Although I have a few mutual friends with him from our respective days in student radio, I’ve only had two interactions with the BBC’s Political Editor Chris Mason. One was this argument about language last year and the other was this wider discussion, picked up by Twitter and curated as an “event” titled Radio Enthusiasts Unite To Show Off Their Favourite Mugs. From memory, I’m pretty sure the phrase used initially was “radio nerds”…
However, I don’t just have radio-related mugs on my shelves at home. I only have one mug relating directly to public policy: the Liberal Democrats’ 2019 “Bollocks to Brexit” mug. Though part of me wishes I’d bought Labour’s “Controls on Immigration” mug back in the day. Not that I necessarily agree with both sentiments, but the mugs are interesting artefacts that carry a lot of meaning. As with any symbol, that meaning is not fixed: it depends on the viewer, and can change over time. Labour’s mug was intended as a symbol of a policy that they hoped would appeal to what we would perhaps now call Red Wall voters, but is now a symbol of the failure of the Miliband project at the 2015 general election. Similarly the Lib Dem mug captures a moment of success for the party at a time of national turbulence, in a campaign where it came second in a national vote for the first time in over a century, but its symbolism also now covers the party leadership’s ill-advised choices later that year, encouraged by that early success, which led to disaster for their cause.
But to accompany my radio-themed mugs, I have numerous TV-themed ones – all genuine artefacts of their time, rather than modern mugs with old logos slapped on (as far as I can tell). A few carry some meaning relating to public policy issues of their day, and in this article I want to talk about these two mugs in particular. Ostensibly they are promotional items for ITV Telethon events, one in 1990 and the other in either 1990 or 1992. As anyone with knowledge of disability rights policy and/or broadcasting policy will immediately recognise, they are nowadays redolent with much more complex, and contentious, symbolism.
Let’s start with Telethon: it was a long-duration live broadcast fundraising event, along the lines of Comic Relief or Children In Need. It originated as a ten-hour Thames Telethon in October 1980 (and therefore pre-dates Children In Need very slightly). For the benefit of younger readers (quite genuinely – if you remember Thames as a broadcaster, you can’t be much under 40 as an absolute minimum), ITV was originally organised as a set of regional franchises, with a distinctive identity in each region, and some region-specific programming: Thames was the ITV broadcaster for London on weekdays, with London Weekend Television holding a separate franchise for weekends. Anyway, the Telethon was judged a success, and repeated after a bit of a gap in 1985. You can see a promotional spot for the 1985 event in this video: today it seems low-budget and stilted. Note that it gives no more detail about the causes involved than just saying it is “for charity”.
The 1985 event raised over a million pounds, and the decision was made to extend it across the whole ITV network, and stretch it to 27 hours, in 1988. Two further events on that format followed in May 1990 and July 1992. Michael Aspel was the frontman for all three, with regional cut-ins featuring the likes of Richard Whiteley helming the Yorkshire Television segments, for instance. Confusingly, although the events were still essentially run by Thames, the production was by LWT, from their South Bank Studios (later familiar for many years as the location for This Morning).
And there’s no two ways about it: the Telethons were every bit the toe-curlingly awful television stereotypically produced for these charitable fundraisers – unless, that is, you have a fetish for seeing the cast of The Bill crooning early rock’n’roll hits (no, really – well, it was a Thames event, and The Bill was a flagship Thames show at the time…). Throw in Ernie Wise (at the time still regularly being offered work by Thames, to which he and Eric Morecambe had famously defected from the BBC, following Eric’s death in 1984) opining in the Thames News report of the upcoming 1988 event, “we make such a good living in this business, we like to give some of it back,” and it seems a rather cringeworthy exercise in luvviedom. But plenty of other people found it objectionable for much more serious reasons. To get an idea of these, note the charitable causes mentioned somewhat in passing within the same report by Bobby Ball as, “handicapped kids and things like this.”
While the language immediately seems dated, the problems with Telethon went much deeper. Disabled people were essentially passive in the events: they (or more accurately, charities providing services for them – of which more later) were the recipients of donations, but not participants in Telethon other than being brought on to remove items of clothing to reveal their prosthesis, or similarly insensitive demonstrations of need. The broadcasts included films deliberately produced to provoke a sympathetic reaction in the viewer, and ideally a donation from them: but to that end, they were often mawkish and condescending towards the disabled people they featured. Unsurprisingly, many disabled people strongly objected to their presentation as needy, helpless and objects for pity, and at times were critical of the individual disabled people who had gone along with the programmes and, it was argued, done disabled people as a whole a disservice.
The 1988 event did not attract much protest (as far as I’ve been able to find), but it arose in 1990 with the formation of the Block Telethon movement, which brought together a number of disabled people’s organisations (DPOs). It was for the 1992 event that the protests really kicked into gear however, with around 2,000 disabled people protesting outside the studio throughout the event, successfully getting media coverage for their case in the run-up to it, and even briefly mounting an incursion into the studio while the show was on-air. Among the key figures were Alan Holdsworth, founder of the Direct Action Network (who was arrested for protesting outside Children In Need in 1991) and Barbara Lisicki; their story was recently depicted in the BBC’s Then Barbara Met Alan, which is still available on iPlayer.
The protests are remembered now as a decisive moment in the fight for disabled people’s rights in Britain, and when 1994 rolled around there was no fourth ITV Telethon to continue the sequence.
Equally, it’s important to understand the protests as part of that wider struggle, which is a long-running one and has distance to travel yet. Viewed in this context, it’s unsurprising that Telethon attracted criticism. The Disability Discrimination Act was passed just a few years later in 1995, making it unlawful for employers and businesses like shops and restaurants to discriminate against someone because they were disabled. Employers had to make reasonable adjustments to workplaces from 1996, although this and other measures were in fact phased in somewhat slowly: businesses employing fewer than 15 people had an exemption from the reasonable adjustments requirement until 2004, for instance. Progress in some areas has been very slow until very recently: accessible taxies only attracted an obligation to accept and assist wheelchair users in 2017, while numerous rail operators had to be granted derogations from the new Persons with Reduced Mobility rules in 2019, having incompetently failed to make use of the substantial lead-in time to modify their trains (the name Chris Grayling appears in that article…).
Equally, the disability rights movement did not start with the Telethon protests, but has roots stretching back decades further. Indeed, rights were the framing approach of the post-war campaigning zeitgeist, with many agendas advanced in those terms, in Britain and elsewhere: civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights and others – the commonality of the approach is not a coincidence. Nor is the timing, with newly sophisticated definitions of human rights and all the more specific rights being developed in response to the horrors of the 1930s and 40s, with rights for patients undergoing treatment or taking part in medical experiments among those on the leading edge, directly in the wake of the Nuremberg trials.
A rights-based approach towards disability inevitably leads to tension with older approaches rooted in philanthropy and charity, and explains much of the tension between DPOs and charities. The Telethon protests can also be seen as another chapter in this long-running story of antagonism. The critical distinction is between charities for disabled people, and disabled people’s organisations that are run by and for disabled people – that is, they are user-led. Kamran Mallick, the Chief Executive of Disability Rights UK, expanded on the distinction in a balanced and measured way when commenting in 2017 on a new strategy published by Scope: “The best, most effective, lasting change comes when it’s driven by disabled people. That doesn’t mean that other organisations, concerned about the rights of disabled people, have no impact at all. Any organisation which aims to be more relevant to disabled people is a good thing and organisations become more relevant if they are driven by the voices of those with lived experience. This is central to the disabled people’s movement, however that alone doesn’t make them disabled people’s organisations. We’d like all charities concerned about disability issues to be run by and for disabled people, which includes not just disabled trustees but senior managers and other staff.” The full article is well worth a read, as it showcases a broad range of responses to Scope’s announcement at the time.
Quoted in 1992, Rachel Hurst of the group Disability Awareness in Action spelled out the DPO objection to charities, and charity generally, and made the practical case for a more rights-based approach, in the context of Telethon: “The horrendous stereotyping in programmes like Telethon is one of the greatest obstacles we face in our struggle to be recognised as normal human beings. It is one of the reasons why we continue to be oppressed and discriminated against. The notion of groups of able-bodied people around the country being encouraged to raise money for another group they can then dissociate themselves from is both repellent and dangerous. What Telethon and programmes like it should be doing is encouraging able-bodied people to make disabled people members of their pubs and clubs, to employ them, let them into their schools, give them reasonable access to public places. We need that much more than the money raised from donations - which doesn't amount to a great deal anyway.”
It's got to be said that DPOs’ rights-based approach and continued campaigning has been hugely successful and influential, well beyond the cancellation of Telethon. Consider the current approach of Children In Need for instance, which was itself a target for protest at the same time as Telethon: in its policy on awarding grants, it talks about how it aims to, “build [children and young people’s] skills and resilience, empower them and extend their choices in life,” and, “involve children and young people in the design, delivery and evaluation of,” the work. For all that CIN’s grants continue to be awarded in part for disability-related work (albeit a modest portion), this approach is far removed from the paternalistic charity of the Telethon days, and is very standard now across the charitable sector.
This can, to an extent, leave charities damned if they do and damned if they don’t where DPOs are concerned. Scope’s 2017 strategy involved divesting itself of its specialist accommodation for disabled people, condemned by DPOs as segregation. The condemnation was long-term: when anti-Telethon protesters carried placards saying “charity segregates, rights integrate,” and “Apartheid Telethon,” that sort of accommodation was clearly among the things they had in mind, so one can well see how DPOs might feel that Scope’s move came rather late.
But the dislike and distrust of charities remains deep-seated. From the DPO perspective, charities’ shift to their ways of thinking and working (in some respects at least) appears as little more than muscling in on their turf. This has become particularly acute in the last few years, with competition for grants and contracts increasingly fierce. This report offers an interesting and seemingly thorough assessment of the DPO sector as it stood this time last year, and reports substantial reverses for both DPOs and disabled people as a whole. It criticises “predatory” disability charities, lumped in with for-profit businesses, for increasingly targeting contracts with public bodies that previously DPOs regularly used to win, but which larger charities are now using their superior resources to apply for (presumably as their own fundraising bases have been squeezed). The tension between DPOs and charities is clearly not going to be resolved any time soon.
Leaving that to one side for a moment, there is a second load of symbolism in the Telethon mugs. They feature ITV’s 1989 corporate logo, which was part of the suite of visuals rolled out as the first attempt to create a single, unified brand for the channel. It failed, and from that failure can be traced the story of broadcasting policy that gave us many aspects of our TV landscape today.
It might be easiest to look at where we ended up and work backwards. We are now well familiar with ITV as a channel with consistent branding across England and Wales, a variant incorporating the old UTV brand in Northern Ireland, and STV in Scotland. Today’s ITV visuals are a successor to the first ITV-wide presentation package to be used consistently across the network in 2002. This in fact happened ahead of the formation of ITV plc from the merger of Granada and Carlton, which happened in 2003, in a perhaps rare example of corporate structure catching up with what was already happening on-air. That in turn was the product of a long process of mergers and takeovers starting a decade earlier in 1992, with all of the ITV franchises outside Scotland eventually owned by Carlton, Granada and MAI (later United News and Media, who exited before the final merger). During that period, on-air presentation had been affected in varying ways: the old franchise presentation was retained in Granada and MAI areas, but Carlton re-branded all of the franchises it acquired, with the long-used Central Television name eliminated in this period for instance.
Stepping back to 1989, the attempt to roll out a consistent ITV-wide identity gives a clue about how all this change would happen. It seems likely to have been a response to the 1988 White Paper on Broadcasting, which was followed by the Broadcasting Act 1990. In short, ITV felt the need to get its house in order, or at least present a better face to the government, in anticipation of what it feared might be a troubling shake-up of its governing legal framework – as well, perhaps, as concerns about looming competition from satellite TV. A more consistent brand might have helped to project an image of the channel as more than just gameshows and weak sitcoms, as its detractors might have characterised it.
In the event, ITV’s well-established regions were resistant to central diktat on their brand, but powerless to avoid being swept away by regulatory change. The Broadcasting Act fundamentally changed how ITV worked, as well as ringing the changes elsewhere, for instance by confirming that there would be a Channel 5, and introducing the requirement on the BBC to buy in 25% of its content from independent production companies.
But the change was undeniably most profound for ITV, whose regulator the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) was replaced by the much less powerful Independent Television Commission (and, for independent radio, by the Radio Authority; regulation was reunified under Ofcom for both in 2003). At the same time, Channel 4 was made a government-owned corporation like the BBC, having originally been a subsidiary of the IBA; it also got the responsibility of selling its own advertising, which ITV had previously done for it. Crucially for ITV, the Act relaxed the rules on franchise ownership: with further relaxation in another Broadcasting Act in 1996, the path was laid open to the conglomeration described above.
But the consolidation of corporate structure followed rather than caused the consolidation of on-air branding, and this too had roots in the 1990 Act. Previously, the network schedule of ITV – that is, the bits broadcast nationally rather than just in particular regions – was decided by a committee of the “Big 5” network companies (Thames, LWT, Central, Granada, Yorkshire). This was effectively a stitch-up that excluded the smaller likes of Anglia, Tyne Tees, Border and so on. The Act set up a new obligation for the network schedule to be decided by someone independent of the regional franchises, and so in 1992 the ITV Network Centre was set up, under a single ITV Director of Programming for the first time. From there, the creation of a single national on-air ITV was arguably inevitable.
There was one other major change with the 1990 Act, which remains probably the most notorious even if, compared to the more detailed changes outlined above, it probably wasn’t quite so crucial in setting a course to the ITV we know today. Whereas previously franchises would be awarded by the IBA on the basis of what it judged to be the strongest proposal for programming – the “beauty parade” – under the 1990 reforms they were to be awarded by auction, to the highest bidder. ITV did at least succeed in having a vague “quality threshold” inserted into the process, and there were checks on business plans to ensure companies weren’t bidding to make unsustainably large payments to the government that their revenues wouldn’t be able to fund (a pitfall which some later rail franchises did not manage to avoid).
Several established franchises changed hands in the ensuing contest: TVS lost out to Meridian, TSW lost out to Westcountry, TV-am lost out to Good Morning Television and, most notoriously, Thames – one of the aforementioned “Big 5” – lost out to Carlton. This has long attracted the conspiracy theory that Thames’s ousting was political revenge by the Conservative government for the documentary “Death on the Rock”, an edition of its “This Week” current affairs series.
The programme was broadcast on April 29th 1988, and drew attention to the circumstances of the shooting by the SAS of three members of the IRA on Gibraltar. The IRA operatives were suspected of working on a car bomb attack, and although a car containing explosives was found, the three were unarmed and not in a position to detonate a bomb when the SAS approached them a shot them dead. The initial government line had been that they had been about to carry out an attack, but the revelations in Thames’s programme gave rise to the suggestion that the shootings had been an execution. (A later European Court of Human Rights judgment found that the planning of the operation had been deficient, and done in such a way as to make the use of force highly likely, which doesn’t imply intent.) Geoffrey Howe, Foreign Secretary at the time, asked the IBA to block the broadcast of the programme, but after deliberating and taking legal advice, it allowed the transmission. One can’t help but think that even if Thames’s ousting wasn’t deliberate revenge, there’s a much stronger likelihood that the scrapping of the IBA was consciously informed by its handling of this episode.
This all leaves open the question of what course ITV might have taken if Thames, one of its biggest and most respected companies, had been involved further into the 1990s and beyond. Would much the same merger have happened, but with Thames instead of Carlton? Would the resulting ITV plc be substantially different from the one we have? Or, more prosaically, would there have been a Telethon in 1994?
The combination of the protests and the departure of the company that had organised Telethon undoubtedly sealed its fate, but it’s hard to tell in what proportions they each mattered. A much-quoted article on the protests is this 1992 report in The Independent, one of its archive pieces that it has handily put online. While it provides many of the widely-cited quotes from protesters, it also features comment from the organisers of Telethon (interestingly it was directed by Alan Boyd of TVS, another franchise-losing company), who made clear that they had heard the criticism and responded to it. Boyd said: “We have tried to change over the years, and our awareness of the issues has increased a hundredfold.” Resulting measures included a guide on language, with “handicapped”, “victim” and “afflicted by” all banned, disability awareness training for everyone involved in the production, and changes to the nature of appeal films. Producer Martin Lucas, himself disabled, is quoted as saying: “The sensibilities have shifted; there's less pathos and more genuine understanding and respect. We will have disabled people talking about how they deserve the right to work like anybody else, the right to proper training, integrated schooling, independent living, reasonable access and the right to be sexual beings and have a family life.”
Clearly the changes did not satisfy the protesters, and with relatively little of Telethon ’92 available to watch online, it’s hard to judge whether the reality matched the intentions (and frankly, if the whole 28 hours was available, you’d have to pay me a heck of a lot to watch it and find out). But given the apparent shift by 1992, it’s not actually unthinkable that a re-tooled and improved Telethon might have maintained a place in the ITV of the 1990s if the loss of Thames hadn’t made it simplest all-round to quietly drop it.
Note on the mugs
Hopefully this article sets out why these mugs are, in my view, interesting artefacts imbued with a lot of meaning – even if, as with many other artefacts and symbols, some of that meaning should now be understood as a warning from history rather than a celebration.
If you want to own one, there are lots of 1988 Telethon mugs on eBay, prominently featuring the branding of Bisto gravy granules, which sponsored the events (and also not featuring the 1989 logo, obviously). They must have been sold as fundraising items as they are cheap and plentiful, but also rather unattractive in my opinion. The later mugs are rarer and don’t come up so often – I had been keeping an eye out for one for ages, and by chance got two within about a month of each other.
Thanks for reading
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