Are you being served?

When I was growing up, that is when there were only two channels on Swedish TV and when the state had a monopoly of both radio and TV production, public service was such a self-evident concept that it was never even mentioned, much less discussed. Public service was synonymous with a mission of benefit to all: the task of the broadcast media was simply to satisfy the tastes and demands of the majority of citizens. The result was the TV we know from the 1960s and 1970s: weekend entertainment, debate programmes on weekday evenings, science and technology magazines, educational TV, pedagogic children’s programmes and one or two detective and melodrama series. The educational purpose was obvious. It says a great deal about this ambition that several of those comedians who became famous at the end of the 1960s through the medium of TV actually had quite a respectable academic background: Moltas Eriksson, Tage Danielsson, Hatte Furuhagen, Magnus Härenstam etc.

The remarkable thing about Swedish TV is that the idea of public service that was established during its infancy seems to live on even today, despite the fact that the external pre-requisites have changed in such a markedly radical way. At least three observations can be made about the period since the TV monopoly was broken, which together mark an essential difference compared with the TV of the 1960s and 70s:

1. Commercialisation of the TV medium. The commercial TV channels which have taken an ever-increasing market share from the end of the 1980s onwards have caused an overall intensification of the entertainment aspect—everywhere nowadays different kinds of reality show are pumped out: silly game shows and competitions, sing-along programs etc.

2. Infantilisation of the TV medium. One is able to accept the fact that the entertainers of the 1980s and 90s seemed rather to make a point of the fact that they had not completed their upper secondary school education, but it is more remarkable that solid knowledge has appeared to be an obstacle in the monitoring of culture and society. SVT’s pop programmes are more often used as a recruiting base for cultural programmes than are the cultural pages of daily papers. And when party leaders are being questioned in connection with parliamentary elections there has for some time been a multitude of amateurs as the jury—recruited precisely from the entertainment industry.

3. Technicalisation of the TV medium: a growing focus on the external form. Even in those cases where the focus is on more traditional educational programmes—about languages, brain research, history etc.—they are extremely carefully packaged, with various high-tech effects which more than anything else indicate that from the producers’ point of view, they do not trust the content as such to be absorbing enough to hold the viewers’ attention.

This development has, however, caused SVT to draw a number of remarkable conclusions about public service broadcasting. As the commercial TV channels aim to satisfy the needs of various more or less expensive entertainment programmes, there should be a reason for SVT to refine the public service idea so as no longer to try satisfy all imaginable tastes. On the other hand perhaps they should emphasise the educational and serious aspect of the public service task—the very reason that this aspect has not been represented in the commercial selection.

Instead of this they have retained the idea of SVT as a smörgåsbord for everyone, at the same time as anxiously following developments in commercial TV, with the result that they can neither motivate their existence by referring to huge viewing figures (where the share of the viewers for SVT1 and SVT2 has dropped from 100% in 1986 to 30% in 2007) nor to high-quality products. When one compares the American development of high-quality TV series on pay channels such as HBO with the products of Swedish TV such as Andra avenyn (a soap set in present-day Göteborg) or Upp till kamp (a historical drama series set in Göteborg from the mid 1960s to mid 1970s), the flaws in the system become clear. Or if you compare the comprehensive documentaries shown on niche channels such the History Channel with expensive SVT drivel such as Jonas och Musses religion (a documentary series in which the presenters start a new religion) or Sex med Victor (conversations about sex).

From once having been clear about its aims, Swedish public service broadcasting seems increasingly to be associated with a nervous side-glance at markets and viewer feedback. From having had a clear vision of its popular education remit, Swedish state television has become more uncertain about the value of precisely what it is that they should really be doing. From this comes far fetched “theme Saturdays” as soon as they show an award-winning documentary at the weekend. From this comes the trend of destroying every in-house historical drama series with an anachronistic references to contemporary youth culture. And from this comes, too, the current theme issue, about a task in crisis. Public service—for whom?