What has the BBC ever done for me? How about it ditch the dross like Mrs Brown’s Boys and focus on quality instead - Andrew Vine
It can be hard to love the BBC sometimes, and especially so when that horribly self-satisfied advert comes on featuring famous names patting the corporation on the back for doing such a splendid job.
I can’t be the only viewer who finds it irrationally irritating as comedian and actor Romesh Ranganathan extols the BBC’s virtues as he strolls through sets filled with everybody from the cast of Call the Midwife to the Daleks from Doctor Who, and even Pudsey Bear from the annual Children in Need charity extravaganza.
“What’s the BBC ever done for me?”, is the question posed to a nation increasingly disinclined to pay £180 for the TV licence fee, which suggests the reply from a lot of people to the affable Romesh might be, ‘Broadcast a load of rubbish, mate’.
Ever since it first appeared during the World Cup, this advert has backfired by prompting as much debate about the BBC’s shortcomings as praise for its undoubted virtues.
I’d doubt very much if it has achieved its intention of prompting the growing number of people who simply don’t bother buying a licence fee to stump up for it.
Evasion has risen steadily, with more than 12 per cent of households who should be paying ignoring their legal obligation to do so and starving the BBC of funds.
But talking down to those people in an advert that portrays the BBC as excessively pleased with itself isn’t going to stem the tide of non-payers. Nor is telling them that the corporation creates £6.5bn for the country’s economy, going to cut any ice with somebody who rarely, if ever, watches or listens to any of its output.
It’s a shame that the BBC has done itself few favours with this self-promotion, because it remains one of the pillars of British life, and culturally we’d be much poorer for its loss.
Instead of parading every celebrity and actor it could persuade to take part in its dreadful ego trip – reminding viewers in the process of the astronomical sums a lot of them are paid from the licence fee – the BBC would have been better off emphasising its value for money.
Like many other viewers and listeners, I regard the licence fee as a bargain. Even at £180, it works out at a fraction less than 50p a day which I get a lot of value out of. The news and current affairs on BBC Radio 4 are the soundtrack to my mornings and tea times, and rare is the evening when I don’t watch something on one of the channels or the iPlayer.
Replacing the licence fee with some sort of subscription model when the BBC charter comes up for renewal next year couldn’t possibly come close to being that cheap, demonstrated by memberships of streaming services which can run into hundreds of pounds a year, especially for sport.
If the BBC is to persuade viewers of its value to the nation, and the need to have a properly-funded public service broadcaster, it should be taking a long hard look at itself and stripping out the dross that fills too much of its airtime so that the money can be spent instead on content that is worth watching.
Cuts of £500m to its output have wrongly targeted news and current affairs and really good content such as the nature programme Winterwatch while preserving dreary lifestyle programming and unfunny comedies that would be better left to commercial channels that could fund them from advertising rather than the public purse.
The BBC shouldn’t be bothering with prime-time shows about people decluttering their homes and garages, or coaching them to become art dealers.
It should be axing the hopeless BBC3, aimed at a youth audience who are never going to turn away from TikTok to switch on terrestrial television, trimming the number of its music radio stations which are swamped by dozens of digital rivals and binning the truly awful Mrs Brown’s Boys, for my money the most puerile and least amusing so-called comedy show ever aired.
Concentrate instead on quality drama that attracts audiences. If the BBC needs a lesson in how to do that, it should look across to 5 and its brilliant adaptation of James Herriot’s stories, All Creatures Great and Small, set and filmed in Yorkshire, which has been such a resounding hit with viewers.
The BBC has been the architect of its own misfortunes by attempting to be all things to all viewers, and in the process disappointing many of them, which is one of the reasons why they never bother to switch on and see no reason to pay their licence fee.
A return to its core mission of informing, entertaining and educating the audience is the way forward. By doing that, it would have something to boast about in an advert.