On 5 July, if polling predictions are correct, the Tories will be out of power. Among the repercussions will be that the BBC and Channel 4 – two of our great creative organisations – will have to get creative and start solving some of their own problems. Bailing out broadcasters won’t be a Labour priority.
The BBC’s licence fee, more than 100 years old, might be a good place to start. It’s clearly unjust in some regards: you pay it even if you want to watch every channel but those operated by the BBC, and a single mother in Barnsley pays the same as the king. All those clever people in the BBC (and an awful lot of people work there – more than 21,000 at last count) need to come up with an innovative alternative.
I used to be head of news and current affairs at Channel 4, during a time when things were different. In 1998, when I started out as a commissioning editor, there were only five terrestrial TV channels, we had no streaming services to compete with, and there was not the plethora of websites and podcasts offering a brilliant range of radical views that we have now. But today we have an opportunity to redefine public service broadcasting, with the current market realities in mind. The BBC and Channel 4 were founded in two very different ages: the BBC’s original mission was to inform, educate and entertain – but now, when global streaming platforms with huge budgets dominate the TV space, we can get our entertainment in lots of different places. Similarly, Channel 4 was set up by the government in 1982 with a unique remit to stimulate the independent production sector, drive innovation, give voice to diverse communities and encourage debate. But are there many truly unique programmes being created under that remit 40-odd years on?
In today’s market, the BBC should stick to what it does best: news and current affairs, children’s programming, documentaries about the UK, religious and ethical programmes, local radio and other key genres that commercial broadcasters and streamers have no interest in. Channel 4’s model must also evolve. Most people don’t realise it makes none of its own programmes – proposed changes allowing it to start doing so, and giving it the right to keep some of the intellectual property in its programmes and to borrow money, are much welcomed.
We should also celebrate some of the other changes already being made. Among the doom-laden articles about Channel 4’s so-called demise, the fact that it will move most of its staff out of London was reported as if it was a negative. But this is terrific news. A few years ago, Channel 4 announced that Leeds would be its national headquarters – so many may be surprised they didn’t move those staff earlier. And this country desperately needs a major broadcaster that is genuinely based in the north. Granada Television was, in its day, the finest television company this country has had. It made Coronation Street and World in Action, and its success was very much tied to its being based in the north. Having worked there for more than a decade from 1982, I can say it was truly a time when some of the finest television was made by a northern company: think Jewel in the Crown, Brideshead Revisited and Disappearing World. This relocation is great news for the levelling up agenda, supported in theory by all politicians, but of which we see little in practice.
And who’s to say good public TV never means cuts? Channel 4’s cuts of 18% in staff appear shocking, but look more closely. They bring the figures for those employed back to 2021 levels. At the height of Channel 4’s creative success in the 1980s – admittedly, very different times – its headcount was several hundred lower than today. Meanwhile, the BBC does need to be more frugal. Four people with three cameras recently turned up to interview me for a few minutes for a BBC education programme. They told me it was necessary, but in a time when people make award-winning programmes on mobile phones, this public broadcaster must change with the times. TV licence fee revenues in 2023 were £3.7bn. That’s an awful lot of money that could be better spent on hospitals.
The aim should always be to save the programmes, not the institutions that make them. The BBC is a huge machine that, in my view, is devoted to saving itself. This machine would have you believe that if you attack its financial model of balancing the popular and predictable with the special, you want to get rid of BBC News. No – we just need to be honest that a lot of what it does could, and indeed should, be done elsewhere.
I have supported the BBC and Channel 4 against the attacks of the Tory right for more than a decade. But now that those attackers are fading from political power, we supporters need to ask searching questions.
We need a moment of honesty. We need to know just which programmes are very special, and also which ones aren’t – and we might decide there is another way of making those that aren’t up to scratch.
Whatever the changes, public broadcasting is a public service. As Keir Starmer said of the NHS, neither the BBC nor Channel 4 is “a shrine to be worshipped at”. So let’s finally take the chance to submit our broadcasters to the forensic, searching questions we would of any other vital national service.
Dorothy Byrne is the president of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. She is a former head of news and current affairs at Channel 4, and delivered the MacTaggart lecture in 2019
