When it came down to it, the BBC-hating Conservative government couldn’t bring themselves to do what they really wanted to following Culture Secretary John Whittingdale’s review of the corporation, which would be to scrap it altogether. In terms of competence, this current accident-prone, U-turning government is right down there as one of the worst in my lifetime and in retaining the BBC they have left it not exactly well alone, but largely alone.
The rest of the world, which envies the BBC, can’t believe we even had a debate in the first place. I am not exaggerating when I say there is not a free country on earth that would not want a public service broadcaster like the BBC. And there is not another broadcaster that produces such a width and depth of programming, on the radio and the TV.
As a template, the BBC is the exact opposite of what David Cameron and the Tories believe in. Publicly funded, public service broadcasting available to everyone at the same cost. This is not an attack on the Tory Party because I am just saying how the BBC does not fit in with their free market, public bad, private good ethos. In their ideal world, TV and radio would all be privately run and in competition with other private broadcasters. Instead of Radios 1 to 6, and all the minority DAB stations the corporation operates, we’d have nothing but Heart and Jack and zillions of adverts. I am not sure whether life would be worth living without BBC radio which provides much of the soundtrack of my day.
There is quite literally something for everyone on the BBC which means that we will not all like everything and as we get older we will complain that everything on telly is crap these days. (If you really think that is true, Google for some TV schedules from the past and you couldn’t be more wrong!) It’s not perfect, for sure, and I suppose if your entire life involves watching TV you will watch stuff that you don’t like, but most of us do other stuff alongside watching the box.
I compare the BBC, at least in principle, to the NHS. Both are world class organisations and both are publicly funded and long may they remain so. You can get a TV top up from far more expensive providers like Rupert Murdoch, BT and Virgin and you can get a health top up if you are wealthy enough to afford private healthcare, but the core broadcaster and health provider is owned by us, the people. Certainly in terms of the BBC, that is why Murdoch hates it so much.
None of this is to say that the BBC could not improve. It could just be me, but I have no interest in the corporation’s daytime schedules. I have only briefly seen them in recent years, but they all seem to revolve around auctions and house renovations for wealthy people. They are probably cheap and easy to put together, but must do better would be my watchwords. Similarly with local radio, the BBC has hopelessly lost its way, certainly in Bristol where the station talks to pensioners and some football fans and no one else. Quite frankly, BBC local radio is near the point where independent providers had might as well take on the job. Tune in to tomorrow’s car crash schedule and then disagree with me. The high point of Sunday mornings is a radio version of Treasure Hunt, which debuted on Channel Four 34 years ago, appropriately called Clueless.
In general, though, the BBC represents the best that broadcasting can produce. We are very good at knocking success in this country but it’s time we wised-up and began to love what we already have, which is, by some billion light years, the best broadcasting corporation on earth. Visit anywhere else in the world and honestly tell me that’s not true.
