Simon Hoggart

The good and the bad

These are difficult times for the BBC. The fine for the Blue Peter phone-in fraud was, in its way, as big a shock as the famous vandalising of its garden. The silly Crowngate affair in which what they claimed was the Queen staging an angry walk-out turned out to be her staging an angry walk-in.

These are difficult times for the BBC. The fine for the Blue Peter phone-in fraud was, in its way, as big a shock as the famous vandalising of its garden. The silly Crowngate affair in which what they claimed was the Queen staging an angry walk-out turned out to be her staging an angry walk-in. And some ratings have been very poor. The drama True, Dare, Kiss broadcast last week got a miserable 3.2 million viewers, one of the smallest ever Thursday peak-time audiences on BBC1. Over on BBC2, Alastair Campbell’s diaries rose from 1.3 million viewers on Wednesday to a hardly impressive 1.5. It all implies a nervous institution that doesn’t know where to turn: first Campbell uses exaggeration, misinformation and bluster to get the chairman and the director-general dismissed, then he receives a reported £300,000 for the right to broadcast his diary. And what is their reward for this weird and perverse loyalty? Scarcely more than 2 per cent of the population even bothers to watch.

Part of the problem lies, I suspect, with the increase in independent productions. These were foisted on the BBC by Margaret Thatcher, and, to be fair, the effect has been largely beneficial. There was a sclerotic nature to many BBC decisions, as if, as in common law, everything had to be done exactly as it had been done before. A classic instance was the way that nearly all episodes of Not Only…But Also, with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, one of the finest comedy series ever made, were wiped to save storage space. But the BBC kept every Trooping the Colour. Can you ever imagine them saying, ‘And now, another chance to catch the 1958 Trooping the Colour, made memorable by the fact that it rained a bit’? Commercial companies were nimbler and responded faster to changes in public taste.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in