Seventy-five years ago in November, under a wireless licence from the General Post Office, the BBC went on the air. Four years later a royal charter turned Britain's first national broadcaster into a public service corporation. You might think, from today's remorseless moves into one commercial activity after another, that the BBC was preparing to become a company once again. What else could explain the unending traumas being inflicted on what Lord Annan called "arguably the most important cultural institution in the nation?"
"Digitalisation" is the BBC's current answer. Money must be saved, traditional practices jettisoned and services homogenised in order to release funds for the shift from analogue television to the new, superior form of transmission based on computer-coded pulses. Even if the dash to digital were imperative, the BBC's current actions would be a cruel form of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Over the next five years, a colossal 9 per cent of the BBC's licence fee income, now ?1.9 billion a year, will go into preparation for the alleged revolution. Today's audience is being deprived for the sake of tomorrow's.
The signs of deterioration are already visible. Budgets for costly programmes such as Newsnight are being cut back by up to 30 per cent, with consequences that can be seen on the screen: fewer reflective reports on distant subjects, more in-studio chatter. Question Time must now be staged more often in London. The proposal to abolish separate editors for individual news programmes-which sparked a revolt by big-name presenters-was justified by the need to centralise editing at Television Centre as part of the response to digital.
In answer to protests, the BBC points to the new digital services the money will make available-wide-screen television, themed channels, pay-television and its pet project, a 24-hour news channel. It omits to say that these new channels will for a long time be watched only by a few. The audience will in fact be limited to those willing to spend about ?200 on new equipment and who have an appetite for specialised television. After all, multi-channel television is available now, on cable and satellite, yet three quarters of the population chooses not to buy it.
A proper wariness of digital is being shown in the US. In September the Wall Street Journal proclaimed: "Promise of digital television is fading." Never in the history of US business, said the Journal, has there been a new technology that promised so much and delivered so little. Nobody in American television can understand how the digital bandwagon got so far, according to the report. Indeed, as an unhappy industry executive moaned: "The technology guys have been way ahead of the money guys."
In Britain, however, the BBC is in the hands of a technology guy. John Birt, its director-general, can make central spending decisions as no US commercial television executive can, because he has licence payers' compulsory contributions with which to pursue his vision. What's more, he is cheered on by the departments of culture, media and sport, and of trade and industry, which love schemes in which Britain appears to lead the world-whether or not the rest of the world is following. (Italians and Germans have responded coolly to digital when offered it.) Nobody denies that digital is television's next technical step. It will certainly come, just as digital telephony has, bringing welcome new services; but it must come gradually, not by fiat.
The sorriest explanation for what is happening to the BBC, however, goes beyond its desperation to go digital. The real goal, it appears to unhappy staff, is centralisation for its own sake. Structures, systems and statistics are revered because they give the BBC the look of a well managed company and because they further its global, commercial ambitions. The BBC's determination to create a 24-hour news channel is an example. Research shows, we are told, that the channel is wanted. But by whom? CNN and Sky News draw pathetically small audiences. This management-led race to enter "the 24-hour global news stakes" is of no interest to licence-fee payers. They cannot even expect to see the fee reduced, for there are no big earnings to be had from international television news.
The BBC does not deserve what has been done to it. Its institutional faults-bureaucracy, indecision, smugness, duplication of effort-are a legacy of its civil service mentality and decades of monopoly. Many of these faults remain, despite the pain of continuous restructuring since 1991. Yet much has been lost. The BBC is now clearly no place to make a career. The official doctrine of bimediality-that the skills that make good television will do for radio just as well-is patently untrue. The atrophy and dispersal of archives amounts to cultural vandalism. The breaking-up of the expertise of the English-language world service is a tragedy. And the BBC's use of English is deservedly mocked.
Ironically, the BBC has never been in less danger of privatisation. Never has the general public, seeing the high cost of subscription channels, so appreciated the value for money of the television licence. The BBC should concentrate its money on doing even better in the future what it does well now. That is the way to meet the competitive challenge of the digital age, in the distant day when it finally arrives.
