BBC: it's all over

World's first public broadcasting system sells out

There is a flagship public broadcaster in the UK and it is Channel Four, whose ‘publisher’ model was devised by my old, sadly now deceased, colleague, mentor and friend Anthony Smith, also sometime president of Magdalen College, Oxford.

A hundred years ago it was the BBC that flew the flag for public broadcasting but a century is a long time in high-technology industries and what once was is no more. I never thought I would write these words but the BBC should no longer get all the licence fees we pay, maybe not even more than, say, a quarter. By the way, the back of the old paper Licence Fees used to make it quite clear that this regressive and outdated poll tax is for the recipient to be legally able to watch (radio has been piggy-backing free for some time) broadcast television in the UK. Nowhere – and quite properly – does it mention the BBC by name. It is a tax, not a subvention and had it named the BBC that would imply it was a state-owned broadcaster.

Here, perhaps, I should declare a number of interests. I have been employed by the BBC as a R4 presenter (for the adaptation of one of my books as a series) and I spent a large part of the 1980s working as a post-doctoral fellow inside the heart of the BBC (and Channel Four, where access was considerably easier and more relaxed), researching public accountability and broadcasters. That research emerged from part of the Annan Committee report on British broadcasting (of which Tony Smith was its secretary). It was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, so research with real heft.

Working with Channel Four, only then newly minted, was a doddle. Getting access to the BBC – do keep remembering it is largely funded by taxpayers – was a bloody nightmare and took over 18 months. To be fair, once in, I had unprecedented access to everyone and everywhere, up to the Board of Governors, but I did have a minder, the head of the Education Department, John Cain (the patrician BBC bureaucracy had to find a ‘reason’ for my presence so pigeon-holed me as part of its educational function).

What I uncovered I wrote in Beyond the BBC: Broadcasters and the Public in the 1980s (still available in print). The BBC hierarchy hated it, Channel Four top-dogs did not. I made some predictions – Sky was just beginning to emerge as a satellite broadcast provider – but, inevitably, did not foresee the internet or, crucially, streaming services and, for example, YouTube. (Cable was, in the 1980s, viewed as key to the future and a means for local news to be cheaply disseminated.)

Meanwhile, the BBC ploughed on its merry way. In the seven years (part-time, I should point out) I spent inside the organisation it was still displaying many elements of its Reithian origins (John Reith, a son of the manse, and the founding Director General, had been badly wounded – he had a steel plate over part of his skull – in the Great War and was, in a literal sense, demented). But those severely applied foundational principles of his, that public broadcasting should educate, inform and entertain (in that strict order), have long been eroded and now almost entirely reversed. The BBC is no longer a trusted source of information, in its desire to hold onto a fast diminishing audience.

Worst of all, entertainment now informs, if that does not insult the meaning of the world, the news, itself riddled with ‘think-tank’ pundits whose funding is never revealed (they are nearly all right-wing, neo-liberalist creatures of billionaires). The BBC’s coverage of the genocide in Gaza is nothing less than monstrous, as good as anything Joseph Goebbels might have requested his place taken today, in this instance, by Netanyahu. Even flagship news programmes are routinely referred to by presenters as ‘shows’, which is an imported idea from the USA, home to the most egregiously partisan news in the western world.

Time, then, to call a halt. The BBC has run its course – in fact it is damaging the fabric of truth because it continues to insist it is the broadcaster of record, not just in the UK but globally. It says its version of events is as close to the truth as feasibly possible* which is, bluntly, a lie. (*In which case, one may legitimately ask, why has it set up BBC Verify, to ascertain the ‘real’ facts? Was not the whole ethos of the BBC once to ‘verify’?)

As an over-mighty (you would not believe the sense of entitlement its senior staff and ‘talent’ have for themselves, true 40 years ago, as well as today), massively over-bureaucratised led corporation, the BBC has also fallen lower by chasing a younger audience. By this I mean those between the ages of 25 and 40. Their own research tells them that this group, by and large, do not use what I will here call ‘fixed’ media at all. Long ago have they given up on newspapers, all but a few magazines – and terrestrially broadcast information outlets.

This was happening well before the era of anti-social media. Today, most of this age group get their gossip and rumour (because none of it is more than that) from their phones or various chat groups (you all know the names). My wife was astonished to learn the ‘news’ about the Obama’s marriage being over (of course, it is not) has been hard currency on these child-like gossip machines for years. Or that Mrs Macron is, obviously, a man. I’m sure you’ll have your own gems to display here.

The point is the BBC is now the worst broadcast tart on British street. It wriggles, twists and ties itself in knots to find a route to the audience it believes it has to have in order to survive (they need this generation of 25-40-year olds to go on paying them the license fee every year – for services they simply don’t use). In short, it’s come to the end of its run.

And, you know what? It’s been a good one, on the whole. To last a century, to have a proud history in an age of technological change and wonders is a triumph. Personally, I’d date its terminal decline from around the start of Thatcherism: the link is neo-liberalism; the BBC’s death knell was to drink its poison wholeheartedly believing, as a divine right, it had the antidote built in to its Royal Charter.

What will happen to it, once the Licence Fee is distributed, for example, to other terrestrial broadcasters (ITV, C4, C5) so that it gets no more than a quarter of the money it now receives? That’s for the BBC to decide but I would point them to their own R3 (give it back wholly to classical music fans); BBC4 (keep up the good work); to restore R4 to its core audience: educated, middle-class, traditionalists. And please, junk the unfunny 18.30 ‘comedy’ slot. You’re having a laugh, right? Except, it’s not been funny – for years. Just another misplaced example of trying to amuse the young, who are all the while endlessly scrolling on their phones, assuredly not listening to Aunty. But then, they never did.

This is the end of this week’s broadcast. Thank you for listening on your wireless set.

Boycott the USA (second head)

Time for some true citizen power to kick in

Our weak vacillating Government won’t make any moves against King Kong Trump and his monkey mafia but, as individuals, we can. In particular, Europeans should all resolve not to travel there, for holidays, for business, (for the purposes of spreading Communism – still on their visa forms). One might ask why the former alleged home of free speech is so scared of the infectious quality of Marxism when its avowed model of neo-liberalism is so obviously successful but hey, cut the poor buggers at State a bit of slack.

What else? Timothy Garton Ash says: ‘…consumer protests. The impact of a largely spontaneous boycott of Tesla cars is pushing Musk to return to his business activity, cutting the leisure time he can spend on vandalising his country’s administrative state. Canadians now have the BuyBeaver app on their phones, so they can avoid US-made goods. (I hope they boycott Russian ones too.)’

I still remember the enthusiasm for boycotting South African goods back when that country suffered for so long under apartheid. Not going to Greece for a holiday when it was run by a dictatorship in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Currently, we avoid buying anything from Israel. And so, to the USA. Just don’t buy US goods (you may have trouble finding any, apart from that ghastly car). Don’t travel there. Travel to the USA is already down substantially and so it their trade. If Trump and his gang can’t play nicely, then… Think of it like this: how long would the Chicago gangsters have lasted if no one had gone to their speak-easys? You got it.

This week: Tim began to read Simon Heffer’s Staring at God, his social history of home life in the UK during the Great War. New facts are always welcome in history and Heffer has assembled a host by concentrating what the war was like for those left in Britain. In particular, he shows how easily Asquith shared top secrets with his platonic love, Venetia Stanley and how little was thought about the integrity of Churchill, especially after his insistence, against all military advice, including Fisher as First Sea Lord, to undertake the unmitigated disaster of the Dardanelles campaign.

Quote of the week: ‘Let’s get that dog whistle out’, said by Lucy Powell, Labour MP for Manchester Central in response to a question about the Labour Government’s cloth-eared response to the continuing abuse of vulnerable adolescents – and children – by rape gangs operating in our towns and cities. Disgraceful, doesn’t begin to cover it.

Music of the week: Sibelius’ First Symphony for its extraordinary evocation of his country. Deeply ‘national’ in its origins (Finland was a vassal state of Imperial Russia at the time it was written in 1899), it conveys a powerful image of lakes and forests. There is a boxed set of all eight symphonies (including the choral Kullervo) available, with Colin Davis conducting the London Symphony Orchestra on LSO Live.