10 pm, 20/11/03
You've just heard probably the most confident, the most likeable and the most amusing Director-General of the BBC that I can remember, and I'm not going to be the patsy to stand up here and pull him apart. So, since you want someone to stir things up a bit, what I thought I might do is - just for the fun of it - look at the things he didn't say.
What he didn't mention, when he was talking about the problems of commercial television, is that commercial public service television in Britain is still very well funded. Actually, Channel 4 this year has had its highest ever programme budget - I think it made it the fourth best-funded commercial channel in the whole of Europe, even though it is a state owned public service channel. But what Greg didn't talk about -and, in a way, why should he because he is running a confident and brilliant broadcasting institution - is the pressures that the BBC is under, very different pressures than it's been under before. And those I thought I'd talk a bit about tonight.
It's quite odd to be coming here to the other end of the world to find that, in a strange way, your debates are prefiguring debates that are beginning to get to the heart of British television. And, in a sense, you've gone through some arguments we're about to go through and, at its heart, I suppose, is that fundamental question: in what way does television matter? Is it just there to make money? Is it product to be traded in the market or, if not, how is it different?
And, as I understand it, you grasped the nettle of deregulation and found it needn't have been squeezed quite so hard and are now trying to put some formal reference points of social and cultural purpose back into it. In Britain it's different. Greg talked about the new digital revolution in Britain. How you adapt the regulated public television world to that revolution is something we're still working out. And, although Greg was happy to dismiss the questions about a public service broadcasting fund, I have to say, it is not just the conservative opposition, in whichever decade they will get into power, that has been thinking about this. It is an issue which is now beginning to be talked about in government and it's being talked about for this reason: the BBC's monopoly of 2.7 billion pounds is at the moment being spent incredibly well. It's because Greg has been so successful, and the BBC arguably has never felt so good about itself, and has never used its great wealth and its great influence to such powerful effect, that people are beginning to question its impact on the market and what it's actually doing to the market, and whether the market itself could produce more if there wasn't such a major intervention in it.
And so next year, the BBC's future is going to be in the frontline of political and public debate, partly because its own Charter is up for renewal, partly because of an independent review that I'll mention in a second.
Let me say something about where I come from. I'm a public broadcaster, it's in my blood. I don't believe that being a public broadcaster means making programmes you don't actually want to watch yourself. I believe it's a valuable term. It's a more valuable term, I think, to a modern, fragmented, diverse, individualistic society like we have now, societies operating in a global market, than ever it was in that old world of hierarchical and cultural certainties.
And I also believe that public values in television only really flourish if they exist in more than just one institution. So, though I believe that a strong BBC is essential to the British creative economy, and to a free and democratic and an informed society, my perspective is slightly different to those who believe that public service broadcasting is simply what the BBC says it is.
The BBC is a magnificent beast in the television jungle. But it's not the only beast. If I may for a moment refer to what I think is one of the best films ever made, which is Walt Disney's The Jungle Book, you'd think the BBC resembles, to hear some of its critics, Shere Khan, that terrifying tiger that chews up everything that dares to cross its path. Now I think that is a completely unfair analogy. I think if you're looking for Shere Khan you just have to look to Rupert Murdoch and News International and you see a far better example.
No, Greg's BBC I think is far more like that great procession of the elephants on dawn patrol, you may remember from The Jungle Book - you know: trumpeting their importance, "Up-two-three-four!, Up-two-three-four!", stomping through the jungle, each of its many executives loyally holding on to the tail of the one in front, undoubtedly a force for good, but so enormous that sometimes, not meaning to, it has a tendency to put its great feet all over anything else that is there. And, speaking in respect of Channel 4, those feet sometimes seem rather big.
Because Channel 4, the UK's other not-for-profit public service broadcaster, is a bit different. I suppose at our best we like to think of ourselves as rather like Bagheera, the sleek panther. But sometimes, alas, for instance after a particularly inane edition of Big Brother, we can be a bit more like Baloo. But anyway, we're the good guys.
So - let me make some sense of this. We're undergoing a technical convulsion - digital. But there's also a convulsion in regulation, too. There's a new, converged regulator of communications, Ofcom, in the UK, and next year it's going to re-examine and redefine, from the bottom up, every aspect of public service television and its role in the market-place. It wants to get a measure of what public television offers beyond the market, and at what cost. And I think that the Ofcom review is going to change British television more than at any time in the past 25 years.
And they're doing this because the entire economic basis of British television has been turned upside down. Because, it may just be worth repeating the fact, that in the past what mattered was to control distribution. Among the three or four channels available there were a whole series of different business models which produced a whole series of different sorts of programmes. They were very competitive, but that competition wasn't just for ratings, it was for choice, and it was for reputation. And I'd like to give a slightly wider picture of how that worked than the one that Greg gave: the BBC, funded by a universal tax, the licence fee - but also the ITV companies, the commercial companies, all with shareholders, all shareholder driven, but, by paying the government for their licences, they took on a series of obligations to make a range of programmes, a range particularly of drama, which wasn't driven by maximising profit in every slot. And that was the great achievement of commercial public service broadcasting in Britain.
Along came Channel 4, dependent on the advertising market for its all funding - Channel 4 doesn't take a penny of licence money - but because it's free from any shareholder pressure, can take a greater level of risk and can use its own independent production companies to get a different sort of grain of programming than you would see from the other models. And lately, Channel 5 - 5 - a channel owned by its private shareholders but with a fantastic, opportunistic, sort of buccaneering sense of success.
But what this meant was, across this whole range of channels, there was no channel which was just there to maximise revenue. They were doing something more complicated than that.
But that's why digital has changed the game. Because, when anyone can launch a channel, the battle is for viewers' attention, not just for being there as a channel. And so those old commercial public service licences are getting worth less and less. And that sense of having exclusive access to viewers is getting of less and less value. And so, the pressure is on everyone at the moment to maximise ratings and, more importantly, to maximise revenue in every slot in the schedule - and it's unremitting.
Digital television in Britain is a huge success, and Freeview, as Greg was saying, is a huge success: 55 per cent of people now have digital television. And satellite channels have gone from taking 12 per cent of the market five years ago to 24 per cent of the market now. But, the two systems, the old public service free-to-air system, and the digital system, are fundamentally different things. The BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and 5, overwhelmingly invest in making programmes that people watch - they create things. The digital channels trade, they trade in pre-sold product: sport and movies, repeats, easily replicated formats. The digital world isn't a world that's about making - it's about buying. As a result, there's a sort of creative deficit looming in British television. Because, though the public service channels are spending, I think, 95 per cent of all revenue on programmes, they're only getting 75 per cent of the share. And in that difference is where you see the risk. And as the battle for attention gets harder and harder, so the risk of something going wrong gets greater and greater.
Now that doesn't mean there are a lot of bad programmes around; the market produces many excellent programmes. And, in fact, in areas such as factual entertainment, you've seen a flowering of originality and of world-wide profitable brands. However, in other areas - in documentary, in investigative journalism, in the arts, in single drama, in original comedy, the commercial logic of investment is getting tougher every year.
So what's at risk isn't excellence - there's always going to be excellence. What's at risk is diversity. And a strange thing is happening at the moment: a diversity of channel distribution is paradoxically leading to a commodification of content.
The free market advocates in Britain would say, that's because the BBC has got such a large slice of the market - 2.7 billion of a 7 billion pound market. The market's never been given a chance to prove what it can do. The market is disincentivised by the very success of the public channels. And I think this is a danger for the BBC. In the coming year, for the first time, this regulator Ofcom will attempt a cost-benefit analysis of public television. And it's going to ask what does it do that the market doesn't - and what would British television look like if public service provision were smaller. Now, personally, I think there's a danger here, because I don't think the public service television will or should ever have a settled definition. Because I think it's a prism, through which we endlessly debate the shifting relationship between the values of a market and the values of a society. But it is based on two crucial things, and only one of those is market failure.
Only one of those, I think, is the idea that you have to intervene to make certain programmes in certain genres because otherwise they wouldn't get made. It's an important part of it, but it's not the only one. I think it's also about being a catalyst to the market, and that's been the role above all of Channel 4 -to push the boundaries of taste, of formats, to push the individual signature of an idea, to back small companies that often have a freshness of imagination, a freshness of perspective, that you wouldn't get in a great, converged producer-broadcaster. And you can risk those ideas that a purely commercial broadcaster wouldn't take on because there are just easier ways to guarantee a return. For instance, Big Brother is a programme that Channel 4 took on and ITV rejected, because ITV was worried about just how many slots in a schedule this one untried programme would take up and what would happen if it failed. In fact, whatever you thought of it, it was the programme that invented interactive television and multi-platform television.
They key is that the BBC and Channel 4 have never accepted that public television is unpopular television. If a programme's good, if it's interesting, if it's different, then it deserves to be watched by a lot of people. And that's at the core of the public service formula. But, what I'd say to Greg is this: it is and has to be a competitive system, and there have got to be a range of competing voices. Channel 4, for instance, attracts a younger audience than the BBC does, because it's built a brand over the years that celebrates its non-conformity. The BBC says “Trust us because we're authoritative” - well that's good reason for doing so. But Channel 4 says "Trust us because we don't trust authority", and many people do.
There's been a series this week on Channel 4 called Adult at Fourteen which argues for the lowering of the age of consent on the basis that 16 is just closing your mind and closing your eyes to what is going on among teenagers. The BBC could not do such a series, and it would probably be wrong for them to do so. In the end, as someone put it, the BBC is there to put the community into the individual, Channel 4 is there to put the individual into the community. And one needs to keep that diversity of public service ambition if you're going to keep the public service ideal alive. Because, I think the question that's facing British television isn't whether the public ambition will continue, because clearly it will, but whether there will only be one monopoly state-owned outlet for it. And I would argue that that would make it a fundamentally poorer thing because you'd be separating out a state culture from a commercial culture, and this would undo so many of the lessons of the market revolution in the past 20 years, that whole growth of public-private inter-penetration. Because television is at its most creative, its most interesting, its most imaginative, and its most socially engaged when it comes out of a culture that gives room for the maker's freedom of expression and yet demands that the producer responds to the viewer's appetites and the viewer's demands too. Creative self-indulgence has got nothing to do with public service television.
What I'd say is this: in the end, television is different to computer games, it's different to music CDs and DVDs, because it's not a transaction where a viewer buys an individual product from a distributor as something for their private use. Television in that sense is a public good, because a programme is free at the point of use to people who may choose to watch it, they may choose not to watch it. But they've got the opportunity of something that will enrich their experience, and widen their lives. And that's why television, though it's one of the most powerful engines of market creation that we've ever had - it's why television enshrines values separate and different to those of the market. You can call them civil rights, if you like. But they're even more fundamental as values than those the market creates, and that's why it matters.
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