Archiving BBC Four could be the BBC’s biggest mistake yet
Auntie, the Beeb, Auntie Beeb – unlike any other broadcaster, the BBC has generated its own set of nicknames, testament both to its dominance of the British media landscape and its complex, and at times uneasy, relationship with public life in general. Is the BBC just part of the furniture, like the Monarchy or the Test Match? Or is it more like a stern matriarch guarding and keeping alive the old family traditions? Or an Angry Young Man set on resetting the terms of our culture?
Throughout its history, the BBC has been occasionally convincing in all of those roles, even, arguably, pulling them off all at once. During its heyday in the post-war era, Huw Weldon could justifiably claim that the BBC was making “the good popular and the popular good”. His stint as managing director of BBC TV from 1968 till 1975 produced iconic series like Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man.
Now, a word on the Beeb’s dominance of our media. For in spite of multiple cost-cutting drives under pressure from the government of the day, a once in a century transformation of communication technology in the shape of “the digital revolution” (post the 1990 Broadcasting Act, which promoted genuine competition between the ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC), and the entry of new channels and streaming platforms onto the UK market, the BBC remains remarkably resilient.
The vast proportion of news consumption is filtered through the BBC, and the licence fee will remain in place, at least for some time (the government recently backed away from decriminalising non-payment). During the early stages of the Covid pandemic, only the BBC could realistically command the attention of a national audience.
And yet, this week’s announcement that the BBC Four is going to be turned into an ‘archive’ channel, with its commissioning brief moved over to BBC Two, shows that something is surely rotten in the state of White City. We might also say definitively that the BBC is no longer in the serious business of “making the good popular and the popular good”. BBC Four’s brief history is as distinguished as any in the BBC’s past.
It brought foreign language series, such as the magnificent Spiral (Engrenages), Borgen, The Killing, The Bridge, Wallander, even the rather lighter Inspector Montalbano to the British audience, a formula which has been copied by other broadcasters, notably by Channel 4’s Walter Presents and the nascent streaming platforms. With the days of dubbed dialogue long gone, and thanks to sub-titles, audiences could get an unfiltered vision straight into another culture, via a series of superlatively directed television films.
With its thoughtful commissioning of longform music programmes and cultural histories, the channel cultivated a distinctive style, an ineffable, if somewhat easy to parody, sense that some issues deserve time to be explored and to reflect on. I don’t like the idea that serious “High Culture” should be ghettoised away from the BBC’s main output, which puts the move to BBC2 in a more positive light, but I just can’t see that ethic translating across. More likely, BBC Four’s distinctive elements will get smashed by the BBC machine – get ready for endless new “big picture” arts series in which so-and-so gets to do their “spiel” on a massive budget (I’m looking at you Schama and the enormous disappointment that was Civilisations).
In 2005, Dawn Airey, one-time head of Channel 5, declared Weldon’s high-minded statement of the BBC’s mission (“making the good popular and the popular good”) “a good maxim for its time” but outdated in a digital age in which technology was rapidly breaking down “mass conformity” and promoting “individual choice”. The BBC has taken that assumption to heart, and it looks set to emerge in the 2020s as a digital-first series of platforms, marketed to a range of “new” audiences, especially younger consumers. Although the new Director-General Tim Davie has put in place an expansion of commissioning outside London, “to deliver for the whole of the UK”, a far more expansive re-ordering of priorities is in order. If Dawn Airey once infamously admitted that Channel Five’s USP was “films, football and f***ing” (so not much change there then), then this retrograde move to dump BBC Four shows that, for all Davie’s fine words, the BBC is as defined by the three Rs “ratings, ratings, ratings”, as it has been since the 90s and its tentative moves towards marketisation under the stewardship of John Birt.
Cutting genuine, quality television in the best traditions of the BBC is no way to “deliver” for the UK. Commiserating with a fellow fan of BBC Four this week, I was told that the channel had been his “favourite channel ever since it appeared”. A captive audience like that is not to be frittered away lightly. Sadly, in this extraordinary era of “individual choice”, it may never come back.