When good programming goes nowhere 

13 October 2004 tbs.pm/531

BBC digital channels ‘poor value for money’

Evidently I am one of not very many people, as the channel I watch most of all is BBC Four, criticised today in a report commissioned by Tessa Jowell from Professor Barwise of the London Business School. Barwise claims that BBC Three and Four offer poor value for money and don’t attract viewers to digital television. Three costs £99.4 million a year while Four comes in at a rather more modest £35.2 million.

I am tempted to agree with him about BBC Three – but then it’s hardly aimed at my agegroup (I am not 25-34), so I wouldn’t take my observation very seriously if I were you. Despite this, however, I have watched Little Britain more than once. Equally, I can’t really see the point of news on either Three or Four (neither can Barwise), when there is News24 available almost anytime to digital viewers. Unless, of course, the latter’s doing some special programme, which is unfortunately increasingly the case: if they are not careful News24 will need ‘Headline News24’ to accompany the existing channel, as happened with CNN.

But BBC Four… I watch it all the time. It’s like BBC2 used to be in the old days. Those cool documentaries like Alchemists of Sound, Here’s a Piano I Prepared Earlier and The Man Who Saw the Future, to name but one genre. OK, they may get repeated on BBC Two, but they appear first on Four.

And there’s a thing. Four’s Race Age documentary repeated on Two gained half a million viewers while National Trust and the Alan Clarke Diaries achieved over two million, says Media Guardian. So maybe the problem isn’t what’s on the channel, it’s just that nobody knows that it’s there. With well over 50% of homes able to watch it, Four really ought to be able to do better than this when the repeats do creditably well.

Barwise does suggest that more money should be allocated to these channels, which in the case of Four would certainly be nice – I can think of at least one programme Roly Keating missed out on, presumably through lack of enough of it: Martin Mortimore’s fascinating documentary on Abram Games. And Barwise likes both CBeebies – “A triumph” – and CBBC, which he calls “a distinctive service”, so it’s by no means all bad.

But he wants to see Three and Four increase their “impact and value for money” (all that neat programming on Four for just £35.2 million – is that bad value for money? It shouldn’t be about ratings, you know…) and “appealing to a wider constituency…” (I am always suspicious of comments like this when they come from business people about public service broadcasting) “…including those thinking of adopting digital TV”. Again this last rather assumes that potential viewers know what the channels are doing before they can actually watch them – promotion again. I see promos for programming on One and Two a lot more often than I do for something on Four.

Once again, I don’t have much to say about Barwise’s comments on BBC Three as I hardly watch it, but as far as Four is concerned, my view is that by all means give Janice Hadlow, the channel’s recently-appointed controller, more money – doing more cool arts-related programming in the vein the channel already achieves would be great – but perhaps even more important, give whatever it is doing more promotion. I hate to see what is in my view great programming, apparently going nowhere. Four, in my view, should be promoted until audiences for its original programming at least equal digital audiences for the repeats on the primary channels, which is surely not an unreasonable goal.

As an aside, I should note that Barwise’s report is only one of several to be considered as part of Charter Review. Curiously, they mainly seem to have been commissioned from business-oriented people who might not, one might worry, be as well-disposed towards public service broadcasting as one would like.

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Richard G Elen Contact More by me

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