Jerry Springer the Opera
YouGov was one of the sponsors of the Edinburgh Festival last month and carried out various polls for tv industry discussion sessions. There were about six altogether - you can see them all on the YouGov website
target="_parent" >here - but are mostly, well, the sort of thing that TV executives have sessions about in Edinburgh - payTV vs free to air TV, diversity in programme making and so on. The interesting one was on taste and decency in television, specifically Jerry Springer the Opera.
All the polls formed the basis of debates at the Festival, the one on taste and decency was apparantly rather entertaining, in a descending to throwing personal abuse back-and-forth type way. Stephen Green is a “irrelevant runt” and the whole audience are a “room full of sinners”. Sadly, it isn’t online so we have to make do with the results of the poll.
16% of people told YouGov they watched Jerry Springer when it was screened on BBC2
(Google reveals various different actual viewing figures for JStO, ranging from 1.7 million to 2.4 million, with the same figure sometimes given as viewers or households). They were, as you might expect, disproportionately young - under 30s were twice as likely to have watched it as over 50s - and were slightly more likely to me middle class and living in London.
The poll did not ask if people were personally offended by the programme, but asked if they thought various reactions to the programme were warranted. 42% thought that complaints about the content of the programme or the language were warranted, 9% thought the protest rallies against the programme were justified, while 2% thought that personal threats to BBC employees were justified by showing Jerry Springer the Opera.
The actual threats reported in the papers at the time were death threats against Roly Keating, the controller of BBC2. The poll however didn’t specify death threats (in fact, the BBC later said the reports were “exaggerated”) and this poll was conducted many months later, so there’s no reason to think that respondents were thinking of death threats when they answered the question (plus there are the normal caveats about a small proportion of people in any poll playing silly buggers). It is still 2% of the population who think personal threats against TV executives are an appropriate response to television programmes they dislike.
Overall however the poll found little support for censorship. Only 17% thought that programmes with potentially offensive religious content like JStO should not be shown at all. 67% thought they were acceptable after the watershed, 14% thought they were acceptable at any time. Asked about where they should be shown, 59% thought they were acceptable on any channel, 22% said they were acceptable on satellite subscription channels, only 13% of people said they should never be shown (this is the order the questions were asked, so the difference between 17% and 13% suggests that some of the people who said such programmes were totally unacceptable relented when offered the chance of having them only on subscription channels).
Similar questions were asked about other potentially difficult programmes - graphic documentaries (the example given was the Boy Whose Skin Fell Off, the C4 documentary about Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa)
and explicit footage on news coverage (the example being the beheading videos from Iraq). Almost everyone thought that graphic and disturbing documentaries were okay, with only 4% objecting (77% specified after the watershed). There was less support for explicit news coverage - 26% said such footage should never be shown, though I suspect that was largely because of the particularly disturbing footage that was quoted as an example and which was, of course, not shown on British television.
Finally, Yougov also asked the same questions of a panel drawn from the television industry. Perhaps the most significant question was how they thought the furore over Jerry Springer the Opera would effect future decisions - 54% thought it would have little or no effect on future decisions, but 35% thought there would be an effect, and 8% thought that, in the light of the fuss over JStO, television channels would be far less likely to screen “risky” programmes.
