I almost never worry about things I got wrong, unless the error was so egregious that every day brings fresh evidence of how wrong I was; so, hello, GB News. The channel is almost three years old, and it’s just over three years since people started worrying about its provocations: should we be calling for an ad boycott, they wondered? My line was, relax, everyone, and my reasons were threefold.
First, GB News would be boring and nobody would watch it. The thing about reactionary views is that they’re nothing if not predictable. They can be incoherent, sure – and argue simultaneously that women belong in the kitchen, and that women’s rights are so fundamental that transgender rights are anathema – but you can always guess which way they’re going to go. Who’d ever want to watch that? I was right, to a degree: the viewing figures were laughable, initially, climbing year-on-year to “respectable fringe”. But I was wrong on a more fundamental level, in conceiving this as regular, commercial broadcasting, whose aim is to win viewers and turn a profit. Even as its viewing numbers have climbed, financially its losses have soared – this week, it posted an annual £42m loss, nearly 40% more than it lost last year. The one thing GB News doesn’t worry about is money.
