Steven Barnetts excellent contribution takes us close to the heart of the debate about public service/public sector broadcasting. It is splendidly apposite that it appears on openDemocracy at just the time that the latest MacTaggart lecture was given, by ITVs Director of Channels, David Liddiment. Setting aside the obvious axe-grinding aspects of Liddiments presentation, his call for the BBC to revert to its prime public service role and give up on the Celebrity Sleepover and Danger: Celeb At Work series that currently disfigure the BBC1 schedule was widely applauded.
When the openDemocracy debate on public service broadcasting began in June, it opened with a classic defence by Andrew Graham, to which I replied. Since then, we have seen an international exchange of experience. Its centre remains Britain, where the annual MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Festival is often an agenda-setting event at which the key players set out their stalls.
Now, in response to the arguments I have developed and defended, Steven Barnett makes some play out of my own MacTaggart lecture of ten years ago. My main point then was to warn that the Thatcherite obsession with market forces had been distorted into a swingeing attack on the broadcasting industry she so hated.
Market farces is the phrase I used to describe the absurd and deliberately damaging auction of ITV licences, the requirement for ITV to give up its collective ownership of ITN, the thoughtless insistence on Channel 4 selling its own airtime (without adequate provision for the possible consequences), and the absence of any public inquiry into the role that Channel 5 might play in advance of its creation.
I particularly appealed to the independent producers called into being by Channel 4 (of whom I had been one of the earliest) not to be so seduced by their role as bringers of efficiency to broadcasting as a whole as to miss the point of the social purpose of the analogue broadcasting structure; and to the ITV industry not to be so angered by the BBCs silence during the Thatcher onslaught on ITV as to abandon the BBC when her guns were eventually re-directed there.
Of course, social purpose has to come first. I would be delighted if Channel 4 re-affirmed its mission to serve minorities. But it is the current management there that has insisted on modernising its role, away from minorities and towards innovation, with the emphasis on becoming a multi-platform media corporation. The separate selling of Channel 4s airtime revealed how ITV had (deliberately or not) understated its true value when it was being sold alongside ITV. But the huge real value of the free spectrum that Channel 4 has been granted should neither be returned to ITV nor left entirely to Channel 4s management to squander on vast overheads and unsound digital adventures. There is a public interest in the money being spent in a proper and considered fashion. It is Channel 4s current regime that is undermining the case for public sector broadcasting: I am trying to persuade them to re-focus on public purpose.
Similarly, with the BBC, of course there is a strong case for a distinctive, comprehensive and authoritative public sector broadcaster, securely and strongly funded. But the method of funding, and the way it is spent, is nonetheless a crucially important issue. When the main service offered by the BBC, which absorbs 70 per cent of all its TV spending, progressively abandons its public service distinctiveness, and allows 90 per cent of its output to become not just indistinguishable from commercial offerings, but clear and deliberate imitations of those offerings, we do have to ask why public money is needed to deliver this, unless it is demonstrably more efficient at doing so than the commercial route.
The method of funding is equally relevant in this argument. The BBC feels obliged to be popular because of the way it is funded. If its audience share were to fall too far, the rationale for the licence fee would be undermined: so we face the paradoxical outcome that, the more powerful the forces of audience fragmentation become in the multi-channel age, and the stronger the need grows therefore for public service distinctiveness, the more insistently the BBC seems impelled to spend its public money defending audience share by retreating from distinctiveness.
Meanwhile, licence fee funds are diverted to launching new digital channels. The biggest slice of the £200 million being spent annually on these ventures is devoted to a channel (BBC Choice, about to become BBC3) that its own controller privately describes as a fully commercial service in public hands. Two new childrens channels are planned to be added to the fourteen already in existence. BBC programmes previously broadcast by one of these fourteen services in a commercial-free dedicated BBC bloc (providing the BBC with valuable revenue) will now be transferred to a BBC service containing substantial elements of imported programming (costing the BBC money). All the BBCs digital services fail one or other of the BBCs self-imposed tests distinctiveness, filling gaps in the market, clear audience demand, helping drive digital take-up.
So I would welcome Steves amended version of my argument purpose first, value for money second if he would accept that, once we have agreed purpose, value for money is highly relevant. Just as we do not shoot all non-productive citizens (why stop at prisoners?), we also do not supply public services at any price. We require purpose and performance.
All I ask of the public sector in broadcasting is that it accepts both those responsibilities, along with the transparency and accountability that must accompany access to public resources. All I ask of the supporters of public sector broadcasting is that they apply the same critical judgments to its practice as they would to commercial provision, even whilst emotionally strongly preferring the former to the latter. And that they stop attributing almost mystical value to the mere fact of public provision: which is where we came in with Andrew Grahams original, passionate contribution.
