Swindon Viewpoint is Britain’s only surviving original community television station. Here is a summary of our long and colourful history.
Viewpoint was first registered as a company in May 1958 by the cable company in Swindon, then called Radio Rentals, (eventually to be known as Swindon Cable). The company at the time thought that commercial television on a local scale would one day be feasible and formed a company in preparation. Swindon was developing a relatively large cable network, relaying TV directly into people’s homes (because reception by aerial was so poor due to the considerable distance from the nearest transmitters). Radio Rentals ran the service and distributed the main off air channels (BBC and ITV) to homes on the system. They also realised that the cable system could carry more channels than those currently available, including locally originated television.
The government was still not permitting local television but Radio Rentals kept Swindon Viewpoint on ice in the hope that one-day they would. The company was steadily expanding the cable network meanwhile, and began to think that a local TV service would also encourage greater subscriber uptake. There were concerns around the funding of a local service however and the company wanted the government to allow them to carry local advertising.
The cable network in Swindon at the time
The chance to activate Swindon Viewpoint came in 1972 when the Government licensed experiments in local TV at a number of places in Britain; Wellingborough, Bristol, Sheffield, Greenwich and of course Swindon. Radio Rentals sold Viewpoint to Thorn-EMI, who were interested in trying out local television, and Thorn launched the Swindon service. Swindon Viewpoint was the only one of these five national ‘experiments’ to establish itself successfully and flourish beyond an initial period.
However, things have not always run smoothly. At our inaugural meeting at the Goddard Arms in 1973, the man Thorn EMI appointed as Station Manager, Richard Dunn, said ‘Viewpoint is a pioneer and the problem for pioneers is they get shot at’. Over and over again through our history this has proven to be the case and countless obstacles have had to be overcome to continue providing this unique and invaluable service.
Almost certainly a key factor in Viewpoint’s initial success was the inspired choice of Manager already mentioned: Richard Dunn.
Richard quickly realised that half a dozen staff and a few recording kits were not enough to make a significant amount of regular television output. Hence his practical decision to harness wider community energies in programme production; but this was also coupled with a genuine personal philosophy of encouraging access to the media, and as much public involvement as possible in decisions surrounding the nature and content of programmes.
Swindon Viewpoint in this early phase was funded by EMI Ltd, the telecommunications company, as a research and development project. EMI was a separate company from Radio Rentals the cable system owner. Viewpoint began transmissions in September 1973 and soon began to flourish, transmitting an average of five hours of original programming a week. (10 hours with repeats).
By 1976 the success and popularity of Viewpoint was beyond doubt. EMI and the public had proved the viability of the service, but the government were still not willing to allow a local channel to carry advertising or sponsorship; so EMI was no longer willing to continue to cover the cost of the operation.
Viewpoint was now scheduled to close but such was the public outcry that numerous public meetings were held and both Radio Rentals and EMI were petitioned to help find a way for Viewpoint to continue. Radio Rentals expressed their commitment to continue carrying the service as it added greatly to their offer, but both they and EMI were clear they could not fund the service at the current (and necessary) level.
EMI then offered to sell the service to the public of Swindon for £2, and this is what happened! So Viewpoint passed into public ownership.
The company was reconstituted as a not-for-profit company and restructured with a Board of Directors elected from and by the public. The Board decided that, even if it in future be allowed, Viewpoint would not carry advertising as they felt it would conflict with the public-access editorial freedom. The board set about raising funds in earnest and Viewpoint survived for a year or two on various grants. The breakthrough came when an experimental Lottery scheme (a forerunner of the National Lottery) was piloted by the firm Ladbrokes, and provided regular funding for Viewpoint.
Richard Dunn left for Thames Television in 1976 and was soon to become its Head. He remained devoted to Swindon Viewpoint however frequently coming to Swindon to help out as much as possible on a voluntary basis throughout his unfortunately short life.
For a year or two after his leaving there was some organisational turmoil at Viewpoint and staff confusion over policy. This finally settled down when Rupert Kirkham, a man who implicitly understood Viewpoint’s philosophy, became Station Manager.
New funding allowed a change to Umatic colour equipment and a productive few years followed with regular programmes like Seen in Swindon, Spectrum, and Tune In gaining considerable popularity, and frequent social action programmes on issues such as housing problems, being regularly made.
By the end of the decade storm clouds began to loom again. The experimental lottery scheme was not renewed and Viewpoint’s funding base once again disappeared. Swindon Viewpoint was scheduled to close yet again in April 1980 when the money to pay staff finally ran out.
The next phase in Viewpoint’s history begins with the arrival in early 1980 of Martin Parry, who would eventually steward Viewpoint for the next half-century.
Martin Parry digitising a roll of 16mm film
He came to Swindon as a British Film Institute funded ‘filmmaker-in-residence’ and had opened a film workshop in the town to encourage and train local filmmakers.
Fresh from work with the pioneering National Film Board of Canada, and having run a local TV channel in Canada, he immediately realised the value of Viewpoint. Martin quickly became involved with efforts to save Viewpoint and with no apparent solution to the funding crisis, eventually proposed that the film workshop go into partnership with Viewpoint, and offered the workshop’s hopelessly inadequate room at Swindon Arts Centre as a base for Viewpoint operations. These, with no funding for staff, would now have to be completely volunteer-based.
He then immediately drew up detailed proposals and lobbied Thamesdown Council to support a consolidated operation as a result of this partnership. By the second year the council had agreed to take on his salary (thus freeing the BFI money for an additional helper) and to provide the near derelict top floor of the Town Hall Arts Studios as accommodation. The space was converted by Viewpoint volunteers for the new partnership venture Media Arts, which was to become one of Britain’s most successful media workshops of the eighties. (See ‘Videoactive’ BBC1 primetime 1987 in videos section)
The film workshop had no video equipment so all that of Media Arts came from Viewpoint and was largely responsible for the success of Media Arts. It was rented commercially some of the time, and the income used to maintain and upgrade it regularly when necessary, whilst the rest of the time it was made available for public access, and also arts based programming. The production equipment worked hard and needed to be reliable and readily available for a variety of functions, which, with some frustrations, it mostly was.
Viewpoint and its structure of an accountable, elected board of directors continued to function, and volunteer made programmes went out regularly on the cable system. Many long time Viewpoint stalwarts such as Peter Wallen, Peter Monk and Rupert Kirkham (Station Manager in the late seventies, and board member thereafter), continued on the Board of Directors.
Many local media figures, such as Paul Langcaster and Shirley Ludford also cut their teeth with Swindon Viewpoint and Media Arts trained a host of local people, many of whom went on to success in the industry. (David Yates became Director of Harry Potter films). Another person key to the success of Viewpoint in the 80’s was Rob Watling, who took the second Media Arts post of Studio Manager. He undertook the training of many community groups in the eighties and effectively organised their production schedules.
Relations with key partners, such as the Borough Council (which Viewpoint’s publicly made programmes unsurprisingly sometimes criticised!) were at times awkward, although they were successfully managed on the whole through the 80s: But liaison with the cable company broke down seriously later in the decade. At the time, the company and Viewpoint were cooperating and through negotiations Swindon Cable had even offered Viewpoint its old premises back and some funding. Viewpoint had begun to equip the studio but then came a community-access programme originating in West Swindon in which the makers heavily criticised the cable company for alleged insensitive practises in laying new cable in the area. (See ‘Rough Cuts‘ in our videos).
The company took the view this was ‘biting the hand that feeds’ and relations deteriorated seriously. The premises were withdrawn cleared out and sold, and valuable records and some viewpoint equipment that had been taken there was lost. Fortunately core equipment was still at Media Arts, so programmes continued to be made.
Despite realising that the programme in question would be received as bad publicity by the cable company, the board had hoped they would understand that Viewpoint’s public-access policy needed to be consistently applied in all quarters.
This was a rather difficult decade for Swindon Viewpoint.
In the early nineties, due to a dire policy and management change at the Council, Viewpoint lost access to its own production equipment at Media Arts and from then on was only able to produce programming sporadically on equipment generously loaned by various other sources from time to time. This understandably led to a radical reduction in programming, and temporarily in the station’s ability to serve the town.
The Viewpoint Board during this era concentrated on consolidating its position in the hope of better times, and worked with a new partnership organisation Western Film Archive set up in 1988 to look after the extensive bulk of media history that Viewpoint had created over the years; and the many other items of local media history that had been donated. The bulk of the early tapes were placed for safekeeping at the County Records Office, and many others were stored in various places, often having to be moved several times as various supportive organisations, such as the Mechanics Institution Preservation Trust, in turn lost their own accommodation.
Repeatedly during this decade attempts were made to rebuild links with the cable company (or companies, – since it was taken over a number of times), gain access to their equipment and re-establish community access programming on the system, but despite frequent positive noises these proved to little tangible avail. Perhaps because some there did not want the risk of more challenging programmes, like the one already cited, or perhaps because the company was itself some of the time endeavouring to operate its own local TV service by a different non-access model so did not want the competition. The cable company completely gave up on a local channel in 2000.
In this decade prospects grew increasingly brighter for Swindon Viewpoint and access TV. Changes in the wider media environment, the multiplicity of outlets and diversification, and particularly the growth of the Internet, meant we were no longer dependent on cable as the main outlet for our programmes. At the same time the widespread availability of cheaper camcorders and computer editing made production easier than in the early days of bulky, expensive and often unreliable equipment.
During these years Martin Parry stewarded the operation to provide training and access to many groups and individuals. At the same time via Western Film Archive, he continued to curate and gradually transfer our large programme library to a digital format and make it available once again; With generous technical assistance from a major IT company, we also developed our first web distribution service for both existing and new material.
The archival process has been slow and time consuming, as tapes sometimes almost forty years old are fragile, and often need careful handling and conditioning to yield reasonable results. But great progress has and is being made, and fascinating new releases from the past have regularly been made available to the public, in parallel with providing a hub for new material of contemporary relevance to Swindon.
By the middle of the decade Viewpoint was in a position to relaunch its service fully as an Internet television station and accordingly did so. A new website steadily grew in popularity to reach over 60,000 regular viewers (at a statistical analysis in 2013).
Viewership has been mainly local of course, but a significant audience has also been drawn from around the world, – since Viewpoint is Britain’s and probably the world’s longest standing community television service, and is taught about on University media courses across the globe.
In these years Swindon Viewpoint continued to flourish, with many aspects of Swindon life covered, from Social Action, Protests, Meetings, Celebrations…. through to various Events and extensive coverage of the town’s lively Music and Arts scenes.
2013 was Swindon Viewpoint’s 40th anniversary year, and we held a grand benefit at which many local bands helped us fundraise. Thanks for helping us celebrate!
Unfortunately our reach was severely restricted around 2016 when our web service collapsed due to its Drupal technology platform being withdrawn. The website you see here has been recently rebuilt on a new platform through the volunteer help of Alan Parry.
In 2023 Viewpoint celebrated its 50th anniversary with a get-together of old staff and volunteers.
This decade is your story! Why not get involved with what is after all your TV service, – as well as Britain’s greatest community television station? Help take it into a new age!
We are particularly looking for people able to make and supply programmes about our town. If you would like to help with Viewpoint’s production or administration activities, or have programmes you think we could show, please do get in touch.
Swindon Viewpoint has long been Britain’s public-access TV success story, and as such has a unique history and place in Britain’s media landscape.
Swindon Viewpoint is now operated by Viewpoint Community Media – a Registered Charity. As well as making our extensive library gradually more and more available, we can now accept and show new material and continue our philosophy of entertaining our public with reflections of local life; – and encouraging debate, dialogue and understanding on issues of public relevance.
What we have in Viewpoint is unique and valuable. Nowhere else can claim such an extensive ‘living diary’, or offer residents such a meaningful way of understanding or engaging with local life.