Do you remember being a teenager? I remember working it all out for the first time, properly: life. Myself. Discovering stuff, figuring out what I liked, what I didn’t, coming to conclusions, changing my mind. Dickens, Simple Minds, K Cider, The Prisoner, combat trousers, Terence Davies, Happy Mondays, The Independent, Pot Noodles, T.S. Eliot, The Cure, Merchant Ivory, Noel’s House Party, Crisis comic, Take That, Daily Mirror, Brecht, draught bitter – the list could go on, things that I tried and discarded, some that are still a part of my life, other things that I’ve forgotten about entirely. And, throughout, the understanding and excitement of making fresh discoveries, new choices.
I’ve made the choice to start this posting with a very personal paragraph because what follows is predicated on the personal: my love of the BBC.
Those five words were carefully chosen. Love feels like an odd word to use in relation to an institution, a corporation, especially for a British person. But the BBC is no ordinary organisation. It’s the most incredible cultural institution in the world.
Another choice: to make such a bold, unequivocal claim – but with good reason. The BBC is an anachronism, but a glorious one. Originally created as a focal organisation for experimental radio services, it now covers all broadcast media and has a significant online presence, all of which is informed by its original public service principles. It’s funded by the licence fee, at a cost of £142.50 per year. The range of channels and services that this provides is astonishing. Imagine such a thing being proposed today; a package (as I’m afraid we’d have to refer to it) consisting of 8 television channels, 10 radio stations (not including the World Service or the dozens of regional stations) and a large and eclectic website that not only supplements the broadcast programmes but also features an enormous amount of original material – and yet, that bare enumeration doesn’t begin to communicate the variety and import of what is produced.
When it began, the BBC was, of course, more modest. It has grown: because of the way it is funded, which ostensibly frees it from commercial pressures; because this freedom allows it to take risks and to consider potential in the way a commercial broadcaster might not (the website being a good example of this); and because it consistently delivers the goods: programmes that people want to watch and listen to. No, more than that: the very best of programmes, that other broadcasters seek to emulate.
Is it perfect? No, of course not. The constituency is too large. Everyone in this country has a view on what the BBC is doing wrong; it’s as certain a conversation saver as the weather, because everyone feels a peculiar ownership of the BBC that goes beyond the mere transaction of having paid the licence fee. For my part, I think BBC1 and Radio 4 are often too cosily ‘Home Counties’ in temperament; that BBC3 is asinine, and BBC4 desiccated; I wish more bold decisions were taken with drama and comedy; that the casting pool was opened out beyond the same half-dozen faces. Do all the best programmes come from the BBC? No, but, in terms of home-grown programming, the BBC sets the benchmark. It makes plenty that is good and original, and if commercial broadcasters deliver quality, and they can and do, it is because they are rising up to meet the BBC. This state of affairs is good; it means viewers and listeners have a wealth of programmes to choose from, good quality programmes of real variety. A proper choice.
Choice is an important word. It was bandied around a lot in the early 90s, when satellite broadcasting was in its infancy; it was the great promise: that more channels meant, ipso facto, more choice. Plenty of us could see then, and even more can now, that this was fool’s gold. Superficially, there are more channels to choose from, but what do they show? Shopping, or cheap imports, or repeats, or repeats of cheap imports. Or, perversely, if you turn onto the right channel, repeats of BBC programmes. But no one could honestly say that this has given us more to choose from. The ‘choice’ of free-market broadcasting is a chimera – or, to put it another way, a lie.
I’ve written this on the day that Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, has announced the closure of 6 Music and the Asian Network, along with half of the BBC’s websites. In support of this, he writes in today’s Guardian that the BBC
How that is served by axing two of the stations that most distinctly affirm the BBC’s independence from the marketplace is unclear. That this whole affair seems like a pre-emptive self-flagellation in anticipation of an unfriendly Tory government seems supported when he goes on to say
This is the pitiful squeak of the abused; the victim who, cowed by years of abuse, now inflicts the torment on themselves, and, robbed of all dignity, asserts that they are better for it, even as the swelling starts and the bruise starts to blacken.
This post was prompted by today’s announcement but there is a wider issue. Post-Hutton, post-Sachsgate, the BBC has embarked upon a process of self-abnegation, of which this latest announcement seems to be the nadir. But I don’t want the BBC to behave like this. It doesn’t need to behave like this. The BBC is brilliant – I mean it in all senses of the word. It shines. Yet it seems over-eager to make itself a victim, and this needs to stop. The BBC’s commercial rivals will never be satisfied with any cuts or limitations that the BBC either imposes upon itself or that are imposed upon it; they will only stop attacking once it is dead.
Put simply, the BBC needs to grow a backbone, and start going on the attack, rather than rolling over and allowing itself to be kicked into irrelevance. How, one might ask, is anyone to respect the BBC if it doesn’t respect itself? Not that I’m not sympathetic to its situation: during that fateful week following Russell Brand’s Radio 2 show, the Daily Mail featured its self-generated anti-BBC non-story on its front page for five consecutive days, and on only one of them was it not the headline story (27-31 Oct 2008). One doesn’t need to be a conspiracy-theorist or even a week into a Media Studies course to spot an agenda at play. The Corporation is under continual onslaught, and I appreciate that that is difficult. But appeasement does not work; they will not have it. Capitulation might quieten the immediate attack, but it also guarantees another.
Well, I say, enough. I want the BBC to try answering back. Try it. They might be surprised to find that people respond to that; that they do have support; that they are valued.
Through the BBC, I continue to be entertained, to learn, to let my mind and imagination be taken to places that it otherwise wouldn’t. The BBC, through the multiplicity and reach of its channels, stations and websites, maintains that joy of adolescent discovery. It continues to shape my cultural life, which is another way of saying that I continue to grow because of it. £142.50? That is a bargain. This needs saying, and I’m fed-up enough not to be embarrassed to say it.
Because I’m tired of the attacks from the Daily Mail and the Murdoch-owned titles and the Conservative Party and, sigh, the Labour government, and every other grub with a vested-interest who is irked by this marvellous, eclectic, inventive, vibrant, market-snubbing, non-corporate corporation that our country is lucky and clever enough to sustain. I’m tired of the dull, the cynical, the stupid, and the greedy, swaggering around as though they embody the essence of all that is true, when they do not. These people diminish. They add to the despair of the nation, not the joy. One day, it is entirely plausible that they will succeed and that the BBC, as we know it, will be gone. Gone. Will we call that progress? Is that something to be desired? Is that choice?
What I offer these parasites is choice language: with all the passion I can muster, speaking sincerely, from the heart, truthfully and intently and unapologetically, I say to them: Fuck Off.
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YES. That is all.
Bravo. Somewhere in all this flannel about prioritising what the BBC is for and ensuring it doesn’t step on the toes of its commercial rivals, the inconvenient wishes of the licence payer seems to have been overlooked.
A perfect example was on Newsnight yesterday when, following Mark Thompson’s piss-poor defence of the strategy review, Paxman interviewed Luke Johnson (ex-C4) Dawn Airey (C5) and Kelvin McKenzie (twat). Unsurprisingly, these people with vested commercial interests thought the cuts didn’t go far enough. But where was the counter argument from people like me who don’t want the BBC to get smaller so we can cross our fingers and hope that the commercial sector will step into the breach, since all the evidence points to the fact that they won’t? That I don’t want 6Music – a station that more-or-less embodies the principles of the BBC – to close, in the hope that XFM actually starts playing the odd song I’m not already wearingly familiar with, or so I can see if Absolute doesn’t just buy up the “^Music brand” and slowly strip it of all its values.
We’re used to commercial broadcasting only thinking of themselves and treating the audience with contempt – see James Murdoch’s oft-stated wish not for Sky to create brilliant programming but for Sky to increase per-capita revenue – so it is gutting to find Thompson going the same way. Well it cuts both ways. I wouldn’t miss a step if most of the commercial broadcasters closed tomorrow, and I don’t see the logic in making the BBC should be made shitter just to accommodate their failings.
“^Music brand” should be “6Music brand”, obv. Sticky shift button.
Yes: if you’re critical of the BBC, a path will be beaten to your door for you to air your criticisms, but, as you say, Quinn, where are the defenders? The people like me (that I know exist because I talk to them) who love the BBC and all that it stands for? That’s why I wrote that piece above. It’s not a reasoned essay at all, more a cri de coeur. I’m heartily pissed off with the relentless grinding down of the BBC, and it’s own complicity in this. One day, it will be gone, and we’ll look around and wonder what happened.