A television channel has reached a sorry state when the structure of its ownership is more exciting than what it broadcasts. Yet this is precisely what has happened to ITV, whose appalling programming schedule has become a low-rent joke, making real the parodies of the BBC’s Little Britain.
The problem is not that ITV strives for popularity and entertainment: so it should. But at present it is achieving neither. The best ITV offering in the pre-Christmas schedule is not one of its own creations, but the sensational battle for control of the network between the two tycoons, Sir Richard Branson and Rupert Murdoch.
Michael Grade’s return to commercial terrestrial broadcasting as chairman and chief executive is precisely what ITV needs. There is, of course, a dynastic symmetry to the outgoing chairman of the BBC taking over the network which his uncle effectively founded. But Mr Grade’s principal claim to the job is his obsession with programming rather than with administration.
In his email to BBC staff this week he said that he had found it hard ‘not to look at the overnight ratings every day, not to engage in idle programming chit-chat with the brilliant creatives who are currently taking BBC television, radio and online to new heights of quality’. His mission at ITV will be to lift the network from its present woeful state where it churns out shows with titles such as Ladette to Lady and Tenants from Hell in a desperate attempt to keep up with its satellite competitors and to restore its reputation as a first-class popular programmer. Mr Grade has the common touch, but he was also a great patron of Dennis Potter. What is certain is that, if he cannot revive ITV, nobody can.
The BBC, meanwhile, is now searching for a new chairman of its trustees. David Puttnam would be a logical choice, given his passion for public broadcasting, the support he enjoys across the political spectrum (he has advised Tory and Labour governments) and his experience of the brutalities of the Hollywood system as a former head of Columbia Pictures. But whoever succeeds Mr Grade will inherit a familiar basket of problems: allegations of bias, concerns about the high price of the licence fee and even its continued existence, and the perennial debate about the precise role of a public-service broadcaster.
The question of bias — anti-government, anti-America, pro-Europe, anti-Israel — is one that will not go away, and even the doughtiest defender of the Corporation has to admit that its ingrained attitudes continue to rear their heads. As Charles Moore points out on page 11, its use of language is sometimes deeply questionable. However, the BBC’s head of news, Helen Boaden, has shown herself open-minded about such issues and less inclined than her predecessors to dismiss complaints as ‘right-wing rants’. Mark Damazer, the able controller of Radio Four, is similarly receptive to criticism. In the wake of the Hutton report, the BBC’s best brains know that they can take nothing for granted.
On the licence fee, the Corporation is unlikely now to secure the increase of 1.8 per cent above inflation that it was seeking to pay for its partial relocation to Salford and new digital services. The compulsory annual fee of £131.50 is already substantial. How much longer can such a ‘poll tax on viewing’ survive in the multi-channel, multi-media world?
The answer seems to be: for the foreseeable future. Although the public understandably grumbles about the fee, there is no consistent majority against the present system. BSkyB has brandished opinion polls showing that a little more than half of respondents believe the licence fee does not offer value for money. The BBC parries with research suggesting dogged public loyalty towards the Corporation. Probably, both findings are correct. We are a nation of consumers now rather than deferential payers of compulsory levies. But most people still like enough about the BBC to resist any proposal that might jeopardise its future. Pay-per-view and satellite television have also forced viewers to accept more explicitly that television does not come for free.
Indeed, the reforms enacted by John Birt when he was the Corporation’s director-general between 1992 and 2000 — hugely unpopular with BBC staff at the time — are a rare example of a British public-sector organisation responding with rigour to the new context of the global marketplace and consumer expectations. Birt’s fixation with the BBC website was regarded by many of his colleagues as a bizarre sideshow. Now, the site is one of the Corporation’s best services, taken for granted as part of what the BBC does. BBC3 and BBC4 have become impressive seedbeds for outstanding comedy programmes such as The Thick of It and The Catherine Tate Show. The Corporation’s drama output is in good shape — Life on Mars, Bleak House — and its news output, especially the Today programme and Newsnight, is still unchallenged in quality. The BBC is very far from perfect, but it deserves credit for the progress it has made.
It is a pity that other public-sector organisations have not undergone comparable reform in the past decade: institutions such as the NHS that command huge public support but require root-and-branch change if they are to reconcile this loyalty with growing consumer expectations. That failure has much to do with internal resistance within the public sector. But it is also a reflection of Gordon Brown’s unhelpful role during the Blair era as a bastion against public-sector modernisation (notably in the NHS over foundation hospitals, and in higher education over top-up fees).
In the weeks before his resignation, Mr Grade told friends that he found the Treasury’s obstructionism in the licence-fee negotiations maddening. Mr Brown is, of course, the keeper of the public purse and obliged to seek value for money from the cash-hungry BBC. But this was not Mr Grade’s point. He objected to the high-handedness, the centralisation and the arbitrary use of power that characterised the negotiations. His experience does not augur well for the change of jobs that Mr Brown himself is planning in the near future.
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