Editorial: July 2005
By Richard G Elen
July 2005
It's BBC-bashing time again, it seems - a perennial pastime these days. This time it's the old saw about the BBC threatening competition. BBC 7 is just so good that it's blowing the competition - OneWord, mainly - away. Now of course the BBC has the benefit of its extensive archives of cool radio progs going back decades - something I've written about in the MediaBlog - but OneWord isn't doing that, so there must be a different problem.
Well, quite honestly, the ‘problem’, if that’s what you want to call it, is that the BBC is extremely good at what it does. The odd niggles about cutting people’s heads off with ill-advised hacksawing of 4:3 programming to 16:9, nasty little DOGs that burn holes in your plasma display, or repetitive documentaries that never get around to telling you very much, are as nothing compared to the fact that overall, the BBC does a wonderful job. It is still possibly the best broadcaster in the world (any potential competition from public broadcasting in the States now being nullified by the Bush Administration placing conservatives in charge to make sure it doesn’t say anything they don’t like).
We should think ourselves lucky that we have such a stunningly brilliant broadcaster serving us, and do all we can to stop it being taken apart, being deliberately understaffed to make taking apart more ‘justifiable’, or otherwise Bowdlerised. The idea of competition is that it raises the quality and cost-effectiveness of what’s being offered, but of course this is a silly dream and it doesn’t work like that. In the early days of ITV, for example, the companies scooted downmarket as quickly as they could to avoid losing their shirts. So much for that then. Now we have commercial concerns wingeing, essentially, that the BBC is too good. What would they like to do with it, lower its quality so they can ‘compete’ better? The present government, in my view, seems to place appeasing commercial broadcasters - Murdoch for example - too high on their agenda for comfort, so I just hope the current cuts in BBC resources aren’t part of a plan to do just that.
