The Spectator’s Notes | 6 March 2010

Mark Thompson’s strategic review of the BBC may be momentous in its implications, even though its actual cutbacks are minor (admit it: had you ever heard of, much less listened to 6 Music?).

Mark Thompson’s strategic review of the BBC may be momentous in its implications, even though its actual cutbacks are minor (admit it: had you ever heard of, much less listened to 6 Music?). This is because it has abandoned the idea that the BBC has to do everything. Until now, the BBC has followed a ‘wider still and wider’ policy. It has defended every piece of junk and every market grab on the grounds that it must cater for the greatest possible variety of tastes and audiences in order to serve all licence-fee payers. That way madness — culminating in Jonathan Ross, his millions and his torment of Andrew Sachs — has lain. It has proved impossible to argue that the BBC has the distinctive values which it is pledged to uphold in its Charter. So what Mr Thompson says he wants is good. The only possible argument for the BBC’s unique system of funding is that it is unique in the value of what it does. But if I were one of those who wanted to keep the licence fee, I would worry. For all its goody-goody way of talking, the BBC has survived by staying powerful. Politicians dare not confront it, except in occasional moments of rage. If it gradually becomes the case (a process which was well under way even before Mr Thompson’s review) that millions of people barely use the BBC at all, what is the politics of forcing them, on pain of prosecution, to pay the hypothecated tax? Why should between 100,000 and 200,000 mostly poor people each year be criminalised because they want to watch television, but do not want to fund something they never see? As I write, I hear from Hastings magistrates’ court that I must come and see them next month to discuss my refusal to pay my television licence so long as the BBC pays Ross.