How many times have we heard that television is the most powerful means of communication at our disposal, the most popular cultural form there is...yet how many of us here get a chance to actively participate in it? We are reduced to passive consumers, night after night listening to the same people over and over again....a one way communication with us as the receivers or if you're lucky you get an annual two-minute sound bite. Communities getting direct access to this television is near impossible with all its barriers and buffer zones: technical hurdles, filtration fences, go-betweens, reference ups, notions of balance and numerous rules and regulations.

Television should be about communicating one to another, yet it has been taken away from us, controlled by a relatively small white male middle aged middle class group of people based around London, and turned into a vehicle for making profits or peddling notions and ideas that are irrelevant, fantastic or dangerous. We only have to examine our experience of television in Northern Ireland over the past twenty years to see how little it has contributed to our understanding, well being and health of our society.

Much the same applies to cinema. While outsiders exploit our universal stories in their Hollywood type movies, albeit with dodgy accents, people here, at best, are reduced to playing bit parts or extras. We get very little opportunity to tell our own stories. Filmmaking is NOT part of our local culture; it is a process well removed from people here.

Programme makers at Northern Visions Media Centre have ran after broadcasters begging them to accept our programme ideas, begging them to commission us, to give us their money? Was it for the power or the glory? We have all put much effort into making programmes only to have them screened at unsuitable premises or despite winning awards at film festivals, rejected by local broadcasters simply because they didn't commission them and therefore control the content. But the whole point of this using this electronic medium is to communicate to a wide audience and up until now this audience was severely limited. It is only through being commissioned by mainstream television that you had access to that distribution. But television goes on about the need for strong narrative, original ideas with mass appeal. They want complex political ideas told through simple stories about individuals. There are highly politicised communities out there on our streets concerned with every conceivable issue to do with war and peace, nationality, identity, even ideas for the future. Its not easy to even find someone in British television who understands the political situation in Northern Ireland. During the two year IRA ceasefire no broadcaster was interested in programmes made by people here dealing with the peace process despite repeated requests from local Northern Irish film makers to do something….. not one programme was made…..an opportunity to make television matter was missed.

The television industry is going through radical changes, in much the same way as happened to the printing industry: introduction of new technology, de-regulation etc., with the resulting job losses, casualisation of labour etc. We may have the choice of more channels but these appear to be part of the trans-global multinational industry constantly re-gurgitating dead cultural artifacts straight into our living rooms.

The price of our communities entering the superhighway is to let our streets be torn to pieces to lay Cabltel…yet our right to access to cable is limited and we have to pay for it. Cabeltel, the owners are motivated by profits to shareholders not by the need to communicate. They may give consent for communities to use cable for community television but it is on their terms and would no doubt be dropped once difficulties arise or if a group wanted to raise its our own revenue through advertising. We are at their mercy of the owners of the cable. We have always looked enviously at local television in Europe and America where their rights to cable access were guaranteed. Now at last that opportunity for local television will exist in the U.K. through RSLs.

Changes in television aren't all bad. The equipment to make programmes is much cheaper, the technology is easier to use and more reliable...it puts it in the grasp of us all. And there are those with power who see the farce of having  more choice in programmes and now see the benefits and urgent need of a more local television with local involvement and control to reflect local needs and culture.....which is good news for us who want to democratise the medium and see it used at grass roots level to imaginatively address local issues, where it can give full voice to a whole range of people and their creativity.

We trust that the gatekeepers of community television do not strangle this precious baby at birth, as was the experience of several local community radio stations including Belfast. There the authority of the day's tight technical demands induce paranoia when setting up a station and nudged a community radio service towards the delivering an audience to the advertisers, and all that that meant, to pay for the expensive technical start-up costs and annual revenue costs insisted by authority.

The Broadcasting Standards Commission, the regulation body for radio and television, may also need to look at its code of standards with its notion of balance and fairness, which may not translate into local broadcasting.

Community television in the form of public access provides the opportunity for access to the electronic media to sections of the community in Northern Ireland normally excluded. Mainstream television, both publicly funded and commercial excludes many social, cultural and political issues and groups from adequate representation on and participation in broadcasting. A television which is locally based and community driven has the opportunity to redress the drift away from localism by guaranteed air time for programming from community organisations, special interest groups and independent film and video makers. It is able to redefine ideas of what may be seen on the television screen. It provides an opportunity for the cultural, social and political diversity within the Irish community, to be recognised, represented and to be seen to be legitimate.
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Belfast is a serrated city yet television could be a place where we all meet. There's no shortage of local people and community groups wanting to communicate and with lots of ideas about pushing the medium to the limit. Two hundred communities and cultural groups use the services of Northern Visions Media Resource Centre. I can see the long line of such groups demanding to be on community television and delighting in its use…..from disabled groupings who make up the highest proportion of our population in Europe, wanting their voice to be heard….to the women's groups who are only now finding their political power…..to Orangemen explaining to the residents of Gervachy Road why their march should be allowed to pass through their community…to the residents of the Lower Ormeau Road conveying their hurt at the antics of some Orange Men as they passing along their streets….to our civic bodies testing their strategies before the public….to the wondrous, exciting, eccentric,  imaginative ideas towards finally achieving peace in Northern Ireland…..and of course the bonnie baby competitions.
David Hyndman
1998