Interfacing the Nation

Abstract

This article engages with prominent arguments about the role of public service broadcasting in the digital age and suggests that the BBC's role as a national universalist provider is one that can be accommodated within an age of identity and media pluralism. Taking the BBC's 2004 coverage of commemoration events that marked the end of the Second World War as a case study, this article combines industrial and textual analysis to investigate how the BBC utilized event programming and interactive television as a `portal' to drive viewers to online spaces. In so doing, it examines how such programming strategies worked to reassert traditional public service concerns with the national whilst simultaneously exploiting its brand value across new media platforms to cater for a fragmenting audience. The forms of interactive television discussed here are characterized by a desire to bring viewers together into one space to `engage' and `participate' under the familiar terms of the national, but crucially within the new media spaces opened to them by the BBC as `trusted guide'. The conclusion outlines how this case study might help us understand a `remediation' of public service broadcasting's role in the digital age, suggesting that the BBC's 2004 commemorative programming was particularly successful in articulating this role.