Cover Story

Reform the BBC, don't kill it

20 September 2003

The BBC is biased, and much of its programming is coarse and crude, but, says Peter Hitchens, it would be profoundly unconservative to privatise it

This, and the increasing use of slang and crude words on respectable programmes, is a sign that the BBC's attempt to combine moral and political radicalism with cultural conservatism is starting to fail. High culture and high standards of diction cannot coexist indefinitely with people who despise them and with ideas that devalue them. The BBC – as it still proclaims in the entrance of Broadcasting House – stands for whatsoever things are true, pure, lovely and of good report. It wounds itself every time it broadcasts a four-letter word. Yet it does such things because many of those who control it no longer understand what it is for. Like the Church of England and the Civil Service, it is a conservative organisation largely staffed by liberal people.

It will not reform itself until it understands its faults. And it will never recognise those failings if its critics mill around Broadcasting House with pitchforks, seeking to tear down the whole edifice.

For much of the standard conservative case against the BBC is oversimplified rubbish. The market obsessives tend to forget their own part in damaging Lord Reith's original idea. A Tory government abolished the BBC television monopoly half a century ago, knowing this would put pressure on the BBC to lower its standards. Yet for 30 years the Corporation resisted hard – so much so that the commercial companies used to say that it was the BBC that kept them honest. Then, largely thanks to Margaret Thatcher's reform of the franchise awards, ITV was freed from many of the rules that had stopped it chasing the lowest sorts of taste. There is a strong case for saying that it was this more than anything else that helped drag BBC TV down to its current dismal level.