First slice off the sacred cow
Plans to break the BBC’s monopoly on the licence fee for the first time could help fund a new system of local and regional news on ITV, and support children’s programmes (Channel 4?), the government revealed in yesterday’s Digital Britain report.
Good or bad? Good that the first slice off the sacred cow’s hide has been taken at last. Bad if this stops or even slows the more radical overhaul of UK broadcasting.
I worked in TV for twenty years and am dismayed with the ever-increasing stranglehold on news that the BSKYB/BBC (a tax exile and a government agency) have acquired. I have been stunned by the shocking largess of the BBC, on its news budgets, its personality pay cheques, its £50,000 a year chauffeurs, and much much more.
Mostly I have been angered by how a state broadcaster should ever have acquired such a position of power that it now distorts every market so dramatically wherever it goes…
Radio– BBC Radio’s £450m annual budget has stunted radio growth.
Internet news – BBC spends more on websites (£150m) than all national newspapers put together.
Local news – BBC’s attempted (but foiled) launch of a £68m network of local news websites with video content would have killed off many local newspapers.
Magazine market – the state broadcaster it is the UK’s third largest magazine publisher.
It has become a sprawling, greedy leviathan. It is consumed with protecting its budgets and pressing ahead in every area of the market it can possibly reach with the sole aim of being number one, destroying all that stands in its way.
But with a collapsing commercial TV market, it is actually television where the BBC has failed so profoundly. The BBC has only ever thrived when it has top flight competition, constantly pushing it to new levels of excellence. As soon as the competition was dispensed with it was exposed for the unimaginative arrogant organisation that it is.
There will be those that point to the “quality output of the BBC”…. Blue Planet – and the never ending number of David Attenborough documentaries, Doctor Who etc . Yet the schedule is actually full of cheap light entertainment copies of commercial programmes, mindless day time TV, inane chat shows (I include Match of the Day in that btw) and timid news coverage. So much for “quality”.
And let us not forget that when ITV had a similarly protected position in UK broadcasting it produced some of the best shows on TV; The Avengers, Inspector Morse, World In Action, The Sweeney, Cracker, Spitting Image, Rising Damp, The Prisoner, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Auf Wiedersehen Pet, The New Statesman, Coronation Street ……. Hell, it was the poorly funded ITV News that picked up this year’s BAFTA award for best news coverage . How is that possible with the BBC news budget?
And let us not forget that when you take into account all of its commercial activity together with the our money, the BBC income is £4billion+ a year. Chew on that one.
But “top slicing” the BBC licence fee is NOT the way to go. The government has missed the point. Again. This was a half-arsed intervention. Putting a sticking plaster on the problem by protecting those bits that the voters might complain about – local news, kids programmes etc.
We need a total overhaul of UK broadcasting. Sell off swathes of the BBC, (Radio’s 1 and 2 value was c£500m alone back in 2007). And replace the TV licence fee with a a subscription fee so we can pay for the bits we want and save money on the bits we never watch.
So much more to say – too much space taken already. But let this be a start. Let’s lift the rose tinted glasses from our eyes and actually see not what the BBC once was , but what it has become. And whether there really can be a place for such a state-funded giant in the multi-channel, multi-media world we live in today.
Tags: BBC, digital britain