On Thursday night in a fashionable Bollywood nightclub in Mumbai, the tall,
slightly stooped figure of Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director-general, let
his eye wander across the high-ceilinged room, past the towering sculptures,
Buddha heads, red teardrop curtains, giant red lanterns, thickets of bamboo
and pools of water glowing with floating candles.
“We are here to celebrate a success story,” he said. “We have our interests in
Bollywood.” Referring to Chak De India, a recent “sleeper” hit, whose
soundtrack became an unofficial anthem in India in the past summer, he said:
“We are here for a Chak De [of our own].”
And why not, as Barry Norman, the former presenter of BBC1’s main film review
programme might have said - before he was replaced by Jonathan Ross, whose
£18m BBC contract has done so much to undermine support for the corporation.
Why shouldn’t the BBC try its hand at making a Bollywood movie?
Under Thompson, the BBC has dabbled in lots of things far away from the
niggling demands of running a public service broadcaster. It supplies the
nation’s GCSE pupils with its Bitesize revision packs; and it has held talks
about backing a city academy in Salford. It has television networks in
America, Japan and the Middle East. At home it has angered the music
industry by offering free classical music downloads.
Under John Birt, when the Millennium Dome needed promotion, it helpfully
incorporated an aerial view into its screen credits for EastEnders., Now, as
Gordon Brown eyes a possible bonanza from the sale of analogue broadcasting
frequencies, the BBC will be at hand to help the public as it begins the
switch to digital from this week.
The BBC grew fat during the public spending boom of Tony Blair’s second term
and embarked on a building programme that will see the corporation’s grade
II-listed central London headquarters transformed at a cost of more than
£800m by 2012. New headquarters in Manchester will open in the same year.
Greg Dyke, who was ousted in 2004 from the post of director-general after the
Hutton inquiry, joked in a speech that the project was “so ambitious that if
one day you read of my sudden resignation it will probably be due to the
fact that it is too ambitious and I should have spent longer trying to
understand the finances”.
Earlier this month the BBC even splashed out on Lonely Planet, which publishes
about 500 guides for backpackers – including disobliging assessments of
modern-day Britain.
All of these activities are a long way from the grind of producing the Radio 4
Today programme in the early hours, with a skeleton staff and a budget under
attrition.
In the coming days the BBC is expected to confirm a rolling programme of 2,800
job cuts while hacking back the budgets of the programme types at the heart
of its public service remit: current affairs and documentaries, with the
teams producing BBC1’s flagship news bulletins being merged into News 24.
The corporation is expecting trouble. Last week Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of
its trust, delivered a warning to presenters of the calibre of John Humphrys
and Jeremy Paxman not to rock the boat in public.
In vain. David Dimbleby, presenter of Question Time and a former contender for
the job of director-general and chairman, said: “It is a false economy to
cut news and current affairs even though they are expensive. They are the
heart of the BBC’s public service role. The residual support for the BBC
depends on quality and not popularity.
“If you have worked as I have for the BBC for many, many years you feel very
strongly about its public service role. We have a different perspective from
and understanding from the public or focus groups. Without wishing to incur
hubris, we have a right to say this and not be silent. Also executives come
and go, but some of us presenters know things because we have been around a
long time and feel deeply.”
If the BBC can no longer deliver its remit, what on earth was Thompson doing
dabbling in Bollywood? And why does it insist on protecting the little
watched BBC3 and BBC4 networks? There is something rather fine, even
utopian, in the guiding principles of the corporation. It is there to
broadcast programmes which the market will not supply.
The principle, we are told, has remained as valid as it was under John Reith’s
broadcasting monopoly and has survived the arrival of hundreds of new
commercial channels. But there are often good reasons why the market will
not supply certain things – starting with the possibility that not many
people actually want them.
Put like that, it would be rather surprising if the BBC had swollen to this
multi-billion-pound enterprise, employing more than 20,000 people, by
toiling away for the past nine decades providing programmes that people do
not want to watch.
Nor has it. Like so many of his predecessors, Thompson is well versed in the
art of mission creep. Each ratings-chasing show or new commercial activity
is justified in terms of its value for the licence payer.
The determination of the BBC to protect BBC3 and BBC4, at least for the time
being, is a modern-day variant of its long-standing rationale for
broadcasting soap operas, game shows and docusoaps. It is not supposed to
chase ratings, but it knows that if its audiences were to drop too far it
would become dispensable. A corporation producing only public service
programmes would be a shrunken little thing, employing a few thousand staff
and causing house prices to plunge in west London.
It became skilled in justifying its popular shows by scheduling a worthy
programme straight afterwards – and then pointing the critics to the extra
viewers who might otherwise not have stumbled across it.
That argument was already looking threadbare in the 1980s when Margaret
Thatcher was appalled to discover that while ITV was producing The Jewel in
the Crown and Brideshead Revisited, the BBC had temporarily dropped Panorama
to make way for The Thorn Birds, a glossy US mini-series.
The ubiquity of remote controls and the rise of multi-channel television meant
that the grubby little secret could no longer be suppressed: Auntie can’t
make us swallow our medicine any more.
It fell to Thompson to devise a theory that helped to postpone the reckoning.
In a lecture given in 2000 to a broadcasting festival in Banff, Canada, he
proposed that the BBC move away from mass market, mixed genre channels (such
as BBC1 and BBC2) to specialist digital services aimed at niche audiences.
If Auntie no longer knew best, what right did it have to clog up BBC2 with
specialist arts and history programmes when a larger audience would much
prefer to watch a makeover show? If that is what the audience wanted, the
corporation was happy to oblige. BBC4, launched in 2002, became the home of
ambitious and difficult programmes – and because they were unpopular they
could be given shoestring budgets.
Now, as the BBC prepares for cuts to make good the £2 billion shortfall in the
licence fee over the next six years, the logic for keeping BBC4 on air is
unassailable. Its audiences might be minuscule, but it fulfils the
corporation’s mission at minimal cost, thus freeing the maximum amount of
money for more exciting ventures.
The simultaneous creation – and survival – of BBC3 can be traced even more
directly to the loss of corporate nerve. In 1988 the BBC appointed Janet
Street-Porter as head of youth programmes and instead of seeking to guide
young people, sought to speak to them in their terms – or to ape them.
To those who argued that the young had better things to do than to sit at home
watching television, it replied that the young were underserved by the
market. Under the BBC’s mutating definition of public service, the young had
become a neglected minority – to be given shows such as the recent My Penis
and I , F*** Off, I’m a Hairy Woman, My Big Breasts and Me, and The C-Word.
The BBC had learnt its lesson from the Blair government: instead of trusting
to instinct, it turned to market research. The BBC divided the population
into 100 distinct groups and, when money was easy, ensured that it gave
something to all of them.
Veterans at the BBC, who have made their careers with crafted programmes,
argue that the volumes of output have increased so vastly that problems such
as the recent faking rows will inevitably continue.
Ambitious executives need their wits about them to keep track of the swings in
ideology. Jana Bennett, the director of BBC Vision who has so far hung on to
her job despite criticism for her part in the notorious manipulation of
footage of the Queen leaving a photo shoot, may now regret the warm remarks
that she made to an industry festival about the controversial genre of
entertainment documentaries.
At the Sheffield documentary festival almost a year ago, Bennett horrified
some delegates by praising “the insight” of Wife Swap and “the pathos of
some of the so-called shock docs”. She said the Channel 4 show Faking It,
made by RDF, the independent producer at the heart of the Queen row, “was
more watchable than the slower, more lingering, more self-important and more
judgmental observational docs of the past”.
This week Lyons and Thompson will announce cost savings that will further
hollow out public service programming as it used to be defined. On the other
hand, some of that output may have been self-important and judgmental. So
why not?
