CITY AND SUBURBAN

How does a broadcaster define a public service?

It's what I do, old boy

CHRISTOPHER FILDES

There was a time when the British Broadcasting Corporation was a public ser- vice with a pure and beautiful monopoly. Then people learned how to get along with- out it. Cable television has now reached my house, offering a choice of more than 40 channels, including televised debates from the House of Lords. (I can't wait to see Maurice Saatchi taking Peter Gummer on.) I must, though, pay to support the BBC, however little use I make of it, and now John Birt, who runs it, says that we must all Pay more and more, keeping ahead of the rate of inflation. The BBC claims to have its own brand of inflation, which leaves the Retail Prices Index floundering. Where would we be without its devotion to classi- cal music? Where we are now, listening to Classic FM, which in its four years of exis- tence has attracted a strong enough follow- ing to be taken over for £70 million. Now the flag of public service has been raised by Michael Grade, who runs Channel 4. You thought that it was a commercial channel, ads and all, backed by the companies with television franchises, and now paying divi- dends to them? Think again: it is a statuto- tY corporation, and the Government may want to sell it off, but not if Mr Grade can help it. He only joined it, he says, because he enjoys public service broadcasting. I agree with Damian Green, who used to burble beside me on The Business Pro- gramme but has gone on to higher things, that public privilege and subsidy might go to productions or series but not to compa- nies or corporations. Mr Grade, though, has joined the large and complacent tribe of broadcasters who define public service broadcasting as 'what I do, old boy'.

Last post, lights out

THE Post Office is another public service Whose days of pure monopoly are now behind it. Ian Lang has suspended its privi- leges, but technology and inflation are doing the work without any help from him. The monopoly in its present form amounts to a bar, now temporarily lifted, on carrying letters for a pound a time or less. Bike mes- sengers buzz around with their bundles of letters, imperilling their lives and mine. Does anyone stop them, or cost out the bundles, or prosecute the carriers? As for technological change, although I have so far managed to steer clear of E-mail, I am

now getting junk mail by fax. I have my reservations about the Post Office's man- agers — who else would treat their cus- tomers as a captive audience and advertise to the queues? — but they must have noticed that their world has changed. I am not sure that the postal union has. It, too, is used to exercising monopoly power. Now its members face the discovery that people have found ways to get along without them.

My call gets shunted

ONE way to spend a restful morning can be to ring up the railways and ask about the trains. I learned to bypass the familiar rail- way numbers and ring the Southampton office, which is businesslike and prompt. However, improvement (which, as Patrick Hutber taught us, mean deterioration) is at hand. There will soon be a single telephone number to handle all inquiries. It begins 0345 and goes on for some time. I found this out when I dialled the Southampton number and found my call referred to it. I tried it at intervals during the morning. It was, reliably, engaged.

Funny money

MY favourite publisher of comic books, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has excelled itself. Here in 24 whizz° pages, using the picture-strip format familiar to students of Beano, is The Story of Monetary Policy. This comes as a sequel to The Story of Money with its rollicking shanty, set to the tune of 'The Banks Of The Wabash':

Oh, when prices are climbing higher than the palm-trees And the dollar buys a little less each day, Then the Federal Reserve must make the lending harder For the banks of Mazuma, far away!

Its tone is more sober, though I liked the scene of hyperinflation in the supermarket: 'Express checkout — six bags of cash or less.' Any temptation to draw Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve Board as Lord Snooty and his Pals has been resist- ed. The typical Fed governor goes bald in his 14 years of office and sees presidents of the United States off. He is depicted but not identified. I am maldng my copy avail- able to the Bank of England, whose mone- tary economists busy themselves to bring out its Inflation Report, full of cautious analysis and multicoloured graphs. The Chancellor then overrules them. Instead, they should be asked to condense the Bank's ideas of monetary policy into a 24- page comic strip. The exercise would do them good, and Kenneth Clarke might even find the result persuasive.

Gresham's lawgiver

TO BE Provost of Gresham College is the academic job I always wanted. On the foun- dation of Sir Thomas Gresham, the Eliza- bethan merchant whose law teaches us that bad money drives out good, this college has no pesky undergraduates or feuding dons — just a scattering of visiting professors, a hand- some building, and a large endowment. Now Andreas Prindl has beaten me to it. He is one of a select group of American bankers who came to the City, decided that they liked it here and have stayed on. A pillar of the international markets and a president of the Chartered Institute of Bankers, he believes that financial services have a common disci- pline that should be taught, to new entrants to the business and in schools. If his new dis- cipline needs a new professor, I am his man, for a suitable stipend.

Fatal attraction

I CAN report keen interest in my Free Country Card which (I was saying last week) will undercut the supposedly volun- tary card on offer from Michael Howard. A reader presses me to diversify into donor cards. He admits to a recurrent nightmare, which finds him in a hospital bed, feeling poorly. Then he becomes aware of two daz- zlingly compassionate blue eyes gazing down at him and realises that he is for the high jump. Then he wakes up. Now he wants a card that reads, 'Not to be resusci- tated by Diana, Princess of Wales'.