Three items following the launch of RDN's book: Scrap the BBC!

1. An outing on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ABC. Click here.

2. An item on 18 Doughty Street, the micro-TV station. Click here.

3. And, below, a piece for the Yorkshire Post.

Let's Scrap the BBC!
By Richard D North*

Yorkshire Post, 18 January, 2007

You'll be paying a bit more for the BBC from now on, and using it less. Those have been the trends for decades and the political and commenting classes have just spent 2006 making it likely that the pattern will remain for another ten years. But the current Charter, just a few days old, and the new quite generous licence fee settlement, which is likely to be announced today, really could be the last time the nation bobs the knee, or tugs the forelock, to Auntie.

I know it is a shocking thought that we should scrap the BBC. It has a special niche in the national psyche: it's respectable; it comes from a time when we felt ourselves to be great; Winston Churchill used it to fight our greatest war; we built Christmas on Erie and Eric (we forget they split for "the other side"). Hell, even now there's Strictly Come Dancing and Bleak House and Paxo and Harrumphrys. Come on.

Sure, there's good stuff on the BBC and with £3 billion to play with, there ought to be. The trouble is that there is nothing so special about what the BBC does that we should suffer the indignity of being made to pay for it just because we want to own a TV. In 1926, it was understandable that people should be made to pay for something to listen to at the same time as they bought their wireless set. We were terrified, back then, that the alternative to a monopoly was a mad bun fight as stations scrambled for signals, an appalling vulgarity as commercial interests took over, and the strong possibility of propaganda horrors too.

Eighty years later, a digital world means that channels are readily available. More teasingly, the BBC, desperate to hang on to its shrinking share of the market, is quite as vulgar as everyone else. And as to propaganda, the vulnerable are prey to all the shrieking lies they could possible want (and, Lord, how they love them) on the internet.

Granted the vitality of the broadcast scene, we now know that we could unplug the BBC, and nothing much would change. Channel 4 would still provide the only indispensable hour of news. HBO from the States would still be providing the most intriguing drama. The intelligentsia would still be sneaking off to catch up on Celebrity Big Brother. Too many young Muslims would still be watching garrottings on their laptops. And that nice Mr Murdoch would still bring us his Sky News.

What's more, it is very likely that Radio 4 would still bring you its green, soft-left liberal pabulum. I say this because there are so many ways the middle class could organise the continuance of its favourite ear-massage. Radio 4 has about 10 million listeners, most of them affluent and devoted. They would love to band together and form a British Broadcasting Club. A £7 subscription from these ABC1 social types would pay for the existing service to proceed, and be freely available to such of the C2DE classes as wanted to tune in. I am not sure that the new service would be allowed to keep the BBC moniker, because it might be regarded as too close to the BBC World Service name, which would probably continue as the government went on funding the planet's best (but right-on) news service to benighted foreigners.

So let's get bold and imagine that the middle classes wanted the best of BBC2, News 24, and Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4. About £500 million should do nicely, and would be a cinch for a membership of 10 million people. A National Trust of the Airwaves or a Royal National Listeners and Viewers Institution would make a fascinating new national body, and fit an existing habit of nicely self-interested noblesse oblige.

Why bother? The answer's that we need an area of broadcasting which is unabashed in its elitism. We know the BBC has abandoned any thought that it could appeal to the brightest and the best. Indeed, it has joined the national mush which makes such talk seem nasty. Tough. Whilst the BBC heads off towards "social inclusion" and a chatty, emotional, feminised world view, those of us who loath this guff should be released from paying for it and encouraged to develop alternatives.

The present arrangements are a curse all round. For all sorts of historical reasons, all our broadcasters - not just the BBC - are treated as children who need discipline. They are all required to be impartial. The absurdity of this idea is clear when you think of the vibrancy of the British print media. At the top end, it's doubtful if a more serious medium has ever existed and at the bottom it's doubtful if there was ever a more lively one. On everything that matters, there are astonishing levels of truthfulness, and it is not likely that any populace anywhere in the world is more challenged as it thinks things through. But this is not the product of control and censorship of the kind broadcasters have to submit to. Instead, a riot of arrangements - commercial and voluntary - produces a vigorous argey-bargey of newspapers, magazines and pamphlets.

No-one claims in print that they have a monopoly of authority or insight. Our broadcasters, on the other hand, are required to pretend that they are both godlike and virginal. They are not allowed to support any politician or policy. They are neutered. So they make a fetish of pseudo-dissident investigation and interrogation, only a small proportion of which produces valuable news or opinion. Our broadcasters are condemned to pick away at authority, and our democratic institutions, because they are not allowed to do anything serious. They are treated like children, and so are we.

*The author's "Scrap the BBC!": Ten years to set broadcasters free has just been published by the Social Affairs Unit, £15.95

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