If you’ve watched a national event on television at any point in your life, the chances are it will have been produced for broadcasting by BBC Events. Charles III’s coronation, the funeral of Elizabeth II, the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the annual Festival of Remembrance and many more were all put on our screens by a talented BBC team. That is why there is alarm about the proposed cuts to BBC Events which could, it’s claimed, leave just one full-time staff member.
I have always been somewhat in awe of that team. As someone who ran television news for a while in the early 2000s, we would be the people delivering – sometimes imperfectly – the breaking stories of royal deaths and announcements of future marriages and the breathless first stages of global talking points. Then, a few days later, Events would sweep in with their multiple outside broadcasts and their brilliant directors and producers, and they would deliver flawless coverage which was watched by millions.
They had a set of skills based around meticulous planning and deploying the highest broadcasting craft expertise, and it is a tribute to them that it became what the audience expected of the BBC: it would get these important occasions right.
They deserve particular credit in recent years for modernising their output. Many events appeal to older audiences, but in a more diverse nation BBC Events managed to bring in younger performers and more contemporary music – their VE Day anniversary concert was hosted by then-Radio 2 stalwart Zoe Ball, in quite a tonal contrast with the Dimbleby tradition – without scaring away the traditionalists. They reflected back to us the country we were and the one that we are becoming, which was no easy task.
So why is this success seemingly under threat? The answer lies in the way that broadcasting has evolved. In-house production, the mainstay of the BBC through most of its existence, is withering away. This is partly because successive governments have mandated that more production should sit with independent companies, and also because there has been a financial squeeze. The BBC has lost billions of pounds in recent years through frozen licence fee settlements and increasing levels of evasion. The net result is that in-house centres of excellence – in a wide range of genres – are no more.
Now it is the turn of BBC Events to be subject to what the corporation says is a “consultation” about its future. The team sits in BBC Studios, which is an entirely commercial operation – again a sign of the way the media environment has changed. Their statement on this latest development is fluent corporate-speak which begins, “As a prudent commercial business with a mandate to maximise returns…” It rapidly saps your will to live.
In fairness to BBC Studios, they are operating in a tough market. The truly big events are few and far between, and the run of the biggest Second World War commemorations in particular has ended. Casualisation of employment has been increasingly common in recent years: when something happens, trusted freelancers are rapidly deployed and hundreds of people from across the sector are brought in to perform the essential tasks.
However, it would be risky to believe that this can all be done by a one-person team – even if that individual is the estimable Claire Popplewell, who is associated with two of this year’s three Bafta TV nominations for live events.
A colleague who has worked for BBC Events notes that you need other executives who can commission the technical set-up for the broadcasts, and the nature of some events is that you don’t know when they’re going to happen – so you are at the mercy of the market if you haven’t enough planning capability.
But their major worries are longer term: “Over the years, who is going to train the next generation of producers? And isn’t this precisely the kind of thing that people pay their licence fee for?”
That is my biggest concern, too. It is possible for two things to be true. BBC Studios has to make ends meet, and it needs to earn the profits that go back into the corporation. But the BBC as a whole has its reputation to think about, and when things go wrong – the coverage of the Diamond Jubilee river pageant in 2012 was a disaster, with a lightweight, celeb-centric programme prompting hundreds of complaints – then cracks start appearing in the foundations of Broadcasting House. It’s a useful insurance policy, within an organisation whose total income is getting on for £6bn a year, to have a small team of experts who are always on hand.
This matters because audiences are fragmenting amid the torrent of digital choice. But they still come together to share our national memories and to witness the ceremonies of the modern United Kingdom.
The BBC is integral to that: events are a huge part of the corporation’s past, and they should be the firmest of commitments to its future too.
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