Twenty-five years ago, I was on a boating holiday off the coast of Turkey. The captain spoke barely five words of English, a barrier swiftly overcome when he discovered who I worked for: now that was something he could understand. For the following week, he summoned me to meals on deck with a three-letter bellow: “Bee-Bee-Ceeee!”
With charter renewal only 18 months away, newspaper headlines bark about its irrelevance, wokeness and badly behaved stars – which makes you wonder, if chief antagonists Murdoch and the Daily Mail got their way and brought down the BBC, how on earth would they then fill their pages?
In the past, Adolescence would have been a Channel 4 drama, instead it’s a multiple award-winner for Netflix. Previously, writer Neil Forsyth would surely have followed his BBC One hit The Gold with the equally glorious Legends on the same channel, but instead it too ended up on Netflix. The hedonists of Rivals would have found a natural home on ITV1 rather than Disney+, while Clarkson’s Farm would have slotted seamlessly into the BBC Two schedule where Top Gear for so long reigned supreme.
But this list of notable absences shows just how instrumental the BBC has been in creating all those plump puddings.
The very reason such current streaming-platform shows enjoy a quality to match the glories of linear TV past is that their makers were directly influenced by those same glories. The older ones learnt at the knee of seminal creatives like Dennis Potter and Mike Leigh, while younger ones grew up with Our Friends in the North.
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I once asked Adam Price, creator of Nordic noir behemoth Borgen, what TV had inspired him. His reply? “Nothing Danish. All your great British stuff.”
The BBC’s long-established greenhouse of talent, when paired with the streamers’ big budgets, means we now inhabit a cultural sweet spot, where programme-makers share our tastes, sensibilities and a common cultural heritage that, sadly, future generations won’t enjoy.
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Of course, the BBC isn’t perfect. Everything from salacious stars to expenses excess puts it with every other creaky UK institution desperately requiring reform from within.
To borrow from Winston Churchill, the BBC may be the worst form of state broadcaster, except for all those others that have been tried. After 100 years, it still aspires to be the best of us, and if we take it for granted, we’re fools.
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