There is a widely circulating rumour in television circles that the government plans to privatise Channel 4. It may not be definite yet, but ministers and officials are certainly talking about it—over the last few months, I've heard the claim from two of them. This is how the idea goes: Channel 4 no longer fulfils any important public service broadcasting function. As a result of the competition for advertising from other television channels, the internet and elsewhere, Channel 4 will soon face a financial crisis and will need public money (at the moment it gets none, although it is ultimately owned by the government, and its chair is appointed by Ofcom). So why not sell it off now and spend the money elsewhere in arts and culture? The BBC can be left to deliver public service broadcasting objectives.
A typical conversation about the future of Channel 4 goes like this:
Channel 4 critic: Big Brother
Channel 4 supporter: Shameless
Critic: How Clean is Your House?
Supporter: Dispatches
Critic: Embarrassing Illnesses
But it is significant that the above discussion does start with Big Brother—which is frequently a shorthand for the incident in Celebrity Big Brother when Jade Goody made an allegedly racist remark, for which Channel 4 was roundly criticised by the regulator Ofcom. There is a stout public service broadcasting defence that can be made for Big Brother, but when the Jade Goody row blew up, the men at the top of Channel 4 seemed incapable of mounting it—it was left to Peter Bazalgette, chairman of Endemol UK, the show's producers, to do so in these pages (Prospect, March 2007).
Channel 4 has also stoked the fires of possible privatisation by saying it is going to need bailing out by the government some time in the future—eyeing up part of the BBC licence fee or the planned "public service publisher" fund (Ofcom's proposal to make public service programmes in the digital age). A report for Ofcom by the consultants LEK concluded that the financial pressure on Channel 4 was unlikely to affect its public service remit until 2010 and possibly 2012, by when the switchover to digital television will be complete. There is also a group of people—many of them from the early days of Channel 4, and many with the ears of politicians—who say that Channel 4 has lost its way. One of these is its deputy chairman, David Puttnam, who recently said that the channel's "sense of purpose" had been eroded over time.
Channel 4 was set up in 1982 to encourage innovation in programme-making and to serve audiences not readily served by the other channels. Reinterpreting this public service ambition in today's very different world is a testing task, but imagine what would happen to a privatised Channel 4. Impolite and old-fashioned though it may be to point this out, as a shareholder-owned company, Channel 4 would have one overarching ambition: to make money for its shareholders. The current financial balancing act—in which revenue from very popular programmes like Big Brother helps fund less popular programmes—would be eroded. Chasing audiences, Channel 4 would be less likely to take risks. As consumers, we generally don't know what we like until we are offered it, and this applies just as much to television as to salad in bags on supermarket shelves. But the financial risk in introducing new television is proportionately much greater; this is why shareholder-owned television companies tend to be risk-averse, and why most of the new ideas on television in Britain have come from the publicly owned operators. We should not underestimate the benefits of this. Britain has the most diverse range of original television programming in the world—that's one reason so many British series and formats are snapped up by US broadcasters, where the ownership monoculture of the free-to-air networks has led to a marked lack of imagination among programme-makers. (HBO, the much-lauded bright light in US broadcasting, is a subscription cable channel, with a far larger potential market than is possible in Britain.) The diversity of British television—and its contribution to the cultural economy—is integrally bound up with its diversity of ownership: some shareholder companies, some public but advertiser-financed, and some public but licence fee-financed.
The US, among other countries, is a clue to what happens when public service broadcasting is confined to one broadcaster: America's PBS is under constant financial pressure. The BBC commands wide public support because all of us watch (or listen to) it some of the time. If the BBC had to carry all of the responsibility for public service broadcasting, its audiences would be likely to fall, as much of this programming is less popular and riskier. If it is restricted from competing with the private broadcasters by a narrow interpretation of what constitutes public service broadcasting, then audiences will fall more sharply, public support will decline and so will its funding. So sell off Channel 4 today, and you change the structure of British broadcasting. This will kill off the BBC, if not tomorrow, then some time in the future.
