Euphoria among BBC bosses, following their ratings triumph over ITV, is about to take a knock. They already know that, however popular their entertainment shows may be, their political coverage is a turn-off. On Tuesday, an internal review team will bring them the further unwelcome news that the solution to this problem is unclear.
Axe-grinders advance ready but unconvincing remedies: feminists call for more women presenters; ethnic-minority agitators urge that more attention should be paid to ethnic-minority issues; regionalists demand less output from London. Broadcasting professionals, on the other hand, offer more subtle and seductive counsel. If audiences find politics unpalatable, they suggest, programme-makers should sugar the pill.
Perhaps outdated formality could give way to a more “accessible” approach. Greying Oxbridge presenters might be replaced by younger estuary-English speakers. Gravity could be supplanted by irreverence. Where the elite have pronounced, the public could participate. Abstract issues could give way to human-interest stories. Talk could be replaced by pictures, and argument by warm and involving emotion.
Suggestions about how such thinking might actually be implemented have so far been modest. One proposal is that David Dimbleby might forsake the Question Time platform and mingle with the studio audience, thereby demonstrating that, however posh he may talk, his heart is with the people. Some simply suggest exporting the chatty style of Radio 5 Live’s talk shows to other, more po-faced networks.
Sadly, experience suggests that just a spoonful of sugar can quickly blunt the pill’s therapeutic properties. Recently, Newsnight tried a kind of “dress-down” edition on Fridays, with a studio audience and a “lighter” agenda. The authority of the programme as a whole was undermined, and mercifully the idea was abandoned. Question Time has opted to intersperse its panellists’ deliberations with the disjointed remarks of randomly selected members of the studio audience. As a result, it has ceased to function as a cockpit for national debate.
In the past, more radically trivialised political programmes have done real harm to the public weal. Their crude oversimplifications have set back, rather than enhanced, understanding of the issues of the day.
Such attempts to meet the disaffected halfway rarely yield even the expected boost to ratings. One man who ought to know this is the BBC’s director general, Greg Dyke. At London Weekend Television in the 1980s, Dyke replaced the most uncompromising political programme Britain has known, Weekend World, with the most populist equivalent then imaginable. Yet the flashy newcomer (called Eyewitness) failed to attract the hoped-for avalanche of new viewers, and was quickly dropped. Dyke ended up bringing back Weekend World‘s Brian Walden.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that dumbing down so often fails to deliver. The BBC’s successes with serious subject matter to date have not been achieved by patronising the audience. Last year, Simon Schama’s History of Britain and The Blue Planet drew huge numbers to history and science. Both of these efforts were presented by ageing, patrician males; yet each displayed passionate commitment to its content. Programmes that instead seem ashamed of themselves can hardly be expected to captivate, however undemanding they may be.
Popularisation could of course only be the solution if the problem really were the stuffiness of the present fare. But is it? Many people doubtless consider Auntie a little staid; but they have more serious, and more legitimate, objections to her current political output. The real trouble may be that the BBC all too often equates coverage of politics with coverage of politicians.
Survey after survey has shown that people believe politicians today to be arrogant, self-seeking and dishonest. This may not be wholly fair, but nor is it wholly off-beam. Certainly, the politicians interviewed on BBC programmes regularly insult the intelligence of viewers and listeners. They rely on bombast or platitudes, parrot worn-out mantras and wilfully mislead or prevaricate, in the apparent belief that audiences will be too stupid to notice.
As it happens, the BBC has one or two hard men who berate such behaviour. But even Jeremy Paxman’s haughty protests pall, and come to seem just another part of a futile ritual. Because the grandest bigwigs anyway decline to be berated, the corporation provides them instead with cosy forums such as Breakfast with Frost, in which sympathetic interlocutors politely refrain from discomfiting follow-up questions. Understandably, some people find these exercises even more infuriating.
When not conveying politicians’ wearisome prattle, BBC political coverage attends slavishly to the minutiae of their doings. Despatch Box, Today in Parliament, The Week in Westminster, Westminster Live, The Westminster Hour and the rest pay endless homage to the gloomy palace’s often arcane rites. Meanwhile, mackintoshed figures in Downing Street keep us hourly abreast of who’s up, who’s down, who’s been snubbed and who’s made a gaffe among the despised political priesthood.
Hardly surprising, then, that the corporation is seen as colluding in a pointless charade, rather than providing the kind of information that people really need.
This is not the only way to cover politics. The review team’s focus groups said they wanted to know what Railtrack’s demise would mean for the railways, not for the career of Stephen Byers. Yet in the BBC’s current output, there is extraordinarily little examination of the substance, as opposed to the process, of politics.
From an organisation so generously resourced by a compulsory poll tax, we deserve more than politicians’ loaded and limited take on the topics of the day. Why doesn’t the corporation confine politicians to programmes that grill them seriously, such as On the Record? Elsewhere it should set its own agenda, instead of following Westminster’s. Why can’t the BBC provide its own analyses of how healthcare might best be financed, what joining the euro would mean for Britain and how terrorism should be confronted? In none of these cases does the party-political ding-dong embrace the full spectrum of relevant thinking.
BBC heads should muster the self-confidence to mount their own expository epics on such issues. These could provide a comprehensive overview of their subjects, aimed at fully equipping viewers to make up their own minds. Such programmes, treated to state-of-the-art production values and the kind of promotion lavished on The Blue Planet, ought to be as effective at attracting peak-time audiences as a series on marine biology.
The BBC’s failure to approach politics in this way seems to be rooted in its own political culture. During a long history of deferring to the political establishment in pursuit of its corporate interests, it has built the appeasement of politicians into its programme-making. It is time the BBC addressed the needs of the people, rather than the inclinations of their justly discredited representatives.
David Cox has produced television programmes about politics for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4
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