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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 183 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 183, February 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Chris Nineham’s review of Behind the Screens (December SR), a compilation of essays exploring television in the 1990s, is disingenuous enough to demand a reply. Only Colin Sparks gets the thumbs up from Nineham, although one wonders if our intrepid reviewer bothered to read the other articles.
According to Nineham ‘the motives behind ruling class broadcasting reforms of the last ten years’ are not analysed. Can I point to Brian Winston’s article which looks at the state’s relationship to broadcasting, past and present. Winston argues, ‘The state had seized [the BBC] just as the state had seized the press and the theatres centuries before; but this was a liberal state and therefore the nature of the seizure was complex and sophisticated.’
Unfortunately, associating culture with complexity seems (like much of the SWP’s cultural analysis) to be the last thing on Nineham’s mind. Yet the 1980s was a contradictory affair as far as television was concerned, with some real gains made for women and black people, both as cultural workers and audiences. The book attempted to address this, but presumably questions of gender and ethnicity are just more reformist grist to Nineham’s revolutionary mill.
For Nineham the book smacks of ‘tragically low’ expectations. But at the first of two conferences out of which the book emerged, Colin Sparks claimed that the revolution could hardly be said to be imminent. Thus it is precisely on the Labour Party that pressure has to be applied. So there you have it Chris, the Big R does not hover on the even distant horizon and thus while it’s all very well to dream about workers’ power, this book was addressing the here and now.
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Mike Wayne |
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