It may be touted as the public broadcasting model for New Zealand to follow, but the UK’s favourite media outlet is facing an “existential threat”. By Andrew Anthony.
Last year, the advisory group set up to look into the future of New Zealand broadcasting recommended that TVNZ and RNZ should be disestablished and merged. In their place the group recommended a new "globally recognised public media entity".
The Labour government last week finally approved the plan. While there is still much work to do before the merger happens, it is almost inevitable that the BCC will come up in public discussions.
And indeed, in the Listener, industry stalwarts including Geoffrey Whitehead, the former chief executive of RNZ and Australia’s ABC, and broadcaster Tom Frewen, have already cited the BBC and its original mission to “inform, educate and entertain” as the prototype on which a merged public broadcaster should be founded in New Zealand.
The BBC is a truly global brand. It has more than 22,000 staff and boasts four TV channels, 40 local radio stations, the World Service, a streaming service, and a website that reaches 38 million people in the UK alone.
It has produced so many radio and TV programmes that no one knows the total figure, though it's estimated to be somewhere between 10 and 20 million. That number includes, in this century alone, Fleabag, The Office, The Thick of It, Happy Valley, Planet Earth, Normal People and I May Destroy You. Throw in Fawlty Towers, Monty Python, The Singing Detective, Life on Earth and countless other classics from the 20th century, and you have an impressive roll call of some of the finest TV ever made.
Yet the truth is that that original mission, devised by the BBC's godfather and first director-general, John Reith, dates from a very different era, long before satellite TV, the internet and streaming services. The competition for viewer time and the way people watch television has radically changed.
People no longer sit passively staring at whatever a given channel is showing, but instead curate their own viewing experience from a wealth of choice. What's more, streaming services help them do it with algorithms that record and predict their tastes. All of this, plus the influx of massive subscription service capital, has left traditional public broadcasters such as the BBC (and commercial ones) struggling to keep up.
This year is the centenary of the BBC – which began in October 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company (it became a publicly owned corporation five years later) in a tiny office hidden away between the Savoy Hotel and River Thames. So, you'd think it would be a year of celebration.
Instead, the BBC is under greater threat than it has been since those early start-up days when it barely knew what it was, let alone what it would become. "Morale is very low," says one radio producer. "Everyone feels under existential threat."
Earlier this year, British Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries announced she was freezing the NZ$320 licence fee – the source of 74 per cent of the corporation's NZ$10 billion income – for two years, with the intention of scrapping it entirely in 2027.
Only a decade ago, the notion of the BBC being placed in a fight for survival would have been, if not unthinkable, then the cause of mass protest and a culture-wide defensive campaign. After the National Health Service, it has almost certainly been the country's best-loved public institution. But so far there has been remarkably little pushback.
Newspapers that may once have come to the BBC's aid nowadays see it as a direct rival. And the public, which for many years held "Auntie" or "the Beeb" in great esteem and affection, is strongly divided along generational lines.
For many people over 40, it continues to command respect and a certain national pride. But for those under 40, children of the online world and streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, and devotees of free-form podcasts, the BBC is something of a strange anachronism.
They don't rely on it for music, as generations before had done when Radio 1 DJs and TV's Top of the Pops schedulers were the gatekeepers of popular culture. They don't depend on its still-massive news output. It's no longer their first stop for entertainment or sport. And a licence fee sounds like a leftover from World War II. For tomorrow's consumers, the stark question is: what is the BBC for?
That original Reithian ethos "to inform, educate and entertain" remains part of its mission statement. Reith and his successors constantly tried to straddle the high-minded and the popular, the particular and the universal. In doing so, the corporation achieved a certain approach and tone that employees seemed to imbibe as if it was plumbed into the tap water.
But that has changed in recent years. As one veteran reporter says: "It used to be that people wanted to work for the BBC because it was the BBC. I remember being shocked when colleagues started leaving to go to Al Jazeera, just because they were being offered a lot of money. For younger people, the BBC doesn't mean what it used to mean."
Years of government pressure and public criticism have also taken their toll. A turning point was the Jimmy Savile scandal. Savile, who died in 2011, was one of the BBC's best-known faces, an eccentric and often prickly character who turned out to be a deranged paedophile and serial abuser. When BBC journalists sought to investigate a number of allegations against Savile after his death, they were silenced by management. Eventually, a rival channel exposed the litany of Savile's crimes, and the BBC was cast as bloated and corrupt, blind to the vices of its stars.
Its values came under fire again when it was revealed that one of its star reporters, Martin Bashir, faked documents and acted in a "deceitful" way to secure his famous interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1995. An inquiry last year found the BBC fell short of "high standards of integrity and transparency" over the incident, which Diana's brother claims did irreparable damage to his sister's already fragile psyche.
Both sagas enabled the BBC's critics to paint a picture of an organisation out of touch with the people it is supposed to serve. In an attempt to "drain the swamp", the broadcaster plans to screen a three-part series about these and other scandals later this year.
There is also a renewed focus on how it treats and rewards its talent. Although publicly funded itself, the corporation competes in a commercial market, crowded with satellite and streaming outfits, for the best people. Just last month, two of its brightest stars, Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis (best known for her 2019 Prince Andrew interview) and journalist Jon Sopel announced they were leaving for a commercial rival.
Unlike its competitors, the BBC is obliged to publish what it pays its talent. Almost everyone in Britain, therefore, knows that Gary Lineker, the former footballer turned TV presenter, earns about NZ$2.7 million a year, essentially for introducing football highlights. It doesn't matter that he could earn considerably more in the commercial sector. The nature of publicly funded broadcasting is that large salaries are prone to appear excessive, even if they are in line with market norms.
Another criticism is that it is too big, with too many layers of management. Yet there are many economies that come with size, particularly in news. Nearly all the corporation's journalists now work across TV, radio and digital. "The synergies are super-efficient," confirms one BBC radio producer.
Beyond news, such multimedia flexibility isn't always so compelling. For a start, television is a visual medium with a premium on aesthetics, including those of the presenters. A lot of people working in radio have what are known as "radio faces". With notable exceptions, the two tribes tend to prefer one medium or the other.
Although the BBC has worked to break down these barriers by restructuring, obvious legacies persist. One of these is the visibility of older women on television – low would be the polite way of putting it. Another problem for the Beeb is gender pay equity. It was even recently revealed that 75 per cent of the people who are prosecuted for not having a TV licence are women.
The corporation is therefore confronting a crisis of optics, competition, funding and relevance. Chief among them is funding, and the person holding the purse strings just happens to be one of the corporation's fiercest critics. Nadine Dorries is an unusual culture secretary. The author of a series of mass-market potboilers, she once abandoned her constituents to travel to Australia to appear in I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!
Dorries is also a diehard Boris Johnson loyalist and, as her career as a novelist and reality TV show contestant suggest, someone with firmly rooted populist instincts. She has long regarded the BBC as a bastion of what she sees as the metropolitan liberal establishment. Last year, she told the Conservative Party conference that the BBC was riven by bias and full of people "whose mum and dad worked there". She noted that it expected to get a new funding settlement and then discuss how it was going to change. "But my perspective is," she told her braying audience, "tell me how you're going to change and then you get a settlement."
If she was playing to the crowd, she was not entirely wrong. The BBC is indeed marked by privilege, and while it's made an effort to look more diverse, it is very much a middle-class institution that is most at home talking to a middle-class audience. How it widens its appeal while retaining its liberal ethos is a question the current director-general, Tim Davie, is presumably grappling with right now.
Historically, the BBC has been attacked from the right and the left, a combination that has mostly reassured bosses. But the attacks have grown in volume and aggression, which reflects a polarising and hardening of politics in post-Brexit Britain, as the populist right and progressive left wage a culture war. "At one time we could rely on the liberal left to come to our defence," says one editor, "because they were in favour of public broadcasting. But that's gone. Now the left blame us for Brexit and Johnson and accuse us of being soft on the government."
In fact, the BBC did a pretty good job of maintaining impartiality during the Brexit referendum and has been diligent in holding the Johnson government to account. But the problem with public funding, however it's structured, is the suspicion that the government can exert a silencing influence, which is nigh on impossible to disprove.
It was widely noted, for instance, by other media that the BBC did not break any of the so-called "partygate" stories which have accused key government staff, and Johnson himself, of flouting the government's own Covid restrictions.
Andrew Marr, the veteran broadcaster and journalist, dismisses these concerns. "You've got several hundred top-rate journalists competing to break these stories and you can't turn to any one organisation and say they didn't get the stories so therefore they're not trying. I think the BBC has done fine."
Yet, if you are the head of a BBC department, and you know that your funding and perhaps continued existence are in the balance, might you hesitate before exposing the people in charge of making the decision about funding?
The licence fee was originally seen as a means of avoiding direct government involvement, because it was levied on TV owners rather than taxpayers, and there were other buffers that sat between the politicians and the broadcaster. When things were going relatively well, those barriers were enough to maintain public confidence. But things are no longer going well, and the tensions and potential conflicts of interest are plain to see.
The days when half the nation would sit down to watch Morecambe and Wise are gone, never to return. There is a new, global, media landscape, in which all broadcasters have to fight to establish their own territory. But it would be a great shame if the public lost its confidence in public broadcasting and, in particular, if the BBC was to relinquish its position as arguably the best public broadcaster on the planet.
For all its flaws, it remains a formidable operation, full of talent and innovation, with an overwhelmingly trustworthy voice in an era of fake news and nakedly biased media. For the average family, the licence fee is still cheaper than Netflix, and provides a far greater range of programming.
The BBC probably remains the standard bearer for what the advisory group would like a merged TVNZ and RNZ to become. If it were to vanish or fade into inconsequentiality, it would be a profound loss not just to the UK, but also to the watching and listening world.
