTDA UK television export statistics 2003,” http://www.culture.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/750CFA98-6566-4387-969B0A30EFADA473/0/APPENDIX1.pdf (retrieved October 2007).

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51. “Mastermind finalist wins £1m on TV quiz,” The Daily Telegraph, September 14, 2006. 52. “Millionaire: a TV phenomenon,” BBC News, March 3, 2003. 53. “Complete Communications. Report and financial statements—September 30, 2001.” Copy available from author. 54. “£106m deal for Millionaire rights,” BBC News, December 1, 2006. In June 2008, Millionaire moved on again, with Sony acquiring 2waytraffic. “Sony Pictures acquires 2waytraffic,” Variety, June 4, 2008. 55. “Blighty yucks save mighty bucks,” Variety, April 19, 1999; Moran (with Malbon), Understanding the Global TV Format; “Rights of passage,” p. 16. 56. An argument well made by S. Waisbord, “McTV: Understanding the global popularity of television formats,” Television & New Media, 5, 2004, 359–83. But see also, for a somewhat different perspective, M. Keane and A. Moran, “Television’s new engines,” Television & New Media, 9, 2008, 155–69, and M. Keane, A. Fung and A. Moran, New Television, Globalization, and the East Asian Cultural Imagination, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2007. 57. M. Warshauer, “Who wants to be a millionaire: Changing conceptions of the American Dream,” American Studies Today Online, February 13, 2003, available at http://www.americansc.org.uk/Online/American_Dream.htm. 58. “Michael Davies has the final answers,” TelevisionWeek, 23, 2004, p. 5. 59. T. Liebes and E. Katz, The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of “Dallas,” Oxford University Press, New York, 1990. 60. C. Hoskins and R. Mirus, “Reasons for the U.S. dominance of the international trade in television programmes,” Media, Culture & Society, 10, 1988, 499–515. 61. G. Ritzer, The Globalization of Nothing, Sage, London, 2003; the quotation is from p. xi. 62. S. Tinic, “Going Global: International Co-productions and the Disappearing Domestic Audience in Canada,” in L. Parks and S. Kumar (eds.), Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (New York University Press, New York, 2002, 169–86), at p. 173–74 (original emphasis). 63. “Building a Global Audience”; “The Report of the Creative Industries Task Force Inquiry into Television Exports.” 64. Of course Britishness is not always regarded as a negative attribute; and where it is considered a positive (think Simon Cowell in American Idol), it will be vigorously emphasized and exploited. 65. J. Steemers, Selling television: British television in the global marketplace, BFI Publishing, London, 2004, p. 138. 66. “Big B brings an acceptable face of greed to Indian TV,” Financial Times, July 27, 2005; Keane and Moran, “Television’s new engines,” p. 163; “Millionaire: a TV phenomenon.” 67. See, respectively: “Overhyped,” Tribune India, October 18, 2000; “In India, a cable industry is buoyed by a quiz show,” New York Times, August 15, 2005; “Bollywood stars turn to TV,” BBC News, June 6, 2000. 68. K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One, Penguin, London, 1976 [1867], pp. 163–69. 69. D. Freedman, “Who wants to be a millionaire? The politics of television exports,” Information, Communication & Society, 6, 2003, 24–41, at pp. 33–34. See also

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Keane and Moran, “Television’s new engines,” which contains some useful speculations (for instance on the parallels between formatting and franchising business models), but which is ultimately a bit disappointing. 70. Although, as Vincent Mosco has observed, this literature is arguably not as rich as might be expected, with political economists of the media having focused less on media commodities than on the institutions that produce them and that regulate the processes of their production. See V. Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication: Rethinking and Renewal, Sage, London, 1996, p. 140. 71. N. Garnham, “Concepts of Culture: Public Policy and the Cultural Industries,” Cultural Studies, 1, 1987, 23–37, at p. 31. 72. S. Jhally, The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society, Routledge, New York, 1991, p. 161. 73. W. Godzich, “The Semiotics of Semiotics,” in M. Blonsky (ed), On Signs (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1985, 421–47). 74. Ibid., p. 430. 75. Ibid., p. 431 (original emphasis). 76. Ibid. 77. E.g. D. Harvey, “Between space and time: Reflections on the geographical imagination,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 80, 1990, 418–34. 78. Much has been written by geographers on these matters, but for the most direct attempt to follow Harvey’s injunction see I. Cook, “Follow the Thing: Papaya,” Antipode, 36, 2004, 642–64.

Conclusion to Part III

One thing that will have become readily apparent to scholars reading this book from “outside” human geography (the academic discipline) is that “human geography” is, or can be, many different things. While no single definition for human geography scholarship will ever fully suffice, the broad and open-ended question of how place, space, environment and landscape are implicated in the operation and outcome of social processes seems, to me at least, to capture the discipline’s essential ingredients.1 In Part III of the book, one of my main objectives has been to make a relatively simple but nonetheless important point about this “human geography” and what constitutes it. That is, notwithstanding a great burst of energy by geographers and others in the past two decades toward exploring and understanding the philosophy, politics and even poetics of space, spatiality and scale, there remains considerable mileage in clinging onto and further interrogating the subject with which most people outside the discipline arguably continue to most strongly associate it: namely, place—where, exactly, things are located or happen (or are shown to be located or to happen), and the substantive nature or natures of this specific “where.” But I also hope to have at least begun to demonstrate something slightly deeper and perhaps more elusive than this basic materiality of place, and in this conclusion to the three preceding chapters I want to reflect briefly on this. The starting point for this observation is that, as noted, an emphasis on place means a respect for and consideration of local specificity or uniqueness. However, the argument I want to make, and indeed have tried to make (if only implicitly), is that a sensitivity to the specifics of place should not necessarily mean an abandonment or disavowal of the search for more generalizable social-scientific claims or, related to this, of attempts at “theory” construction. 407

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That a focus on place means a denigration or suspicion of “theory” or “science” is, it should first be noted, a common belief. It is certainly the view of those mainstream economists turned “geographical economists,” such as Paul Krugman, who tend to sniff at the scientific pretensions of work by place-conscious economic geographers.2 And many economic geographers have themselves worried that “a local focus leaves geographers embedded in the specific to such an extent” that they not only lose a purchase on theory and its presumed powers, but also become “marginalized from contemporary policy formulation.”3 For my part, while I understand the concern that drilling down into localities might lead one to lose sight of wider theoretical principles or repeating social and economic patterns (or of the search for these), I am inclined to think that this is ultimately a false or at least thoroughly unhelpful dichotomy. For clearly there are very definite limits to the worth of analyzing individual places in detail without connecting up that analysis iteratively to more generalizable models of society or economy. Meanwhile, theory in the abstract, divorced from the real world in its place-bound specificity, seems equally if not more constrained and constraining. Indeed, Neil Smith remarked some twenty years ago that the “battle” between “the unique and the general”—brought to a head, in human geography, by the “rediscovery of place”—was always “a thoroughly sterile debate.”4 But the “debate,” such as it is, needs to be engaged and countered precisely because it lingers on. In the end, critical social science is surely best progressed through a combination of the search for and refinement of theory on the one hand, and the detailing of empirical specifics—including the specifics, particularly for geographers, of place—on the other. Hence in none of the three latter chapters in which place is the emphasis of my work have I shunned the appeal to wider theoretical principles, or indeed the attempt to actively shape such principles. And while the geographical focus both of these chapters and of the book more generally has been the UK and New Zealand, I do believe the arguments I have developed have a wider resonance (if I did not, I would have chosen a very different title for the book). But the debate between the specific and general, and the yoking of place to the former at the perceived expense of the latter, is crude and unhelpful not only because social science needs “both.” What I hope to have shown in Part III is that the debate is also limiting because it implies and enforces an extremely limited understanding of place, and of place’s implication in social processes. A dichotomy of unique and general renders place inherently passive and inert: social and economic processes happen in place, and, at best, we need to make our theories flexible and sensitive enough to accommodate the range of outcomes that processes throw up from place to place. By contrast, my argument has been that place is constitutive of social and economic processes, and hence must be similarly constitutive of the gener-

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alizations that attempt to capture such processes; it is not something to be simply accommodated, but instead expressly factored in (or, for want of a better word, modelled). Accounting for the “role of place in social life,” then, is fundamental to rewriting theory or—as David Harvey puts it in an essay whose title (“From space to place and back again”) inspired my own subtitle for Part III—“metatheory.”5 This, mark, is to imbue place with “power” only to the extent that we understand place as itself constructed through social processes; to go any further, as Harvey himself insists, is to lapse into fetishism. Nevertheless, whether we are concerned with place as a material socialeconomic context for the crystallization of television program content, place (or its absence) as a material driver of programming’s international distribution economy, or place as the locus of internal production economies and political economies, theory has to have a central place for place.

NOTES 1. This is the “definition” favored by Derek Gregory. See especially his Geographical Imaginations, Blackwell, Oxford, 1994, and his “Geography,” in R. Johnston, D. Gregory, G. Pratt and M. Watts (eds.), The Dictionary of Human Geography, 5th edition (Blackwell, Oxford, 2008). 2. For a discussion and critique of this position, see especially R. Martin, “The new ‘geographical turn’ in economics: Some critical reflections,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 23, 1999, 65–91. 3. The quotation here is from M. Banks and S. MacKian, “Jump in! The water’s warm: A comment on Peck’s ‘grey geography,’” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 25, 2000, 249–54, at p. 253, and was made in the context of a running debate about contemporary human geography’s policy relevance. But a very similar set of concerns have divided geographers at various different times and in many different academic-political contexts. In the late 1980s, for example, the argument that critical economic-geographical research was becoming “too local”—and hence, it was claimed, “anti-theory”—was made quite forcefully against members of the critical realism school by professedly more theoretically inclined Marxist geographers. See especially D. Harvey, “Three myths in search of reality in urban studies,” Environment and Planning D, 5, 1987, 367–76. 4. N. Smith, “Dangers of the empirical turn: Some comments on the CURS initiative,” Antipode, 19, 1987, 59–68, pp. 65–66. 5. D. Harvey, “From space to place and back again: Reflections on the condition of postmodernity,” in J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam, G. Robertson and L. Tickner (eds.), Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change (Routledge, London, 1993, 3–29), at p. 5.

Coda: Into the Home of Media Power

Trade in television programming has been a central theme of this book. There are a number of different explanations for such trade occurring as extensively as it does, but a key one, as we have seen, is typically cost: it is, normally, considerably cheaper to import programming from overseas than to make it domestically. In chapter 6, however, I argued that while strictly “true,” this argument, applied most often to the relative affordability of US programming imports, ultimately veils a critical feature of global television trade. When acquiring a program import, one pays only for domestic distribution rights. When making a program, by contrast, the potential market is global. Producer-exporters can often profitably sell a program into an overseas territory for much less than the cost of making the program because they are able to spread those original production costs across several national markets. The direct comparison of (import) price and (production) cost is, in this sense, unfair. For if producer-broadcasters in small markets such as TVNZ in New Zealand were confident that they could sell their proprietary produced programming worldwide, including in the US, the cost of making that programming would not seem so prohibitive. But therein lies the rub. Very few international producers have been able to successfully penetrate the US market, which in value terms is far and away the world’s largest. Thus, when TVNZ compares the price for domestic distribution of a US import with the cost of making its own program, it may in purely theoretical terms be comparing a national price on the one hand with a global cost and revenue potential on the other, but in practical terms the revenue potential, too, will ordinarily be largely or exclusively domestic. In this sense, the comparison is a fair one. For the likes of TVNZ, then, US imports are “cheaper” in large part because international markets in general—and the US market in particu411

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lar—are so often beyond the reach of their own program production and export initiatives. I reprise this argument here in view of a critical analytical implication that flows from it: namely, that if we are interested in questions of economic power in regard to the global television industry, we should not only be looking at the power of the US media to dominate international markets, but also, potentially, at how issues of power might be implicated in international producers’ attempts to capitalize on the US market. This is the “centripetal” perspective on so-called media imperialism that I have urged at various junctures in the book, and which I considered most explicitly in chapter 10 in regard to NHNZ and the BBC’s Natural History Unit, and to a lesser extent in the final section of chapter 6 in regard to New Zealand’s television export performance more generally.1 Here, I focus once more on these “centripetal” relations of power, but in this instance by picking up directly where chapter 11 left off—that is, with the burgeoning, ongoing trade into the US of UK and European program formats, with Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? in the vanguard.2 I make this my focus precisely because the format trade has been, in the last decade, the area of most notable success in the US television market for non-US television producers and distributors. If we are concerned to examine questions of power in relation to penetration of this traditionally import-resistant market, the format business seems a propitious place to look. I situate this brief discussion as a “coda” because my study has been concerned mainly with the nature and effects of media power in the UK and New Zealand television environments, whereas what follows is focused essentially on somewhere else. I argue, in short, that despite the unending exuberant headlines—“Brits rise to the export challenge . . . Britons revamp American TV . . . British Invasion Transforming American TV”—it has actually proven extremely difficult for international format developers and exporters to capture, and thus repatriate, much of the considerable economic value that is undoubtedly created in America from the exploitation of their formats.3 And this in turn, I suggest, reflects the fact that relations of power in world media are still skewed heavily in favor of the leading US media corporations.

NUMBERS We saw in chapter 11 that the UK-originated format Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? has enjoyed marked commercial success both in the UK itself and in a large number of international export markets. What of its performance specifically in the US market? Here, too, the show’s cultural and economic ramifications have been dramatic. Licensed from Celador International by Disney and aired on the latter’s ABC broadcast network (a wholly owned

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Disney subsidiary), the show achieved 35 million viewers at its peak. Prior to its acquisition and production of the Millionaire format, ABC had been trailing behind its main competitors CBS and NBC in primetime ratings; Millionaire put it firmly in pole position.4 The show’s impact on ABC’s economics was stunning: Disney’s broadcasting division, which ABC dominates, almost doubled operating income from $571 million in the fiscal year ending September 30, 1999, to a little over $1 billion the following year, which was the year of Millionaire’s greatest strength.5 From 2001, however, audiences began to decline, with Celador later blaming ABC for overexposing the show in the face of its own repeated protests. “ABC scheduled Millionaire into the ground, completely ruthlessly,” the format’s originator, Celador’s Paul Smith, would tell the Financial Times. “It was on air virtually continuously for two years, four to five days a week. What other show would survive that kind of exposure?”6 By 2002, ABC was back in third place in the ratings and Millionaire was pulled.7 This was not the end of the franchise’s life on American television, however. It lived (and lives) on in off-network strip syndication (where it is distributed by Disney’s Buena Vista Television) and briefly, on ABC itself in 2004, as the $10 million top-prize spin-off Who Wants to Be a Super Millionaire? Such numbers—35 million American viewers and literally hundreds of millions of dollars of American profit—are obviously striking, and, read alongside the wider growth statistics for the international and (especially) UK format development and export markets cited in chapter 11, they intimate a profound impact on the export economics of “television UK.” This intimation is only reinforced by the types of headlines noted above (“British Invasion Transforming American TV,” etc.). And yet, if we scrape away the surface froth and examine substantive changes in the UK’s television export trade in the last decade, the effect of the formats “boom” appears, if anything, strangely underwhelming. Most notably, the export of formats continues to contribute only a small proportion of the overall revenues generated by UK television export. The percentage varies from year to year, but it has never exceeded 10%, and typically, even in the recent “boom” years, it has hovered around 5 or 6%.8 Moreover, just as the UK’s format business in general (and Millionaire in particular) was coming of age at the very end of the 1990s, overall UK television export revenues were falling: by 10% in 1999 and a further 11% in 2000.9 The picture, then, seems in fact to be one in which the ripening of the format business has actually translated into relatively modest changes in overall UK audiovisual trade dynamics. Indeed, the UK’s television trade deficit grew by nearly 50% from 1997 to 2000.10 Numbers, it transpires, can themselves help to provide part of the explanation for why we have not seen a more dramatic impact on UK television export trade metrics from the increasing export of formats to international

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markets in general and the lucrative US market in particular. In the first place, while the US may be the world’s largest television format market by value, this reflects the size of the US broadcast market as a whole—each format production can be amortized across a larger viewer and advertiser base, allowing higher individual production budgets and format license fees—more than the volume of formats being produced there under license. Thus, in 2004, as many as six European countries (France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK) broadcast more format-based hours than the US—more than twice the volume in the case of France.11 In other words, formats account for a much smaller segment of the overall broadcast market pie in the US than in the wealthiest European countries, hence limiting the financial upside for those exporters targeting the US format market. Second, not only does the US market feature fewer format-based productions overall, but a large share of these are actually based on domestic rather than overseas ideas. In 2004, just 362 hours of imported format-based programming were broadcast in the US, compared to vastly higher totals in, most strikingly, France (1,812 hours), Germany (1,742) and Italy (1,692). Furthermore, the US remains an important exporter of formats in its own right (think The Price is Right, Family Feud and Jeopardy!): the world’s third largest exporter by broadcast hours in 2004, and its second largest, behind only the UK, in both 2005 and 2006.12

POWER Numbers, however, can only take us so far in understanding why UK television trade economics have not been more substantively transformed by the explosion of the formats business in the past decade. In this section, I suggest that a much fuller and more persuasive answer is available if we consider relations of power. But how can we determine who “has” power in international trade, or—perhaps better—where the real leverage in such trading relationships resides? One possible answer is to analyze the relative capture of economic value by those who participate in such trade: who, we can ask, captures the bulk of such value, and what allows them to do so? In the case of international format trade, a key indicator is the format license fee paid by the local acquirer of the format rights to the international distributor of those rights. All other things being equal, a higher percentage license fee will mean a vendor with greater relative power, while a lower percentage implies that power and leverage vest more with the buyer. In this respect, it is striking that where European companies do succeed in selling formats into the US market, they find that local broadcasters drive a significantly harder bargain than elsewhere in the world. If format fees

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worldwide typically range from 5–15% of local production budgets, US fees appear to sit firmly at the lower end of this range.13 According to Michael Rodrigue, chief executive of US format developer Distraction Formats, the format owner can expect to recoup no more than 5–7% in the US market.14 However, both Paul Telegdy, the BBC’s Senior Vice President of Programming and Co-Productions in Los Angeles, and David Gyngell, who was chief executive of Granada America until late 2007, claim that ordinarily fees are even lower than that: between 3% and 5%.15 No wonder, then, that Gill Hay, Channel 4’s Deputy Director of Acquisitions, notes simply that “the US broadcasters have unbelievable power.”16 In their dealings with the US broadcasters who acquire and reproduce their formats, the UK’s leading format developers and exporters have certainly sought to push up these fee scales. As Telegdy observes, the 3–5% range was simply “what was deemed historically to be the value, in the US, of a good idea.” There was, he says, no reason in principle to accept that this fee level was right and fair, and when he arrived in the US in 2004 to drive forward the BBC’s West Coast business, he clearly believed that it was not. “I wanted 50%,” he says. And yet despite the best efforts of Telegdy, Gyngell and others, there is no evidence—even anecdotal—of US format license fees having increased. Rather than simply hammering at this particular locked door, then, the UK’s leading format exporters have pursued an alternative strategy to try to increase their format earnings in the US market. This strategy has consisted of attempting to move up the value chain into local production. As noted in chapter 11, format distributors typically enjoy only a license fee on international sales—the format usually being licensed to a local production company, which may or may not be affiliated to the local broadcaster that ultimately airs the program. This local production company, in turn, is remunerated primarily in the form of a production fee (though it may also enjoy participation in “back-end,” which essentially means profit). The local production fee, like the format license fee, is typically based on an approved production budget. For many years now it has been recognized in the UK that relying solely on an export license fee fundamentally limits UK businesses’ ability to capture economic value from the international exploitation of their television formats. The Creative Industries Task Force report into television export performance, published in 1999, made this recognition clear. “While formats are an important part of our industry,” observed the members of the “Right Product” group, “they do not optimize either the direct financial impact, or the indirect economic benefits, of exporting UK-produced programming.”17 And at around the same time, leading industry figures were beginning to publicly signal an intention to muscle in on local production activities in key overseas markets. “To get the real value from selling a format,” said

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Peter Bazalgette, Chairman of Endemol UK, in 2000, “you need to have a handle on the local markets for production.”18 Endemol has, indeed, been at the forefront of European production companies’ collective drive to produce more of their formats in international markets, in addition to simply licensing there the intellectual property. It has achieved success in this area in a large number of territories, the US included. Big Brother (for CBS) and Deal or No Deal (for NBC) are among the high-profile formats that Endemol USA produces for US broadcast. Of the leading UK production companies (Endemol, of course, is Dutch), the BBC (through BBC Worldwide) and ITV (through Granada America) have made the most ground in ramping up their format-based US production activities. The BBC’s Telegdy recognized from his arrival in the US in 2004 that this was likely to be the most profitable strategy available to the BBC. The BBC had been licensing its intellectual property in the US for a number of years, but it was, Telegdy says, “not getting paid enough” because it was “in completely the wrong place in the value chain.”19 The BBC’s major US breakthrough came just a year later with the first series of Dancing with the Stars (based on the original BBC UK format Strictly Coming Dancing), which it produced in Los Angeles for ABC. The sixth US season of Dancing, still under BBC production, aired in the Spring of 2008. ITV, meanwhile, has also enjoyed format production success Stateside, with its two main hits having been Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, both vehicles for the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, and both produced for the Fox broadcast network. It is fair to say, therefore, that UK format exporters have enjoyed a measure of success, since 2005 in particular, in breaking into the business of local US format-based program production. The three aforementioned shows from the BBC and ITV are all big hits. Indeed, it is noticeable that in 2006, the contribution of format export and related local production work to overall UK television export revenues jumped from the typical historic range of 5–6% (6.1% in 2005) to 9.4%, with the monetary value of such activities almost doubling, from £30m (2005) to £56m.20 Progress is clearly being made. Yet it is, I think, crucial to caveat the degree and depth of such progress. Firstly, very few UK or European production companies have been able to successfully follow where the heavyweights Endemol, ITV and the BBC have led. The BBC, after all, is no ordinary beast. As Matt Creasey, Head of Sales (Finished Programs) at Endemol UK, says, the BBC only achieved the success that it did “because it has muscle—there is always resistance to [incursion by international producers] in the local market.”21 And the BBC recognizes its privileged position: Worldwide has said it wants UK independent producers to be able to use its LA base, precisely because most lack the leverage to crack the US market independently. “It’s very risky and

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expensive to set up your own L.A. office,” as Wayne Garvie (Worldwide’s Director of Content & Production) observes.22 Thus, for the most part, UK and European format exports to the US continue to be produced by local production companies. And these local production companies, we must not forget, are not a collection of essentially independent entities. As I noted in chapter 4 in my discussion of the US “television oligopoly,” the American broadcast industry is characterized by a high degree of vertical integration, with the majority of the leading US television shows now being produced by the major broadcast networks’ in-house production arms. Even if, as David Gyngell notes, these businesses are vertical “through ownership rather than action,”23 ownership still means money. If UK production companies capture local production business in Los Angeles from local producers, they are effectively “taking” that business from their customers—the studios that own both those local producers and the network broadcasters. Secondly, there is also a question mark over the amount of money actually being taken out of the US market by the likes of the BBC, ITV and Endemol even where they do successfully secure local production work. For one thing, although seldom acknowledged, these organizations often find themselves working alongside local co-producers—Granada USA with Arthur Smith & Associates on Hell’s Kitchen, for instance, and Endemol USA with Allison Grodner Productions on Big Brother. In fact the broadcast networks will sometimes insist on such an arrangement.24 The phrase “local production” should always be treated cautiously, therefore, for as Pascal Volle, a consultant to several leading US television distributors and producers, points out, the word “production” is “a very slippery one.”25 Rarely, if ever, will it mean that the UK or European company in question is carrying out all production work and is taking home all production-related revenues. In January 2008, for instance, the leading UK television trade periodical Broadcast trumpeted “Hat Trick wins US order,” referring to the UK production company’s agreement to produce the new format Game Show in my Head for CBS; but the fine print reveals that Hat Trick will in fact co-produce with a pair of US producers (Fox21 and Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst), and the headline in the US-based periodical Variety put a very different slant on the deal’s dynamics, announcing “Kutcher imports ‘Game Show’ for CBS”.26 Even in the case of Dancing with the Stars, where the BBC is the sole named producer, there remain intimations from some market observers that the BBC is in fact located relatively low in the US food chain.27 Thirdly, even those who have been at the forefront of the push to grow local European and UK-owned production businesses in the US admit that this initiative, despite the high profile and much-discussed individual success stories, remains very much in its collective infancy. As Telegdy, at the BBC, observes, his unit and those like Granada America are merely “inching

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our way into the US broadcasters’ business.” Indeed, part of the reason that local US production companies—which are often owned, as noted by the same companies as the broadcasters—have not yet marshaled any kind of strategic defense against the so-called “British invasion” is that, as Telegdy freely admits, “we are not yet hurting them.” What happens over the next few years, then, will make for fascinating and instructive watching. It is clear that the US broadcasters have always enjoyed considerable power in their dealings with European format exporters, and that this power remains largely undimmed. Nevertheless, it is equally clear that a threat to such power has now been posed, and that if there is such a thing as, in Telegdy’s words, a “tipping point” at which the economics of the major local stakeholders will begin to creak, then “we have nearly reached it.”28

LAW The book Whigs and Hunters by the late British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson contains a fascinating and famous postscript on “The Rule of Law.” In it, Thompson argues that contra a reductive, structuralist critique, the law cannot simply be seen as a “tool” or “ideology” of the ruling class—a mere handmaiden of “power.” He argues, instead, that the law needs to be understood as fundamentally ambivalent because it can often prevent power from being exercised arbitrarily. Rules such as “the rule of law” may well “mystify the powerless,” but, “at the same time, they may curb . . . power and check its intrusions.” The law, he says, imposes “effective inhibitions” on power.29 These comments from a far-off world seem strangely apposite when one comes to consider the fact that in the world of US television, as in the world of contemporary American big business more generally, the law, and litigation specifically, are more or less ubiquitous. In fact Paul Telegdy of the BBC goes so far as to argue that if a US show is not the subject of one or more lawsuit, then it more than likely is not a hit show. A lawsuit, in other words—and perverse as it may sound—is “the measure of success.”30 In this final section, I argue that the law is relevant to the present discussion because appeals to the rule of law can be suggestive both of the limits to power, and of the strategies that might be pursued by those “with” power to try to transcend or deny such limits. In the world of television formats, one could cite various different examples of such appeals, but perhaps none is more revealing than a case involving, appropriately enough, the format I have discussed at greatest length both here and in chapter 11: namely, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The format’s UK originator Celador, I show, has resorted to “the rule of law” in an attempt to “check”—in Thompson’s words—what it sees as the “arbitrary” use (and hence, abuse) of power by America’s Disney.

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We have already seen that US importers of international formats typically enjoy significantly greater economic power vis-à-vis the format vendor than acquiring broadcasters in other international format markets. Celador’s claim, in short, is that with Millionaire, Disney has played hardball even beyond the bounds of these tough terms of trade. Thus, in May 2004, Celador and its chairman and founder, Paul Smith, in a suit filed at the Los Angeles Superior Court, charged Disney with breach of contract, breach of good faith and fair dealing, fraud, and unfair competition. Their claim is a complicated one, but essentially argues that Disney, in its dealings with Celador, abused the vertical integration that sees it owning both the production and distribution vehicles for Millionaire in the US, denying Celador its “fair” share of revenues in the process. To begin to understand the politics and economics of this suit, one needs to unearth, where possible, the details of the original 1998 licensing agreement between Celador and Disney for Millionaire’s distribution in the US.31 Because Millionaire, with its extraordinary success in the UK, was considered an atypical format, a simple license fee expressed as a percentage of the local production budget was deemed inappropriate. Instead, there would be two main elements to Celador’s remuneration. First, Celador would receive a producer fee of $25,000 for a 30-minute program and $35,000 for a one-hour program for Smith’s role as executive producer, with those rates rising 5% each year. Second, more complex, and ultimately the source of the lawsuit, Celador and Disney would share equally in any “contingent compensation” (basically, profit) deriving from the show’s US distribution. This profit would effectively amount to the fees for which Disney was able to license the show to US broadcasters, less all fees paid to local production companies for producing the show. At the heart of Celador’s claim is the assertion that Disney agreed in principle that the show could air on any major broadcast network and not only on its own ABC, implying that the license fee would be for fair-market value. Instead, the suit alleges, Disney licensed the show at below-market prices, first to ABC, and later, for distribution in the secondary syndication market, to another of its subsidiaries, Buena Vista Television. Celador claims, moreover, that Disney also subsequently failed to follow industry custom and renegotiate a higher fee with ABC following the show’s successful debut in August 1999. But the allegation does not stop there. Celador says that the show’s cost line, as well as its revenue line, was manipulated, with Disney’s in-house production arm, Valleycrest Productions, charging inflated production fees. Indeed, the suit actually goes further still, alleging that these two “deceptions” were centrally coordinated: that there was an oral agreement within the Disney group for ABC to license the show at a per-episode fee equal to Valleycrest’s per-episode production fee, thus ensuring that it would never generate “profits” to be shared with Celador.

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If these various machinations did actually take place, what, we need to ask, would have been their net effect?32 The key here is to consider the effects on both Disney the company (“Walt Disney,” Celador’s legal partner) and on Disney as a consolidated group (containing the Walt Disney Company itself and its various subsidiaries). Squeezing Millionaire’s license fees to ensure that they corresponded precisely to the show’s production fees would, as already identified, stop any direct profit from flowing to Walt Disney the company (co-owner, with Celador, of the US rights)—and hence to Celador. But ABC and Buena Vista’s bottom lines would benefit from paying below-market prices for the broadcast licenses, while hauling in vast advertising revenues; Valleycrest’s bottom line, in turn, would be padded by inflated production budgets and production fees. And as wholly owned subsidiaries of Walt Disney, these respective profits would be consolidated directly into the Disney group accounts (Figure C.1). In fact whatever the level of Millionaire’s US license fees and production fees, the overall profit accruing to the Disney group would have been the same, since, with all counter-parties being Disney entities, all such payments were simply internal group transfers. The crux of Celador’s case is that Disney knowingly manipulated the distribution of profit origination within the group to ensure that the specific legal entity with which Celador was partnered and would share profits—the Walt Disney company, not the group as a whole—would realize as small a share of this overall profit as possible.

Figure C.1: Two hypothetical scenarios for the distribution of Millionaire fees, costs and profits between key stakeholders (Given equivalent revenues from distribution / broadcast in each scenario) Source: Author Note: ABC, Buena Vista and Valleycrest are all 100% owned by Disney

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Interestingly, this case has remarkably clear echoes of another, even higherprofile (and now settled) suit lodged against one of America’s leading media groups, on this occasion Time Warner. In a suit filed in February 2005, Peter Jackson, the New Zealand director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, sued New Line Cinema—the Warner subsidiary that financed and distributed Rings— for fraud, specifically in respect to The Fellowship of the Ring. The echoes of the Celador/Disney case were primarily threefold. First, the plaintiffs hired the same lawyer, media specialist Stanton Stein of Alschuler Grossman Stein & Kahan. Second, the substance of the suit was more or less the same, striking once again “at the heart of the modern vertically integrated media company.”33 Jackson’s central charge was that New Line used pre-emptive bidding rather than open bidding for subsidiary rights (books, DVDs etc.), most (but not all) of which were licensed to other Time Warner group companies such as Warner Brothers International, Warner Records and Warner Books. This use of pre-emptive bidding, the suit alleged, meant that New Line received less than market price for such rights. The effect on Warner as a group, as with Millionaire and Disney, would be zero: one company’s extra profit directly compensating for another’s lower returns. But overall gross revenues for the film, as accounted for by New Line, would be reduced; and Jackson’s remuneration was based on a direct percentage of this turnover. Yet the third and final echo of the Millionaire case is the one I am most interested in here: the fact that each case involved a geographic outsider consorting with the American media industry, only to end up feeling defrauded by American companies’ perceived abuse of the dominance they continue to enjoy within the global circuits of media power. This is not to suggest that either Jackson or Celador warrants a great deal of sympathy: Jackson was reported to have already received in the region of $250 million from New Line for the trilogy, while Smith, at Celador, was estimated to be worth over £100 million by the UK’s 2001 Broadcast Rich List, and more recently cashed in on his equity in Millionaire with the sale of Celador International to Dutch media group 2waytraffic for £106 million.34 The point, rather, is that if there is any substance to Celador’s claim—and if there was any substance to Jackson’s35—it merely reinforces the fact that trends such as the increasing sale of program formats into the US market need to be set against the context of a deeply entrenched matrix of global power relations that continues to substantively favor the corporate American media. Millionaire, after all, never delivered Celador more than around £10m in revenue from the US market in any single year. Now put that figure alongside the £200–300 million that the show was reported to generate for Disney annually in its most successful years, and the over £10bn appreciation in Disney’s market value in the 12 months from October 1999—for which ABC, and on behalf of ABC, Millionaire, have been accorded substantial credit.36

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The lawsuits suggest, also, that representatives of the American media may be prepared not just to defend those embedded power relations, but to push to the limit the leverage that such relations confer upon them. Not only do the flows of formats into the US remain limited on the scale of the American broadcast market as a whole, then, but such flows have done little to unsettle the edifice of control that confronts those seeking to penetrate the US market and to extract meaningful and “fair” profit from it. The media’s empire, in other words, remains firmly in place; its geography not reformatted, still less reversed. For, if indeed it is the case that Celador and Jackson—owners of, in Millionaire and Rings, two of the last decade’s definitive media properties—cannot get an entirely fair deal at America’s media table, what chance is there for anybody else?

NOTES 1. Questions of export trade have traditionally dominated the extensive literature on the “centrifugal” forces of American “media empire,” but that literature has increasingly begun to conceive and analyze American power in international media markets from other, complementary perspectives. As one good example, see most recently Dal Jin’s “Reinterpretation of cultural imperialism: Emerging domestic market vs. continuing US dominance,” Media, Culture & Society, 29, 2007, 753–71, on US influence in the Korean television market and on Korean trade dynamics. 2. C.f., for a very different tack on very similar questions, A. Moran and M. Keane, “Cultural Power in International TV Format Markets,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 20, 2006, 71–86. 3. “Brits rise to the export challenge,” Television Business International, November 1, 2000; “Britons revamp American TV,” New York Times, July 18, 2000; “British Invasion Transforming American TV,” The Denver Post, July 25, 2007. 4. “Wobbly kingdom,” The Economist, September 26, 2002. 5. “Walt Disney: Annual report for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2001,” http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1001039/000089843001503823/d10k.txt (retrieved September 2005). 6. “Format for success,” Financial Times, April 15, 2002. 7. “Wobbly kingdom.” 8. “BTDA UK television export statistics 2003,” http://www.culture.gov.uk/ PDF/TV_export_survey_2002.pdf (retrieved October 2007); “BTDA UK television export statistics 2003,” http://www.culture.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/750CFA98-65664387-969B-0A30EFADA473/0/APPENDIX1.pdf (retrieved October 2007); “PACT UK television exports survey 2006,” http://www.culture.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/AFFC3C9B-8BFD-4AEB-B027-981F05C0AF91/0/TVExports2006StatisticalRelease.pdf (retrieved October 2007). 9. T. Miller, N. Govil, J. McMurria, R. Maxwell and T. Wang, Global Hollywood 2, BFI Publishing, London, 2005, p. 22. 10. Ibid. 11. “World trade in television formats: UK and the Netherlands are ahead of the USA in exports,” Screen Digest, 403, 2005, 100–102.

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12. Ibid; “UK banks 40% of global TV formats market,” Broadcast, August 2, 2007. 13. The global metric is from J. Steemers, Selling television: British television in the global marketplace, BFI Publishing, London, 2004, p. 40. 14. “Format finance,” Television Business International, October 1, 2000. 15. Interviews with author, August 15, 2007, and August 28, 2007, respectively. 16. Interview with author, August 31, 2006. 17. DCMS, “The Report of the Creative Industries Task Force Inquiry into Television Exports,” http://www.culture.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/2BAEF3D8-C46B-43C7918D-5B63B27BF56D/0/dcmstvexports1998.pdf (retrieved June 2006), p. 49. 18. Quoted in “Brits rise to the export challenge.” 19. Interview with author, August 15, 2007. 20. “PACT UK television exports survey 2006.” 21. Interview with author, September 13, 2006. 22. “BBC goes for Wayne’s world,” Variety, December 25, 2005. 23. Interview with author, August 28, 2007. 24. Ibid. 25. Interview with author, December 6, 2006. 26. “Hat Trick wins US order,” Broadcast, January 14, 2008; “Kutcher imports ‘Game Show’ for CBS,” Variety, March 4, 2007. 27. Anon. interviews with author. 28. Interview with author, August 15, 2007. 29. E. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977, pp. 263–66. 30. Interview with author, August 15, 2007. 31. I draw especially on “‘Millionaire’ maker Celador suing Disney,” The Hollywood Reporter, 21. May 2004. See also “Celador sues Disney over US Millionaire,” The Guardian, May 21, 2004. 32. The case has not been settled out of court, nor yet gone to court. A motion to dismiss was denied in January 2005. And one party involved in the sale of Celador International (and thus Millionaire) to 2waytraffic told me that the case remained, as of August 2006, in the disclosure stage—with a daunting 110,000 pages of evidence having been tabled to date. For the denial of the motion to dismiss: “U.S. District Court. CENTRAL DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA (Western Division - Los Angeles). CIVIL DOCKET FOR CASE #: 2:04-cv-03541-FMC-RNB,” http://usdcdata.com/ CACD/2/2004/cv03541.Celador_International_Ltd_et_al_v._Walt_Disney_Company_et_al/DS_1_04035411.html (retrieved September 2005). 33. “The lawsuit of the rings,” New York Times, June 27, 2005. 34. Respectively: “Jackson ruled out of Hobbit film,” BBC News, January 11, 2007; “Format for success”; “£106m deal for Millionaire rights,” BBC News, December 1, 2006. 35. We will probably never know the answer to this question, since the two parties settled matters privately, out of court, in December 2007. Prior to this rapprochement, New Line had repeatedly cited Jackson’s lawsuit as the reason for its decision to exclude Jackson from any role in its forthcoming adaptation of The Hobbit (the other Tolkein story to which it owned the film rights). Then, at the same time as striking an agreement for Jackson to executive produce The Hobbit,

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New Line announced that the parties had “come to an agreement” over the litigation. “So far as Jackson’s protracted wrangle with New Line goes,” it was reported, “it appears the parties are making nice after what appeared to be a long and ugly dispute over money owed by the studio . . . to the film-maker” (“Jackson signs deal for The Hobbit—but won’t direct,” New Zealand Herald, December 19, 2007). But anyone tempted to conclude that Jackson merely capitulated because his case was failing would do well to cast an eye back just three months from this agreement, specifically to an interim court ruling in Jackson’s favor in the original lawsuit. In September 2007, a federal judge ruled that New Line had failed “to provide documents related to the film’s revenue stream in its legal battle” with Jackson and that it “may have destroyed documents and failed to search for documents and emails it was required by the court to produce.” New Line was ordered to pay $125,000 in sanctions (“New Line sanctioned in “Rings” suit,” Variety, September 23, 2007). It is therefore hard to avoid the conclusion that there might have been substance in Jackson’s claim. Indeed, further fuel was then added to the fire in February 2008 when the Tolkein Trust (the British charity that manages the Tolkein estate), together with publisher HarperCollins, brought a $150 million lawsuit against New Line on more or less the same grounds as Jackson had done three years previously. Claiming that it was entitled to 7.5% gross profit participation from the film trilogy, the trust said it had not received any payments, and was suing New Line accordingly for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and fraud. “New Line,” said a representative of the trust, “has brought new meaning to the phrase ‘creative accounting.’” See “Tolkein estate sues New Line,” Variety, February 11, 2008; “Tolkien heirs sue Lord of the Rings studio for $150m,” The Guardian, February 12, 2008. 36. “Millionaire almost single-handedly drove up the stock price of Disney.” See “Prime-time ‘Millionaire’ returning to ABC,” New York Times, January 26, 2004.

Closing Remarks

This book opened with America’s 1996 Telecommunications Act, and with Thomas Frank’s identification of that act as an example of the ongoing march of the juggernaut of what political economists of the media typically frame as the “organized power” of the US broadcast industry. I introduced this framing not because I wanted to go on to argue that it was wrong (or indeed, right), but because I wanted to argue that it was unhelpful. For I have tried, throughout the book, to get away from preconceived notions about power, what it is, and how it operates. I have endeavored instead to think about power from the bottom up—to “envision” it in all its complexity. Nevertheless, having sought thus to map out media power in the context of the UK and New Zealand television economies, I think it is worthwhile returning to the top-down representation with which we began, and asking how it ultimately stands up. Is organized power, after all, an appropriate way to capture media power in the forms in which we have encountered it? Our first task is to say a little bit more about what political economists mean by “organized power.” Understanding the phrase’s genealogy can help here, since most critical political economists of the media are inspired, to one extent or another, by Marx, and for Marx “organized power,” unsurprisingly, was explicitly tied to capital and therefore class interests. Indeed, Marx saw political power as “merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.”1 This understanding of power as being “organized” by virtue of the shared class interests of capital and capitalists is one that has long permeated the critical political economy of the media, and one which was secured there by, among others, the hugely influential communications theorist Harold Innis, who saw the role of academics as “questioning the pretensions of organized power.”2 Power is “organized,” then, precisely by 425

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its alliance with—and rooting in—capital, with this alliance seemingly rendering that power singular, manifest (readily perceived) and coherent.3 An important reason for questioning, here, the accuracy of this concept of “organized power,” is that it would probably be quite easy, on a superficial reading of my book, to conclude that it fully embraces and reaffirms that opening representation, including the grounding of such power in the US market. After all, I have not argued against the continuing powerful influence of the world’s largest corporate media organizations, or against their heavy US centrism—unlike, notably, other recent scholarly examinations of power in television’s international space economy by, for instance, Jeremy Tunstall or Michael Keane, Anthony Fung and Albert Moran.4 In fact, I have argued precisely in support of those features. But the point I am keen to make in conclusion is that my argument has never been about the materiality of this collective institutional influence or about its geographical center of gravity. My argument, rather, has been about the terms in which we capture both this particular influence and the wider sets of power relations in national and international television—and it is in this respect that falling back on the notion of “organized power” is, in my view, insufficient and potentially misleading. I base this view on six main sets of arguments that I have developed in the course of the book (some more fully than others), and I will summarize those here. First, there is the question of what power is, or what it “looks” like. For political economists, and perhaps especially those influenced by the Marxist tradition, power, as just noted, is essentially a capacity, and is irrevocably tied to the ownership and accumulation of capital. “Organized power” means big capital and its ability to dominate. My argument, in Part I and in the latter sections of Part II, is not that such an understanding is wrong, but that it is partial and hence inadequate; it is sometimes, but not always, the best way to capture the nature of power and the modality of its exercise. If we want to get to grips with powers of governance, powers of definition and enframing, and powers of maintaining orderly and disciplined environments for accumulation, we need to extend and refine the ways in which we think about power. Recognizing the constitutive dimensions of knowledge, and particularly geographical knowledges, is, in this respect, key. Large media companies assuredly produce and rework such knowledges, but they are not the only ones to do so, and the ways in which those knowledges are implicated in grids of power cannot be reduced to questions of capital concentration. Second, even where it is appropriate to align power and its exercise with big capital and its capabilities, the umbrella term “organized power” is all too homogenizing. More specifically, it veils material gradients of power within the media economy: to argue that big capital prevails because of the power conferred by scale and wealth is to underplay the fact that profitability varies, market influence waxes and wanes, and large companies do

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fail. Competitive advantage is not an ahistorical or aspatial given, but is variously accrued and relinquished in the fires of often rapid and profound structural and regulatory change. To understand the power of the media, as I argued in chapter 5 and to a lesser extent in chapter 6, we need to address the shifting distribution of power within the media—geographically, historically and “vertically.” Third, power has a microeconomics as well as a macroeconomics. By macroeconomics I mean the broad forms in which power is manifested in the media economy, be it as “capacity” or as “effect” of knowledge—as per my first observation above. By microeconomics, meanwhile, I mean the specific axis along which power is exercised. This, I argue, is important, because it is quite possible for a media company to enjoy a position of power on one axis but not on another. The notion of “organized power” implies that a company either exercises power or does not, but this is simply not the way power “works.” A company may be very influential in one respect but quite weak in another. Mapping overall fields of power means disassembling power into its constituent dimensions, assessing each dimension in its turn, and reassembling the overall picture accordingly. As we saw in chapter 6, it was only relatively recently that the major US television program exporters came to realize significant leverage in pricing negotiations with importing broadcasters in key international markets. But to suggest that those exporters and their studio parents previously lacked “power”—as one might if, following the lead of mainstream economics, one limited questions of power to questions of pricing—would be to overlook all sorts of other ways in which market power is exercised, and hence to seriously misread overall geometries of power within international television. Fourth, one of the problems with thinking of power in the economy as “organized” is that it directs our attention ineluctably to the institutions that inhabit the economy, and away from the commodities that they produce and sell; if power is a capacity it is hard to imagine commodities possessing it, whereas institutions and their officials clearly can. Hence political economists’ heavy emphasis on institutions and questions of ownership. There is of course nothing wrong with this line of inquiry, but it is not the whole story. To more fully understand the media economy and the power relations in which it is embedded, I have suggested that it is productive to examine not just institutions but also commodities and the economic architectures that have cohered around them. Fifth, in the political economy tradition, “organized” usually means coordinated—if not entirely united, then, at the very least, co-compliant, with competition among capitalists significantly less material than the competition between capital and labor. Yet the degree of meaningful competition “within” capital actually varies greatly across both time and space. We saw this briefly in chapter 6, in the specific context of the import into New

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Zealand and the UK of US television programming, a long history of “corespective” behavior having given way in recent years to far more price-based competition. But clearly television’s corporations compete on numerous additional fronts, too, and in this book I have not been able to consider the vital question of how competitive, overall, they truly are; to do so would require, at the very least, another entire book. The point I wish to make here is that the concept of “organized” power imputes to capital a coordinated front (including, but not only, against labor), and while this may sometimes be an accurate way to capture capital’s configuration—think, for example, of America’s Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and its role in the recent US writers’ strike—it will not always be. Sixth, and lastly, it bears remembering that “organized power” is a representation (one among many possible others). If we forget that that is what it is, we risk not only mistaking this particular representation for reality, but also overlooking the fact that representations—this one and others—are themselves constitutive, to one degree or another, of reality. Arguably the main lesson to emerge out of Part I of the book is that knowledges produce economies in a variety of different ways. Six recognitions, then, all of them make the concept of “organized power” a somewhat problematic one, and all of them emerge from the enterprise of critically envisioning power in UK and New Zealand television. To bring the book to a close, we can ask what implications or suggestions it potentially opens up for ongoing research agendas concerned with the economic geography or political economy of the media. Three sets of possibilities merit close consideration. As ever with an economy so fundamentally predicated on technology and technological advancement, the impact of new technologies is obviously a key issue, and this would be the first area where I would expect to see future research focusing. For one thing, the rapidly growing penetration of digital video recorders is beginning to substantively disrupt the linear, time-constrained television viewing experience with which most adult viewers have become so familiar—with implications for advertising techniques and economics, in particular, that are only beginning to be thought through. Moreover, and as discussed at various points in the book, the viewing of television programming is, for the first time in history, occurring to a significant degree on devices other than television sets—on personal computers and, to a lesser extent, on mobile telephones and other hand-held devices. How both consumers and the industry itself will shape and respond to such developments over the next decade remains to be seen, but clearly there will be substantive ramifications for scholars to follow, map, and attempt to understand. The only additional point I would make in this latter regard is to echo an observation I have already offered earlier in this book, which is that despite

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the bold and frequent claims that such developments will herald an entirely new television (space) economy, the evidence for such a fundamental transformation presently remains thin, and there is certainly nothing inevitable about it. We would do well to remember that, going back in time, very similar proclamations accompanied the initiation of previous rounds of major technological innovation—VHS thirty years ago, multichannel television twenty years ago, DVDs ten years ago—and yet the basic economic and spatial architectures of television production and distribution have remained strikingly consistent. The Television Will Be Revolutionized, announces one recent book by a well-known scholar of communication studies.5 Perhaps it will; but “revolutionized” is a strong word, and both the medium itself and those institutions most centrally bound up with it have shown considerable robustness in the past. The second area of research that might emerge relatively smoothly from this book would be a questioning of the relevance of its key approaches to—and findings about—the television economy in markets other than New Zealand and the UK. Certainly, and as noted in the conclusion to Part III, I believe that the way I have approached the world of television could be similarly fruitful in other geographical contexts, and that such work might throw up some similar results; but that is only a belief, and has no basis in empirical research of my own. Every television market is unique, not only in terms of its internal characteristics but also, and related to this, in respect to its implication in internationalized circuits of both capital and culture. Both the UK and New Zealand are, of course, very Westernized and technologically advanced markets, and are very strongly integrated with Hollywood, and this particular context has inevitably given my work a specificity of which—I should emphasize—I am well aware. Furthermore, various excellent studies in recent years have powerfully demonstrated quite how different the modern internationalizing experiences of different national television industries can be.6 Nevertheless, it seems to me that one could do a lot worse than approaching television economies in other parts of the world through the same triplicate lens of power, knowledge and geography that I have relied upon here, and that doing so would be likely to yield a productive envisioning of power and of the spatial dynamics of capital accumulation. Finally, what of the economic world beyond the media? I have no a priori reason to believe that the type of approach to economy and power utilized here would lack analytical purchase in other sectors of the economy. To be sure, all studies of the space economy must seek to factor in the “special characteristics” of the institutions or commodities being studied—just as, following the lead of the likes of Nicholas Garnham, I have tried to do here. Indeed, the “spatial fix” I described and examined in chapter 4 is, perhaps, a feature unique to the media economy and the public goods that circulate through it. Yet, like Garnham and other political economists guided, in the

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final reckoning, by Marx, I would insist that capitalism is, still, capitalism. I have sought to demonstrate here that a focus on power, knowledge and geography can generate a series of insights that a more rigid adherence to Marx might not allow. (Other geographers are beginning to explore similar propositions, and while in most cases Foucault is their main touchstone, he need not be our only (post) modern ally.7) But even where we yoke an appreciation of knowledge, space and place to the political economists’ traditional emphasis on power, my view is that critical political economy in general, and Marx in particular, should remain the bedrock of the attempt to understand today’s complex economic geographies.

NOTES 1. K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx/Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, Progress, Moscow, 1976, p. 505. 2. Quoted in M. Neufeld and S. Whitworth, “Imag(in)ing Canadian foreign policy,” in W. Clement (ed.), Understanding Canada: Building on the New Canadian Political Economy (McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 1997, 197–214), at p. 198. 3. This is not to say, of course, that the alignment of media power with the capitalist class is without tensions and contradictions. On these, see especially S. Hall, “Media Power and Class Power,” in J. Curran, J. Ecclestone, G. Oakley and A. Richardson (eds.), Bending Reality: The State of the Media (Pluto Press, London, 1986, 5–14). 4. J. Tunstall, The media were American: US mass media in decline, Oxford University Press, New York, 2007; M. Keane, A. Fung and A. Moran, New Television, Globalization, and the East Asian Cultural Imagination, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2007. 5. A. Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized, New York University Press, New York, 2007. 6. See, for instance, M. Curtin, Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2007. 7. For a “theoretical” consideration, see J. Crampton and S. Elden (eds.), Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2007; and for an empirical analysis, M. Hannah, Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000.

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Index

Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (Canada), 388 advertiser-funded programming, 181–83. See also advertising; product placement advertising, 8, 74, 398; industry developments, 181–83; and ratings, 293–308; revenues, 94–95, 186–90, 218, 252–53, 420. See also attention economy; mass-market premium agglomeration: of media production activities, 20–21, 323–25, 360 Albritton, Robert, 14 Al-Jazeera, 150 Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), 11– 12, 428. See also studios, Hollywood Allison Grodner Productions, 417 All3Media, 184, 255, 256, 260 American Broadcasting Company (ABC), 12, 157, 218, 230, 259, 389– 90, 391, 416; and Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, 412–13, 419–21 anaemic geographies, 204, 208–11, 226–27 Arthur Smith & Associates, 417 Ashley, Simon, 339 Attali, Jacques, 398–99

attention economy, 189–90, 293, 302– 3. See also advertising audience measurement. See ratings Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), 72, 74, 100, 107–8, 273 Bagdikian, Ben, 132, 162n27 Ballance, Alison, 354, 363, 369 Baran, Paul, 217 Barnes, Trevor, 27–28 Barnett, Clive, 137–38 Barnett, John, 232, 389 Bartlett, Randall, 215 Battlestar Galactica, 160, 242, 262, 268–76 Bauman, Zygmunt, 110 Bazalgette, Peter, 416 BBC Natural History Unit (NHU), 352, 353–61, 364–70 BBC Worldwide, 261, 326, 364; international production activities, 259, 416–17; international program sales, 210, 222–23; revenues, 8, 74, 365 Benkler, Yochai, 128 Bernstein, Carl, 205 Bernstein, Howard, 338–39 Bethell, Tom, 62 457

458

Index

Bettig, Ronald, 6, 143, 147, 202 Big Brother, 183, 290, 392, 416, 417 Big Cat Diary, 355–59 The Big Experiment, 389 The Blair Witch Project, 14 The Blue Planet, 261, 366 Bousé, Derek, 361, 363 Branson, Richard, 95, 255 Braun, Bruce, 351 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 62, 154–56, 190, 193, 249, 306, 384; acquisition of US programs, 174, 201, 208, 216–17, 250; Board of Governors / BBC Trust, 49, 91; Charter, 180, 327; commercialization of, 8; iPlayer, 128, 159, 193; joint venture with Discovery Channel, 133, 261, 364–70; license fee, 252, 294, 327, 341; power of, 94–95, 416–17; production activities, 174, 180–81, 259, 268–71, 273, 415–17; proposed move to Salford, 98, 321–41; public-service obligations, 8, 70–71, 290–91. See also BBC Natural History Unit; BBC Worldwide British Isles: A Natural History, 367 British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), 98, 149, 177, 190, 217; acquisition of US programs, 191, 219–21, 381; financing of, 255, 264–68; growth of, 185–86, 262–63; and international program coproduction, 269–76; power of, 94– 95; and ratings, 304–8; and satellite footprint issues, 152–56 broadcast networks, US, 1, 11, 133, 267, 302, 315, 391–92, 417–18, 425 Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (BARB), 30, 35, 294–307. See also ratings Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA; New Zealand), 92 Broadcasting Standards Commission (BSC; UK), 49, 91 Broomhead, Steven, 333

bro’Town, 238n98, 388–90 Browning, Steve, 92–93, 387 Bryan, Richard, 278n23 Bubble, 144 Buck-Morss, Susan, 46–47, 303 Buena Vista, 218–19, 221, 226, 413, 419–20 Burnham, Andy, 97, 182, 330 cable television, 10, 95, 143, 163n27, 177, 185–86, 252, 263 calculative practices, 4, 46, 293, 301–4 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), 107 capitalism, 5–8, 93–94, 131, 139, 265; and advertising, 302–3; and commodity fetishism, 397–400; and creativity, 329; as monopolistic, 217. See also circulation of capital; Marx, Karl Caradus, Chris, 217–18, 226 cartography, 43–44 CBS (US), 75, 259, 392, 416, 417 Celador, 393, 412–13, 419–22 The Chair, 229–31 Chamberlin, Edward, 215 Channel 4 (UK), 53, 70, 95, 255, 290, 357; acquisition of US programs, 218–19; advertising sales, 297–99; cost profile, 74–76; and independent production sector, 174, 179; public-service obligations, 8, 71, 290 Channel Five (UK), 8, 71, 255, 290 charters, television company, 100–101, 106–8. See also British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC): Charter; TVNZ: Charter Christie, Julie, 230–31 Christopherson, Susan, 129, 324 Chrysalis Television, 184, 232 circulation of capital, 3, 12, 15–16, 19, 241–76. See also capitalism; money capital; productive capital Clark, Helen, 71, 80 Clifford, Denis, 107 Cloud 9 Screen Entertainment, 258

Index clustering. See agglomeration CNN, 133, 258 Colley, Linda, 382 Collins, Richard, 54–55, 91–92, 217, 237n91 commodity, 247, 427; fetishism of, 247, 397–400. See also cultural commodities competition, 214–20, 427–28 consumption: moments, 241–43; production of, 263–64 convergence: of media and communications technologies, 49, 106 co-production, television program, 261–62, 268–76, 364–66, 370, 387, 417 copyright, 136–38, 143, 145 cost-benefit analysis, 112–15 costs: of television broadcasters, 74–79. See also marginal costs The Cottage, 144 Cottle, Simon, 352 Couldry, Nick, 3 Creasey, Matt, 416 creative industries, 17, 330; mapping of, 39–49. See also capitalism: and creativity; creativity and economic development; cultural industries creativity and economic development, 329–34. See also creative industries; Florida, Richard Crissell, Andrew, 384 cultural commodities, 6–7, 9–12, 14, 76, 134–38, 171–74, 192–93 cultural discount, 213, 395. See also media economics; trade: in television programs and program formats cultural economy, 4 cultural imperialism, 103, 130, 205–8, 227–28 cultural industries, 5, 12, 14, 17, 39, 134–37. See also creative industries Currah, Andrew, 160n5 Curran, James, 3 Currie, David, 53

459

Curtin, Michael, 159, 190, 324 CW Media, 261 Dallas, 395 Dancing with the Stars, 259, 416–17 David Graham and Associates: and UK television program export policy, 46–47, 379–86 Davies, Gail, 352, 366 day-and-date release, 144–45, 157 Demeritt, David, 48 Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), 97–98; mapping of creative industries, 39–49 Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), 46–48, 97, 100, 379 Desperate Housewives, 218–19 Desrosières, Alain, 44 Dicken, Peter, 247 digital versatile disc (DVD): pricing of, 145–49; region coding, 147–49; and studio windowing strategies, 143–49 Discovery Channel, 258, 283n78, 357, 362–63; joint venture with British Broadcasting Corporation, 133, 261, 364–70 Disney, 12, 133, 258; program export deals, 218–19, 221; and Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, 412–13, 418–22. See also American Broadcasting Company (ABC); Buena Vista Diverse Productions, 357 Dowling, Jonathan, 229–30 dumping: of television programs, 205–11. See also price, of television programs Dunn, Elizabeth, 31–32 Dyke, Greg, 179, 294, 321, 326 EastEnders, 242, 268, 271–73 economic geography, 3, 20; and the media, 323–25; methodology in, 27–28 economic models, 35, 52, 212–14. See also neoclassical economics economies of scale, 10–11, 76, 135–37 economy: production of the, 45–46, 293, 303

460

Index

Ehrlich, Paul, 64 empire, 352–59; of the US media, 226– 32, 353, 362–70, 411–22 encryption, 10, 151–52, 154–56. See also satellite television Endemol, 95, 183, 256, 260, 392, 416–17 enframing, 43–49 Equator, 353 Ernst & Young, 53 expertise, 51–53, 110–11, 114–15 export policy, television program, 46–47, 379–86. See also trade: in television programs and program formats Eyeworks, 231 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 102–6 Fellett, John, 96 fictitious capital, 265–66 Fithian, John, 144 Florida, Richard, 322–23, 329–31, 332, 334, 336–37, 339–40. See also creativity and economic development Football Association Premier League (FAPL): and satellite television, 153–54 Forde, Matt, 210, 222–23 Format Recognition and Protection Association (FRAPA), 391. See also formats, television program; law formats, television program, 78, 379, 390–91; and commodity fetishism, 397–400; growth of trade in, 391–93; New Zealand-originated, 229–32, 388–90; placelessness of, 389, 393–97; UK-originated, 259, 365, 412–22 Foster, Robin, 104–6 Foucault, Michel, 9, 44, 48, 50, 52, 54, 243, 303, 430 Fox Television, 4, 144, 155, 219, 362, 392, 416. See also News Corporation; NHNZ Frank, Thomas, 1–2, 5, 425

Franklin, Harvey, 69, 108 Fraser, Matthew, 205 Freedman, Des, 106, 397, 400 Freeview (New Zealand), 112, 114–15, 177 Freeview (UK), 114, 155, 186, 190 Frewen, Tom, 71, 109 Friends, 219, 221, 297 full funding, of television programs, 179 Fung, Anthony, 426 Game Show in my Head, 417 Garnham, Nicholas, 5–6, 7, 179; on cultural commodities, 9–12, 14, 130, 135–37, 172–73, 398, 429 Garvie, Wayne, 417 Gavin, Rupert, 386 genealogy, 242–43 gentrification, 339–40 geoblocking, 158–59 geographical imagination, 17–18, 61– 80. See also imaginative geographies George, Susan, 63 Gertler, Meric, 31–32 Gibson Group, 174 Gitlin, Todd, 291, 302, 304 Glasmeier, Amy, 34 Godzich, Wlad, 398–99 Golding, Peter, 6–7 Goodey, Felicity, 328, 333 Gordon the Garden Gnome, 273 Gore, Al, 64 governance, 18, 87; and capitalism, 93–94; of New Zealand media and communications, 92–93, 96–97, 100, 111–14; of UK media and communications, 48–55, 91–92, 97–100 Governors’ Camp (Masai Mara, Kenya), 355–59 Gregory, Derek, 64 Grey’s Anatomy, 191, 218 Grundy Television, 387–88 Gyngell, David, 415, 417 Hacking, Ian, 44 Hall, Stuart, 124, 283n87

Index Hamann, Paul, 366 Hannah, Matthew, 44 Haraway, Donna, 355–56 Harley, Brian, 44 Harraway, Neil, 362 Hartzell, Jamie, 367 Harvey, David, 7, 103; on circulation of capital, 15, 242, 244–48, 272, 274; on commodity fetishism, 247, 399– 400; on credit, 265–67; on discourse of overpopulation, 62, 64–65; on geographical knowledges, 64; on neoliberal entrepreneurialism, 337– 38; on place, 193n1, 358, 409; on spatial fix, 131, 139 Hat Trick Productions, 417 Hay, Gill, 221, 226, 415 Heartbeat, 358 Hell’s Kitchen, 416–17 Henderson, George, 13, 277n19 Heroes, 144, 201 Hesmondhalgh, David, 50, 55, 91, 102, 104 Higdon Simon, 104–5 Hobbs, Marian, 100, 108 Honest, 389–90. See also Outrageous Fortune Hoskins, Colin, 212–14, 216, 222, 395 Hrvatska radiotelevizija (HRT), 73–74 Hudson, Ray, 263 Iger, Robert, 144 imaginative geographies, 381–86 independent production, television program: in New Zealand, 174, 175–78; in UK, 174, 178–93; in US, 133 Independent Television commission (ITC), 91, 180, 386 Internet: and television, 128–29, 140, 156–60, 178–79, 181, 220, 316–17, 428–29 Isaac, Jeffrey, 8 ITV (UK), 54, 98, 155, 173, 181, 193, 255, 389–90; acquisition of US programs, 174, 208, 216–17, 237n82, 249, 271; power of, 94–95;

461 production activities, 174, 191, 259–60, 290–91, 325–36, 416–17; public-service obligations, 8, 71, 290–91; ratings, 186–90, 299–300, 306

Jackson, Peter, 145, 258, 421 Jayne, Mark, 45 Jessop, Bob, 88 Jhally, Sut, 398 Kaun Banega Crorepati, 396–97 Keane, Michael, 426 Kelsey, Jane, 108 Kerr, roger, 68–69 Kiedrowski, Tom, 104, 106 King Kong, 145 knowledge: flows of, 18, 87–115; geographical, 39–49, 61–80, 123– 24, 210–11; productive function of, 16, 45–47, 79–80, 124, 293, 301–4 Krugman, Paul, 211, 408 labor, 13, 15, 247; division of, 11–12. See also productive capital Labour Party (New Zealand), 61, 71– 72, 77–80, 100, 107–8 Labour Party (UK), 17; and creative industries, 39–40, 46, 329–30; and independent production sector, 180; and media policy-making, 97–98; and television export policy, 46–47, 379–86 Larner, Wendy, 46 law, 143, 147, 152, 154, 418–22 Le Heron, Richard, 46 Lealand, Geoff, 92, 230–31 Leese, Richard, 333 LEK Consulting, 53 Lessig, Lawrence, 137 Levitt, Theodore, 206 Life on Earth, 353 Link TV (US), 238n98, 388–90 Living TV (UK), 191, 217, 218, 389 lobbying, 96–98, 148–49 local programming, 76–79, 386–90

462

Index

Longman, Phillip, 66 Lost, 157–58, 218–19, 223 MacKenzie, Kelvin, 306 Maharey, Steve, 61, 71, 78, 80, 92, 108 Malanga, Steven, 332 Mallard, Trevor, 71, 80 Malthus, Thomas, 62, 64–65 Man vs. Wild / Born Survivor, 357 Mäori Television, 8, 70–71, 175 mapping: of creative industries, 39–49 marginal costs, 128, 135–36, 209–11 Martin, Ron, 223 Marx, Karl, 65, 137, 138, 256, 263, 265, 429–30; and circulation of capital, 15–16, 242–48; on commodities and commodity fetishism, 379, 397–400; and political economy of media and communications, 6–7, 11; on power, 8–9, 425; on value, price and profit, 13–15, 266 mass-market premium, 186–90. See also advertising McCarthy, Anna, 349 McChesney, Robert, 1–2, 5, 291 McCloskey, Deirdre, 213–14 McDevitt, Caroline, 306 media economics, 6–7, 19, 202–3, 208–14 mediacity: UK, 328, 330–31, 337–38 mediated identities, 381–84 Meehan, Eileen, 9, 291, 293, 295, 303–4, 305 Meek, Kip, 115 Mellor, Rosemary, 336 Miège, Bernard, 11–12, 134 Miller, Peter, 50–51, 111, 303, 307 Ministry for Culture and Heritage (MCH), 71, 107–9, 112–13 Mirus, Rolf, 395 Mitchell, Timothy, 4, 9, 208–9, 243; on discourse of overpopulation, 65–66; on enframing, 40, 44–48, 57n29, 303 Monbiot, George, 367 money capital, 246, 250–56, 262–68. See also circulation of capital

Moran, Albert, 426 Mordue, Tom, 358 Motorway Patrol, 387 MTV, 133, 258 multichannel television, growth of, 177, 185–86 Murdoch, Elisabeth, 260 Murdoch, Rupert, 220, 232, 254, 381 Murdock, Graham, 6–7 Napoli, Philip, 295, 297 National Geographic, 368–70 natural history programming, 351–70 NBC Universal, 12, 133, 160, 201, 258, 268–70, 275–76 neoclassical economics, 6, 215–16, 222–24. See also media economics neoliberal urbanism, 337–40 Network Ten (Australia), 390 New Zealand, 4–5; as locus of geographical imaginaries, 61–80; media and communications governance, 92–93, 96–97, 100, 111–114; television export business, 229–32, 254, 386–90; television industry, 8, 94, 174, 175–78 New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER), 113 News Corporation, 133, 177, 219, 232, 254–55, 361–64, 381 NHNZ, 4–5, 176–77; export business, 369–70; origins of, 360; ownership of, 231–32, 255; production operations, 257; programming, 257, 353, 354, 361–64. See also Fox Television; News Corporation; TVNZ Nielsen Company, 302, 304–5. See also ratings Nine Network (Australia), 389–90 Norsk Rikskringkasting (NRK), 73–74, 107 Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA), 328, 329, 333–34 NYPD Blue, 144 NZ On Air, 77, 176, 230, 271, 387–89 Oakley, Kate, 44–45, 345n40

Index Office of Communications (Ofcom), 99, 182, 191, 291, 304; creation of, 40, 99–106, 109–10; and deregulation, 50; and disciplinary power, 48–55, 91–92; evidence-based approach of, 51–52, 104; and expertise, 51–53; and independent production sector, 180–81; and public-service broadcasting, 52, 97–98 Orange Roughies, 271, 273 output deals, television program, 218– 19, 221. See also trade: in television programs and program formats Outrageous Fortune, 238n98, 389–90 overpopulation, discourse of, 62–67 Oxygen Media, 12 Palloix, Christian, 248–49 parallel importing, 138–39, 148 Parsons, Christopher, 361 Peck, Jamie, 27–28, 51, 332, 334, 336–41 Perry, Nick, 88–89, 101–2, 109 Petley, Julian, 102 Pickles, John, 44 piracy, 138, 145–46, 156–60, 275–76, 391 Pitt, Ruth, 332 place, 3, 20, 349–50; and economic process, 222–26; in neoclassical economics, 222–24; of origination of policy, 101–10; in television program formats, 393–97, 388–90; of television program production, 20–21, 360–68, 323–25; of television program shooting, 258, 324, 353–59, 394; in television programs, 377–90; in theory construction, 407–9 Planet Earth, 366, 369, 370 Plummer, Paul, 34 policy transfer. See knowledge; flows of political economy, 6, 16–17, 216; of media and communications, 2–3, 6–8, 130, 293, 302–3, 397–99, 425–27 Popstars, 229–31

463

Porter, Ted, 44, 52, 304 power: and the consumer, 20, 289–99, 308; disciplinary, 41, 47–55, 91–92; distribution of, 11–12, 94–95, 131–34, 171–93, 201–32, 414–22, 426–27; and knowledge, 40–55, 304–8, 357–59; and law, 418–22; nature and exercise of, 8–9, 19, 202–3, 227–28, 308, 315–16, 425– 28; as “organized,” 2, 5, 8, 425–28; as productive, 4, 293, 305–8 presales, television program, 272–73. See also co-production, television program price, 13–15; of digital versatile discs, 145–49; and power, 202–3, 205–8, 214–20, 414–16, 427; of television programs, 19, 75–79, 201–32, 411–12 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), 52 Prime TV (New Zealand), 175, 217, 369 Prison Break, 219 product placement, 181–83. See also advertising productive capital, 247, 256–62. See also circulation of capital profit, 13–15, 173, 184, 227, 244, 266, 365, 393, 419–22 public goods, 10, 134–36, 171 public-service broadcasting, 8, 52, 70–71, 326 Radio Joint Audience Research Limited (RAJAR), 306–7 Radio New Zealand, 107–8 Radio Telefís Éireann (RTE), 73–74, 107, 155–56 Ralston, Bill, 96 Ramsay, Gordon, 416 Rantisi, Norma, 41, 340 ratings, 20, 30, 35, 186–90, 289–308 RDF Media, 260 region coding. See digital versatile discs (DVD) regulation theory, 93–94, 96 Reith, John, 384

464

Index

Richards, Ed, 109–10 Rigby, David, 34 Ritzer, George, 395 Robinson, Angie, 333 Robinson, Joan, 215 Rodrigue, Michael, 415 Rogue Productions, 389 Rosati, Clayton, 2, 22n7 Rose, Nikolas, 50–51, 111, 303, 307 “runaway” television production, 258, 324, 394 Russell, Catherine, 356 Said, Edward, 88, 101, 110, 383 Sakr, Naomi, 149–50 Salford (UK), 98, 321–41 Salford City Council (SCC), 328, 335 satellite television, 112, 135; and studio windowing strategies, 149–56, 202. See also British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB); Sky Network Television (New Zealand) Saxenian, AnnaLee, 31 Sayer, Andrew, 2, 9, 213–14 scarcity, economic, 10–11, 18, 136–43, 145–46, 173, 190, 191–93 Schiller, Herbert, 205–7 Schlesinger, Philip, 207 Schumpeter, Joseph, 217 Sci Fi Channel (UK), 201, 306 Sci Fi Channel (US), 160, 270, 275 Scott, Allen, 76, 129–30, 161n13, 324, 332, 349, 360 Scott, Jonathan, 358–59 Screen Producers and Directors Association (SPADA), 92, 178, 325 Screentime (Australia), 230 Seaton, Jean, 98 S4C, 70–71 Shed Productions, 184 Sheppard, Eric, 27–28, 34, 223 Shine Productions, 260 Silverstone, Roger, 1 Shortland Street, 387–88 Skornia, Harry, 302 Sky Network Television (New Zealand), 251–52, 258; competition with

TVNZ for US acquisitions, 217, 219– 21; financing of, 254; history of, 177, 255; power of, 94, 96–97, 175 Smith, Adam, 91 Smith, Chris, 40, 380 Smith, Neil, 388, 408 Smith, Paul, 413, 419, 421 Smythe, Dallas, 293, 302–3, 397–98 South Pacific Pictures, 176, 231–32, 255, 387, 389–90 Sparke, Matthew, 41, 204, 208–9 spatial fix, 18–19, 138–60 Special Broadcasting Service (Australia), 388 Spectrum Strategy Consultants, 113–15 Star TV, 159, 259, 396 statistics, 43–44, 212–14, 302–4. See also ratings Stedman, Michael, 364, 369 Steemers, Jeanette, 202 Storper, Michael, 129, 324 studios, Hollywood, 136–37, 258, 394, 417–18; power of, 131–34, 216–20, 315–16; program export business, 201–26; windowing strategies, 139–60, 202; and writers’ strike of 2007–8, 11–12. See also broadcast networks, US; vertical integration Super Channel (Canada), 389 Sussman, Gerald, 2, 22n5 Svantesson, Dan, 159 Sweezy, Paul, 217 Swyngedouw, Eric, 110, 336 Talkback Thames, 256, 260 Taylor, Peter, 381 Taylor, Russ, 105 Telegdy, Paul, 415–18 Thompson, Caroline, 326, 339 Thompson, Edward, 418 Thompson, Graeme, 91, 93 Thompson, Jonathan, 50–51 Thompson, Mark, 321, 327, 331–33, 341 Thomson, Roy, 193 Tickell, Adam, 27–28, 51 time-space compression, 157–58

Index Time Warner, 133, 146, 221, 230, 258, 421. See also CNN Tinic, Serra, 395 Toepfer, Bill, 229–30 Touchdown Productions, 230–31 trade: in television programs and program formats, 19, 75–76, 131–32, 201–32, 249–50, 368–70, 377–400, 411–22 The Trials of Life, 361 Tunstall, Jeremy, 131, 133, 211, 364–65, 426 TVNZ, 232, 255, 361; Charter, 61, 76, 78, 93, 99–100, 106–9; cost profile, 74–76; debate over “correct” model for, 61–63, 70–80; export activities, 229, 387–89; financing of, 254; governance of, 93, 96–97, 106–15; import activities, 216–21, 226, 411; power of, 94, 96–97, 175–78, 230; production activities, 174–76; program commissioning, 258, 271, 363, 369–70; revenues, 8 24, 155; 2929 Entertainment, 144; 2waytraffic, 393, 421 TV3 (New Zealand), 96, 175–76, 216–19, 255 Tyndall, Jo, 112 Unbreakable, 139–40 underpopulation, discourse of, 62–63, 66–68, 70–80 United Kingdom: balance of trade in television, 132, 380–81, 413; creative industries, 39–49; media and communications governance, 48–55, 91–92, 97–100; television export business, 253–54, 379–86, 391–400, 411–22; television industry, 7–8, 46–55, 94–95, 174, 178–93, 295–308

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Valleycrest Productions, 419–20 value, 13–15, 244–48, 266–67; capture of, 11–12, 201–32, 411–16; of television audiences, 295–99 value chain, television industry, 181– 83, 415–18 van Beusekom, Monica, 66–67 Varis, Tapio, 131 vertical integration, 133, 417–19 Viacom, 75, 133, 187, 258, 270. See also CBS (US); MTV Virgin Media, 95, 98, 217, 252, 255 Walking with . . ., 366, 369 Ward, Kevin, 337, 341 Warshauer, Matthew, 393 Wattenberg, Ben, 66, 68 Wayne, Mike, 11 Weakest Link, 365, 392 Weber, Max, 127 Weber, Samuel, 350 Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, 392–97, 412–13, 418–22 White Wilderness, 353–54 Wild Asia, 354, 364 Williams, Gwyn, 337 Wilson, Leigh, 229, 387, 388 windowing, 138–60 Wolf, Eric, 4 Wood, Denis, 44 Woodward, Shaun, 333, 341 Writers Guild of America (WGA), 11–12, 428 Yleisradio (YLE), 73–74, 107 YouTube, 157, 160, 290 Zonn, Leo, 377 Zucker, Jeff, 144, 317

About the Author

Brett Christophers studied at the universities of Oxford, British Columbia and Auckland. He has also worked for several years in and around the UK television industry. He is the author of several journal articles and of the research monograph Positioning the Missionary (UBC Press, 1998). He currently lives in Sweden with his wife and children, and is a research fellow in the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Uppsala University.

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