If there’s one thing I learned at the Peacock conference in Wales over the weekend, it’s that I didn’t know anything about Peacock. And while there may not have been a reason for me to know anything about Peacock before, there is now – and it’s time I patched a few of the gaping holes.

So after a weekend without cellphone reception and wireless broadband, I’m back in civilisation with access to the internet ‘on call’ (rather than just for a few minutes a day from a communal and public computer), it’s time to do the reflection thing.

I’m hitting Google to try and flesh out some of the characters I met over the weekend – combatants, breakfast companions, sharers of jokes, and speakers of languages foreign (mostly Economics – but also Welsh, to a lesser extent) – and also to try and fill in the fairly sizable chasms in my knowledge.

First, when you say ‘Peacock’, you’re talking about the document:

Report of the Committee on Financing the BBC
(Cmnd 9824)
July 1986
Chairman: Professor Alan Peacock.
Expected by the Thatcher government to conclude that the licence fee should be abolished, the Peacock Committee favoured retaining much of the existing system as a ‘least worst’ option.

To talk about the man, you say ‘Alan’ or, more correctly ‘Professor Sir Alan Peacock‘.

Second, ‘nice train man’ is, as I’ve mentioned, Sir Samuel Brittan.

Brittan is known as a columnist for the Financial Times and the author of several books and a vast array of articles, which I actually feel inclined to make my way through as penance for my earlier ignorance.

He has a reputation for being eminently readable, so I won’t consider it a chore – though I suspect there’ll be a great deal to disagree with in there…

Mr Jeremy Hardie describes himself as an accountant, though honorary fellow of Kings College in London, former chairman of WH Smith and restauranteur might be more accurate.

These three men were members of the committee that published a report to Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1986, ostensibly concerning the funding of the BBC (Thatcher was hoping for advertising), but in fact making recommendations and observations about the economies of broadcasting across the board.

The findings of the committee were in no way binding, but many of its recommendations were adopted as policy. Advertising on the BBC was not introduced, the TV licence was maintained and ITV was subjected to the auctioning of spectrum licences.

So now, 20 years after the establishment of the committee – and in the wake of a new review of the BBC’s Royal Charter, academics and broadcasters were brought together with three of the main authors of the report to discuss the impact of Peacock, its implications for British broadcasting, and its implications for the future.

That, at any rate, was the intention. What seemed to happen as a consistent subtext (and, in a sense, a more interesting thread) was the seemingly unbridgeable division between economics and sociology – as conference chairman Professor Peter Jay put it, one “cast in stone” and the other “knitted in wool”.

There were people I was instinctively drawn towards throughout the proceedings. Jean Seaton and Anthony McNicholas seemed natural intellectual allies (though with far deeper and more nuanced understandings of what was transpiring than I had access to).

Likewise the entire Welsh crew, headed by Prof Tom O’Malley and the contingent from Bournemouth, led by Hugh Chignell (who is simultaneously very funny, yet entirely incapable of telling a joke).

But what was surprising amongst this apparently clear division between us, the “woolly sociologists” and the clear and rigorous economists, was that there was more to it than that. There was a practiced positionality and counter-positionality that seemed more game than defence of belief.

Jean Seaton ‘gets’ economics and clearly understands that public broadcasting principles have resource implications. Samuel Brittan is aware that there is more to broadcasting than can be explained by reference to markets. But their role is oppositional – and it took me all weekend to figure out what was going on.

It was only on the delayed train back from Shrewsbury to Birmingham, where I sat amongst them off duty – and saw them together: trade unionist Tony Lennon, media ethics professor Richard Collins, Sir Samuel Brittan, Jean Seaton, Anthony McNicholas, Jeremy Hardie… all sitting in a train exchanging newspaper sections, pleasantries, stories of family at home and a weekend away spent in beautiful surroundings.

And that’s when I figured it out: it didn’t matter that I didn’t agree with – or even fully understand the arguments being put forward and countered. What was important was that here was a bunch of devastatingly intelligent human beings debating something that they cared deeply about.

Twenty years after the Peacock Report, the true legacy seems to be that public broadcasting in the UK really matters and, if that selection was in any way representative of the minds negotiating its ongoing trajectory, then it’s in pretty good hands.