MEDIA STUDIES
The BBC cannot and should not be expected to compete in the marketplace
STEPHEN GLOVER
This is not a column attacking Greg Dyke, director-general of the BBC. My col- league Peregrine Worsthome did that job admirably last year when Mr Dyke delivered an undeniably disappointing Spectator lec- ture. After Mr Dyke's MacTaggart Memori- al Lecture in Edinburgh last week, my thoughts do not dwell so much on the banal- ity of the director-general's language as the impossibility of his job. I honestly wonder whether anyone can save the BBC now.
There was a rather more seismic MacTag- gart lecture, given 11 years ago at the Edin- burgh Television Festival, which set the scene for Mr Dyke's efforts last week. The speaker was Rupert Murdoch. Though he was about to face severe financial difficul- ties, having just launched his satellite televi- sion channel Sky, Mr Murdoch was in a very perky mood. His purpose was to pour scorn on public service television — i.e. the BBC — and the people who ran it. 'Much of what is claimed to be quality television,' asserted the proprietor of the Sun and the News of the World, 'is no more than the parading of the prejudices and interests of the like-mind- ed people who currently control it.' The BBC's programmes were 'often obsessed with class and with a tendency to hark back to the past'. Mr Murdoch could not imagine the BBC pursuing a British Watergate 'with the vigour of the US networks'.
Most of Mr Murdoch's criticisms of the BBC were preposterously unfair, and driven by his own commercial interests. It did not occur to him that the BBC had served as a truly national (I mean British) institution, fulfilling Lord Reith's original prospectus of informing, educating and entertaining, with greater distinction than any other broadcast- er in the world. Murdoch was the represen- tative of a new age which had no time for public service broadcasting and whose only values were those of the market. No one could have forecast then the phenomenal commercial success of what became Mur- doch-controlled BSkyB which, with some help from ITV and Channel 4, has stolen from the BBC most of its best sporting cov- erage. Not many people realised that the writing was on the wall for the BBC.
Eleven years later Mr Dyke strides to the same podium in Edinburgh. What he said is an answer to Mr Murdoch and other detrac- tors of public service broadcasting. The BBC must adapt or die. The new director-general's recipe is to produce more money, most of which will be squeezed out of the excessive bureaucracy imposed by his predecessor, John Birt. (What an implied rebuke to Lord Birt this is!) The lion's share of the new cash will go to BBC 1, whose programmes will become 'more engaging, more exciting and more gripping'. This is another way of saying more populist, though Mr Dyke did not quite lay his cards on the table. The Nine o'clock News is to be moved to ten o'clock. In itself this is unimportant, since it hardly matters whether the main news bulletin is shown at nine or ten. The point is that the decks are being cleared for 'exciting and gripping' dra- mas to compete with commercial and digital television. That means more trash.
The import of Mr Dyke's lecture — that BBC 1 is to be further dumbed down — was partly concealed by his other announce- ments. BBC 2 is to continue on its present path, though there may be fine-tuning in due course. (It was more than usually difficult to follow this part of Mr Dyke's lecture.) There will be a BBC3. This passage was also a little vague but it seems that it will be aimed par- ticularly at young people, with comedy and music. And there will be BBC4, which will `be unashamedly intellectual, a mixture of Radios Three and Four on television'. Spec- tator readers will probably like the sound of this. I certainly do. However, limited resources of about £120 million a year are earmarked for BBC3 and BBC4 and their programming is likely to be spread a bit thin. It certainly seems that BBC3 and BBC4 will run the sort of programmes we can see at the moment on BBC 1 and BBC2, though in greater quantity.
In effect, Mr Dyke is offering us a two- tier BBC. There will be the mass appeal, populist BBC 1, competing head-to-head with the commercial stations. And for peo- ple who wish to use their brains, there will be BBC2, BBC3 and BBC4. (I should prob-
`Say aah.' ably add BBC 5, which will be the existing News 24, a round-the-clock news service.) His reasoning appears to be that in order to justify the licence fee, BBC 1 must divest itself of much of its remaining educational and information baggage and become unashamedly commercial. However, for those who want a bit of self-improvement there will be four other BBC channels pro- ducing output that would make Lord Reith glow with pride. I hope it is not too cynical to say that the chattering classes are being offered BBC 4 so that they will not mind too much what happens to BBC1.
But I do mind, and so should everyone else. No one can pretend that BBC1 is any longer a bastion of excellence, if it ever was. But there are still vestiges of the old Reith- ian dream. So long as the BBC enjoyed a duopoly with ITV it was possible to offer people some slightly elevated programmes which they might not have chosen to watch given unlimited choice. Along comes Mur- doch, offering 'choice' in television, as he does in newspapers, which nine times out of ten simply means trash. Mr Dyke's under- standable reaction is to play him at his own game on BBC1 while preserving the old val- ues of the BBC on minority channels. The line is that it is the licence payer who is pay- ing and therefore must call the tune. If he does not want to be educated or informed, why should he be? It is a free world and the apostle of freedom is Mr Rupert Murdoch.
How sad it all is. Perhaps the argument was lost 11 years ago in Edinburgh. From that moment the BBC found itself in a near- ly impossible bind. If it went on as it had, it would be accused of elitism and of not sup- plying what the licence payer wanted in the new media marketplace. Mr Dyke's solution is, in marketing speak, to segment the mar- ketplace. Yet if BBC 1 is dumbed down to the level of its rivals, all the arguments for mainstream public service broadcasting will fall away. What would be the point of the BBC as presently constituted if it abjured the values of public service broadcasting in its most important activities? That is the question politicians of all parties are bound to ask when the BBC reaches the end of its current charter, and the issue of the licence fee is again considered. Mr Dyke may have embraced the logic of the market but he is in danger of vacating the high moral ground and, if he does, he will inevitably lose the political argument.
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