What does it say about us that the TV schedules have to keep reminding us of our nationality?
Digging for Britain is back, I see (8 pm, Tues, Weds, Thurs, BBC2). Haven’t they found it yet? For a country that has its national identity reflected back at itself so relentlessly, you’d think we’d all know it by now. Yet apparently we must be told.
Look at the number of TV programmes that feel the need to label themselves ‘British’. I counted 30 in this week’s schedule alone. Even excluding the many repeats (looking at you, Bargain-Loving Brits in the Sun), there were 13 such programmes on offer during the week. Thursday’s peak viewing offered a choice between Digging for Britain or Sandi’s Great British Woodland Restoration on Channel Four. (I searched for ‘Britain’, ‘British’ or ‘Brits’ in programme titles of the main terrestrial schedules for BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel Four, Channel 5 and BBC4.)
Surely, I thought, it wasn’t always like this. And indeed it wasn’t. I turned to the Radio Times online archive to check. Scanning through the schedules for the first week of 1975 produced sharp pangs of nostalgia – there was André Previn’s Music Night and David Attenborough giving the Royal Institution Christmas lectures. But I found only one programme branded by country. That was a ten-minute item about Clive Sinclair’s electronic calculators broadcast on BBC1 on 5 January 1975 under the series title Made in Britain.
I tried again. For 2000, I found a five-minute short about the water-lily broadcast under the rubric Flora Britannica. In other words, just one short programme with an explicit British agenda for each of the equivalent weeks in 1975 and 2000.
What changed? Brexit, patriotism and national branding
So, when exactly did we become so insecure as a nation that we now have to be reminded several times a day where we belong, from Rip-Off Britain to Britain’s Greatest Bridges? Is it a reaction to Brexit or to more recent far-right calls to ‘patriotism’, for example? It would be nice to know, but unfortunately the Radio Times archive only runs from 1923 to 2009, so I couldn‘t explore this.
However, the Guardian noted a similar effect as early as 2011, even though its reporter then found a mere half a dozen Britain-branded programmes in the week’s schedule, adding the wry observation that this was already long after Tom Baker had tried to debunk the rising phenomenon by booming “Britain, Britain, Britain” over stereotypically national scenes in the comedy series Little Britain.
Perhaps it will help to unpack the semiotics. Look at the ways the national label is used. First, and most obviously, it can be simply geographical, as in Monty Don’s British Gardens this week (Fri, 8 pm, BBC2). But geographical cannot be separated from cultural of course, and we all know that British gardens are not simply those found here; the term implies an entire horticultural tradition.
In other programmes there is an implicit or explicit claim to being the best; feel the pride, for instance, in Building Britain’s Biggest Nuclear Power Station (2.45 am, Thu BBC4). Elsewhere, ‘British’ need not be said at all – but is anyway. There is nothing intrinsically British about Great British Bake-Off that viewers need have it pointed out to them.
There is no real cause for complaint here. Calling a programme ‘British’ hardly puts you in breach of Ofcom broadcasting standards. And in fact, it seems to satisfy aspects of the BBC Charter, which states that “the BBC should accurately and authentically represent and portray the lives of the people of the United Kingdom today” and “ensure that it produces output and services which will be enjoyed by people in the United Kingdom and globally”. Perhaps merely adding the label is felt to tick the box. But the proliferation of ‘British’ programmes should give us pause nevertheless.
Global appeal and resistance to trends
According to Sabina Mihelj, professor of communications and media at Loughborough University, who has studied nationalist tendencies in the industry, Britain is not unique in branding its programmes in this way, which may be a side-effect of earlier government exercises in national branding, such as the UK’s ‘GREAT’ campaign, launched in 2012. One reason why the UK might be taking a lead is the possible increased sales appeal of British programmes globally, although domestic viewers remain a consideration, too. “Such branding of national cultural products offers a way of resisting the appeal of global – often American – cultural trends and offers a sense of security and pride in the context of growing tensions around immigration,” she says.
But is there a risk that such messages will backfire. “The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious,” wrote George Orwell in his wartime essay “England, Your England”. So either the ‘common people’ watching these programmes will be unimpressed by the nationalist appeal being made to them by their titles, or the programmes are not really for them. More seriously though, it shows how easily the Overton window of nationalism shifts without our noticing.
Is this a passing phase or a new normal? Perhaps it doesn’t much matter. Younger viewers increasingly go elsewhere for their screen-based entertainment and are unlikely to be moved by these heavy-handed appeals to their patriotism. Meanwhile, the older demographic is left to graze on the terrestrial schedules, and the content of the ‘British’ programmes on this week – archaeology, gardens, feats of engineering – surely reflects their interests.
The possibility of broader horizons
But it could be different. It is not impossible to imagine a more fine-tuned reflection of the British character being offered by our broadcasters, as well as a greater sense of our context in the wider world. I’m not asking for a sitcom about the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (1670 on Netflix ticked that box for me) or a dramatisation of an obscure German novel (such as I found of Hermann Sudermann’s The Song of Songs in the BBC2 schedule in 1975). But it was nice to see in the 1975 schedules The Mighty Continent, the seventh in a thirteen-part series about the history of Europe in the 20th century written by the historian John Terraine, for example. In the week that Simon Schama’s Story of Us (9 pm Weds BBC2) begins – I didn’t count this as one of the Britain-branded programmes, despite its content – perhaps he will have some answers.
Hugh Aldersey-Williams is a Norfolk-based writer and curator. He wrote about Sir Thomas Browne in East Anglia Bylines in April 2024.
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