SPECTATOR
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AUNTIE BETRAYS HER CLASS
Anew era in broadcasting arrived unheralded this week, when BBC1 announced that its annual audience share in 1998 had fallen for the first time below 30 per cent. The breaching of this psycho- logical barrier was as inevitable as it was significant. The proliferation of new chan- nels — cable, satellite, terrestrial and digi- tal — has been chipping away at the BBC's loyal viewing public for some years. Howev- er hard the BBC tries, the trend can only continue on its descending path.
Eventually, when the Corporation's share of the market falls below some as yet to be determined point, reform or abolition of the licence fee may return to the realm of practical politics. At the moment, however, our public service broadcaster faces a more immediate and insidious threat to its future.
The tide of British culture is ebbing, just as culture's celebrant Matthew Arnold saw on Dover beach the ebbing of the sea of faith. The middle classes may have expand- ed, but they have also mutated. In the past, the British middle class, although not con- sciously intellectual like their French coun- terparts, felt a powerful urge towards self- improvement. Lord Reith's BBC, with cul- tural education at the heart of its mission, was a product of this system of values. The middle class, whether measured by income or by the class to which individuals believe they belong, now includes the sub- stantial majority of the population. But with material prosperity has come cultural degradation. The new entrants have reject- ed the values of the socio-economic group, which they have joined and many of its original members have embraced the low- brow tastes of the joiners. They have dumb- ed down and in the process, the television audience for intellectual diversion or cul- tural instruction has gradually been eroded. The BBC may remain intermittently true to the self-improving mission on which it was launched by its middle-class founders, but it is slowly being abandoned by the audience that it was created to serve. This is the trap that the licence fee sets for the Corporation. With its funding linked inex- tricably to its viewing figures, it feels obliged to follow its audience into their cul- tural and intellectual decline. This can only have one outcome. What- ever the BBC does, its share of the viewing public is bound to fall. If it also abandons the moral purpose of its founders, it has no remaining role in the public sector. It can- not, of course, fight alone against social change. But as a key British institution, it has a duty to struggle against the decline, in the hope that it may be reversible. Increasing affluence, longer retirements and more leisure time may eventually lead to a revival of interest in education and high culture amongst the middle classes. When that day dawns, the BBC must be there to provide it. It has a duty to pre- serve the values of an earlier age in trust for future generations. 0 nce again, faking in television docu- mentaries has been exposed, this time thanks to evidence from closed-circuit tele- vision security cameras in Nottingham, with young people posing as homeless beggars. This follows fast on a television company being fined for faking a drugs-smuggling sequence. In both cases the malfeasance was exposed by a combination of chance and vigilance by authorities: one a local council, the other, the Independent Televi- sion Commission.
It makes us wonder how many others slip through the net thanks to lack of systematic monitoring. In that context, the rash of flag-burning in Muslim countries on our television screens deserves consideration. At first sight, it fits perfectly into the lumpen Left's text: common people of the Muslim world demonstrate solidarity with the Labour Left's opposition to the bomb- ing of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. They assem- ble to burn US, British and Israeli flags.
But there are nagging questions in the back of a viewer's mind. First, how did they get hold of the flags to burn, and secondly, how was it that the Western television crew was always conveniently there to record the action?
You cannot buy British, Israeli or American flags in most Moslem countries; shops simply do not stock such things. And if you could get hold of one, what then? Are we to imagine a would-be flag-burner and his friends wandering through the souk hop- ing that chance will send their way a Western television crew with cameras on the ready, time on its hands and nowhere particular to go, to choreograph them (you will notice how well choreographed the burning cere- mony always is), shoot the scene and pass it on to our screens in time for the news?
It does not ring true. Second thoughts suggest that it is the television teams who wander out with their Stars and Stripes, Union Jacks and Star of David flags, chore- ograph a few members of the mob with time on their hands, and then dispatch the scene by satellite with appropriate com- ments. It used to be said that the camera does not lie. Times have changed. Lies, damned lies and statistics, and politically- slanted soaps are reinforced by TV news and documentaries.
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