Loading ...
Terrible (if expected) news this morning, with the BBC confirming that it’s pandering to the bullying - sorry, lobbying of Rupert Murdoch and his paid underlings in the Tory party, and making drastic cuts. The most notable casualties will be 6 Music and the Asian Network.
To be fair, the response of many people, even fans of the BBC, has been along the lines of “You can’t cut 6 Music! You should cut (X) instead” - X being something they don’t particularly like, be it 5 Live because they’re not into sport, Radio 3 because they’re not into classical music, or Top Gear because they’re not into watching the tragic results of a mad scientist’s experiment 50-odd years ago to cross-breed a human being with an arsehole.
So the perception that BBC expenditure needs to be cut is pretty pervasive, even amongst its allies; however, I think that ditching entire channels is a terrible shame, unless they’re clearly total rubbish, which 6 Music clearly isn’t (I know nothing about the Asian Network). Money should be saved elsewhere - trimming bureaucracy / fewer expensive imported programmes / reduction in output (e.g. turning some channels off at night).
Cutting whole channels will be like a red rag to the bull(shitters) in the red-top rags: soon they’ll be after more. Modern-day Whitehouses at the Sun and Mail will complain that BBC3 is “too sweary”, Times readers will moan that BBC4 is “too intelligent” etc, and soon the corporation will find itself having to justify its existence on a channel-by-channel basis.
The BBC may not be perfect, but it’s still excellent value for money. The overwhelming majority who love it should be careful of complacency; Murdoch has his eyes on forcing its sale (bit by bit if necessary) or dismantling it altogether, and he has a lot of friends in what is likely to be our next government. Killing off 6 Music and the Asian Network sets a dangerous precedent.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Fatuous comments and ridiculous generalisations, Irritating Things. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
I suppose my concern in relation to:
… is that this comes with the significant risk of a decline in quality of output, as such, I’m not sure it’s completely invalid to close an entire channel / station.
On the one hand, reductio ad absurdem I can see that you don’t want to operate a radio station that has four listeners, but on the other hand, I’m not sure the BBC should be about producing solely the shit that will be appropriate for and of interest to a mass market. There are plenty of commercial TV / radio stations that fill this niche successfully based around an advertising model - and arguably the focus for the Beeb should primarily be on quality of programming in a more abstract sense, rather than quantity of consumers. If high quality, varied programming means running 6 Music then this should be the decider and not viewer numbers in my mind.
That said, I think the BBC is in an almost impossible position here - give the current head of ITV some airtime on the news and he’ll almost certainly plug the suggestion that ITV should get some of the license fee funding (which is bullshit). If BBC operate a radio station that has (for example) 50,000 listeners, but costs £10m to operate then the cost per listener is £200 - more than the license fee, which means that other license fee payers are subsidising this radion station’s listener base. If pitched in this light, it becomes quite hard for the BBC to defend, so I can understand why there would be a pressure to think along these lines to a certain degree. Although it shouldn’t be entirely commercially driven, in the above sense it is a commercial entity.
I hasten to add that I think I’m probably only addressing one aspect of a complex issue when saying all of this - which will in part be because I haven’t really thought a huge amount about it.
My favourite thing about this story is the dilemma Daily Mail readers now find themselves in: on the one hand, it’s a reflex action to complain about any change whatsoever, especially when it involves the cutting of any kind of beloved British institution. On the other hand, they can’t quite bring themselves to stick up for the Asian Network…
Sadly, Zee, beloved British institution or not, I fear that Daily Mail readers are ecstatic about the cuts to the lefty-liberal BBC. They couldn’t be happier if the reanimated corpse of Oswald Mosley formed the “End Elf and Safety and Political Correctness, Deport Immigrants, Chemically Castrate Paedos and Stop the Met Office Producing Those Inaccurate Long-Range Weather Forecasts” Party and ran for prime minister.
… playing devil’s advocate* here, but why not get rid of the BBC and associated TV License system?
(* - As per observation above, I have not spent a lot of time thinking my views through here, so looking to lazily adopt the views of others…)
“Why not get rid of the BBC and associated TV License system?” - there are two distinct questions here. “Why not get rid of the BBC?” - because the Reithian ethics of equal consideration of all viewpoints, probity, universality and a commitment to public service could not possibly be served by the alternative of ratings-chasing commercial channels. We’d lose the best public broadcaster in the world and one of the last things which other countries truly envy about the UK, and we’d have to endure adverts every 10 minutes wherever we channel-surfed. From a personal point of view, I’d also miss the opportunity the Beeb gives me to flip a huge giant bird at the array of right-wing bigots who disagree with a public service broadcaster offering universality, usually with an unabashedly liberal slant.
“Why not get rid of the licence fee?”, on the other hand, is a far trickier one. I don’t think that there’s any way that the BBC could be funded other than publicly and by everyone in the UK, but the fact that the money is raised by asking people to pay £142.50 per annum for the right to use a colour television and threatening to put them in prison if they fail to do so is draconian, undemocratic and, in an age of multiple media platforms / TV through the interweb etc, technologically desperately outmoded. The concept needs a SERIOUS re-jig at some point; but how to accomplish this and keep everyone paying without grasping some very thorny issues, especially around democracy, is difficult in the extreme. Perhaps we need a bit of that “Marxist utopia” Fox News keeps going on about.
Having not had my copy of The Economist delivered over the weekend, forcing me to buy a copy on Monday (or rely on freediot rags like Metro or City A.M. and consign myself to knowledge only of the affairs of footballers and their WAGs, rather than the more useful current variety … oh, FFS … ok, sorry, I’m going to have to go off on a massive tangent now.
From this article: “Cheryl Cole and Charlotte Church to war again on Jonathan Ross?”
No they’re not! Every media outlet in the UK would love nothing more than for Cheryl to pull Charlotte’s hair and get punched in the face in return. I bet the entire industry is weeing itself with excitement at the mere prospect that it might kick off. What a fucking nonsense story.
Fuck it, I can’t remember what I was going to say, but I’ve revised my stance. All daily newspapers, idiot weeklies and TV stations should be banned. The Beeb should be the sole source of televisual entertainment in the UK, they should also have added to their remit a daily newspaper to fill the void. The Economist and its ilk may remain in print. That is all.
… following up on the rant, I suppose that’s the point really - the BBC’s important because of the standards it maintains - even the briefest consideration of what else is out there highlights the value in having something held to a standard, rather than letting commercial forces drive it down to the lowest common denominator.
In relation to The Economist, the article on this topic is quite interesting / informative - particularly the cost per user hour figures that I hadn’t seen elsewhere:
Neeedless to say, TM, I concur entirely. I don’t think it would take more than a couple of weeks of BBC 1 being replaced by CowellTV (first night schedule; So You Think Celebrity X Factor Pop Stars Can Dance on Ice whilst Dining With Me - the Rivals’ Little Brother, running from 5pm - 10pm every night, followed by “Jordan - My Story. Yes, AGAIN.”) for even the hardest-nosed licence fee rebel to repent bitterly.
No offence* intended, but the bottom line is that we NEED clever people shoving good television down thick people’s throats, and that currently the only way that this can be achieved is by the thick people (and everyone else) being forced to pay for it. What other country in the world would have a programme like “The Thick of It”, or an astonishingly intellectual film-maker like Jonathan Meades, on one of the main nationwide channels?
To be honest, I found the Economist article slightly boring / lacking in the sort of hands-on-hips-pelvic-thrust of opinion that I like, but I guess that’s what The Economist does. However, the graphs are, as you say, extremely interesting. Not least because The Economist has presented the data to make it look as if BBC 6 Music and the Asian Network are the two least-used channels, which I don’t think is the case. Why they would want to do this, and why the data doesn’t include CBBC, BBC Parliament, BBC Radio 7 or any of the other BBC strands, I’m not quite sure.
(* - i.e. loads of it)
The Economist can indeed at times be a bit dry / boring, but I generally prefer my news to be delivered in a more neutral / factual format rather than the same but layered by an opinion with which I can agree / disagree (… and by this I mean considered opinion as one might get from a broadsheet, and not ranting idiot bullshit). Purely a matter of personal preference really I’d guess.
In the interests of even handed debate, I’ve prepared the following table ordered by Reach (from lowest to highest) and from BBC data:
From this, you are of course correct that BBC 6 Music is not the least popular channel, nor is it by any means the most expensive per user hour. However, in absolute terms both BBC Asian Network and BBC 6 Music are expensive - which is what counts in a cost-cutting exercise. Of the nine channels with the lowest reach they are most and joint second most expensive respectively, together forming 41% of the costs here. With the same absolute cost, a lower reach and a higher cost per user hour, there’s certainly a credible argument from these figures that BBC 1Xtra should have gone instead of BBC6 Music.
Of course, if you expand this out to the 10 lowest reach channels then BBC Radio 3 costs more than the other nine put together - although cost per user hour should really be a consideration here.
Facts and figures aside, Taf - is the real motivation for all this that you’re a BBC6 Music listener and you don’t want to see you favouwite wadio station cancwelled? Awwwww …
TM - many thanks for putting those stats together. My main point is, of course, that none of them should be cut on principle; as such, any fwavouwite channelly-wannelly-woo of mine is irrelevanty-wellevanty.
I’m not actually a BBC 6 Music listener, despite the fact that I sit slap-bang in the middle of their target demographic (in fact, I seem to remember hearing that their initial “blue sky thinking” meeting actually specified a target of “male, mid-late 30s, wishy-washy socialist, harking back tragically to the ’80s, probably terminally single, ideally with a name which rhymes with “Cycle Pal Ban”). Like many, I’m more of a podcast vulture these days; in fact, I’ll make you a prediction…. (ahem…)
- In 20 years’ time, the concept of “channels” will be all but redundant. We’ll simply pick and choose our favourite radio and TV from a big BBC pool, which will also include a “suggested programme” facility which will choose something for you when you’re not sure what to watch, based on a record of your viewing / listening habits. And eventually, all BBC archive material will also be added to the pool of what’s available, leading to a BBC which both fulfils its remit of universality AND allows you to experience, on demand, quality programming from before you were born, let alone when you started paying the licence fee. Plus we’ll all fly around using jet-packs, eat meals in tablet form, take holidays on the moon and have cosmetically-perfected bodies, like Jordan or Jocelyn Wildenstein.
Taf - yeah, the favouwite wadio question was a bit of a cheap shot, detracting massively from the intelligent debate - still, I could help it having snickered away for literally days about it.
The more I think about the figures, the more I think you’re probably right, wholesale channel culling is less sensible than cost cutting by reducing output - although it’s possible that disproportionately more content would have to go since you’ll still have operational costs for a channel - even if it’s output is reduced to 10 mins a day.
Re. your prediction I suspect you’re right - and probably on a much shorter timescale than 20 years. As I see it, BBC iPlayer is very much the precursor to this - all the last series of Silent Witness that I watched was done using iPlayer - if I could get episodes from previous seasons then I almost certainly would (… in fact, in an unexpected bout of vanity, since my main motivation for watching Silent Witness was my sister saying Dr Harry Cunningham’s mannerisms reminded her of me, I’d probably download all the episodes and force everyone to watch them to confirm the similarity).