Politics
The end of 'civilisation'?
Charles Moore
4 A seamless robe.' To most of us, in r-kHoly Week at least, the phrase is a reminder of the Passion. But in Shepherd's Bush and Portland Place, all the year round, it refers to the BBC. (It is charac- teristic of that institution that it un- blushingly applies the biblical phrase to itself.) The seamless robe is the arrange- ment by which 'public service broadcast- ing' comprehends sport, opera, Selina Scott, Jimmy Saville, breakfast, dinner, lunch and tea and all the human frame requires.
Once there was a time when this robe could be worn with reasonable decorum. Sir John Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC, looked rather fetching in it. His Corporation's output in those days was small, uniformly decent and uniformly high-minded. Whether it was very interest- ing, and whether it did justice to the range of talent available in Britain at that time, we will not presume to ask. Now, however, the robe is bursting at the seams which it does not have. Inside it are Mr Stuart Young, the Chairman, Mr Alistair Milne, the present Director-General, Mr Bill Cot- ton, Mr Brian Wenham and the other princes of our culture, all hot and flounder- ing about like the bits of a large and under-rehearsed pantomime animal. Last week the Government agreed to stretch the robe once more, but with the implica- tion that this is the very last stretch that it will allow. The licence fee is to be £58, but Professor Alan Peacock is to chair a committee to ask whether the fee could in future be supplemented or even abolished. This is the latest turn in a little history which tells quite a deal about the nature of one of our most prized institutional arte- facts and about the 'stridency' and 'dog- matism' of the present Government.
People have observed that the BBC's campOgn for the latest increase was not terribly well conducted. The threat to remove Dr Who was taken amiss. The claim that the Peat Marwick report on the Corporation's efficiency gave it 'a clean bill of health' was thought rather odd when it was visible at little more than a glance that it actually diagnosed several well-advanced and widespread diseases (lack of cost con- trol, lack of accountability, the speculative character of projections). But the critics were surprisingly polite about the quality of the BBC's arguments themselves.
Why did the BBC need so much more money, for instance? Mr Young said it was partly because . . the commercial section of television is very affluent, so its wage increases are very large'. Mr Young's questioner here was a BBC journalist, and so he did not go on to ask why the commercial section was rich. It is rich for the simple reason that it has a monopoly of advertising, a position which the BBC supports. In short, the BBC supports an arrangement which forces it into unneces- sary expense.
Mr Young says that he 'would move heaven and earth to see that we don't take advertising', but he also claims that 'if the BBC did take advertising it would not lose'. In a similar piece of reasoning, Mr Milne told an audience of businessmen in Cardiff that: 'Once you advertise, the sheer attraction of television as an advertis- ing medium would kill all other forms of financing such as a licence fee', and in the same speech said that the television sta- tions would find themselves so desperate to get advertisements that they would all be forced to produce rubbish. All broadcas- ters, he said, would have to turn to the `same pot of gold for their finance', as if the advertising market were precisely fi- nite. 'All that stands between us and that sort of calculation [the sort of calculation which produces popular programmes in order to raise advertising revenue], Mr Milne grandly declared, is civilisation it- self' ; and yet it is part of the seamless robe theory that the BBC must' compete in every department, matching soap for soap and smut for smut.
The BBC's central claim in its campaign was that the BBC was the 'best bargain in Britain'. This provoked some ribaldry among those clever enough to go through a few figures and question the nature of the BBC's arithmetic and its claims about productivity and the comparative cost of public broadcasting in other countries. But even if it were accurate and its employees were ascetic and its managers were admi- nistrative geniuses, how could it be a `bargain'? A bargain is something which you can choose to have: it is good value because it undercuts the competition. The licence fee is a tax: it is no more of a bargain than the standard rate of income tax. You cannot choose between the BBC and anything else.
Or so, at least, the BBC has always insisted; and yet the most curious thing about the whole story is that technology is now reaching a state where people can choose. There is cable and the efforts of Mr Robert Maxwell in the field; there is something terribly clever called Satellite Master Antennae Television (SMATV); there will be Direct Broadcasting by Satel- lite (DBS); soon there will be solid state televisions whose activities will be unde- tectable by the BBC's vans. All this means that it will be as impossible to monopolise (or `duopolise) the television as it became to monopolise book publication more than 400 years ago. The BBC must know this, and yet it speaks as if a combination of policing, robe-stretching and public money can preserve it. It knows that it is an empire which could not lose a part without the whole being changed; does it not know that the whole is threatened even if the parts stay the same? There is nothing in the BBC's Charter which prevents it from taking advertising. No law need be changed. If Messrs Young and Milne and Cotton and Wenham wanted to escape like Houdinis from their stifling seamless robe, they would persuade the Governors to pre-empt Professor Peacock and go straight to the Home Secretary with their own proposals for a mix of advertising and licence fee. But of course they are pre- vented by 'civilisation' from such a course.
A similar notion has held the Govern- ment back until now. For six years, this `savagely ideological' Government has left this monopoly undisturbed. Even a year ago, the Home Secretary, Mr Leon Brit- tan, spoke of reform of the BBC as the visionary scheme of impractical men. As late as December last year, the Home Office Minister, Mr Giles Shaw, told the House of Commons that there were no plans to consider advertising. Even now, the Government has granted a licence fee increase which is higher than inflation. The extent of its reform has been to breathe the word advertising and to appoint a commit- tee chairman who is not wholly averse to every aspect of the free market. If Profes- sor Peacock reports on time (next sum- mer), the Government might have the chance to offer the reduction, or at least the pegging, of the licence fee in time for the next election. But it is equally likely that it will find the matter just too terribly delicate to do anything about.
In all this, the Government has behaved quite characteristically, and quite unlike its caricatures. Its instinct, like that of all governments, is to leave inconspicuous ill alone and let sleeping dogs and seamless 'robes lie. Only after pressure from public opinion (here, dislike of a high licence fee) and a long public argument does it feel the need to move. When it does move, it moves very cautiously. It is only different from its recent predecessors in one respect.
When it looks into matters such as these it does so with an anti-statist prejudice; not a very strong one, of course, because this Government, like all governments and Mr Justice McCowan, tends to identify its own interest with that of the state, but an identifiable one all the same, just as Attlee's government's prejudice was socialist and centralist. This Government is disposed to side with 'civilisation', and it is only when 'civilisation's' self-appointed representatives, like Sir Peter Hall or Mr Milne, become quite insufferable that its patience wavers, and it makes a polite and tiny gesture towards reform.
Previous page
