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Image by Getty Images via @daylife   From The Independent

More than 6,000 complaints about an Eastenders plot had been logged with the BBC last night and the number is expected to keep rising.

The public reaction was sparked by the storyline in which which Ronnie Branning, played by Samantha Womack, steals a newborn baby after her losing her own to cot death.

BBC executives were forced into defending the plot which was criticised as sensationalist and unrealistic. The website Mumsnet was among the critics. "We appreciate this is a challenging storyline," said executive producer Bryan Kirkwood.

The level of fury has been exceeded only once before – when more than 7,000 viewers objected to the death of Danielle Jones.

MEDIA STUDIES: REPRESENTATION AND SEXUALITY

An interesting take on this issue from Sue Perkins writing at  the Queerty Website.

If Gay TV Characters Weren’t So Stereotypical, How Would We Recognize Them? / Queerty

 

If Gay TV Characters Weren’t So Stereotypical, How Would We Recognize Them?

Sue Perkins, the lesbian British comedian who is not related in any way to Tony Perkins, read all 226 pages of the BBC’s report on the portrayal of gay characters on television, and she’s got a suggestion: it’s the soap operas that need to start offering up more accurate representations of ‘mos if any minds are going to change.
The report, which made our radar for revealing how many straight Brits have a problem with the way gays look on the tube, also showed gay audiences were a bit fed up with the stereotypical characters they usually see under the LGBT banner. Which is the problem Perkins — who was outed in 2002 on I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! by ex-girlfriend Rhona Cameron — has. Writing ina Guardian op-ed:

Although the BBC and Channel 4 fare well in this report, there is much left to do. The responsibility must fall on the biggest hitters – soap operas. Watched by millions of middle Englanders week after week, they could change the perception of gay people where it matters most. In 1987, EastEnders’ Barry and Colin shared a chaste mouth-graze. In 1994, Brookside’s Beth and Margaret locked lips. Coronation Street discovered lesbians this year. If gay history had evolved as slowly and timidly as television portrayed it, then the first drag queen would be tiptoeing out of the primordial ooze around about now.
What saddens me is that the same issues keep arising. For gay men, it’s the predominance of the camp cliche. For lesbians, despair at the outdated butch-femme stereotypes. Gay women generally are under-represented, unless you count the number of times the word “lesbian” or “dyke” features as a lazy comic’s punchline.

There’s no real mystery that television writers are “lazy” and network execs “dumb things down,” because that is how the industry works, at least according to some antiquated model that says viewers will only tune in if we give them caricatures. Which is why we’re usually presented with the gay BFF, always there to shop or gossip.

When gay characters stop cat-hoarding, scatter-cushion throwing and compulsively shagging — when we’re just sitting around paying bills like Average Jos – then middle England, and the Queer Nation, will be happy.

And as we all know, Average Jos are themselves accurately represented by the over-sexed, money-obsessed, impossibly-thin characters also seen on television.

MEDIA STUDIES: REPRESENTATION AND SEXUALITY

Gay roles on television need to be real

• Sue Perkins

The up-coming BBC 3 series, Lip Service. Photograph: BBC/Kudos/BBC / KudosLast week saw the publication of the Corporation’s “Portrayal of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual People on the BBC”, a document only marginally more anticipated than the local phone directory. It runs at a mammoth 226 pages and, having read all of it, I can say with certainty that this is one dossier no one could be accused of “sexing up”.
Let me begin by saying that whatever conclusions I draw, they will be incorrect. I will have said the wrong thing, sold out, screwed over the sisterhood or dissed my brothers. I’m simply not capable of representing the diverse and dizzyingly rich panorama of gay existence, and neither, it transpires, is television.
Although the BBC and Channel 4 fare well in this report, there is much left to do. The responsibility must fall on the biggest hitters – soap operas. Watched by millions of middle Englanders week after week, they could change the perception of gay people where it matters most. In 1987, EastEnders’ Barry and Colin shared a chaste mouth-graze. In 1994, Brookside’s Beth and Margaret locked lips.Coronation Street discovered lesbians this year. If gay history had evolved as slowly and timidly as television portrayed it, then the first drag queen would be tiptoeing out of the primordial ooze around about now.
What saddens me is that the same issues keep arising. For gay men, it’s the predominance of the camp cliche. For lesbians, despair at the outdated butch-femme stereotypes. Gay women generally are under-represented, unless you count the number of times the word “lesbian” or “dyke” features as a lazy comic’s punchline.
As compensation we have gay-centric dramas; the excellent Sugar Rush and the groundbreaking Queer as Folk. Maybe the up-and-coming Lip Service on BBC3 will join those ranks. But surely, in order for true ground to break, there has to be a middle way – something between the tepid sexlessness of the soaps’ queer couplings and the separatist universe of the US show The L Word, in which the characters are like something out of the Barbie Lesbian Range: the tennis pro with detachable miniskirt, the hairdresser with blow-drier.
For me the solution is less “L” word than “I” word. Issues. Gay characters are a gift because they can deliver the shock value that soap operas are hardwired to. But surely, by normalising rather than pathologising gay culture you please not only gay respondents, but the 19% of heterosexual viewers that the report reveals are still squeamish about our presence on their screens.
When gay characters stop cat-hoarding, scatter-cushion throwing and compulsively shagging — when we’re just sitting around paying bills like Average Jos – then middle England, and the Queer Nation, will be happy.

The fee for this article has been donated to Families Together, providing information and support for families with LGBT children.

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MEDIA STUDIES: INSTITUTIONS

Courtesy of the Guardian.

BBC’s Mark Thompson takes aim at Murdoch empire in MacTaggart lecture

Mark Thompson and James Murdoch. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/PAMark Thompson, the BBC director general, launched a scathing attack on Rupert Murdoch’s media empire tonight, warning thatBSkyB is too powerful and threatens to “dwarf” the BBC and its competitors.
Delivering the annual MacTaggart lecture at the Mediaguardian Edinburgh television festival, Thompson rounded on Sky’s chairman, James Murdoch, who used the same speech last year to attack the corporation.
“A year ago, James Murdoch fretted aloud about the lamentable dominance of the BBC,” he said. “He was able to do that only by leaving Sky out of the equation.”
Thompson said Sky was “well on its way to being the most dominant force in broadcast media in this country”.
He said that News Corp, in effect controlled by the Murdoch family, now enjoys unprecedented industry power in the UK. News Corp owns 39% of Sky and is in the process of buying the part of the broadcaster it does not already own.
“If Sky’s proposal to acquire all of the remaining share in Sky goes through, Sky will not just be Britain’s biggest broadcaster, but a full part of a company which is also dominant in national newspapers as well as [being] one of Britain’s biggest publishers,” Thompson said. That would be “a concentration of cross-media ownership that would not be allowed in the United States or Australia”.
In a sideswipe at the Murdoch press he also criticised newspaper coverage of the BBC, claiming: “Some newspapers appear to print something hostile about the BBC every week … the scale and intensity of the current assaults does feel different.”
Thompson also attacked Sky’s content, conceding that it had spent heavily on news and sport but saying it had failed to invest enough of its £4.8bn subscription revenues in British programming. He said Sky should be forced to pay ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 a fee for carrying their channels on its satellite platform through a “retransmission” charge.
That money could be used to invest in original UK programming, plugging a £300m funding gap that Thompson said had emerged since 2006 as advertising revenue has plunged.
He said Rupert Murdoch had argued in favour of a similar levy in the US, where News Corp owns the Fox channel. “He’s winning the argument,” Thomson said. “Fox is now receiving distribution fees from the cable companies. So why not introduce retransmission fees in this country as well?”
That could raise approximately £75m for commercial terrestrial channels whose revenues are under pressure because of an advertising recession.
“James may quibble with Rupert’s logic,” Thompson said. “I find it strangely compelling.”
In last year’s MacTaggart lecture James Murdoch accused the BBC of mounting a “land-grab” and described its ambitions as “chilling”.
Thompson responded by insisting that the BBC had never been so popular, citing research which showed that British television in general is highly valued by licence-fee payers.
“The purists have spent a generation making the free market case for abolishing the licence fee,” he added, in a thinly veiled reference to the Murdochs. “The British public agree with them less now than they did when they started.”
He continued: “Across the UK population, 71% of people say they’re glad the BBC exists.” Those figures were the same for readers of the Murdoch press, he said. News Corp owns the Times and the Sun as well as the Sunday Times and News of the World. He said the figure for Times readers was 83% and for Sunday Times readers 85%.
“I believe that the reason they have little traction on this subject is because their readers are able to compare what they read about the BBC with their own experience of the BBC’s services, week in, week out.”
Thompson also signalled that recent proposals to close the BBC’s generous pension scheme to staff would not be reversed, insisting that the corporation was “not afraid to shed the last vestiges of its bureaucratic past”.
He said he would remain in his post to negotiate the next licence fee settlement with the government next year. “Do I have the commitment and the energy to lead the BBC to where it needs to get to next? My answer is an unequivocal ‘yes’.” He added that he was “up for the fight”.
A spokesman for BSkyB said: “Mark Thompson has had a year to reflect on widespread and legitimate criticism of the governance of the BBC, its value for money and the effect its size is having on commercial competitors.
“He has failed at any point to address the impact that the scale and scope of the BBC’s activities is having on an all-media digital marketplace, which is worrying for the future of independent journalism.”

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