The BBC and the public interest
Senior officials of the BBC are fond of pointing out that the Corporation is widely regarded abroad as providing the best broadcasting service in the world. This may well be true. Certainly, the Blic suffers neither from the commercial pres- sures inflicted by the sponsorship system on television networks in the United States, nor from the political pressures to which France's state-owned ORTF has to submit. But this fact (if it is a fact) no more places the BBC beyond reproach than does the fact, for example. that the City of London is the best capital market in the world render the City immune from criticism. Yet, armed with the appalling Pilkington Committee report of 1962. which whitewashed the BBC and blamed every conceivable television evil on the commercial channel. the BBC'S top brass have clearly convinced themselves that it does—that what's good for the BBC must of necessity be good for Britain.
The truth is that, just as the most terrible deeds in history have invariably been committed by those most convinced of their own moral righteousness, so it is only the sense of the secular saintliness of their mission that has enabled the higher echelons of the BBC to indulge in recent years in an almost obscene lust for monopoly power. The objective of serving the public in the high-minded Reithian sense has been replaced by a ruthless determination that no one else shall be allowed to serve the broadcasting public in any sense at all.
In the early 'sixties there was a great debate over which service—the BBC or rrv—should be allotted the third tele- vision channel. The then BBC hierarchy (and Mr Kenneth Adam, at that time Director of BBC Television, has in a recent series of Sunday Times articles given a revealing glimpse of the calibre and atti- tudes of the men involved) were so intent on preventing ITV, whose very existence was an effrontery, from gaining a further outlet that they had no time to consider what they themselves would actually do with the third channel if they got it—as of course they did. The result was that when BBc 2 was initially launched it was a com- plete fiasco. Thanks to the passage of time and the talents of Mr David Atten- borough Bee 2 has since redeemed itself, but meanwhile the invaluable chance of providing the commercial television corn- panies with genuine competition from their own kind has been lost.
Hard on the heels of this instructive episode came the saga of the pop pirates. If anything ran counter to the ideal of public service broadcasting on which the BBC'S claim to special status is based it must surely be the emission of a con- tinuous stream of recorded pop music for nineteen hours a day. A Reithian case could well be made for juxtaposing pop music with more 'improving' programmes as listener-bait, but for a continuous pop programme--never. Yet no sooner had the pirates captured a mass audience than the BBC threw the public service ideal out of the window: the pirate ships were sunk and mic Radio I was created in their image. The only difference was that, since by this time the BBC'S sense of its own purity could only be sustained by a refusal to accept advertising, the cost of the ser- vice had to come from the taxpayer.
And now the BBC is at it once again. Terrified that the Tories, as soon as they get into power. may carry out their declared policy of permitting the setting up of a hundred commercially-financed local radio stations, the Corporation is busily trying to prevent this by launch- ing as many local stations of its own as it possibly can before the general elec- tion comes. This time, however, its monopoly-mania has run into a snag: a severe shortage of cash. Not only does the BBC face the substantial expenditure involved in switching BBC 1 over to colour this year. but television licence revenue has ceased to be an expanding source of income. Everyone who wants it already has black and white television, the Government is not prepared to raise the licence fee any more. the Post Office is not anxious to spend a considerable further sum of money on equipment to track down the estimated million and a quarter licence-evaders who cheat the BBC of some 01 million a year. and the extra £5 for a colour licence is irrelevant so long as so few colour sets are sold. The BBC'S response to this predica- ment has been entirely in character. The new director general. Mr Charles Curran. has called on the Government, in the name of the 'survival of public service broadcastng by the BBC as we know it' (sic), to exclude the purchase and rental of colour television sets from the credit squeeze (and this at a time when everything else, from police recruit- ment to nurses' pay, is being held back) so that licence revenue may rise once again. At the same time, fearful that this favour will not be granted. yet deter- mined nevertheless to extend the Cor- poration's monopoly tentacles into local radio at all costs, tutu high officials have been meeting in solemn and secret con- clave in an attempt to find the money by economies in the existing services. And needless to say. the candidates for the axe are exclusively those areas where the inic has hitherto been performing a genuine public service: among them the tux's regional orchestras (which now seem certain to go. along with the rest of the regional broadcasting set-up) and that nugget of gold among the dross, the Radio 3 Music Programme (which, thanks to public protest. looks like gaining an eleventh hour reprieve).
From all this one clear lesson emerges. The unc's gadarenc rush away from any sense of public service in broadcasting (in the mistaken, hubristic belief that what the mi( does is. by definition, a public service) must be stopped before it is too late. Until that is clone, so far from its being permitted an increased licence revenue, the BBC should be warned that any departure from the public service role will mean a reduction in the licence fee. Meanwhile. Radio I should be scrapped, and the pumping out of pop music returned to circus proprietors and other private commercial interests of an equally appropriate nature. The British Broadcast- ing Corporation should be debarred by law from having any part whatever in local radio (or television). A Television Council, analogous to the Press Council. should be set up in an attempt to main- tain standards on both the inic and ITV. And a Royal Commission into broadcast- ing in Britain should be charged with the task of exposing to public view, and informed debate, what has been going on behind the closed doors of the 1TA and WIC— the latter an organisation with an annual budget of some DO million of tax- payers' money. Once that has been done, but not before, it will be time to change the absurd and inefficient licence-fee system for a more sensible means of financing public service broadcasting worthy of the name.
Previous page
