Bad News at the BBC

There’s no surer sign of a fading soap opera than a lurid plot twist. Unlike their glossy American counterparts, British soaps traditionally aim for stolid social realism, depicting ordinary folk pursuing humdrum lives. Now dwindling audiences are spurring producers to unleash implausible killers and gothic disasters on their workaday protagonists. Take the hapless citizens of Walford, a fictional London borough that is the setting for EastEnders, one of Britain’s top-rated soaps. Recent episodes have seen a troubled adolescent kidnap his estranged stepfather, chip-shop owner Ian Beale, to exact revenge for his psychopathic mother’s death in prison. Ian’s current wife Jane was shot during her attempt to free him (keep up now: the gun originally belonged to a pedophile who targeted Ian’s 13-year-old daughter). Jane’s doctors say she’ll survive her injuries, but such infusions of melodrama may not save EastEnders from inexorable decline, or help sustain its progenitor, the British Broadcasting Corporation.

In the past few months, the BBC has itself resembled a superannuated soap, the long-term future of the 85-year-old institution called into question as it lurches from embarrassing revelations about editorial lapses to high-level resignations, job cuts and threatened strikes. Management has apologized for such breaches of trust as falsifying the results of a public vote to name a cat on the children’s show Blue Peter (producers rejected the winning entry “Cookie” in favor of “Socks”) and showing a trailer for the documentary A Year with the Queen with scenes shown out of sequence to suggest (deceptively) that the monarch had stormed out of a photo session. That scandal claimed a number of scalps, including the boss of BBC1, Peter Fincham, who resigned on Oct. 5. Two weeks later, the BBC’s director general Mark Thompson announced plans to kill off some 2,500 jobs, mostly in news and factual programming, and to sell the Corporation’s iconic West London headquarters, Television Centre. Management is now locked in talks with unions, which have threatened industrial action if an agreement on the layoffs is not reached by Nov. 5. “The BBC’s problems are manifold,” says Roy Greenslade, former editor of the Daily Mirror newspaper and now a journalism professor at London’s City University. “There are more dramas at the BBC than ever get shown on screen.”

How did it come to this, that an institution revered for the quality of its output, a global role model for public-service broadcasting, the backbone and guardian of British life, “monolithic and ingrained into our culture,” in Greenslade’s words, should suddenly seem so vulnerable? One source of the Corporation’s problems can be found back in Walford: 9 million saw Jane tackle Ian’s crazed captor — far shy of EastEnders‘ record episode in 1986, when over 30 million watched nothing more dramatic than the marital breakdown of a pub owner and his barmaid wife.

Back then, viewers had only four channels to choose from, all terrestrial, and all required to include some content intended to benefit society: BBC1, the home of EastEnders and the rest of the BBC’s most popular output; the more esoteric BBC2; the commercial network ITV; and Channel 4, then only four years old and set up to break the duopoly of the BBC and ITV. The greatest challenge to EastEnders‘ popularity came in the proletarian form of ITV’s long-running soap Coronation Street.

Today EastEnders is menaced by something far more dangerous than a rival show and way deadlier than any serial killer dreamed up in a script meeting: the digital revolution that’s wreaking global havoc in industries as diverse as broadcasting, newspapers, magazines, film and music. Challenged by technologies that allow anyone to read news, watch TV or listen to music on a bedroom computer (or to make these things oneself for consumption by other people on the same computer), these businesses are frantically scrambling to reinvent themselves. EastEnders must now fight for an audience not just with other terrestrial channels but with cable and satellite stations, while younger Brits spend more and more of their time trawling online sites like YouTube and Facebook. Mark Byford, the BBC’s deputy director general and the Corporation’s head of journalism, says there’s a noticeable “falling away” of large swathes of TV viewers who are “under 35 and especially under 25.” The BBC derives 78.5% of its $8.5 billion income from an annual license fee of $275 payable by any household equipped to receive TV; in return, it’s obliged to cater to all ages and socio-economic groups. “In a world of fragmentation, a world of more choice, of a revolution in how people are accessing content, one of our big, big challenges is to hold that reach,” Byford says.

An even more fundamental challenge is to convince the government and the public that the BBC should continue to exist in something close to its current form after its 10-year charter expires at the end of 2016. For almost two decades, the BBC had expanded its operations rapidly as it tried to keep abreast of convulsive changes in technology and viewing habits. It funded these adventures with cash from license payers. It was already beginning to slim down again when, in 2006, the government agreed to a lower-than-inflation increase to the cost of the license fee over the next six years, leaving the broadcaster with a $4 billion shortfall. Cutting jobs and selling property will keep the Beeb afloat for now, but underpinning today’s turbulence is a deeper question that even its own managers are asking — in this brave new digital world, just what is the point of the BBC? Amid conflicting answers lies the key to the future not just of the BBC but the whole of British broadcasting.

There’s one BBC interviewer so confident of skewering evasions that he seems almost languid as he moves in for the kill. Jeremy Paxman’s usual quarry are obfuscating politicians, but his target on Oct. 17 was Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust. Lyons, Paxman’s bosses’ boss, had agreed to appear on the BBC’s in-depth news program Newsnight to give his explanation for staff cuts and other measures the director general would announce the following day. These would include a paring back of the BBC’s much-vaunted news-gathering operation. How, Paxman wondered, could such a move be in line with the BBC’s public-service mission, defined by its first director general Lord Reith, to “inform, educate and entertain.” “Let me give you a list of the distinctive programs the BBC is making,” said Paxman, his voice laden with sarcasm. “Help Me Anthea — I’m Infested. Is that the sort of program the BBC should continue making? My Man Boobs and Me. How about that? Help! My Dog’s as Fat as Me. Freaky Eaters. Fat Men Can’t Hunt.” Lyons, flushed under the studio lights, replied that these shows “may well fall very neatly into that category of things that may no longer be made.”

These programs have something in common besides the power of their titles to make BBC executives blush: they were all commissioned by the digital TV channel, BBC3. Set up in 2003 to cater to precisely the younger audiences that Byford says are so tricky to retain, BBC3 has scored several successes, including an exuberantly tasteless comedy show called Little Britain. Featuring such popular characters as an incoherent delinquent called Vicky Pollard and a pugnacious, latex-clad homosexual named Dafydd Thomas, who deludedly believes he is “the only gay in the village,” Little Britain drew a mass following and won a primetime slot on BBC1. But although BBC3’s share of viewers aged 16-24 has risen by 47% since October 2006, its audience still amounts to only a 3.7% share of viewers in that age group. BBC broadcaster John Humphrys, who vies with Paxman for the distinction of being Britain’s least emollient interviewer, recently advocated that BBC3 and its posher, arts-oriented sister BBC4 should be axed to save money. After all, he harrumphed, they’re watched by “only six men and a dog.”

Danny Cohen, BBC3’s 33-year-old head, counters: “The danger is that people say the only things that matter about the BBC are the things that matter to me … We don’t make our programs with 50-year-old viewers in mind.” Closing BBC3 would be a false economy, he adds: “Channels don’t cost money — content does. You could remove BBC3, but you’d still presumably want to provide programs for younger viewers.”

His channel is not just about entertainment, insists Cohen, but also meets the other Reithian ideals by informing and educating its young audience on issues such as body image — hence My Man Boobs and Me and the succinctly titled F*** Off, I’m a Hairy Woman. Among new projects in the works are not only TV dramas and comedy programs but also a Web-based experiment, which Cohen describes as a “weird mixture of YouTube and talent show.” Part of the BBC’s updated remit is to boost the “media literacy” of the British and push the move to digital technology as analog is phased out. BBC3 intends to set trends and not just follow them.

The BBC’s enduring belief that it must stay in the forefront of changes in the wider media environment has driven its growth. The Corporation ballooned in the 1990s, adding staff (numbers peaked at more than 27,000 in 2004; they now stand at 23,000 before the new cuts take effect) and diversifying its operations and output. In came the rolling news service BBC News 24 along with a commercial arm, BBC Worldwide. The drive for ratings intensified.

Nobody stopped to ask if the BBC could sustain such growth, or if it was feasible for it to stretch itself in so many directions. Director general Thompson’s new plans for the BBC, which he calls Creative Future, reduce staffing and budgets but leave the range of activities pretty much intact. There’s a constant tension between the BBC’s aim of making what Byford calls “brilliant, outstanding, special, stand-out content that raises the bar of broadcasting” and the Corporation’s need to justify its existence by attracting mass audiences, which tend to eschew high culture and serious factual programming. Populism has the upper hand. “If you look at the history of the BBC, it is the history of a very slow retreat from the public-service remit, as if gradually the grass is growing over Lord Reith’s grave,” says Greenslade.

Reith may well be spinning under the grass, but the BBC isn’t alone in its travails. Britain’s Serious Fraud Office may review documents obtained from the U.K. communications regulator, Ofcom, in relation to its decision to fine the breakfast TV company GM.TV. In September, the regulator imposed a penalty of some $4 million on GM.TV for encouraging viewers to dial premium-rate phone lines to enter competitions after winners had already been picked. ITV has admitted to similar practices. “Television is at a low point,” says Graham Stuart, director of independent production company So Television.

The scandals over rigged competitions reflect the industry’s search for new sources of income as its traditional wellsprings — subsidies and advertising revenues — threaten to run dry. There’s another reason for falling standards, says Stuart: the huge popularity of reality TV — cheap to produce and capable of provoking the kind of controversy that still hooks big audiences. Controversy is, of course, hard to control. Channel 4’s last run of Celebrity Big Brother sparked riots in India after Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty was subjected to racial abuse from fellow contestants. Earlier this year, The Verdict, a BBC reality show, brought together a jury of celebrities, including the novelist, former politician and jailbird Jeffrey Archer, to rule on a fictionalized rape case. It attracted heavy criticism for trivializing a serious subject, and viewing figures were paltry, too.

If shock tactics don’t grab viewers, star power often will. That’s the thinking that drives the competition between the BBC and other broadcasters to sign and retain big-name talent. A recent hit for the BBC, a science-fiction-infused detective series called Life on Mars, made for the BBC by the independent production company Kudos Film & Television, won over viewers with its originality and an unstarry cast. It’s an exception in an era when schedules at the BBC and at commercial broadcasters buckle under the weight of leaden fare built to showcase stars or to reprise themes that have already proved successful elsewhere. (TV’s fictional hospitals now employ almost as many staff as Britain’s unwieldy National Health Service).

Graham Stuart avers that broadcasters do need stars. He co-founded So Television with Graham Norton, an Irish-born comedian who fronts BBC chat shows and game shows. Norton “is paid a lot of money by the BBC,” says Stuart, but “what we’re doing here is show business and everything relies on a small number of talented people who are stars. They’re the reason people will switch on.” He adds: “If Lord Reith, a cranky old Presbyterian, could use the entertainment word, then other people should be able to, too.”

Another cranky presbyterian seems anything but entertained by the BBC. At a September press conference in Downing Street, Gordon Brown gestured to a journalist near the front of the throng, indicating that it was his turn at the microphone. As the journalist identified himself, Brown motioned him to stop. The press conference had barely begun and the Prime Minister had already answered questions from four BBC correspondents. Now here was a fifth. Brown didn’t care that each journalist represented different BBC outlets catering to different audiences: to him, the BBC was the BBC and enough was enough.

There’s been little love lost between the BBC and the government since the 2003 clash over claims made, in an unscripted on-air exchange between John Humphrys and reporter Andrew Gilligan, that a dossier making the case for the Iraq war had been “sexed up.” This led to a judicial inquiry after the source for Gilligan’s story, government scientist David Kelly, committed suicide. Strained relations with the government probably did not directly affect license-fee negotiations, but add to the sense that the once-beloved Auntie Beeb has become the relative nobody wants to sit next to at family events. She’s unlikely to find a warmer reception from a Conservative government: Tories and Euro-skeptics regularly accuse the BBC of a pro-Europe bias and a left-liberal agenda.

These claims are furiously rejected by the BBC. Byford says it constantly strives for balance and impartiality — for what he calls “a completeness of view.” He concedes, though, that the BBC’s swarms at news events can seem “incoherent and duplicative.” Plans unveiled on Oct. 18 to fuse TV, radio and online newsrooms and lose up to 490 jobs “should have been done earlier,” says Byford. “We’re a multimedia broadcaster increasingly organizing around a multimedia platform.”

Whether or not these cuts deliver the improvements Byford envisages, the spectacle of the BBC targeting such core services and preserving frothier output fuels concerns that it has lost its reason for being. Richard D. North, author of a 2007 book called Scrap the BBC!, calls the broadcaster a “grotesque monopoly” and advocates its privatization. “Broadcasting now needs no more control or support than the print media,” he says.

Really? Lift all public-service strictures from British broadcasting and what would remain? North argues that the élite would find a way to ensure that the sorts of programs they enjoy continue to be made. Andy Duncan, chief executive of Channel 4, disagrees, and vehemently. “There would be a huge reduction in the quality of television in this country. If people had a profit motive only there’d be less investment in content, particularly in some of the areas where quite clearly the market wouldn’t provide as much.”

The veteran broadcaster David Attenborough insists that public-service broadcasting still plays an irreplaceable role in British cultural life. As he sees it, it’s pointless to expect individual programs and channels to fulfill all public-service requirements, even though his own natural-history shows for the BBC, including the hugely popular Life on Earth, appear to meet every Reithian ideal. Attenborough shares the view of the BBC’s top management that the broadcaster must continue to provide a spectrum of programming to ensure something for everyone. If some people switch off, no matter. “The notion that you shouldn’t pay for something if you don’t use it is uncivilized,” says Attenborough. It’s no different, he adds, than having some of his tax money spent on, say, a public swimming pool or library “even though I don’t use either.”

The new vision for the BBC articulated by its director general Mark Thompson is that it will go on doing what it has been doing, but with fewer people, a greater impact and higher standards. Quality is the key, whether it wears a suit and extracts the truth from politicians or spills out of a comedy character’s absurdly tight latex outfit. Delivering quality programming is the only way the Corporation can bear out this claim by its deputy director general Byford: “The BBC is here to make the world a better place.” It’s down to Thompson, Byford and their beleaguered colleagues to ensure that the world continues to include a BBC that is more than a ghost of what it once was.