Anyone who watched the finale of Strictly Come Dancing last month could be mistaken for thinking that all was right with the BBC. Viewing figures might have been down on the Covid years, but here was event TV that mustered all the resources at the corporation’s disposal – musicians, costumiers, lighting and sound technicians – into a glittering occasion that delivered a new success story for multicultural Britain: the lovable Sudan-born wildlife presenter, Hamza Yassin. One-third of the Reithian mission – to entertain – was jubilantly fulfilled. Yet those dipped figures (down to 9.2m, nearly 2m below the previous year) reflect a more difficult story that unfolded over its centenary year, calling into question what John Reith’s objectives – to inform and educate as well as to entertain – might mean as it moves into its second century.
In April, the corporation’s director general, Tim Davie, announced that, in order to meet government-imposed funding cuts, it would have to seriously reduce the number of programmes that it produces and was considering turning more television and radio stations into archive services, dedicated to recycling existing material. In October, the audio producers’ trade association wrote to the broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, pointing out that by April 2023, Radio 4’s drama output – a seedbed for talent – will have fallen by 50% since quotas that protected key genres were removed in 2017, calling into question the BBC’s commitment to developing writers and putting out one-off radio production.
The next five years will see the end of the corporation’s current royal charter and the reappraisal of its funding model. The idea of a public service funded through a licence fee has faced a sustained challenge for both political and technological reasons, as its competitors proliferate and younger generations drift away from broadcast media. At the same time, a two-year freeze on the licence fee has forced it to make cuts of £285m a year, with the loss of hundreds of jobs, leaving its foreign language services in tatters and seriously reducing its local news networks.
Remarkable value
Mr Davie declared last month that a switch-off of broadcast “will and should happen over time”. So while the BBC claims to continue to be committed to live broadcasting, it is actively planning the closure of individual “linear” channels and radio stations over the next two decades. In this scenario, the case for maintaining the licence fee, paid by people who own television sets, might seem tenuous. On the other hand, 88% of the time that audiences spend with the BBC today is through traditional television and radio broadcasting. Its chairman, Richard Sharp, a Tory party donor and close ally of Rishi Sunak, has argued that the £159-a-year licence fee – which raised £3.8bn of its £5.3bn income in 2021-22 – is “remarkable” value at 43p a day. He is right to do so and to say that there is little fat to cut.
There is no doubt that it is a commercial challenge for the corporation to keep up with competitors that are leaner and meaner, because they don’t have such a wide range of obligations. They include not only rival broadcasters but online providers and audio services. A report by the National Audit Office in December described a BBC that lacked the money required to evolve in a Darwinian world, and was held back by the demands of maintaining its existing television and radio channels, despite having a clear vision of how it wanted to shift to a digital-first future.
However, this is a negative way of framing a challenge that is not merely financial but also intellectual, political and strategic. At the time of its foundation, in the aftermath of a world war, the national broadcaster was seen as a way of keeping chaos at bay by “spreading throughout the world a doctrine of common sense”. In this context, all those channels that the auditors regard as an inconvenience lie at the heart of its identity.
Consider the World Service, which arrived as the Empire Service in 1932, a decade after the BBC, and now supplies news to 458 million people around the world every week, in 43 different languages. Its Persian subsidiary alone has an average weekly audience of 18.9 million, with radio reaching a further 1.6 million people, at a time when heavy censorship has made it hard for local media to report on widespread anti-regime protests across Iran. Several journalists at BBC Persian radio are among the 382 to lose jobs in an attempt to shear £28.5m off the World Service budget by 2023.
Debating its future in the House of Lords last month, the crossbench peer Lord Alton asked how the World Service could be expected to compete with Doctor Who and Strictly Come Dancing. “Why should we expect a listener in Liverpool to pay via their licence fee for services in a language they do not understand?” This is a reductionist argument that does no favours to the people of Liverpool. The case for a return to the era when the World Service was directly funded by the government is severely undermined by the Tories’ politically motivated attacks on the BBC, and the irresponsible cuts that they have anyway been making to overseas budgets.
No compromise on quality
The Foreign Office may have put an extra £4.1m into the pot last year to support the service in Russia and Ukraine but, coming hot on the heels of the real-terms cut to the BBC’s income, this looks like robbing Peter to pay Paul. It is just the sort of political fancy-footwork to which the BBC as a whole would be vulnerable, were it to abandon the independence that comes with the licence fee. Critics have pointed to precedents set by European countries that have successfully shifted to a universal household tax or direct grant funding from the government – but countries that have done this, such as Germany or Sweden, don’t have a World Service to support.
In his announcement of programme cuts last spring, Mr Davie said that the era of the BBC trying to do “everything with every service” was no longer viable because it ended up spreading itself “too thin”. What was not up for debate, he rightly insisted, was a compromise on quality. The unique quality of the BBC, however, is precisely its range. It was deeply moving to hear Iranian women asking the World Service to save their secret diaries for them. In such febrile times, under the government of a party with a track record of playing political football with it, to abandon a funding system that still works, and is independent, in favour of one for which a case has yet to be made would be dangerous. Indeed, it would seem like the worst possible start to a new century of public broadcasting.
