BBC DOWN THE PLUGHOLE
the BBC's selective view of what is and is not an advertisement
THE BBC's attitude to advertising becomes more and more peculiar. It has always taken a snobbish line on this issue. To the people who run the BBC, advertising is `trade'; and the BBC is not about trade, it is about culture. It cannot be seen to engage in commerce any more than the government departments it so closely re- sembles. Yet there have always been some anomalies in this general policy. The Listener sells space to advertisers, like any other weekly of its kind. Its standards have not notably been corrupted or lowered by the exhortations from publishers and record companies in its chaste pages. If it be argued that the Listener appeals to a very limited range of 'posh' advertisers — and therefore no harm done — what of the case of the Radio Times, which has been for decades among the largest selling maga- zines in the country, and an excellent medium for mass-advertising of the widest possible appeal? So keen is this paper on selling space that it was for many years said to be the only magazine which actually paid its advertising manager more than its editor.
There are other anomalies. Although the BBC affects to regard the advertising agencies as the devil incarnate, responsible as they are for the depravities which it claims would soil its virginal schedules, it has lately been having a good deal of truck with those awful fellows, negotiating with no fewer than four of them. Its object was to find the one which would most effective- ly mount an advertising campaign showing why the BBC is too precious to descend into the advertising arena. The hypocrisy of the BBC's position was illuminated during the debate on the issue staged by the Royal Television Society during its recent conference. The man who was seconding my motion that the BBC should take ads had to withdraw at the last minute, as the BBC had just picked his agency to mount its campaign, and it was thought inappropriate that he should ex- press his views on the issue. In any other context the left-wing rentamob which seems to dominate the thinking of BBC news and current affairs staff would have been raising a hullabaloo about censorship.
However, the anomalies go deeper still. It now appears that the BBC has for many years been doing deals with commercial and other enterprises, giving promotional plugs and publicity in return for cash contributions to projects in which the BBC is interested. To make matters worse for the BBC, these activities have been unearth- ed by the hated Rupert Murdoch's News of the World. For instance, this summer the BBC broadcast a Blue Peter show and two other programmes about the Madagascar project of the World Wildlife Fund launched by Fiat Cars. This involved send- ing a BBC television crew to Madagascar. The Fiat people are quoted as follows: 'We paid much of the cost of the BBC going to Madagascar. Our name was mentioned on the programme, and when David Bellamy introduced Blue Peter he displayed Our information pack.'
Another case cited by the News of the World involved a Roadshow broadcast on 15 September. It provided plugs for the Thorpe Park leisure complex in Surrey. In return the company sent a cheque to Unicef for 'almost £6,000'. According to Thorpe Park, this is the third time it has done a deal with the BBC. The fact that the ultimate recipients of the cash are reputable charities — or at least one assumes they are reputable charities does not quite remove the sting. This is a `I'm trying to forget,' form of sponsorship, particularly, in my view, when a commercial firm defrays some of the BBC's costs. The BBC's defence is that it has raised about half a million pounds for charity through such deals. That may well be true. But the BBC is perfectly capable of putting on a charity appeal without the need for three-way transactions with commercial firms. Nor is it clear to me what is the systematic basis on which the BBC differentiates between one charity and another. There is a lot of semi-commercialised benevolence going on, for instance, in the pop world today. I would like to see the BBC's code of conduct on this kind of thing — if there is one. And I would like to be reassured that, if it does exist, it is observed rather more closely than the BBC's code of conduct on terrorism.
There is the further point of free plugs on the BBC. Readers often write to me claiming that free plugs for all kinds of things on the BBC have increased, are increasing and ought to be diminished. I have no means of knowing whether this is true, but it seems to be a common impress- ion. The other day I watched a pretty blatant plug for a charity on BBC Break- fast Television; the same day, as I recall, there was a plug for a series of opera performances on the Third Programme. Both worthy causes, I do not doubt, but I would like to know by what criteria the BBC decides whether a free plug is legiti- mate or not, and whether free-plugging is always regarded as permissible provided it is for a charity. I assume that the Peacock Committee is looking into these aspects of the BBC's present performance and check- ing it against the claims made in the BBC's submissions to it. There are certain murky areas in the whole business of radio and television reviewing of books, plays, con- certs and so on, and the electronic promo- tion of personalities who stand to make fortunes by means of free BBC publicity. The clarification of these areas is directly relevant to the Peacock Committee's main object of discovering whether it is in the public interest for the BBC to take ads. If viewers are to be subjected to constant plugs, it is better that they should be openly acknowledged and paid for; as it is, the viewer has to submit both to plugging and the licence fee.
In the meantime, the BBC has still not come up with any acceptable alternative to an advertising revenue. By the end of the decade, barring a huge and politically unacceptable increase in the licence fee, the income of the ITV companies will be twice that of the BBC, and the difference in quality of output is bound to be obvious. During the RTS debate, Alasdair Milne said that all the BBC wanted was an `assured income'. Don't we all? This feck- less, Micawberish phrase reminded me of Reggie Maudling's extenuating plea: 'All I ever wanted was a little pot of gold for my old age.' Assured incomes do not go to those who live by the begging bowl: they go to those who work for and earn them.
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