The Guardian keeps pumping out the pro-BBC stuff. Here’s BBC executive Jane Tranter telling us how fabulous the BBC is…and yet not only is she jumping ship for the commercial world she also puts a whacking great hole in the BBC’s main line of defence…that it is the central prop of the creative industries in the UK which would whither and die without BBC support.
As Jane Tranter prepares to head her own UK production company, she talks about Doctor Who, her fears for the BBC – and why Wales is like New York.
It quotes Tranter saying this in response to the government’s review and the suggestion that the BBC should be smaller and do less…..
‘The BBC should mean something to all people, it should be the people’s broadcaster. To think the BBC should be made for a cultural elite with a more narrowcast is patronising.’
But the BBC is made for a cultural elite, made by them, for them. They have zero interest in your views on immigration, Europe, Islam or austerity.
Tranter goes on….
“One thing that really strikes me is how much time politicians have got to tell the BBC what programmes they should be making. You wouldn’t get Barack Obama doing that over here.”
Apart from the obligatory mention of the sainted Obama does she say anything of note here? Is she right? Should politicians keep out of BBC business? If not politicians who? The BBC itself? Why should that small coterie of culturally elite, metropolitan media types, have the monopoly on what the BBC produces and the values and views it propagates?
The BBC has a very self-serving view of its place and role in society. In its own eyes it is a unique stand alone organisation beholden to no-one. An organisation that has a very religious view of itself in that it is untouchable, beyond criticism and reproach and yet has the right to pass moral judgement on society and dictate the shape and behaviour of that society. Much like Jesus it believes itself to be the product of a virgin birth unsullied by association with mankind, sent to save us from ourselves…and claims it is being sacrificed, crucified, because of its beliefs and values.
Unfortunately far from springing from nowhere in an immaculate conception the BBC’s first incarnation was as a commercial enterprise before being nationalised by those dreadful politicians…it is the love child of politicians and commercial companies, and even those companies had their broadcasts shaped by government. When the BBC was nationalised as a public service, which the BBC seems to forget, it was still shaped by the government and owes its initial success to toeing the government line on the General Strike.
The BBC is a creation of the politicians in its present form….it owes pretty much everything to its unique status gifted to it by those politicians who set out its mission in the Charter.
To claim that politicians should have no role in deciding the size, shape and role of the BBC is absurd….it is their creature to start with…..and it is curious that when the likes of Harriet Harman, or Tories like Lords Fowler and Patten, speak up for the BBC then the BBC is happy to be the subject of their benevolent scrutiny and quote their warm words extensively.
The BBC is in any case far from independent of politics. Its charter obliges it to maintain civil society and citizenship….a very political charge on it. That’s an obligation given to it by parliament…politicians. They therefore have an interest in the BBC to ensure that it is carrying out its duty…one they generally neglect which is why this site exists.
The BBC, a public service, should not be left to decide what a ‘civil society’ or ‘citizenship’ looks like. That is surely for a democratic Parliament to decide not a small group of culturally, socially and financially elite people who happen to have got jobs at the BBC and then recruited like-minded people to work with them….the result of which we see today as they try to impose their very particular notion of what society should look like…and if you disagree they use all the resources of the BBC to either lock you out of the debate or to attack and destroy you as with Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson.
Politicians have an important role in deciding what such a society should look like and to require the BBC to work towards promoting and ‘maintaining’ that vision. The BBC’s independence comes in only in its decisions on how to carry out that obligation, but certainly not in deciding what that obligation should be.
That is of course if you believe the BBC should have such a role in engineering what a society should look like…which I doubt it should…being too open to manipulation by its own employees….
“The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities, and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”
Andrew Marr, BBC presenter.
Tranter goes on to say [Funny how she allows herself to have ‘very strong views’ about the BBC’s shape]….
“I have got very strong views about BBC Studios and they may not be the BBC’s,” says Tranter. “What they need to look at is why was it once the most exciting place in the industry to work in and why is it not now.
“I always felt the BBC was a really cool place to work, where you could make the kind of programmes you couldn’t necessarily get your hands on anywhere else. For me it was just really exciting and energising and challenging and they need to put that feeling back.”
That’s interesting isn’t it? The BBC insists that it is the lynchpin that the whole creative industry swings around and that the British economy would lose out if the BBC were somehow ‘diminished’ and yet here we have a BBC executive telling us the BBC maybe past it having lost its energy, its excitement and its challenge.
She tells us that she believes her new commercial enterprise will itself be a ‘lynchpin’ for the creative industries bringing huge benefits to the economy……
It is forecast the new company could bring in as much as £100m to the Welsh economy over the next 10 years.
Tranter said Wales could be a “world leader” within the decade.
“TV has changed beyond all recognition in the past decade. Huge international productions made on movie scale budgets have put British TV at the forefront of this revolution,” she said. “Bad Wolf has the potential to be a game changer for the creative economy in Wales.”
So now we know, the commercial sector is not only growing but bursting out and generating other businesses and creative opportunities…..as the Times tells us when it reported on the ‘Top Gear’ Amazon deal….with a sub-story headlined “Big money digital media are biggest threat to the BBC”.
The Guardian has noticed the huge success and massive investment that commercial media is putting into production…..
Such changes are happening fast. BT, with turnover of £18bn plus, is buying giant packages of TV sport. Sky, with revenues of just over £11bn, is fighting as seldom before. Netflix has billions to spend. American giants are expanding everywhere: Liberty on the point of buying another chunk of ITV, NBCUniversal to invest $250m in Buzzfeed. The temptation at takeover time – when, say, Nikkei pays £844m for the FT – is to see these deals in isolation. In fact, the information and entertainment world is solidifying.
However they still want to paint a picture of a world blighted by a ‘diminished’ BBC….
“Small” doesn’t mean beautiful; it may mean peripheral. Some critics know this well. They want a nobbled BBC. Some politicians are less savvy. They don’t understand the blight that threatens Britain’s creative sector. There’s a warning for the BBC here. Why concentrate on digital news at the expense of drama and entertainment? The royal charter writers must see a world queuing up to buy BBC content. Why turn it away, failing to understand what may be lost?”
The BBC’s Steve Hewlett, masquerading as an impartial observer, also notes the success of the commercial sector but tries to use it to deny the claim that the BBC’s licence to print money is a huge advantage over the private companies….
BBC’s rivals aren’t feeling the pinch as much as green paper suggests
What about its [The BBC’s] impact in the heartland arena of TV – where the big money is spent?
Conveniently, last week offered a chance to look at exactly how the BBC’s commercial rivals are spending that money, and how well they are doing at generating a return. And what a week they had – profits galore! Commercial television is on quite a roll.
Taken together the numbers make the idea mooted in the green paper – that the BBC is “crowding out” or in any way impeding its commercial rivals, in TV at least – seems almost absurd.
Indeed if there’s any cause for concern it might be something nearer the opposite: in other words that, after round after round of cutbacks (and in fairness an ongoing struggle too with its own inefficiency), the BBC could be in danger of being left behind.
So once again we hear of hugely successful commercial media companies that are ‘splurging’ money on investments in the industry and yet we keep hearing that without the BBC the industry might wither and die, or at least be reduced to a shadow of its former self.
Doesn’t seem like that is going to happen. The majority of hugely popular and successful TV is produced by commercial companies, even the BBC’s productions are more often than not done as joint productions with outside companies or totally produced by outsiders and bought in….The Voice is one example, produced by a Dutch company…now owned by ITV ironically.
The BBC’s own production facilities have been put on a commercial basis so it’s hardly a relevant argument anymore that the BBC is the backbone of the creative industries when clearly there is massive money flowing in from the commercial companies.
That’s not to say that the BBC shouldn’t do pretty much what it does now, less the bias, but claims of being the creative industries’ bankroller and mentor are shown to be an argument that doesn’t have much weight or credibility as a reason to keep the BBC as it is. The BBC is that comfortable fit, one that most people grow up with and enjoy its familiarity…and as Stalin said ‘Quantity has a quality all of its own’…the BBC is everywhere, nationwide, and provides a familiar backrop to whatever you are doing, wherever you are. Shame to destroy that in the quest for that elusive target driven efficiency that will never result in quality….and its not the amount of money we pay the BBC that is the problem, it is the way it is extorted from us under great duress. Subscription [not per programme] or a charge on income tax [not council tax] are the only two sensible funding options. It costs over £100 million to collect the licence fee at present…what a waste of that money.
As the Telegraph says the licence fee has been made redundant…
How, exactly, can anybody still justify the BBC’s licence fee? The TV industry is changing at breakneck speed, reminding us almost every day of why we don’t need the state to intervene for great content to be produced.
The news that Amazon, which recently entered the content market with Prime Instant Video, has signed up Jeremy Clarkson and his crew is another seminal moment in the demise of the old TV structures. The programme will air in 2016 and take on the BBC’s new Top Gear show presented by Chris Evans. Next year’s launch could be remembered as the tipping point – the moment a new generation of content producers finally dethroned the old TV incumbents, and the BBC in particular.
Even the BBC admitted that when discussing the Amazon deal on the radio last week…and reminding us that there are no adverts on Amazon.
And the Telegraph backs up the argument that the BBC isn’t needed as the industry prop…..
All of this is a major blow for the BBC’s model and rationale. Supporters of the current taxpayer-financed set-up argue that without public service broadcasting we would see a race to the bottom – but that is not what the investments that are increasingly being made by US entrants into the market would suggest.
Thanks to new technology, it is now possible to produce cutting-edge content that is both extremely upmarket and commercially viable. It is also possible to produce water cooler, mainstream TV that was once the preserve of terrestrial players.
The BBC’s licence fee needs to go, for two related reasons. It is unfair and a horrendous distortion of the market, allowing vast amounts of taxpayer-financed content to be dumped for free on its website. Streaming services, national and regional newspaper websites and commercial TV all suffer.
Excellent article Alan! Well grounded in content, evidence and conclusion.