TELEVISION
Levy blues
BILL GRUNDY
I am sure that, for all his well-known meta- physical bent, when Sir Isaac Newton was formulating his three famous laws of motion he thought only of their application to things like apples and asteroids. But he wrote wiser than he knew. For at least one of the laws— 'To every action there is an equal and oppo- site reaction'—has a much wider application.
For example: for months now the heart-rending cries of television tycoons rolling around in the agony of their un- accustomed poverty have been recorded in most of the public prints. Representations have been made to Lord Aylestone and by Lord Aylestone. The Prime Minister has been graciously pleased to give a nod, or a wink, that something is very likely going to be done. Mr Peter Cadbury threatened to chuck Western Television in; Westward Tele- vision chucked him in instead. Now he's going back again (although why he should want to become chairman once more of what is clearly, according to his own words, abso- lutely hopeless as a money-making company, I haven't quite worked out). Other chairmen have added their mite to the moans. The country as a whole must now be well aware that, at least, in its own opinion, commercial television is on its last legs. (Whether the country as a whole believes it is another thing: a Sunday Times reader was asking at the weekend if Iry really could be in such a bad way if the companies are prepared to pay vast sums of money for people like 'Simon Frost and David Dee'.) In view of the campaign that has been conducted on rrv's behalf, it was inevitable that sooner or later the reaction would set in. It started with a letter to the Times on 6 January from Mr Christopher Mayhew NIP, not notorious for his support of commercial television. He asked, first, what had hap- pened to the vast profits made by the com- panies in the past; second, are we being asked to 'bail out' all 'Tv companies, or just a few, a:•d if so. which; and third, why, now that some shareholders are facing losses 'do they not take their medicine like men, instead of appealing for public assistance'? Mr May- hew was easily, if slightly unsatisfactorily answered by letters from Lord Shawcross and Mr Ward Thomas. He cannot be said to have been answered at all by Sir Lew Grade, who simply blew a trumpet blast on his cigar, ignored all Mr Mayhew's ques- tions, and left it at that.
A much fuller development of the May- hew view followed soon after in that fortnightly melange, Private Eye. It was by Mr Paul Foot and was headed 'Con the Nation Street', which made it quite clear from the start which way his sympathies lay Mr Foot delivered several hearty kicks in various directions. Advertising revenue, he pointed out, has consistently risen; this year it should total £100 million. After levy, corporation tax, income tax, and transmitter rental charges have been deducted, that should leave them about £54 million to run one channel against the BBC's LB million to run two.
No shareholders in the world have been better rewarded over the past ten years than those in commercial television, Mr Foot said, and gave instances. Lord Shawcross was quoted as saying, in a letter to the Times, 'I want the shareholders' capital to be suffici- ently rewarded to enable and encourage them to spend larger amounts on producing programmes which will not only have public appeal but which will also have high quality'. It is a noble-sounding sentiment and one can imagine Lord Shawcross's still-handsome features distorted with emotion as he dic- tated the sentence. Unfortunately, as Mr Foot pointed out, 'there has been in the past no connection between the size of share- holders' rewards and the quality of the pro- grammes'.
Well, that's all very well, and it is time somebody had a go, but I really think Mr Foot goes a little too far. I have little or no tears to shed for the bigger companies, those which have made very large profits over the last ten years. But where in Mr Foot's article do, say, Yorkshire TV and London Weekend TV come, who haven't been going for ten years (in fact they haven't yet been going for two)? And what about the tiny stations, such as Border and Grampian, which do the state some service by tackling, if only on a small scale, local affairs which would other- wise never get any airtime at all? They are definitely not well off. The levy affects them badly. Border made £9,000 last year, and since you can't make a film series at much less than £3,000 a half-hour these days, that doesn't leave much room for exciting new programmes this coming year, does it?
And is advertising revenue as dependable a source of income as Mr Foot makes out? The answer is No. Look at the Mirror maga- zine and the shortage of contract ads for the new Sun as proof. And for a slice of nroof nearer the pudding I offer you a letter I saw the other day. It was from the managing director of a not-so-small regional company to his opposite number in one of the Big Five. It made it quite clear that the revenue position was such that a projected new series would have to be dropped. It was planned as
a co-production; but the smaller company simply could not find the cash to pay its share. And I notice that Mr Foot didn't mention that as advertising revenue has risen so have all costs.
So perhaps the situation, while not as bad as the wailers want us to believe, is a lot worse than Mr Foot fancies. There is no doubt in my mind that the levy should be reduced. But it should be reduced in such a way that the first beneficiaries are the pro- grammes. The way to ensure that, as I have said in this column before, is to base the levy on what is left after programme costs have been met, not on total income: that way there is less temptation to cut down on programme budgets.
People in the television business have been pressing for this method of operating the levy for over six years. Is there the faintest hope that somebody might actually be going to pay attention at last?
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