On one of those typical English days where damp, ragged, lead-colored clouds extend right down to slick pavement stones, we tubed out to visit Illuminations, the London media production company that’s been at the forefront of making arts programming for the last quarter century. We met Illuminations’ bright light, founder John Wyver. John was an early television critic for London’s Time Out, he has published a volume on film history, and is about to publish a new book the history of arts programming on the BBC. For
the last twenty-five hears, however, John and colleagues have turned Illuminations into a hallmark for intelligent, creative and beautifully produced programs on the arts.
Our conversation was a short course on the history of British television and the dramatic changes it is undergoing in response to many of the same forces that challenge our own PBS: vigorous competition from multiplying commercial channels, and the rise of alternative eyeball-glue like videogames and the internet. John described his company as having had three acts, each a response to a particular historical model of the media market. The first act was work with which Illuminations made its mark: handsomely produced arts series and one-offs for BBC 1 and 2, ranging from elaborate, imaginative television versions of everything from Shakespeare to Benjamin Brittan operas ["heritage programming," as John calls them], to ultra contemporary series on the rise of the internet [John claims to have been the first person to use the word “internet” in a television program, and the first to have included an email address in the credits], to a series on artists’ experimental television.
The second act is unfolding in the present where declining audiences and new competition has made public broadcasters less prone to arts content that isn't mass audience friendly. Illuminations’ response has been to produce projects out of their own pocket rather than wait for declining commissiions. They then sell them to their traditional international markets, but also to new ones like personal DVDs’, direct sales to museums, and, in the future, iPods and the like. Plus, they’re converting production to hi def, since most venues think of the arts as prestige programming, and hi def is the new currency of prestige.
The third act, in its R&D phase at Illuminations now and being readied for the near future, is something John calls “configurable media.” He showed us a test clip of an art history series in which individual segments exist in a database, allowing viewers to move through the program choosing themes they find intersting. The program unrolls without pause as the segments assemble themselves in advance. John imagines such future programs viewed in an online context where, for example, a teacher could send students a “playlist” on architecture as one path through a massive program on Renaissance art.
It was great fun to visit their production offices and to understand better the challenges media makers face given the dizzying pace of evolving media markets and formats. We could not have been welcomed by a more generous and intelligent host than John Wyver.
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