Let the BBC expand--but privatise it first
'BETRAYAL and surrender,' thundered John Reith, the BBC's first director-general, when, as a member of the House of Lords in 1952, he tried in vain to defend the BBC's broadcasting monopoly. Half a century on, the BBC is still fighting, and losing, the battle against the growth of commercial TV. Today, 44% of British households pay to have scores of channels delivered to their living-rooms; over two-thirds of them will do so in five years' time. Struggling to regain ground, the BBC has applied for licences to operate four new digital TV channels and five new radio ones. Yet, in arguing the case for further expanding public-service broadcasting, the BBC is exposing the contradictions at the heart of its own operation.
The government is expected to announce at the end of August whether it will let the BBC go ahead. Tessa Jowell, the media minister, said recently that the BBC would need to demonstrate that its new services did 'not duplicate what the commercial sector is doing'. In other words, the government wisely considers its chief criterion for assessing the BBC's case to be whether the new channels address a market failure.
Three of the four new BBC channels are designed for young people: one for pre-school children, one for 'pre-teens' and another for young adults. The fourth would provide a 'forum for intellectual debate'. Judging the case for the four new channels by the government's own standard, it is hard to argue that the first three will supply something that the market will not. The children's market alone is fiercely competitive in Britain, with 14 digital channels. Ah, the BBC will reply, we will make better children's programmes. Really? The existing output provides precious little evidence of that. And not all commercial children's channels carry wall-to-wall cartoons.
Even the argument for the fourth proposed channel is less than compelling. The sorts of cultural niches that this channel would occupy--the arts, sciences, history and philosophy--are increasingly inhabited by small commercial channels, such as Artsworld or The History Channel.
Yet, however hard it is to make a persuasive case for the BBC's new channels, it seems odder still to argue that Britain's biggest broadcaster should not try out good new ideas. The chief objection to the BBC doing so is that such operations would be financed by the licence fee, a heavy tax on television sets. Were the BBC a self-financing commercial organisation, there could be no objection to its launching as many channels as it fancied.
The idea that the BBC might go commercial alarms many people, both inside and outside the organisation. Yet the arguments for having a huge state-financed corporation dominate the broadcasting business were formulated in a different broadcasting era. Few hold today.
The BBC, goes one line, lures viewers to programmes that are good for them (documentaries, news) by scheduling them after the stuff they actually like (gameshows, soaps). But viewers today channel-hop the minute the credits roll. The BBC, goes another defence, provides more diversity and higher quality than the commercial sector. As the BBC struggles to win back viewers, its offerings have become indistinguishable from the competition. The BBC, runs another line, binds Britons together with common cultural experiences, such as big sports events. That is out of date too. The BBC has now lost most sports rights to commercial TV.
The slimline option
What, then, to do with the BBC, with its huge production house, its six licence-fee funded TV channels and its 24,000 staff? As the argument for state finance weakens, so the case for selling it grows. Privatisation would not just save the public the [pound]2.4 billion a year tax it pays for the licence fee, it would also free the BBC to expand as it wished.
Sell the BBC, then, and keep government out of television? Not quite. The good stuff on the pay-TV channels is available only to subscribers. Other viewers should still have access to the serious, thoughtful programmes which Britain's public-service ethos produces. But an elephantine, state-financed producer-and-broadcaster is not the only way to do this.
