Quote:
Originally Posted by tweetiepooh
The BBC should not be funded by any mechanism the government or any other external body has control over.
The license fee, which isn't really that much, covers radio and TV broadcasting and programme making. The point of the license is that it allows the BBC to make programmes that are potentially non-commercially viable (and advertising TV to make sure the BBC doesn't just produce such programming).
As license payers, the BBC is responsible to us, and it it there it has missed the ball. Rising costs mean the BBC feels unable to justify broadcasting some sporting events, and rising production costs unable to want to take chances as much. The BBC also needs to get it courage up and sometimes be unpopular, with both government and populace.
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The BBC’s main problem is that with the rise of multi-channel TV it has become more and more difficult to justify the argument that ‘nobody else is making this’. It has become easier for people to claim they never watch it, and as there are so many rival places you can take out a subscription, the concept of the TV licence as ‘pay once, get everything’ is long since gone.
Channel 4 is relentlessly avant garde, and with only commercial income to support it. Sky Arts has an enviable reputation. Netflix and Apple TV are surprisingly good at making British-focused shows and Apple TV’s line up includes a lot of stuff you might have seen once upon a time on the BBC, back in the day when it had a ton more imagination than it has now (and was producing the likes of Life on Mars and Hustle, and bravely recommissioning Doctor Who as unashamedly family teatime entertainment).
Secondary to this, though still significant, is that the BBC has a very obvious cultural bias that it has long ceased pretending not to have. Its most obvious manifestation of that is its relentless shoehorning of drag queens into its mainstream schedule, which has nothing to do with the cabaret acts of old like Dame Edna or Lily Savage, and everything to do with a conscious attempt to participate in the queering of mainstream culture and entertainment. This same intent manifests in plenty of other ways too which I won’t list here.
There is still a public service argument to be made. The BBC’s funding level allows it to commission more, of a higher quality, than the size of the UK market would otherwise support. It thereby sets a bar commercial challengers are forced to reach with their own prime time content, and facilitates the training and employment of vast numbers of creative professionals who then pop up all over the world, as well as attracting some of the biggest film and TV productions in the world to these shores, where there is talent and infrastructure.
However, what cable and satellite subscriptions couldn’t kill, streaming subscriptions might. The TVL is far too broadly perceived as a subscription which people ought to be able to opt out of. And too many people now do, even though they break the law by doing so. Ultimately in an open democracy laws only work when people consent to be governed by them. When they are wholesale flouted, then government either has to take extreme measures to enforce, or recognise there’s no democratic consent for the law as it stands and come up with something else.
I suspect we are on the cusp of the ‘something else’ - and whatever it looks like, the BBC will still be a universally funded, free to access service at the end of it.
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