Stephan Shakespeare talks to The New Culture Forum

Stephan Shakespeare, founder of YouGov, is the man behind the creation of 18 Doughty Street Talk TV, the first British TV channel on the Internet.

18 Doughty Street was launched in October this year. Unencumbered by the traditional requirements of so-called 'balance', it promised to offer something completely new. So has it?

Peter Whittle (who hosts the channel's Culture Clash programme) talked to Stephan about the first months 'on air.'

NCF: Stephan, on its launch literature 18 Doughty Street had the following quote from Orwell: ‘In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.’ Do you think that 18 Doughty Street is telling the truth?

S: I don’t think that anybody can know that they are telling the truth in that way, but I think that people being able to speak without constraint will get us closer to it. I think the nearest we can get to the truth is if people with different points of view, and different experience, can discuss things in a context where they feel really they can say whatever they like, where they don’t have to play up to an audience, or play up to a regulator, where they don’t have to worry who they please and who they don’t please. I don’t think anybody can pronounce on what’s true and what’s not true. I think any consensus is going to be right 70% of the time and wrong 30% of the time. The best way you can counteract that is to have lots of voices, and lots of people choosing which voices they want to hear, which voices they want to balance, and how, and you have this collective wisdom of crowds that determines the best guess. Doughty Street is just another place where people can talk and discuss, but what can be different is that they don’t have a false concept of balance and boundaries.

P: So do you think it is being different?

S: We are at the very early days of 18 Doughty Street. When we started this, we had some ideas about how we wanted it to be. Then we came up against the constraints of production teams, and so on, saying this is possible, that is not possible, and they’ve come from their own background in TV production and they put constraints on us of a different kind, which we are just learning how to go beyond. When we started this, I always had the view that you can spend six months or a year planning how this would be, and then launch, or you can just launch without any idea how it’s going to work and then look at it after six months and do it again, as it were. And that second route is very much what we’ve gone down. We just said ‘Let’s get started, we don’t really know how this is going to work’. It’s actually unknowable how it is going to work, because people are not used at watching TV on the Internet. Let’s just get started, and as we go along, we will make some mistakes. It will become more obvious in the doing that it would ever have been planning in the abstract.

P: 18 Doughty Street was mooted as ‘anti-establishment television’, and I think my immediate reaction when I looked at this was that it would be against the kind of vaguely left/ liberal orthodoxy which dominates. Is that how you see it?

S: I think that is how I see it. I think an establishment orthodoxy certainly does exist. I don’t think it’s all powerful, and I don’t pretend we live in a world where there are no platforms for alternative voices. But there is such a magnetic pole to the mainstream, and that mainstream is dominated by, as you say, a sort of leftist liberal outlook. I don’t mean leftist as in socialist, but I would say it is a set of attitudes. I would say there’s a need for something which is outside of that, and that plays against that.

What I find extraordinary is the degree to which there has been outside interest in this, and favourable reviews of it. The output at the moment is terrific, as far as it goes, but it is early days, and the most notable thing about it is how generous everybody else has been prepared to be about it. Probably it’s because they do perceive a striking need for this.

P: Have you any idea of how many people are actually watching it?

S: I don’t think the audience on any particular night breaks beyond a thousand. It’s a small audience - very much the sort of political media world - but we’re not going to push it, or market it until we are ready, until we’ve found our feet, so that’s exactly what we would expect, and what we would have assumed. At the moment, the website, for example, is an embarrassment, it is not only a not very good website, it is a terrible website – you can’t do the basic things, blogging alongside watching and having links to all the things you can download in a clear, simple way. To be fair to the people who designed it, we probably gave conflicting messages as to what we wanted, and it’s resulted in this. On the 8th of January, all that will be re-launched, it will now be designed on the basis of what we know about what we want to do, and at that point, we will be able to market this out beyond the niche audience we have at the moment, and that is very clear in our minds, that in a way we don’t want to drive lots of people to it at the moment, when the look of the studio is changing, the websites are changing, and the schedule is going to be changing. We are treating this as a sort of Beta phase, and then on the 8th March we are going to be much clearer about what the whole thing looks like, and how it functions, and at that point, we can push it out and go for a wider audience.

P: Will it be markedly different in term of the presentation, apart from the website?

S: I don’t think it’ll be markedly different in term of what you see. There will just be a lot more, and a lot of different things, in addition. That’s to say, I don’t think that anything that we’ve done hasn’t worked. I think the pre-recorded programmes (ie those in the 8.30 slot such as World View and Culture Clash) have all been terrific discussions, bar none. Any one of those discussions, if you heard them on Radio 4 in the afternoon would have been at the very least as good as anything you hear there, and at the most, markedly different. For example, the discussion on Culture Clash on what was described as cowardice in the face of Islamic fundamentalism had a passion and yet a rationality, a fairness about it, that really attacked a certain attitude that’s prevalent in the media, and you wouldn’t have heard that anywhere else in the media because there, even if you had had one person advocating that point of view, you would have had to have a balance with two or three people saying what a lot of nonsense. I think it’s terrific if you have a discussion if people take different points of view and challenge each others points of view – but if that challenge is always coming from a predictable ‘bring it back to the safe area’ position, you are never going to get a proper discussion, because what happens, and we see it on Newsnight, night after night, is that everybody involved entrenches very quickly to their predetermined positions, because that is what happens with all human beings when you challenge their position. You know, you make a point and I immediately say ‘That’s completely wrong, it should be this’. Instead of going to a next point and exploring those ideas, you are going to start justifying what you’ve said, trying to make the viewer think that you are right, and the other person is wrong. Now if you don’t need to do that, if the rest of the people in the discussion perhaps disagree with you but actually do so in a way which you welcome because you want to develop your idea, that discussion becomes more exploratory, discursive, and ends up in a different place. You really feel you’ve been around the subject, rather than watching two or three people who are intent on pushing each other into their original corners.

P: I’ve stopped watching Question Time because there’s this kind of monolithic, predictable viewpoint which come across from the whole panel. I wonder, with 18 Doughty Street, would there be views that you wouldn’t have on? How free do you want to be? We’ve heard this week that the BBC was thinking of putting on extreme voices – they mentioned the Taliban, and the BNP as examples. Would you do that?

S: Number One, I wouldn’t design it that way, and I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with that design where what you’re saying is ‘yes, we do have a narrow channel of conventional discussions, and to balance that we’re going to have two outriders to have a go at each other.’ That doesn’t work, so I wouldn’t begin with that design.

I have to say in practical terms, if somebody said we would like to invite the leader of the BNP, I would say ‘Let’s not’. Somebody else can do that, it’s not a voice that I think I would want to give a platform to. What Doughty Street isn’t doing is saying, this is a place for all other voices. We are free to make our choice, and we are free to say actually I don’t want to hear from a certain position, and that goes back to my first point, about lots of different platforms among which you can make your choice about. Somebody else can start their own Internet TV – and they will – and if they want to have the BNP on it that is up to them, but I don’t feel that I need to do that. It is not something I would feel comfortable with. The beauty is we don’t have a responsibility to something else, we don’t have a responsibility to say ‘the BBC doesn’t do that, so therefore we will do all the things that the BBC doesn’t do.’ We only have a responsibility to do the things that we want to do, because it pleases us.

P: 18 Doughty Street made it clear it didn’t want to be Tory TV. But – not that you should care – do you know how the Tory party views it?

S: It can’t be Tory TV for the simple reason that not all of us there are card carrying Tories, and even if we were, we wouldn’t necessary want to add to this centralization of power that is already existing in politics. I am a Conservative Party member, and I would much rather see a Conservative government than a Labour government, but I wouldn’t want to add to the disproportionate strength of party hierarchies. I think that is part of the problem. It’s completely reasonable – I am not making an attack on that in this sense and I wouldn’t expect them to do anything different from what they are doing, because that is why they are leading a party. But it is up to the rest of us to make sure that there are other platforms, other voices, other strands of discussion that people can join.

P: If you’re talking about anti-establishment TV, especially from right of centre viewpoint, it would seem to imply that it is sort of against, or looking at a another kind of conservatism that is not necessarily Cameroonist if you like. Do you think that this is a voice for dissent for conservatives?

S: In as much as it is a voice for any kind of dissent, yes. In as much as it is, as what you’re suggesting, an anti-Cameron thing, absolutely not. We have lots of people on who are 100% loyal to David Cameron, or indeed to Menzies Campbell or Brown or Blair. And we have people who are not. That seems to me the right thing that a discussion platform, a media platform would seek to do. I hope it will never be a home for discontent with any particular leader or politician or whatever and I don’t think when you view it, it is that at all. The vast majority of people who come on to the programme do wish David Cameron every success, they probably just wish he would be successful in slightly different ways or in slightly different areas. We hear a lot about what a modern political party is now, and a modern political party, it seems to me, would, yes, try to provide leadership and some discipline but also accept that they’re functioning in a world in which the audience, the public, is distrustful of politicians, and feels patronised and manipulated. Therefore they should welcome other voices. And to be fair, they have done exactly that. ConservativeHome which is related to 18 Doughty Street has had a huge amount of, I won’t say support, but cooperation from the Party, which doesn’t seek to make it change its views, nor does it do the opposite, of accepting it as being part of themselves. They see it exactly for what it is, which is another voice, broadly supportive but there to widen the discussion.

P: Going right back to the beginning, can you just explain how you first came up with the idea for 18 Doughty?

S: A number of things I was watching came together at the same time. I was in America flicking around channels as one does, and came across some very obscure channel - I have no memory of what it is or what they were talking about – but what struck me was the way it was done. It was in fact a radio station, in which they set up a single camera in the corner of the room to beam as it were as a TV station permanently what was going on in the studio. So you listened to it as a radio station but you could look up and see who the people were who were talking, you could have a bit of the behind-the-scenes feel. And I thought this was terrific, it really worked, because if I wanted to be sitting for an evening television, I would not watch a single camera on a radio station, but if I was moving around the room doing stuff, it is almost a different way of watching radio – and I thought that must be very low cost, and it works really well. So that was one thing which was in my mind. I had been interested for some time in Big Brother obviously, and my conception of Doughty Street would be a little bit like a Big Brother house – I’m exaggerating the comparison massively - but what I mean by that is that you would be watching in and be able to interact with people in the room having a discussion, and I think as time goes on we are going to increase the sort of coverage of what goes on in the house - not just increase programme as such.

P: So the house at 18 Doughty Street will be more than a TV station?

S: I think that is what is going to happen. We are looking at putting a camera in the kitchen, a camera in the green room, as it were, to be able to switch to a discussion that is going on there. I think if you were to have a conventional editorial meeting that ought to be beamed live to whoever’s there. People could be watching and come in with suggestions as well.

P; what are the other things you are planning to do?

S: We are looking to increase audience participation greatly by bringing in the creativity and the critical intelligence of our audience in the designing and making of products for Doughty Street. It will be, this is what we are thinking of doing, we would love suggestions from you, then we will discuss the suggestions, have input on the discussion, come to some sort of agreement about what this new format should look like, start doing it, get feedback on it, change it, so that in other words the audience is absolutely a part of making the programme, not just through interacting with the programme once it exists, but actually from the conception through to the final product.

P: 18 Doughty is the first of his kind in this country, isn’t it?

S: I think it is the first of its kind, anywhere, in this way. Clearly it picks up on strands that have existed on the Internet, but I can’t think of anything that is like Doughty Street – or that is like what Doughty Street intends to be. We are nowhere near the place that we will be, I think, within six months.

P: The US still has a culture war, with its shock jocks, but here there’s been something of a rout. Is 18 Doughty a first shot across the bow?

S: Certainly quite of few of us at Doughty are big admirers of Fox News, big admirers precisely because of what you’ve just described, of someone coming along and saying actually we don’t need to accept ABC, CBS and NBC news as the only way of doing this. It is a cultural monopoly that needs to be challenged and, obviously, they have been big winners in that cultural war. What we are doing is not unrelated to that, but it is not the same. You talk about America. We will be looking, certainly, as we develop, to be facing America quite a bit more as well – if we are to be going out after midnight, we can actually quite explicitly face an American audience in the small hours. And we already of course had Fox News do an experimental programme from Doughty Street. It is an interesting thread.

P: Compared to the US, there are so few alternative voices here and in Europe, there seems to be nothing.

S: I wouldn’t quite say nothing. I was really on the edge of my seat the other day in the back of a cab. The driver had on I think it was Talk Sport in the middle of the morning and there was this guy, obviously the presenter, who was in a five minute diatribe about everything that was happening in London. There was a bit of the ‘political correctness gone mad’ cliché but actually it was beyond that, there was a raw anger in it, and a willingness to say exactly what was on his mind as it came into his mind. But I thought, that actually is an authentic voice, which fits in with the American Shock Jock thing. And one of the things we want to do with Doughty is to get much more involvement from the students – we are right next door to UCL, and there are lots of young people around there. When we feel that we are more established in our production, we will be really sending a big invitation to anyone out there who wants to come on and have a go. I see a revolving door with lots of people coming in and getting a chance to do their bit – and some of those turning out to be new stars. Some of those will be ‘thank you very much and see you next year’ of course, but we hope that from it will emerge people who will just suddenly take to the camera, take to the sofa if you like, and knock our socks off. We have this fantastic opportunity to be that open.

P. Stephan, thanks very much.