Television - Could the BBC's populism be the cause of ITV's woes? Andrew Billen doubts it

The measure of how brilliantly ITV's director of channels, David Liddiment, did with his MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival last weekend was the size of the disappointed crowd that failed to get into Lorraine Heggessey's session the next day. As the person sitting next to me said, you'd have thought we were about to get a preview of the Harry Potter movie rather than meet the controller of BBC1. Without presenting any vision for ITV's future, Liddiment had turned the heat on to BBC1.

His lament on the Friday night was over the BBC's lack of creativity. On BBC1, there were too many copycat programmes, too many episodes of EastEnders, Holby City and Casualty, too few (in fact, since Omnibus moved to BBC2, no) regular arts strands, and a general effort to push public service to the fringes of the schedule. If you were even a little cynical, you might say it looked as if he was complaining that BBC1's populism was making his job harder. What he was actually saying was that it was making it more boring: "The BBC's creative leadership will determine whether other broadcasters, particularly ITV, have any scope at all in the future to take a programme decision based on creative rather than strictly commercial grounds."

In other words: if you think ITV is predictable, blame the BBC. Personally I would prefer, in the first instance, to blame Liddiment himself. He presides over a network whose long-term decline - a matter partly of demographics, partly of multichannel viewing - has not been halted by his team, and which will enter the coming advertising recession in vulnerable shape. Its audience share has fallen to 28.2 per cent, only a couple of years after he himself was aiming to get paid a bonus for achieving a peak-time average of 40 per cent. Yet it would be unfair to say that he has shied away from making real changes to the schedule. At this point in his career, he may even wonder if his problem has been to take too many risks.

When, at another session, ITV's controller of entertainment, Claudia Rosencrantz, was accused of playing safe, she said: "I think we take incredible risks. I think we're quite mad with some of the risks we take." She is probably right, given that so many of the risks ITV has taken have failed: the news move, the over-selling of Survivor, the live comedy from Ant and Dec and Baddiel and Skinner, and now, although it is early days, the trussing up of football as early evening light entertainment. Congratulations are in order for the innovative scheduling of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and for sticking with Tonight with Trevor McDonald (whose 46 outings a year compare favourably to Panorama's 30), and for occasional gems such as Andrew Davies's promising-sounding Othello - but the ratio of triumphs to disasters is not running in ITV's favour.

It may well be that Liddiment's lecture hid a plea to ITV's shareholders to get off his back about ratings and let him pursue a personal mission to restore the concept of public service to his channel. When the fine documentary-maker Roger Graeff stood up in the post-MacTaggart question and answer session and revealed he had been told by one ITV commissioning editor that "we need you to guarantee eight million on the title; we don't care if you make an intelligent film after that", I prefer to think Liddiment was genuinely ashamed.

But innovation will always fail more often than it succeeds, as demonstrated by Heggessey's bright idea of clearing a Saturday night on BBC1 for that intensely visual subject, telephone text-messaging. No wonder Liddiment is encouraging her to take more chances. But the idea that ITV is failing because BBC1 is a roaring populist success that generally avoids brave leaps of faith such as The Joy of Text is nonsense anyway. This is a station whose share has just risen to 26.6 per cent. The truth is, Heggessey's channel is in as much of a ratings trough as his.

Much the more interesting part of Liddiment's speech was not his opportunistic knocking of BBC1, but his analysis of why too few good ideas were making it to the screen on either channel. Why was television so boring? Part of the reason, he said, was the shift of power away from the producers who make programmes to the broadcasters who commission them. He proposed some solutions: reducing the bureaucracy of the commissioning process, not expecting programme-makers to be salespeople, encouraging regional production, allowing second-broadcast rights to be retained by independents and ending the right of BBC in-house producers over, in effect, three-quarters of the channel's output.

Now, I just watch the stuff. I'm in no position to say if these are the answers to the problem, but what was exciting about Liddiment's lecture was that he recognised that a problem was what it was, and that the solution was understanding that even mass audiences, in the long run, prefer to be surprised than pacified. In Edinburgh last week, I visited my 81-year-old aunt. Even she said she was going to get "a box" this winter "so there will be something to watch". If Liddiment and Heggessey were doing their jobs, Auntie Eve wouldn't need to do that, would she?

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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