Daily Mail, March 4 2002

The new TV channel BBC4 started at the weekend, and very classy it looks. For openers, it offered up a cracking programme about Goya, a concert by the African artist Baaba Maal, and a production of the opera Madame Butterfly. Terrific. Just the sort of thing, you might think, that public service broadcasting should be doing.

There is, however, one small problem. BBC4 is a digital channel. Only about a third of homes have digital television, and any future wave of enthusiasm seems unlikely.

So now the kind of programmes for which BBC2 was first invented, but which it has largely dumped in its own quest for ratings, are being cast into an electronic limbo. BBC4 might become a superlative channel, but one which is not being watched.

Indeed, to those with suspicious minds, digital is a handy means of notionally delivering the BBC’s public service remit while further dumbing down the terrestrial channels in the quest for the holy grail of market-share.

The danger is that other serious programmes such as documentaries, drama or politics might also be hived off from terrestrial. Already the BBC has suggested that live coverage of the party conferences should be banished to the digital Parliament ghetto (sorry, channel).

Mesmerised by the ratings game, the BBC is increasingly playing to the lowest common denominator. Instead of gripping plays or cutting-edge documentaries, we are fed a diet of cruelty and voyeurism; in the place of great comedy, we get daft quiz shows and asinine smut.

We even get public service porn. BBC Choice is serving up such elevated fare as Sex Warts and All, Porn Star, Nude TV or Toilets, Fear, Phobia and Fetish. This is the reductio ad absurdum of the strategy of catering for every conceivable broadcasting taste, but with the BBC kite mark of quality.

The core of public service values lies within news and current affairs. But the

BBC’s TV news bulletins are increasingly devaluing accurate and informed reporting and analysis by experienced correspondents in favour of dodgy and vacuous performances by pretty faces and titanic egos.

The prerequisite of good journalism is objectivity. And here lies perhaps the BBC’s greatest and most pernicious betrayal. For with some honourable exceptions, it instinctively reflects every politically correct view going.

Whether on Europe, Israel, the Conservative party or social issues like drugs or the family, the choice of interviewees, the slant of the questioning and the tone of voice and body-language make it all too plain that anyone who challenges the world-view of the left is considered bigoted, repellent or barking mad.

The government, by contrast, is given a relatively respectful ride. As with the Mittal cash-for-influence scandal, the BBC often gives the impression of being dragged along only reluctantly in the wake of newspaper revelations.

This impression of a state broadcasting system has been hugely worsened by the appointment of Director-General Greg Dyke, a contributor to Labour party funds, and Chairman Gavyn Davies, a close friend of Tony Blair -- not to mention the constant exchange of employees between the BBC and the government’s special adviser class.

Davies has now proposed that the BBC governors should themselves have special advisers, over whose appointment he would have the last word. This is even worse. The governors are supposed to be the BBC’s ultimate safeguard from inappropriate government interference. Can one imagine the uproar had a Tory government tried to suborn the governors through hand-picked political satraps?

I have always believed in the BBC and in the licence fee. The BBC is a vital institution in the life of the nation. Its purpose was to unify and to elevate, and the licence fee safeguarded that mission. But now I am getting so angry and disillusioned that I am even beginning to feel that a spot of civil disobedience might be in order when it comes to paying up.

For the BBC is now unrecognisable from the noble aims of Lord Reith. In the twenties, he laid down that broadcasting would carry into people’s living rooms the best in the world, and to avoid the harmful and degraded.

But what is the point of the BBC if it is no longer doing this? Why should licence-fee payers be funding porn? Why should they have money increasingly taken from them to pay for channels they cannot see?

The BBC lays claim to uniquely high-minded quality and values, which justify paying a poll tax for a service watched by only 30 per cent of the audience. But the quality now is poor. Who feels any more that the BBC is compulsory viewing on great events? Who would watch News 24 rather than the superior Sky News? What is the justification for the licence fee if the BBC is destroying its very raison d’être?

The rot set in under John Birt when he decided the BBC had to compete in the market, a policy continued in spades by Greg Dyke. It is said that the licence-fee can’t be justified if no-one is watching. But the whole point of public service broadcasting is that it does not compete in the market-place and is not driven by ratings. Moreover, quality does not repel – it attracts.

People switch off from political coverage for the same reason they are turned off by politics itself. It’s not that they don’t care about the issues. They care passionately. What they can’t stand is the sterile point-scoring, the avoidance of serious argument and the impression that interviewers and politicians all seem part of a cosy metropolitan conspiracy of attitudes that makes viewers feel they are living in a completely alien universe.

What’s more, many viewers are hooked into serious programmes which are craftily sandwiched between popular entertainment. While BBC programmes in general are so dire, few will make the effort to switch on specially for Panorama or the news. Segmenting programmes into specialised ghetto channels is therefore disastrous. Yet this is precisely what digital is doing.

BBC big-wigs think they can replicate public service values on digital channels. Viewing figures don’t matter, goes this argument, as long as the channels are high quality. After all, relatively few listen to Radio 3 or Radio 4 and yet these are considered national treasures (even though they, too, are not what they once were).

But TV is a mass medium with huge pulling power which sustains well-funded competition. Radio 3 and Radio 4 could not sustain their quality without the licence fee because speech radio costs a fortune and both are minority tastes. That’s why Radio 3 and Radio 4 are niche public service markets, while digital means the fragmentation of television and declining standards.

If the BBC still claims to be a public service broadcaster, then it has to behave as one. If it wants to play the same game as commercial broadcasters, then the licence fee is dead. Complacent Auntie can’t have it both ways.

Posted by admin at March 4, 2002