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Television in rude health

Written by Robin Hague

37th International Emmy Awards point to increasing global excellence

Just a few hours of an evening in New York and the magic and power of television remind us there is still hope for this medium to arrest hearts and minds and that it can be more than Ed Murrow’s feared “wires and lights in a box”.

The 37th International Emmys Awards were presented at the Hilton on Sixth Avenue on Monday, the audience of a thousand of the television world’s great and good gilded with such as Barbara Walters and Sir David Frost, Prof Markus Schächter and Dr Henry Kissinger.

In an era when the Internet, games, social networking, YouTube and a panoply of other entertainments and distractions are feared as Horsemen of Television Apocalypse, the sometimes bizarre, often breathtaking and plain just moving best programming from around the world shows the industry is in rude health and good hands.

The International Emmys is important, not just for its reputation as the most prestigious multinational television awards festival, but because it shines a light on the honest endeavours of skilled broadcasting artisans from the very furthest corners of the globe.

The awards are taken seriously and properly so. A cast of international celebrities headed up by Ed Westwick, Edie Falco, Moby, Katharine McPhee, Rachel Roy, Keke Palmer and Paula Zahn, presented the statues to winners from six countries.

British programming won in five categories, including Best Actress and Actor. There is a sense of predictability in the UK’s excellence in television production, but this year at least, a consciousness was abroad of the accomplishments of producers from many other countries.

After all, the finalists across the ten categories announced on Monday were winnowed from dozens of programmes entered from more than 50 countries.

The stories ranged through dramas exploring assisted suicide, children grieving for their dead best friends, the modern history of finance, to a full thousand short, funny stories from Japan, even the hitherto unreported, if fictional, endeavors of a unit of Danish secret agents.

One of the British awards went to Oxford Film and Television’s excellent ‘The Mona Lisa Curse,’ the Arts Programming Emmy accepted by its presenter, the international arts heavyweight Robert Hughes. In a moving speech, he described the award as a “high moment” for him, but also exhorted the Hilton Ballroom audience to “forget about the prices, just remember what the serious art is and why, if we love it, why we love it”.

In a very real sense, this sentiment reflects why television works, at least the pick of it. Why all around the world, people still gather before TV sets in living rooms, souks, dusty village squares, downtown sports-bars, even furnace-hot corrugated iron halls set by Lake Turkana in Kenya.

It was television that relayed into our disbelieving minds, the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, an event at the heart of former US Secretary of State Dr Henry Kissinger’s speech presenting the International Emmys Directorate Award to Prof Markus Schächter, Director General ZDF.

In his acceptance speech, Prof Schächter talked of being born into a divided Germany, witnessing its reunification and leading ZDF in a digital revolution where happily “top quality means top ratings”.

Reminding us again that television can be so much more than just an entertainment, he pointed out that 50% of ZDF’s daily programming is informational and that its successes are being “achieved in a competitive market,” where the future will be “entertaining and educating at the same time”.

Prof Schächter talked of the opportunities and challenges afforded by the Internet, warning his audience that “those who do not dedicate themselves to the web will end up in a museum”.

It fell to Barbara Walters to present the International Emmys Founders Award to Sir David Frost. “I’m not exactly chopped liver myself when it comes to interviews,” she said, but Sir David is “the best interviewer there is, a chronicler of our times”.

Sir David’s acceptable speech was preceded by one of those showreels that can still a room and take the breath away. Interviews with Robert F Kennedy, Johnny Carson, Benazir Bhutto, John Lennon, Richard Nixon of course and Nelson Mandela. These were interviews that at times reflected their times, sometimes helping form them. He is still going at it strong, now in his fourth year of producing Frost Over the World for Al Jazeera English.

Sir David’s career spans nearly fifty years. In this time, unlike many other enterprises, such as automobile or aeroplane manufacture, or the health sector, television has been an industry where it’s been repeatedly stated its best days are behind it. In the Frost era, television has had more Golden Ages than the Golden Age.

Well, Monday night’s International Emmy Awards were a sharp rejoinder to those who like to bask in past glories. As the cheers went up around the ballroom for nominations from Brazil, Mexico, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, China, Argentina, Qatar, Poland, Thailand, Denmark, France, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and South Africa, the audience was reminded that television has many more Golden Ages before it.

Sir David concluded his acceptance speech with a quote from Ed Murrow, the great CBS broadcaster, regarding television’s capacity to go beyond entertainment. The full, flinty, quote is: “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful”.

On the evidence of Monday night, that weapon is being used.

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