Six months into his term in office, it is time for the BBC’s director general, Greg Dyke, to show us what he’s made of. Fiddling with the corporation’s management structure and frowning over its taxi bill will no longer do. What’s the big idea? At an eagerly awaited speech in Edinburgh this bank holiday weekend, we are to be told.
Not that the master plan will come as a surprise. It has been kite-flown, leaked and spun as energetically as we might expect from a paid-up Tony crony. Essentially, the BBC’s television service is to be transformed. “Mixed programming” is to give way to “themed channels”. In practice, this seems to mean that BBC1 will divest itself of most of its remaining serious programmes, so that it can become a more or less populist channel. Most of BBC TV’s current affairs, arts and science programmes will be consigned to a new, low-budget channel to be called BBC4, available only to digital subscribers.
This is no trifling change of tack. Until now, the BBC has claimed as part of its unique selling point a commitment to attracting audiences to artistic and intellectual pearls by insinuating them into a populist swill. In so doing, it has supposedly enlarged our horizons, concentrated our attention on what matters and bound us together as a community. These are all purposes that are becoming more, rather than less, urgent. The new media are encouraging us to indulge individual tastes at the expense of both potential personal fulfilment and the public interest. Many see this as a possibly dangerous trend. Resisting it could have been the BBC’s primary millennial goal. But no. Dyke proposes not to lead, but to desert, the fight for social and cultural cohesion.
The reason given is that this struggle is just too difficult. In an age when viewers can exercise ever more choice, the BBC must go with the flow. As for its historic mission to give us what we need, rather than what we think we want, well, “elite culture is just one more niche, and one which appeals to a diminishing minority”, in the words of Dyke’s de facto deputy, the BBC’s director of television, Mark Thompson.
So, universal applause for an up-to-the-minute and democratically minded new DG, followed by trebles all round in the Broadcasting House bar? Not exactly. The themed channels scheme has provoked protest not only from self-confessed bastions of the cultural elite such as John Tusa, the director of the Barbican Centre in London, but also from people’s tribunes – the likes of Roy Hattersley and, indeed, the Secretary of State for Culture, Chris Smith. The critics assume that it is the BBC’s job to pursue its mission, whatever the weather. So why doesn’t Dyke?
Has this football-loving, estuary-English-speaking man of the people brought the taint of barbarism into a hitherto sacrosanct cultural temple? On the contrary, it is because Dyke has succumbed so quickly and completely to prevailing BBC thinking that he has chosen the course he has. For years now, the corporation’s panjandrums have ignored cultural or social goals, fighting instead to preserve the scale and grandeur of the institution that pays their mortgages, lends them status and picks up that £6m annual taxi bill.
To achieve this, they believe they must, above all, safeguard the licence fee, and that this depends on maximising audience size – the more licence-payers watch, however vacuous the content, the more likely they are to carry on paying; a bit of heavy stuff is a necessary fig leaf to disguise what is actually going on, but it can drag down the numbers. When this is the game you are playing, shunting serious programmes into a cheapskate ghetto where they can rot, unwatched, to create space and money for the kind of programmes already offered by commercial broadcasters seems to make excellent sense.
But does it? Just suppose we accept Dyke’s line that mixed programming is unviable in the emerging broadcasting environment. There might then be a case for a minority channel that would make serious programming available to the few prepared to seek it out. Such a channel could be freed from the trivialisation currently inflicted on even the worthiest of BBC programmes in an attempt to boost ratings. It might even rediscover the sense of high purpose that the corporation has so woefully lost. And it could be supported at little cost to licence-payers (or, perhaps, taxpayers in general, commercial sponsors or Lottery punters): Dyke proposes to spend £50m on BBC4, compared to the £823m spent on BBC1 last year.
With the advent of the new channel, however, it would no longer make sense to run extremely expensive populist channels that, while similar to those offered by commercial broadcasters, would be provided by an inefficient nationalised industry funded by a regressive poll tax. Because the pearls that might have been used to justify this would be gone from the swill.
Advertisers would love to support East–Enders and Ground Force. If they were allowed to do so, not only would single parents be spared the jail sentences currently meted out to them for failing to pay the licence fee, but we might all be better off. Barring 40 per cent of the television market to advertising, coupled with the exorbitant rates that advertisers are consequently charged, forms a barrier to the creation of new consumer goods and services.
BBC1, a proposed youth channel to be called BBC3, and Radios 1 and 2 could form the basis of a new, privatised media company, free to fund itself by advertising and subscription as it saw fit. Such an entity would quickly bring market discipline to bear on the corporation’s endemic waste and bureaucracy. Liberated from the rows about unfair competition that currently inhibit the BBC from exploiting its assets to the full, it might eventually become the global entertainment player that British broadcasting has failed to produce to date.
So is this Dyke’s hidden agenda? Is he after a management buyout, rather like the one he sought but failed to pull off at Pearson, his previous employer? Apparently not. By all accounts, he is as sold as any of his predecessors on perpetuating the BBC as a sprawling national icon promising everything to everyone. He seems to believe that he can have it all, that he can continue to suck thirstily from the teat of the public milch cow, while shaking off the obligation to discharge public duties.
But he may not be able to have it his way, after all. In the past, politicians have accepted the BBC’s betrayal of its mission with few complaints. The themed channels proposal, however, seems to have goaded them into action. The government now enjoys a veto over both the creation of new BBC television channels and significant changes to existing ones.
Last month, Chris Smith reminded New Statesman readers of these powers, describing himself as “very unhappy” about the idea of a switch to themed channels. We thus find ourselves in an Alice in Wonderland world in which political erosion of the hitherto jealously guarded autonomy of the BBC seems to offer the best hope of preserving its integrity. However, Dyke may yet outwit his Westminster opponents, using the kind of nifty footwork with which the BBC top brass usually manage to bamboozle their critics. Look out for some tactical back-pedalling, perhaps involving emphatic, but not quite bankable, pledges to ring-fence selected crown jewels of public service broadcasting, such as Panorama, from the rigours of theming.
If Dyke does prevail, and a new universe of themed channels unfolds before our wondering eyes, this may prove a Pyrrhic victory. What will it profit Dyke if he sustains BBC1’s audience share, only to see the case for its public funding rumbled? As the political class responds to the Dyke revolution, he may turn out to have committed the blunder that his predecessors dreaded above all others – dislodging the corporation’s £2bn annual drip-feed of public money.
Now a chill sense of foreboding can be detected in the circular corridors of Television Centre. In the Dyke-speak that has superseded Dalek-speak at all levels of the corporation, a BBC man confided the reason: “I think we may really have pissed on our chips this time. The licence fee is toast.”
David Cox is a television producer and a former head of current affairs at London Weekend Television
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