How Greedy is the BBC?

[Teddy Bear]

They'll settle for as much as they can get away with, without any concern about what they are providing in return - except the sham they are serving the community.

Greedy Auntie
An absurd licence fee request from the BBC

If Michael Grade was appointed as the BBC Chairman to “sell” the corporation to ministers, he has already succeeded in that task. The Green Paper published by Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, this year did not just meet the expectations of the BBC, it exceeded them. The licence fee will, in effect, remain in being until 2017 with only a modest midterm examination to trouble a well-fed Auntie. Having secured that bounty, Mr Grade and Mark Thompson, the BBC Director-General, have opted to push their not inconsiderable luck further by asking for an extortionate annual rise of 2.3 per cent more than the inflation rate for every year from 2007 to 2013.
In fairness to the BBC, this is the first time that it has made any sort of detailed public submission for a rise in the licence fee and the only occasion when it has allowed its estimates to be subject to external scrutiny. There is also an element of trade union politics at work here, with the BBC seeking an increase of 2.3 per cent beyond inflation, but being ready to settle for less.



Even allowing for the showbiz, this is an audacious bid and one which is impossible to justify. It is also a submission that barely acknowledges the transformation that has occurred in television since the last time that the BBC held out the begging bowl in the dim, distant years when Chris Smith was at the helm of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. In so far as the new environment is recognised, it is to only to provide justification for the lifting of taxpayer’s wallets and the pilfering of purses.

The much-heralded process of “going digital” is the perfect cover for a blank cheque from the public. It is also an exaggerated element of BBC accounting. It is responsible for £700 million of the £5.5 billion extra in direct spending that the corporation wishes to undertake and an extra £200 million of the supplementary £500 million that the BBC would like licence payers to set aside as a form of contingency reserve. The BBC should meet such costs through tighter budgetary controls elsewhere in the business.

The core of this plan, therefore, is that the BBC wants to spend more on the quality and quantity of its activities. The “quality” aspect consists of a populist pitch to “abolish repeats” (at least on BBC One and Two in peak viewing hours). The “quantity” ingredient includes a £1.2 billion drive to expand “digital services” and a £600 million strategy for “local relevance”.

The Culture Secretary should look at these plans with extreme suspicion. The quality component is basically a wish list. The quantity dimension is even more disturbing. Having moved into education publishing, magazine publishing and manifold merchandising, the BBC should not be encouraged to crash into the music downloading industry or marginalise local newspapers by providing, courtesy of the licence fee, “ultra-local” news services. What of the young journalists in Birmingham or Blackpool or Bath trying to start a local online news service? The BBC is treasured as a national institution. It should not be a taxpayer-funded marauding monopoly.

[Teddy Bear]

Anyone in doubt that the BBC serve only their perceived own selfish interests, which they see as grow and expand as much as they can, regardless of cost since they don't pay for it, should read this article.

A BBC future from planet bonkers
Bryan Appleyard

Last week the BBC outlined a digital masterplan. But is this really what it’s supposed to be for?


‘I don’t think even he believes it,” one prominent BBC figure said to me, “I don’t think anybody could. It’s a suicide note.” He was talking about the Royal Television Society lecture given last week by the corporation’s director-general Mark Thompson. The DG outlined a technological revolution in which all BBC content will be online, open access, available 24/7, interactive, downloadable, portable, podcastable, bloggable and probably playable on your fridge. He spoke of a machine called a BBC i-player and of how, five years from now, we shall “drag-and-drop” television and radio stations.
It will be part of an extra £5.5 billion spening over the next 10 years and, to fund it, the BBC wants the licence fee raised, year by year, from its present level of £131.50 to more than £180 by 2013. Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary, has signalled that this is seen as no more than “an opening bid”. But the BBC has already sweet-talked her into giving away an even bigger prize. She has guaranteed the licence fee itself will continue for the next 10 years.

“They played her beautifully, like a trout,” said one embittered ITV executive. One crucial tactic was the massive coverage of the Queen’s golden jubilee. It was a television event that succeeded, according to former DG Greg Dyke, in saving two British institutions — the monarchy and the BBC.

But why did my BBC friend think Thompson’s lecture was a suicide note? Because, in the future he described, there was no place for broadcasting — disseminating material to everybody at once — only narrowcasting — sent to individuals who can choose to see, hear, or read it whenever they want.

But this is the British Broadcasting Corporation. “If the platform is not to be linear scheduling,” said my friend, “then what is the point of being a broadcaster? This just turns the BBC into a publisher.”

This is not just wordplay. It is a crucial transformation that has convinced many that the BBC has no longer a right to exist on anything like its present scale. There are already dozens of highly successful and highly competent players in the narrowcasting market on the web.

Blogging is just the beginning. Home-made content — as Thompson acknowledges — is going to become ubiquitous and popular, lots of little narrowcasts soon turn into a very big share of the public’s screen time. So, as far as the BBC is concerned, what’s the point? There is much quite plausible arm-waving in Thompson’s lecture about this. But there can only be one argument for the licence fee and it’s always the same, whatever gizmos are on offer. That argument is “market failure”.

In a fully open, free and competitive broadcasting market, certain types of programme would not get made. So, just as we subsidise the Royal Shakespeare Company to keep Shakespeare on the stage, we subsidise the BBC to raise television output above the standards of the market swamp. The problem is, we don’t subsidise the RSC to be the biggest player in the theatrical business. But that is exactly what we do with the BBC. Its dominance of British broadcasting is absolute.

Or to put it another way: why does public money go into backing the dismal national lottery show or any number of programmes that could equally well be made in the commercial sector? Strictly speaking, the market-failure argument would only justify, say, one television channel, one radio station and, maybe now, the website. How, therefore, can it justify this multi-billion pound gorilla in the relatively small room of the British media?

A second leg of the market- failure argument is required. Here it is. The BBC’s mission is not just to protect certain types of programme — Planet Earth, Bleak House — it is to raise the standards of programmes as a whole. If there are to be television makeover, quiz or comedy shows, then they should be the best. By example, the BBC lifts the whole of British television out of the swamp.

This leg of the argument was effectively bought by Jowell when her white paper on the BBC said “being entertained should be of fundamental importance” and she encouraged the corporation to “take the business of fun seriously”. These words are not just mood music, they are metaphysics. Jowell had bought into the faith that everybody is made better by a big BBC.

In his lecture, Thompson reinforced the metaphysic with the results of Creative Future, “the largest and most detailed audience research project we’ve ever undertaken”. This revealed both “an audience which continues to judge the BBC by very high standards” and a shift in audience expectations. “They are clearer than ever before that they want to be entertained by the BBC, not just alongside being informed and educated, but in almost everything the BBC does,” he said.

The public, in other words, had also bought into the second leg of the market-failure argument. Why shouldn’t they? Everybody wants to be entertained and, if the licence fee gives us Planet Earth, Bleak House, Doctor Who and Only Fools and Horses, then long live the licence fee.

Unfortunately for the BBC, there is one more very good argument to throw into the pot. Take Doctor Who. It is brilliant but expensive mass entertainment that, under the present dispensation, probably would have been dismissed by the commercial sector as too risky. On the other hand, ITV could have made it if they too had been subsidised. So why not continue the licence fee, but spread it around a number of programme-makers, rather than just pouring it into one institution?

The appeal of this argument — which recently acquired a new convert in the form of another former DG, Lord Birt — is that it would put an end to the overweening, near-monopoly power of the BBC. This is regarded with some bitterness within the business. “They cannot bear not to have their finger in every single pie!” exploded one very senior ITV figure. “They are as ruthless as any commercial outfit at destroying competition.”

Fully aware of this rancorous backdrop to their activities, both the BBC chairman, Michael Grade, and the DG have used the word “imperial” in their recent remarks. Such culturally loaded words are not used casually by such men.They were signalling that they understood the BBC had been seen as imperial in the past and might still be seen so by some. But, they were saying, we are not imperialists.

Yet the grand designs embodied in Thompson’s lecture makes this hard to sustain. Surely what he was saying was that the BBC’s next phase is the colonisation of the wires of the web and the microwaves of mobile communications. He was saying that in the “fundamentally disruptive” media conditions of the “second digital wave” the BBC had a duty to maintain its size and power, to continue to lift us all out of the market swamp.

There are deep waters here, discussions to be had about what we need, what we want and what we value. Jowell’s decision to renew the licence fee for 10 years — rather than, say, five — has infuriated many precisely because it closes the discussion down. Nobody can now ask with any hope of being heard whether it is really the job of the BBC to be all digital things to all men, or to suggest that it should stick to what it does best — making and broadcasting a few high-quality shows. Instead, say the bitter voices, the new imperialism of the BBC has been sanctioned by a nod from the government, solely on the back of its jubilee coverage and the feverish years of bridge-building and lobbying after the Gilligan, sexed-up dossier affair.

Thompson sees it as his job to keep the BBC, not just in existence, but as big as it is, in spite of the multimedia firestorm that is about to engulf us all. It is a radical reinterpretation of the role of the corporation. But the truth is, for all the triumphalism of his lecture, his position was weak and he knew it. He played the only card he had if the gorilla was to stay in the room and not be replaced by some smaller, less imperial ape. The licence-fee deal comes this summer. It will be the last, and it won’t survive the decade.