The Guardian view on the BBC plans: nice ideas but much to prove
|
Version 0 of 1. The BBC is in a deeply fragile position. In the budget of 8 July, the chancellor, George Osborne, imposed his will: the corporation will take on the cost, borne since 2001 by the government, of licence fees for those over 75. That means, in practice, that the BBC’s funding will be cut by a painful £650m. The deal – if you can call it that – was done fast, dirtily and in secret. It was a swift and brutal ambush, when the BBC had hoped for an open and public debate to settle its future. The concession that Tony Hall, the BBC’s director general, managed to extract from the government was a rise in the licence fee in line with inflation, dependent on the outcome of the charter renewal process, which must be settled by the end of 2016. Shortly after the budget, the culture secretary, John Whittingdale, published a green paper on the future of the BBC, questioning its scale and whether it needed to be “all things to all people”. Tony Hall’s speech at the Science Museum in London on Monday was, then, the counter-attack. The aim was to begin to present a vision for the BBC’s future so inspiring that the government would be convinced to lay off (and to honour that conditional promise to increase the licence fee). The question is: is the vision sufficiently compelling? Lord Hall repeatedly promised that the BBC would become better, not bigger (indeed, there would be unspecified, but inevitable, cuts). The big idea is of an “open BBC”. The corporation will, promises Lord Hall, no longer be a fortress, drawbridge up, but a thrumming city, its gates thrown open to outsiders. The most significant adumbration of this notion, alongside such ideas as making some of its resources available to the local newspaper industry is in its proposal for the Ideas Service. The name is a deliberate echo of the World Service. It would be an online, shareable resource for science and culture, provided by the BBC and partners – universities, museums, arts organisations. Related: BBC will offer staff and content to help local newspapers It would provide the best of everything to the greatest number of people, to paraphrase Lord Reith. If you happened to want to know about Stravinsky, say, here would be the best material imaginable: recordings from Radio 3, ballet from the Royal Opera House, links to historical resources and archival material. Perhaps even to reporting from the Guardian. A wonderful idea in principle. But the BBC has yet to show that it is willing to work as a truly equal collaborator, instead of dominating its so-called partners as has so often been the case in the past. It will also have to show that the Ideas Service is of genuine benefit to its new partners and to its audiences, rather than simply a self-serving, circular way for it to suggest how open it is. Is this really the public-service game-changer the BBC wants it to be? The kind of organisation it is proposing to work with, after all, is already producing its own content: museums, scientific bodies and universities have become makers of public-service material that they are eagerly and efficiently distributing themselves, though without, perhaps, the formidable reach the BBC can offer. The BBC has indicated a path for itself that involves making a serious cultural shift at the same time as losing a great number of jobs and at least some services. For those of us who care about the common culture that the BBC represents, we can only cheer it on. But it has a long way to go. |