A new BBC director-general arrives but the old and giant problem does not go away. There’s not enough money. Matt Brittin knew the score when he strode into Broadcasting House last month – as did Tim Davie before him, and Tony Hall before Tim Davie, and Mark Thompson before Tony Hall. Since 2010, when George Osborne mounted the first of his two ambushes of the BBC by freezing the licence fee and forcing the BBC to take on extra obligations, funding is down by about 30 per cent.
And so yesterday’s announcement of cuts is only the latest in a string of such declarations, with pretty well the same message each time – no matter which director-general is delivering it. It’s become a ritual. There are to be job losses, programmes will disappear, and more efficiency drives will be launched. And, as always, there are accompanying and correct noises about the BBC needing to focus its diminishing resources on its digital products – BBC iPlayer, BBC Sounds, podcasts, websites and social channels.
Then comes the unions’ response, with talk of “devastation” and the “risk to the BBC’s public service mission”. They may choose at some point to talk of strikes – and a fat lot of good that will do them, because no matter the howls of complaints from staff, and indeed from audiences, about the amputation of much-cherished individual programmes, this is only another appetiser.
This time round, the cause celebre is The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4 and to many it will seem peculiar to get rid of something so “public-servicey” with its focus on foreign affairs – at a time when war is back in fashion and diplomacy, or the lack of it, offers endless opportunities for context and analysis. But the World Service programme that replaces it – Newshour – is not a negligible beast and we will all survive. As for the apparent evisceration of the Radio 4 Midnight News, there is bound to be some sort of news bulletin at midnight, so the savings will be markedly unexciting.
Television is, of course, intrinsically more pricey, so the end of a bespoke BBC Breakfast programme on Sunday might yield a bit of useful money – but several hundred million more need to be extracted.
What next? For many years, the cry has come “cut the number of channels”, with the merger of the pitiful rump of BBC4 with BBC2 at the top of everyone’s list. Sure. Politically, that might even make some of the BBC’s many critics happy – but that won’t solve much of the problem either. It’s not a TV or radio channel itself that costs the real money; it’s the content that those channels broadcast. And a lot of BBC content – above all News – is already shared by many channels – so just having it pop up on one channel fewer is no big deal. The content still needs to be paid for.
So – adopt the brace position – what lies ahead is about a hell of a lot more than The World Tonight. A lot of stuff is going to disappear, and not just in the News Division. There will be cuts here, there and everywhere. The BBC will simply generate substantially fewer programmes. Drama, comedy, documentaries – cut, snip, extinguish. Probably only David Attenborough related content is safe.
Anyone reading this will have a list of programmes they think should have long ago been extirpated, many of which they will have neither seen nor heard. But the point of the BBC is that it tries – and largely succeeds – to satisfy its many audiences by making many different sorts of things. One licence-payer’s poison is another’s total delight. Someone somewhere – often a lot of people everywhere – will be cross.
When I was controller of Radio 4, I too needed to find some money, though nothing on the scale now required, and terminated a Friday night drama slot. It was not a large audience affair and there was plenty of drama elsewhere. But I did not wholly get away with it. The late, and very great, Sir Tom Stoppard wrote me a letter (obviously exquisite) of complaint. There could be no more stinging a criticism.
Matt Brittin’s formulation is that he wants to spare output with the “highest audience value and impact”, and who can complain about that? But there are 24 million licence payers and thus 24 million different versions of the BBC, and they won’t easily be persuaded that his judgements about value and impact are the right ones. And you can be sure that a pack of politicians, pundits and ex-BBC employees will be telling him that he’s screwed up.
It comes down to this. That despite the fact that the BBC reaches over 90 per cent of the adult population, despite the fact that on average it’s even now used for 15 hours a week, despite the vast amounts of chaff and manufactured-for-money outrage and lies that are served up on a lot of social media channels a lot of the time – which is decidedly not the BBC’s stock-in-trade – the politicians have mostly failed to get the BBC’s real mistakes in proportion and have hopelessly under-valued a huge national asset. Over to them.
Mark Damazer was controller of BBC Radio 4 from 2004 until 2010
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