Ideas over time

There have been previous leaders of the BBC not short of 'Big Ideas' of their own. 20 years ago Mark Thompson launched 'Building Public Value' as a strategy, and at the Edinburgh TV Festival, talked about how to define 'Public Value' in BBC terms. 

Some of his thinking stuck; other bits did not. At Edinburgh, he said "I do think that Building Public Value calls for a shift of emphasis. In genres where the BBC does not have a paramount mission and perhaps also where other PSBs may be heavily represented - some of the light factual genres, leisure and lifestyle, format documentary, reality, some forms of general entertainment would be examples - we have to be very sure that we really are adding something distinctive and original and valuable within each genre."

Now we have BBC1 output dominated by Celebrity Masterchef, and continuously threaded by Bargain Hunt, Homes Under The Hammer, Escape to the Country, Antiques Road trip and two quiz shows every tea time. 

Another bit of Thompsonian analysis was that twenty years earlier, John Birt had established the primacy of 'News': "Money was taken from every other part of the BBC to invest in a new, world-beating news infrastructure." Thompson, a Birt beneficiary-turned-heretic, told Edinburgh: "My biggest criticism of the news and current affairs revolution of the 1980s would be that it was lop-sided. The question of what else was up there, what else alongside news was part of the irreducible central mission of the BBC, where else could we make a wholly distinctive, indispensable contribution, was never answered."

Thompson never offered a list, but said that scripted comedy needed more money, as did 'excellence' in programming in general. 

He was also critical of chasing all audiences as an underlying strategy: "Sometime in the early Nineties, strategists inside the Corporation began to use the word 'under-served' and suddenly, all over the BBC, commissioners and producers found themselves staring with ashen faces at bar charts showing how this or that audience was using a given BBC service less than the average: the young, the less well-off, members of ethnic minorities, the North and so on....

"But amid all the bar charts and statistics, there is also the potential for enormous confusion.What matters more: the shape of the agenda or the shape of the audience? Is it right to keep that programme of weighty policy analysis just as it is? Or should you add a hip-hop soundtrack and reduce the average age of the participants from 57 to 17?

"Now of course you have to have proper regard for who's watching and listening, but the danger when you get into this territory is that you get trapped in a series of compromises which end up pleasing nobody. And I don't think any of our audiences want us to compromise."

Dear readers, 20 years on, I invite you to list programmes that are full of such compromises. Nearly all, I say.