Were you devastated to hear that the consumer programme You and Yours is to be axed in the latest round of BBC cuts? Me neither. Nor The Artificial Human nor Thinking Allowed. In fact, there’s a whole raft of BBC radio programmes that I hasten to switch off, though not half as quickly as I run to silence The Archers.
It’s radio that shows the Corporation at its best, even though the output is so often delivered through the prism of an astonishingly narrow range of views and political outlook
But I was annoyed about the earlier decision to see off The World Tonight, an actually useful programme for news and analysis. The late Ed Stourton thought that the Corporation’s management had pretty much lost the plot when it culled its lead presenters, though it hasn’t yet sunk low enough to axe the Sunday programme which he often presented. Fortunately, neither has it dispensed with Gardeners’ Question Time, the one programme I not only listen to, but won’t allow anyone to talk over, nor Radio 3’s Private Passions, the intelligent version of Desert Island Discs.
It’s funny that the only bits of the BBC which actually register on my own radar are radio programmes, which may have something to do with my not having a TV. More to the point, I don’t miss it. When there was that incessant, insanely annoying advertisement for the licence fee, ‘What has the BBC ever done for me’, it served only to demonstrate the number of flagship television programmes that are either stupid, clapped out or superfluous. And before you even mention Traitors, I only watch it because my daughter makes me watch it with her on her laptop, but the bonding experience seemed like it might not survive the opening episode when I couldn’t shut up about the near-blasphemous opening sequence in a church (which I can only hope had been decommissioned) complete with monk lookalikes.
There is much to be said about the BBC cuts, but what struck me was that the promised £500 million worth of savings is a mere 10 per cent of its actual annual budget. Which suggests that the BBC itself consumes the annual equivalent of the GDP of a small state. How many middle managers and consultants would you have to do away with before you made even a dent in that? That impression of a bloated colossus is almost overwhelming whenever I visit Broadcasting House. Left to myself I should certainly get lost in the bowels of that labyrinthine maze. When the nation actually watched the BBC – when the evening news was a national event, which ceased to be the case around 1997 – it could fit into quite a compact HQ.
But what’s interesting is that the cuts that make the news – that feature on the radar of people like Spectator readers – are almost always the ones to radio. It’s radio that shows the Corporation at its best, even though the output is so often delivered through the prism of an astonishingly narrow range of views and political outlook. What other organisation would have presented Choral Evensong – one of the very few actually religious programmes – for the last century (it celebrated its hundredth anniversary on Wednesday)? Or the Proms?
And yet what we actually have to pay for, since 1971, is the television licence, £180 a year. I only started paying the licence when I wanted to use the BBC archive, one of the very few services that justifies it, to watch Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and episodes of John Freeman’s Face to Face interview series with genuinely fascinating people. I remain infuriated by how much of the good stuff isn’t actually available. Further, it seems I may not listen live to BBC radio online at home or abroad without a licence. And that licence seems unlikely to survive another generation of young people looking at streamers like Netflix in preference to the Coporation’s offer. It’s just not plausible.
So, how about a compromise? Why not reintroduce the 1971 radio licence for those of us who would rather watch the washing machine turn than Call the Midwife, with perhaps an additional fee for access to the archive? Perhaps the radio section could return to its original congenial building on the Strand, leaving the bloated bureaucracy and the television production in the grim colossus on Portland Place? Because lots of us are forced to pay way over the odds for a service we don’t use and wouldn’t miss. My opening offer is 50 quid a year, plus a tenner for the archive. How about it?
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