Former BBC Acting Chair Dame Elan Closs Stephens’ address to the Prix Italia 2024

Prix Italia Lecture: Everything Must Change

It's a huge privilege to be standing here. As Emelie mentioned, I stood down as the Acting Chair of the BBC earlier this year after some 14 years serving as a member of the BBC's Governing Body. I was also a University Professor of Communications and the Chair of the Welsh language Channel 4 (S4C) before that. This lecture gives me the opportunity to share with you some thoughts about the state of public service broadcasting and its future, so thank you all.

The title of my lecture today comes from one of the most evocative and well-known Italian novels, Il Gattopardo/The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.

For those who are not familiar with the novel, it opens in 1860 when forces led by Garibaldi landed in Sicily determined to unify all Italy under the Kingdom of Savoy (which incidentally had its palace and headquarters just a few hundred meters from here in central Torino). As he contemplated the upheavals in Sicilian society, the Sicilian Prince Don Fabrizio is warned by his nephew Tancredi: "If we want things to stay as they are, everything will have to change.

Now, as with much of history and literature, there are different interpretations of di Lampedusa's work. But those lines from The Leopard have always remained with me.

It is of course a paradox. It's a realisation that trying to resist and cling on to outdated attitudes is futile.

And so, I want to talk about the seismic changes that have occurred within broadcasting over a hundred years. I reflect also that, despite huge changes brought about by new technology, the industry has been very adept at riding change. We've been able to throw off the old skin and slip confidently into the new one. Over a hundred years, we've seen the industry change from radio to television, from single channels to a digital multi-channel world, from linear channels to streaming and libraries to be accessed in the viewer's preferred time. We have moved from curation to personal choice. We have moved from the mass to the individual.

And so, the theme of this lecture will be that for our values to remain the same, our relationship with our audience must change. In order for everything to stay as it is, everything will have to change.

The Era of Mass Communication.

Our industry came into being with the birth of mass communication. And one of the most innovative leaders of that great seismic change was, yes, another Italian, Guglielmo Marconi.

Why is it such a great honour to be giving this lecture in 2024? Because it is exactly one hundred and fifty years since the birth of Marconi on the 25th of April 1874. As in all fields of discovery and invention, there are many who take important steps -Hertz, Tesla, Braun - but it was Marconi who drew up the patents that proved technically and commercially successful. He was one of the driving forces in the creation of this industry. In 1909, he and Karl Ferdinand Braun shared the Nobel Prize for Physics. Marconi was only 35 years of age.

It is strange now to recall that the main disadvantage of wireless telephony was that it could be heard by everyone.

The BBC's first official historian, Asa Briggs, reminds us that inventors, businessmen and regulators all thought of radio as a device for communicating between fixed points - between ships, or between lighthouses or between ships and land. "Cross interference" was THE major problem of this invention, because of the possibility of complete chaos.

"Wireless telegraphy" said one Select Committee of the House of Commons, "can only be used … in sparsely populated countries and undeveloped regions". Little did they realise that this amazing invention was to herald in the age of mass communication. Its great strength was to be heard by everyone.

When the liner Titanic hit an iceberg off Newfoundland late in the night in 1912, the ship's distress messages could be heard by shipping for hundreds of miles across the Atlantic. As a result the Cunard liner Carpathia arrived by dawn to rescue more than 700 survivors from lifeboats and the water.

It was a very public demonstration of the power of wireless telegraphy and it made Marconi a household name and a hero on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was to take an American, David Sarnoff, to recognise its true potential.

Sarnoff described the concept of a radio audience as a large number of people all receiving information simultaneously from a single transmitter. He even went on to forecast the kind of programmes which would attract this new audience - broadcasting of events of national importance, concerts, lectures, baseball scores. Thus began a revolution in entertainment, in the sharing of news, in the accessibility of information to rich and poor alike without hierarchy. It was a paradigm shift in the way we behave and the way in which we see ourselves. For me, it is the equivalent of the invention of the printing press.

Mass communication opened the door for all wherever they lived, to enjoy theatre, cinema, music, documentaries. It democratised access to news, the arts and education. But, as we know, it is also a passive audience that watches and listens to the same programme transmitted to each home at the same time. That era is now coming to an end. Of course, radio is still successful and an intimate friend though we may no longer be listening on radios. Television still manages huge mass audiences for live sport, live events, public disasters such as Covid - it even draws in an audience for elections. But the tectonic plates of the old model are shifting.

In this new world, public service broadcasters can sometimes lose confidence. The industry starts to question its old ability to manage change. And the speed of change can be overwhelming.

Let me turn first to the speed of change.

It is a truism of our time that we think the pace of change is increasing.

When Netflix started in 1999 , it took 3.5 years to reach a million subscribers.

When Facebook launched in 2004, it took 10 months to reach a million subscribers. Instagram in 2010 took two and a half months.

And now of course we are talking about the time taken to reach a hundred million followers worldwide. Tik Tok took 9 months. It's not surprising that we're dazzled by the speed of change.

But the speed of change isn't a recent phenomenon. Our industry has always had to deal with change right from the very beginning.

I'm going to take my examples from the industry in the United Kingdom and from the history of the BBC, which celebrated its centenary as a company in 2022. When the British Broadcasting Company was created in 1922, 36,000 licences were applied for in order to listen to this new service. By 1926, only four years later, there were 2,178,259 applications for a licence.

At the end of 1922, the BBC had a staff of 4. By 1926, it had 630.

Can you just think about that figure for one moment - the hard work, the innovation it must have taken to build something from nothing.

Who says that we are living in a world of unprecedented change? If our predecessors were clever enough to meet that challenge a hundred years ago, surely, we are up for meeting the challenge of our own time.

Let us jump forward a few years. By 1955, there were almost nine and a half million licences - and those are households not individuals.

By that same year of 1955, television had been given a major boost by the televising of Queen Elizabeth The Second's Coronation a few years earlier. Then there were just over four and a half million combined sound and television licences. By 1975, there were 17,700,815 combined sound and television licenses. That is almost 18 million households.

So, my challenge to all who care about this industry is this: swift change has been at the heart of the industry. We are no different from those who have gone before us. We are not necessarily victims of some huge societal shift that has never happened before. We must grasp the moment as others before us have done.

So how do we recognise societal shift?

The one thing we can learn is that change cannot be predicted on an evolutionary business model trajectory. You cannot say that there will be a 5% or a 10% change per year that you can model. Looking back at the history of our industry it's not evolution but revolution. To use the terminology of one of the recent Prime Ministers of the UK, Boris Johnson: "When the herd moves, it moves."

So how do we recognise seismic change in order to react positively and swiftly? The answer might not be in the technology but in society itself.

Many years ago Professor Raymond Williams, a Cambridge University cultural historian and thinker, wrote in his book on Television: Technology and Cultural Form that technology might not be a determinant of our culture but that our culture adopted the technology because it was ready for it. Let me say that again: change comes about not just because there are technological breakthroughs and inventions. It also comes about because society likes those technological inventions and wants to use them.

During the First World War, young men - farmers, plumbers, tradesmen, had been sent abroad to fight and some to be trained in telegraphy. The end of the war brought a new social contract of votes for all, eventually even women. It was the beginning of a more democratic society and radio gave individuals access to information and entertainment that has been the privilege of the rich.

When television was taken up in the United Kingdom after the Second World War, the BBC secured the right to televise the Coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth II. It was a Ceremony of huge spiritual importance and had never been seen except by those privileged to be within the innermost circle. Now this hugely important event was to be broadcast to everybody.

The same period saw the creation of our National Health Service, the advent of free university education as well as the birth of the Open University. In the UK it was a period of immense societal change. One of our most distinguished playwrights of the time, Dennis Potter, talked of his childhood as a very intelligent working-class boy. "The BBC of my childhood was…paternalistic and often stuffily pompous. It saw itself in an almost priestly role. But at a crucial period of my life it threw open the 'magic casements' on great sources of mind -scape at a time when books were hard to come by, and where I had never stepped into a theatre or a concert hall, and would have been scared to do so even if given the chance."

Change happens not just because of technology, but because we are ready and willing for that technology to develop.

So, what do we make of our own societal changes?

Most social commentators agree that the defining nature of today's society is the emphasis on the individual. Some would go so far as to say selfishness. Even one of our favourite pastimes is called a selfie. We have moved away from the idea that there is a binding social contract. We are a society that says: "I want my programme when I am ready for it." We are a society that may say: "I am not prepared to pay for societal goods that I do not want." We may be a society that says: "Why should I pay for someone else?" We have moved away from the ideals of mass communication and shared moments that were at the heart of our industry a hundred years ago.

As a result, the very idea of the public good and universal public service broadcasting can seem outdated. We stand in the headlights of history, a little dazzled, a little blind, and dare I say it, a little lacking in confidence.

This evening I would like to put two propositions.

One is that the value of shared communication and shared understanding remains important - not just important but necessary.

The second is that we must harness individualism to our own ends. We have to change fundamentally the nature of our access to our public.

So, to start. The fundamental values that have been there since the start of public service broadcasting must remain our values going forward.

The way in which we receive our news, and our programmes has changed but the concept of universality has not. We still need a space for rational discussion that is shared by all. We still need a verification of false facts that is accessed by all. Even democracies these days can be pretty fractured. Can a state where you have a 51/49 split or a 52/48 split and where both sides are shouting at each other without listening, can that state be a functioning democracy? Or is it two opposing camps without resolution or common ground?

Who can help to preserve the public space where opposing views can be given airtime? Who can move us away from the echo chambers of our own likes and dislikes, or even our own hates. The concept of a trusted service has never ever been more important. That is why it is under fire from media empires and conglomerates who make money from discord. As an industry, we have to regain the confidence to re-assert those values, even though the context seems inhospitable.

And it's not only the industry which must re-assert its values and gain in confidence. It's Governments all over Europe that must find once again the courage of shared spaces and shared discourse.

At the beginning of our industry its critics berated the Marconi Company for its "frivolous use of a national service". This came after the famous concert on the 20th June 1920 when Dame Nelly Melba - yes, she who gave her name to a pudding - had sung across the airwaves in English, French and Italian. Those critics did not understand the delight of entertainment. But they did understand the importance of a national service.

I fear that today the necessity of a national broadcaster offering a shared space has been downgraded and even forgotten. Why would a nation's Government not have a national broadcaster, giving time to its nation's own stories even if some of those stories are uncomfortable?

We must also look again at the cost of providing this shared space for our nation. And who pays?

Public service broadcasters pay a heavy price for universality - for the ability to talk to all wherever they are. That price is the necessity to ride two horses - to transmit on terrestrial transmitters in order to reach everyone and to distribute on digital platforms. Some of those digital platforms are not open to everyone either through cost or through problems of the infrastructure. But our old-fashioned transmitters reach out to society as a whole. And they are an expense.

Streamers have no such obligations. They are free to provide a digital only service. And that digital only service is an entertainment library without the heavy cost of live breaking news - a very costly undertaking born by public service broadcasters in the UK. Surely the time has come for some of the cost of our terrestrial infrastructure and even the costs of our broadband infrastructure to be shared industry wide. Let me expand. National broadcasters have always contributed to the cost of national infrastructure from terrestrial radio transmitters to digital multiplexes. The UK Government has paid substantial sums to try to reach the last 5% of digital broadband exclusion. Yet, as far as I am aware, there is no levy towards the national infrastructure from those who profit from it the most. Governments in the UK and Europe have to re-assess the ideas of a completely free market - a free market that is weighted heavily in one direction. It's time to understand the value of our national broadcasters and to provide a level field of competition.

My second point - in order to survive, public service broadcasters must also change fundamentally the way they connect with the audience.

Individualism is the dominant mode of our society. We cannot fight it. As I said earlier, this is not just a technological change but a societal change. And so, we must create algorithms to bring our audiences nearer and to nudge them into participation. Public service broadcasters must have the innovative leadership and the money to enter the marketplace of individualism and claim it as its own. We must know our audience, individual by individual, community of interest by community of interest, geographical location by geographical location.

Sometimes my Alexa comes alive when I have not called it. An author I have bought for my Kindle in the past is bringing out a new book. My Alexa does not tell me - for obvious reasons of competition - that a BBC programme or an ITV or Channel 4 programme - is now available. If I look at an advert for a new fridge, I am sent a nudge immediately through a Facebook page. When do I receive a nudge for public service broadcasting other than through an already signed-up email. It's time to be able to bring in those who no longer consider us relevant. It is time for public service broadcasters to be as sophisticated as our competitors in gathering audience data, in nudging our public into sharing our world.

It will take money - a lot of money.

That's why Governments have to take an interest. That's why we need the European Broadcasting Union to take an interest. Where, in an age of falling living standards, can we find a new financial model for this to happen? Can we have benevolent partnerships with social media conglomerates? What are the pitfalls and the guiding principles.

It's all difficult. But do it we must. Somehow, we must find the money and the innovative partnerships for public service broadcasting to thrive, not just to survive in some old-fashioned dusty corner. I am sure that all of you, many of you distinguished leaders in your field, are already talking about this. I hope you will come together to find answers.

It will take Government help. It will take new money and new regulation, and it will take innovative leadership.

However, the good news is that others before us have managed challenging circumstances.

Twenty years ago, for example the BBC was at the forefront of the digital revolution and the creation of iPlayer. Public service broadcasters can be there again if they keep their nerve, if Governments recognise their national importance, if they find the finance model to have that sophisticated relationship with their audience. And as for that infrastructure levy I talked about just now - could some of that be put aside for national broadcasters to modernise further. To gather audience data more fully , to act on it swiftly, to connect with its modern audience.

And why would we want to do that?

It's because of the paradox at the heart of this lecture.

In order for a wider societal cohesion to remain, we must embrace individualism.

And so, to a last word

Some of you will know that I am Welsh, so I have one more connection to the story of Marconi. On the 13th May 1897, Marconi sent the first ever wireless message over the open sea from Flat Holm Island, a Welsh island in the Bristol Channel, to Lavernock Point near Cardiff, the capital city of Wales , a distance of 6 kilometres. He was only 23 years old.

Marconi's message from Flat Holm to Lavernock was: "Are you ready?"

So , I put it to you my friends, in the words of Marconi, are we ready?

In order for everything to remain the same, everything has to change.

Thank you.

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