I'm a conservative with a small "c" on many BBC matters. I'm not, either, an expert on tv production. But I'm concerned on two fronts about moves to change the way BBC in-house television production operates.
In the long-term, removing the protection of a 50% quota and allowing the teams to compete for business on other channels, is essentially privatisation, albeit nested within BBC Worldwide or some other cute commercial construct. The glory and madness of the BBC has often been a cussed reluctance to balance the books - to stick with comedies when they start off like turkeys, to back uncomfortable presenters until we get comfortable with them, to risk oddball new and classic drama in the face of press harrumphing, to invest in big, long-term commitments when the audience "interest" is far from obvious.
The last decade has seen increasing casualisation of the BBC TV Production workforce - but there's still a preponderance of staff jobs. Staff jobs that bring training, development and thinking opportunities. Career breaks, maternity leave, part-time working, switching between departments, cross-fertilisation of ideas. 2,500 posts represents an unrivalled knowledge bank and breeding ground that, I believe, makes British television the envy of the world. I'm not saying that commercial operations don't offer the same opportunities; some do, but they don't have to, when the bottom line looks hard to reach. I worry that today's move by Lord Hall is also more about a tactical failure to reach the bottom line of Delivering Quality First rather than a bold strategic initiative.
Bill Cotton used to argue that the state-subsidised National Theatre and RSC (in the 70s and 80s) were essential to the pre-eminence of West End Theatre - providing the training in all elements of production that fed into commercial hits. That core of trained talent also meant, he said, that he could have cast hits like Dad's Army and Are You Being Served several times over, and they'd still have worked. Cast round at our commercial tv channels, indies and mega-indies, and look at the numbers of BBC-trained staff on the books.
My second anxiety is, that, with production effort moved even slightly away from the BBC heartland, we go back to John Birt's vision of a modern BBC. Long-term, he believed Auntie only needed to make news - all other output could be delivered by commercial companies, with the best ideas from anywhere picked by a small group of highly-intellectual BBC commissioners locked in brilliant, strategic conversation over position papers in the upper floors of Broadcasting House. A BBC of, say, 8,000 hacks and 80 commissioners (plus PAs to get their sushi and order the taxis). No, thanks.
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I think you're right to be conservative. It sounds as if Tony Hall is trying to take the truism that 'The BBC trains the whole broadcasting industry' and make it flesh; to bring it to public notice - or, at least, the government's - so that he can trade on it in the next licence fee negotiations: "Look what VALUE you get from the licence fee - not just your favourite BBC programmes but your favourite ITV and US network programmes, too!"
ReplyDeleteAlways assuming, of course, that there'll BE negotiations, and not just another quick post-coalition bullying session on the back stairs at Westminster, ending with the DG shouting "Yaroo, you rotters! OK, OK, I'll pay for World Service and you get first dibs on all my tuck."
Viewed from within the media world, it sounds a reasonable idea: lots of little TV production companies are being taken over by so-called mega-indies', so the Mark Thompson model, of small-scale indies, staffed largely by ex-BBC & ITV programme makers, crawling over one another to feed at Auntie Beeb's WoCC trough, seems to have become redundant. But what does that TV production market consolidation mean?
Outside, the press feeds us a dominant image: the bloated old Beeb, full of time-serving luvvies, hideously inefficient, leaking licence fee money out of its pockets, ceding ground to cool, tightly-run indies who can hire and fire staff on a per-production basis. But even little indies have to make a profit - and why else would they get gobbled up by mega-indies, or grow into multi-million-dollar mega-indies themselves, if they weren't making ends meet? There seems little doubt that the global TV market - i.e. the US TV market - sees the UK as a cash cow:
'U.S. companies moving into the booming UK production sector know that broadcasters are doling out a lot of cash for original content. “There is a very rich commissioning opportunity added together with a significant amount of spend by the BBC, Sky and others,” one UK-based exec says. Indeed, Sky alone has committed to ponying up £600M per year on original British content. And, with the closure of BBC Three, BBC One is gaining an extra £30M for drama.'
(http://www.deadline.com/2014/03/the-indie-tv-production-company-buying-spree-whats-behind-it-when-will-it-end/)
No, I don't believe the BBC licence payer gets a better deal in the end from the farming out of TV production - and that's before we even begin to consider quality.
There's another danger in this: the BBC has a poor history of handling indies - most of its recent scandals have stemmed from its inability to properly oversee programming made by independent companies: Brand/Ross; 'Crowngate'; the BBC World '£1 documentaries'; the many Top Gear rows. News is not immune, even though most people think it's still an in-house operation: The prime cause of Newsnight's McAlpine nadir was the programme's decision to use an independent investigative journalism unit and, clearly, not ask it enough hard questions. The Beeb's execs have hardly covered themselves in glory of late.
So if the Corporation is to put the locus of important programme-making decisions even more at arm's-length than they already are (and, by the way, that's NOT executive offices, however much they'd like to think so, but studios and edit suites), it may find that those arms have become impossibly, unworkably long. Stand by for more licence fee-endangering scandals.