Climate change on TV: Brand v Clarkson, X Factor, and Rooney?
Daniel Nelson
Smuggling climate issues into TV soaps was another proposal.
Discussion in the Palace of Westminster was prompted by the launch of a report, The Environment on TV: Are broadcasters meeting the challenge?, published by the London-based International Broadcasting Trust.
Not all the report’s recommendations were accepted by the panel and audience.
For example, report author Caroline Haydon’s emphasis on the importance of “long-form documentary coverage” was rebuffed by Ralph Lee of Channel 4: “We must look for sideways, imaginative ways of making programmes about climate change.”
Lee also dismissed the proposal for more audience research. When asked, viewers always say they want more programmes about the environment, but in reality they don’t watch them, he said: the best research was to check the viewing figures.
Similarly, Bill Lyons, executive editor of Country File, pointed out that his programme had between 6 million and 9 million viewers a week – making it the highest rated factual programme on TV – which proved that “there is an audience for environmental matters”.
Lyons and Lee agreed that television was not in the business of making public information films, and that advocates for particular causes should engage with the public and not expect TV to do it for them.
Other successful programmes with a strong environmental bent cited in the report included Richard Attenborough’s Africa series (6 million viewers per programme; coverage of the natural world far outstripped any other environmental topic in the year covered by the report) and Simon Reeve’s travels. The Reeves programmes were cited as an example of “smuggling in”, a term used by commissioning editors to tempt viewers by offering other attractions.
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Fish Fight was praised, too, as an example of a technique that can work: campaigning. Viewership was down for the second series, but 850,000 people signed up to the campaign and an appeal to viewers to click into action produced 42,000 tweets in 24 hours and a peak of 22,000 that Twitter described as a hashtag spike equivalent “to those the X Factor enjoys around its biggest moments”.
Leo Hickman, ex Guardian environment correspondent and now chief climate change adviser to WWF, mused at the London meeting, “If only an X Factor competitor would sing about climate change or recycling…”
His comment was made in jest, but if you’ve taken part in an NGO meeting about communications you’ll know that there’s always someone who thinks that, say, biodiversity loss or global soil erosion could be halted if only the subject could be captured in a cresting Tweet or by a singing cat You Tube video gone viral.
Oddly, the meeting hardly mentioned NGOs. Nor do they feature much in the report. It quotes WWF’s Tom Crompton as saying, “NGOs definitely don’t do enough to engage with the media and when they do it’s often in unhelpful ways. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to see beyond the immediate and narrow focus of their own particular interest.”
Other points from the report include:
· Environmental issues rarely find their way into comedy or drama
· A genre of climate fiction has emerged, known as cli-fi
· Climate change is “a quadruple whammy … it’s worthy sounding, it’s bad news or the audience already knows it, and it’s something people can’t do anything about themselves” – David Glover of C4 (He might have added, “and you can’t see it”.)
· “I don’t think the word ‘green’ is right any more” – Bill Lyons
· Six years after the screening of Martin Durkin’s The Great Global Warming Swindle – which gave the view of a minority of scientists not signing up to the theory of man-made global warming, and was criticised by Ofcom – it’s still the film mentioned most often… as staying in the minds of programme makers.
· “For a long time space didn’t rate, and then along came Brian Cox” – David Glover.
The only spontaneous outburst of applause at the meeting was provoked by a suggestion that Channel 4 should turn its investigative skills onto climate change denial: who are the deniers, who’s funding them, how do they work?
+ The report is available from the IBT, www.ibt.org.uk
