If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember Challenge Anneka, where Anneka Rice would charge around the country, via Truck which contained a beach buggy, or whatever it took (often flagging down a lift) to get to a location and do something. Sometimes a small community project, and sometimes something big, life changing; something you remember, even all these years later.
If you remember Challenge Anneka, they you almost certainly remember the Romanian Orphanage episode. This author still does. At the right time, in the right frame of mind, the emotion still runs high, and the tears still fall.
It turns out, of course, a lot of others agree. Including some of the folk who took part in the episode, who, without the cameras present, without Anneka Rice to organise stuff, kept going back, doing more, helping others and making the world, one act at a time, a better place.
That’s the power of television, and, if we’re honest, a lot of what television should be about.
We all want to change the world, even though most of us won’t. Most will feel powerless to affect change, or even know where to begin. But we all could be agents of change if we want to be.
That show, so many years ago now, changed many people’s lives, not least the orphans in that orphanage. Since that episode, countless other orphans and orphanages got folk driving over from the UK (and other countries) to help rebuild, restock and improve their lives.
It’s not just children.
All these years later, countless others look out for animals from countries who don’t have joined up plans to deal with strays, and band together to help removed captive animals in inhumane conditions, or to help fix other wrongs.
That’s what public service broadcasting should be about, and that’s the kind of programming we want to see again on UK screens and worldwide.
That’s what we, as an organisation, see as our focus. News and current affairs are our bread and butter, but we want to do so much more, because together we can do so much more, and use the power of media to all become agents of change together.
If you want to see television working for good?
Want to get involved, and BE one of the agents of change?
Television used to be about so much more than reality television that locks people up in a house or on an island. We know those folk will actually survive, because the show is not really about their survival, but about who they become and how the act when they believe it is. But why fake it when there are so many people and creatures and places in the world that need help. Collectively we can make a difference, and then maybe others will be talking about us 30 years later, about the good we did together.
