12:16pm Wednesday 3rd March 2010
By Steve Pratt
As the BBC publishes a far-reaching strategy review, Steve Pratt considers the implications for the Corporation and how the public can influence what happens.
TWO weeks ago, BBC director-general Mark Thompson held out the prospect of hundreds of jobs to local broadcasting talent at a conference at Teesside University. Yesterday, he announced a wide-ranging strategy review for the BBC that will cost hundreds of jobs, close two radio stations, cut half of its website output and see a 25 per cent spending reduction on online activity.
Talk about giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Unavoidable because the Corporation is like a one-armed juggler as it struggles to keep all its balls in the air. The BBC must keep up with the broadcasting Joneses while justifying its spending, mindful that public funds in the form of the licence fee can be taken away as easily as they are given.
In publishing the executive’s proposals, the BBC Trust stresses it supports the Director- General’s vision of “a BBC focused on quality content and enduring values that keeps open a public space for all”.
It endorses the central proposals put forward for achieving that vision while retaining the right to consider the detail.
This is an admittedly problematic position in which the BBC finds itself, but it is not alone.
All broadcasters are feeling the pinch, thanks to the recession and the drastic changes affecting the whole industry.
The days of the big four terrestrial broadcasters are long gone. ITV has already undergone massive changes and job losses. We live in a multi-channel, multi-choice, digital world, where viewers can receive their entertainment and information through TV, computer and telephone.
An organisation such as the BBC, a body weighed down by tradition and financed by the public purse, risks being left behind and ending up a white elephant in this brave new world if changes can’t be made.
Whether the BBC Trust’s weighty tome Putting Quality First will succeed in winning over public and political support is debatable.
It’s a difficult PR task to convince people you are hard up when you’re establishing a massive new base – BBC North, in Salford, near Manchester, at a cost of £150m. Five departments are moving to the North-West, including children’s, sport and Radio 5 Live. That comes on top of a reported £7m overspend giving Broadcasting House, in London, a makeover plus reports of the big fees given to the top talent at the BBC.
The jobs Thompson offered on his Teesside trip result mainly from London staff choosing not to move to Salford, leaving hundreds of vacancies to fill.
These cuts – and no amount of PR smoothing over by executives can disguise the proposals being anything but reductions in services – aim to “reprioritise” nearly £600m a year to higher quality content. Which begs the question: who decides what is quality and what is dross? Taking the most extreme example, someone must answer the vital question: East- Enders is popular, but is it art?
Opinions will differ, which makes the lengthy Strategy Review redundant. Perhaps the BBC could appoint a panel of judges – How about Simon Cowell, Cheryl Cole and Dancing On Ice hatchet man Jason Gardiner – to adjudicate on what counts as quality in a Britain’s Got Talent type exercise.
BECAUSE the BBC must be seen to be taking notice of the people paying them – the licence-payers – the strategy review comes complete with a 12-week public consultation exercise and an online survey that will have you scratching your head more than Mastermind.
There are 11 questions, with the proviso that “you can answer as many or as few as you wish”. If they’d asked “who shot Archie?” I’d be all right. But nothing so simple. It’s all about commenting on strategic principles and which areas should the BBC make more distinctive from other broadcasters and media?
Is a survey really the place to debate the director-general’s “five high level principles which would set the future direction of the BBC” or the “proposed editorial priorities”.
These include “the best journalism in the world” and “ambitious UK drama and comedy”, two things to which you’d hope the BBC aspired already.
Traditionally, proposed cuts should contain one or two headline-making plans to take the spotlight away from other potentially more offensive ideas. Suggesting the closure of two relatively- unknown radio stations – 6 Music and the Asian Network – fulfils this task.
Already, several dozen MPs have signed up to a parliamentary motion expressing “deep concern”
at these closures, although you doubt how many have ever listened to those stations?
Neither, the small print in the review states, offers appropriate value for money. The Asian Network doesn’t have enough listeners to justify the level of BBC investment as a network radio service. So much for public service broadcasting remit for which the BBC is famous.
Maybe they are being offered as sacrificial lambs for the sake of appearances, although the survey claims no decision has been made on closing services and invites public comment before anything is done.
But can anything be done to stop BBC1 from expanding its “knowledge” output to areas such as history and science, or the BBC putting an extra £25m into the BBC2 budget from 2013 to boost “distinctiveness”.
As for BBC3, the channel must remain committed to original comedy and drama, as well as continue to move towards “relevant, accessible and thought-provoking factual shows”.
This presumably means the end of documentaries like The Day My Boobs Caught Fire.
And it sounds like the fun will be taken out of BBC4 as it refocuses with less comedy and entertainment, but more “arts, music, culture and knowledge”.
The trust plays it safe by welcoming the general direction of the report, while adding it will want to “test it and consider how it is delivered”.
What they’re clear about is that it “heads towards a more disciplined and sharply focused BBC”.
That means some difficult choices, but rest assured they “will not shrink from those choices where they are in the interests of licence fee payers” so that the end result will be a BBC “that is genuinely distinctive, genuinely open and transparent and genuinely public service”.
Responses from the public consultation and its own analysis will be used by the trust to form a final view on what the future strategic framework for the BBC ought to be. Its provisional conclusions will be made public in the summer and a final strategy published in the summer.
Viewers will be watching this particular “public space” with interest to see who stays and who goes.
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