There is a certain type of likeness that is given to, or expected of, people of colour. In fact, it stretches across all young marginalised communities. We are told we may only see ourselves represented in the media in Kidulthood, Top Boy, East Is East, or Bend It Like Beckham. These are tiresome and repeated tales about how race or socio-economics holds us back, limits our dreams, pushes us towards violence and poverty. Commissions for spoken word pieces, scratches, and documentaries are offered with the understanding that we may speak within the confines of immigration, terrorism, welfare and street crime. Young people have disengaged simply because the fetishisation of struggle has become so upsettingly limiting for their creativity or viewing. We need to give young writers, performers, poets, and journalists the opportunity to tell a narrative that is not confined to what we assume they should typify. We must allow an environment that encourages narratives about love and food and boredom; beautiful work written and produced by people from these backgrounds who have so much more to say about this world.

Chimene Suleyman (@chimenesuleyman) is a writer, poet and performer from London. 

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Mary Fitzgerald is Editor-in-Chief of openDemocracy. Before joining oD she worked for Avaaz, the global campaigning organisation, and is a former Senior Editor of Prospect Magazine. She has written for the Guardian, Observer, New Statesman and others. Follow her on Twitter @maryftz.

The post What is this project? appeared first on 100 ideas for the BBC.

The issues that are currently swept under the sheep’s fleece carpet would be dragged into public view. It might cover the speculative property boom that has seen the price of farmland rise 12-fold in four years, as much of it is snapped up by City money or by opaque funds in offshore tax havens.

It might explore the rural housing crisis, exacerbated by the capture of much of the best stock by second home owners and the rack-renting of farm cottages by absentee landlords.

It might discuss farm subsidies, which currently represent perhaps the most regressive transfer of tax receipts of the modern age, as taxpayers of all stations pour their money into the pockets of landowners, who are paid by the hectare (the more land you own, the more public money you are given). Among these people are the world’s richest benefit tourists: oil sheikhs, oligarchs and financiers who scarcely set foot in this country.

It would take cameras into intensive pig and chicken farms, abattoirs and meat processing factories. It would show how the soil is being stripped from the land by contract farming, how the BBC’s beloved sheep farmers help to cause floods downstream by ensuring that no trees grow on the hills, how wildlife is wiped out by subsidised grouse shoots.

It would be bold and investigative, exposing what powerful interests do not want us to see. The exact opposite, in other words, of the BBC’s current rural coverage.

George Monbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) is a journalist, academic and political and environmental activist; he writes a weekly column for the Guardian

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credit: Annalena McAfee

Last month, as the earth passed close to the meteor shower known as the Perseid cloud, as it does every year, the following sentence appeared on the BBC news site. “Experts advise finding a dark location, away from artificial light, and an unobstructed view of the sky.”

These words are probably untrue (a serious matter for a news service), for no expert would stoop to such fatuous and condescending advice. Unintended comedy apart, this counsel encapsulates reasonable jitters pervading the BBC. It remains the brilliant, indispensable part of our national culture. But the vultures in the form of commercial media interests and their friends in government are circling. They aim to dispose of the indispensable. In response, the Corporation sometimes twists itself into apologetic postures of bland populism. You hear it in the dead of night, in the chirpy upbeat electronic jingles separating half-bite-sized news tidbits, and in the three note call signs and drumbeat messages dramatising the one fact you do not need to know: that you’re listening to the BBC World Service.

You hear it in the alteration of the simple, intimate format of the Reith lectures. Nothing wrong with the speakers (Atul Gawande last year, Stephen Hawking this) but the cheery stage management of a presenter, the jolly atmosphere of Roadshow, the pre-arranged interventions from the audience, or the earnest applause of Any Questions have downgraded a noble institution. The fear, I would guess, is that moron’s call, the charge of elitism. Stand your ground, BBC. Don’t duck – or the vultures will get you.

Ian McEwan is a bestselling novelist and Booker Prize-winning author

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credit: KT Bruce (c)

In general, the BBC should continue to remind people of the enormous range of programmes that it puts out, and the sheer value of the 40p a day that the licence fee represents. That is the truly astonishing accomplishment of the corporation. Attacks on it should be shown up vigorously and at once for what they are: either commercial envy or naked ideology.

But there are particular things it must do too. For instance, it must plug a hole that it’s allowed to appear. There should be a regular, by which I mean weekly, programme about books, and it should be on BBC2. Melvyn Bragg’s ‘Read All About It’ was excellent in its day, but the world of books and reading has changed and is still changing rapidly, and a new programme should look at some aspects of the book world beyond the latest bestsellers or critically acclaimed literary fiction. What is the effect of Amazon on bookselling and publishing? Should we bring back a form of Net Book Agreement? What new publishers are coming up, and what sort of books are they producing? What is the truth about vanishing libraries? How do authors earn a living? A small (5 minute) spot in a 45-minute programme could look at a different background issue every week.

But mainly it would look at books: new books, classic books, children’s books, bestsellers, prize winners, graphic novels, the whole gamut. Lively critical attention is what we want. Reading is one of the most popular occupations in the country, literature is this nation’s greatest cultural achievement, and the best broadcasting organisation in the world has no TV programme dedicated to books. It’s time it did.

Philip Pullman(@PhilipPullman) is a novelist and advocate of the literary imagination 

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The BBC is a public service, it is also a universal service. The BBC  should remind people why public services are important and the range of programmes that the BBC has provided, the people it has served and innovative and creative programming it has given rise to. It should show what is at stake: people will be denied access to services – and a voice – if reporting is  left solely to commercial channels.

Anyone who has spent any time in North America understands the corporate capture of news, the degradation of investigative reporting and current affairs programmes, and the degeneration of public broadcasting through spending cuts. Five conglomerates – Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) – control  most of the newspapers, magazines, books, radio and TV stations, movie studios, and much of the web news content of the United States. They are in large measure responsible for instilling and imprinting the social, political, economic, and moral values of both adults and children in the United States.  Ben Bagdikian’s brilliant book The New Media Monopoly is a brilliant and chilling account of what is at stake. It is an excellent starting point for an informed debate about the future of the BBC and the kinds of programming we want.

Over the last 20 years the BBC has already been subject to significant cuts and a high degree of marketisation. It has experimented with internal markets and new public management and competition,  the effects of which are poorly understood.

Corporate capture of public services is not new, but the BBC should open up the debate as to why public broadcasting is important at all levels, international, national and even local. It should loudly proclaim why independent broadcasting is vital and why  – most importantly – that private corporations should not own and control every media outlet. Independent thinking and reporting needs to flourish in order for society to thrive, and the importance of public ownership and public accountability to make this possible should be debated and understood.

So the BBC should face this threat openly and play its role in ensuring that there is an informed public debate, properly funded too, about why public broadcasting is so crucial for a healthy society and why it should matter to us all.    

Allyson Pollock (@AllysonPollock) is Professor of Public Health Research and policy, Queen Mary, University of London

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credit: Sam Churchill (c)

Every week I buy books. They can be on any topic that catches my attention. Novels, science, criticism, nature, politics, economics, comedy. They are piled up in my bedroom and my living room. I look at them longingly.  I taste this one and then that one but as more and more accumulate the pile grows.

Radio 4, and indeed BBC4, are like my books but they come right into me because every time I turn them on there is some new delight. The programmes are like live books that dance and sing. They introduce me to things I’ve never even thought about.

Oh, how they enliven me. They nourish the soul. They engage my mind. Just the idea of losing such a breadth of imaginative broadcasting is catastrophic.

The BBC I love is at odds with the programming on much of TV in which everything is a competition. A lazy format which doesn’t play to the contestants’ strengths. Tension is created on the cheap, not by the wit. Scoring is fine but do adults always a have to play ring-a-ring-a-rosie? Surely not.

Why not get the talented producers to think of ways to entertain and yes – dare one even say educate – without this kind of insult. We are capable of pleasure and involvement without the tired formula of winners and losers. Our emotions and intellects can be pleasured by things other than competition.

We need robust defences of a country talking to and with itself, not the mimicking of rubbish formats that are created only for profit. Here’s the rub: the BBC is told it can only survive if it generates a significant income through globally prestigious exports. Energy therefore needs to be put into the longings, interests and aspirations of stories that touch us in their uniqueness. We know that books and movies  – and the best of TV series – work precisely because the particular, the idiosyncratic, the authentic cultural tropes are not watered down but are intrinsic instead to the pieces. So BBC, play to your strengths, not your weakness. Keep showing us ourselves artistically so you can excite your local and international audiences.

Susie Orbach (@psychoanalysis) is a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, social critic and author of Fat is a Feminist Issue

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Photo by Chris Boland / www.distantcloud.co.uk

My hope for the BBC would be to end the sclerotic commissioning that bungs everything across the desks of the Controllers and re-empower producers to green light programmes in house and from independents. There is too much hierarchical management at the BBC since the dreadful John Birt went mad with internal markets and pyramid structures. The BBC DOES need an overhaul; it doesn’t need to be destroyed. And if we want future generations to love the BBC, expand kids’ programming. Make much more and make better. Increase that budget! And make those programmes available in cross platform formats with enriched on-line content. Kids are cross-platform. Use them or lose them!

Jeanette Winterson OBE (@Wintersonworld) is an author whose works include Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

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credit: still from ‘Dr James Bennett – Reader in Television and Digital Culture‘

We are all now used to encountering database algorithms in the form of recommendation engines – ‘if you liked this, you might also like …’. Video-on-demand services are one of the key sites we encounter such algorithms: they promise us more of what we might like. The BBC’s iPlayer does this well, linking us to other episodes of the programme we’ve just watched and shows ‘you may also like’. Having recently watched ‘Synth Britannia’, my recommendations screen is cluttered with music documentaries.

But is that really what a public service broadcaster should do: recommend more of the same? It used to be that, in a broadcast world, audiences were connected to different programmes, different genres, and different experiences by the schedule. Scheduling was – and still is – an art form. At its best, in a public service context, it exposes viewers and listeners to a mixed diet of content that opens new experiences and viewpoints: moving us from comedy, to news, to drama, to a music documentary to a current affairs programme: not to just another music documentary. Television was a window on the world that let us explore – albeit at the scheduler’s behest.

In the digital age the viewer is supposedly in control: choice is the driving mantra of our time. But recommendation engines serve to structure that choice. They are based, primarily, on encouraging us to watch more content. They play ‘safe’: if you liked a music documentary, you’ll like another one. If you liked Top Gear, here is some more Top Gear: keep watching.

But what if a public service algorithm also made some recommendations from left field – to open our horizons: if you liked Top Gear, here’s a programme on environmentalism and fossil fuel, or Woman’s Hour. If you liked a music documentary, here’s a sitcom. Choice will remain the key ingredient: but it should be a genuine choice – to choose to continue to watch more of the same, or have the option of exploring something new.

In a digital world, ‘information, education, entertainment’ should be appended by “Explore”: the BBC should once again open up a window on the world. A PSB Algorithm would mark the BBC’s services out as distinct from the market and connect viewers to a greater breadth of the Corporation’s amazing output and a diversity of voices and viewpoints. And that is what PSB should always be about.

James Bennett (@james_a_bennett) is Head of Media & Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London

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Image credit: David Kwaw Mensah

The BBC’s impact could stretch beyond light programming, news and being an entertainment channel. It could create shifts in perception and mobilise people, revolutionise how a channel can operate beyond the perceived constraints of its medium.

I’m more interested in what the BBC can do outside living room spaces, aside from the distracting, momentary consumption of Saturday night TV. There is room for a channel to be more radical in its approach. With its global standing, the BBC could empower communities and young people. It has access to some of the world’s great thinkers. It could produce its own alternative to TED and TEDX, putting some of the power back in the hands of people at local levels to discuss global issues that matter, thereby giving them a certain onus in the process, rather than individuals paying for a licence fee and feeling excluded from decisions that directly affect them.

With the sad demise of many youth centres, it could provide state of the art hubs around the country for young people, where they can learn everything from music production to jiu jitsu, essentially helping to cull some of the boredom, apathy and disenfranchisement affecting youths in Britain today. There is a major issue with libraries disappearing. This is a travesty and cause for alarm. The BBC could bridge the gap in struggling boroughs by providing mobile library services or digital options.

In a world where the next iPhone product is eagerly anticipated, who are Britain’s answer to the likes of Steve Jobs? There should be investment in a platform for inventors and programmes to encourage more young women to get into the sciences. Research and funding could go into providing an accessible, affordable space travel program. The BBC should create a channel that exists both ‘on the box’ and beyond the box. What happens when a channel becomes more than just a television channel and begins to evolve and intersect the lives of its users? Orwellian? Possibly but it’s also potentially quite an interesting concept to explore.

Irenosen Okojie (@IrenosenOkojie) is a writer, curator and arts project manager

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