BBC Four

BBC4 is not the NHS, and it's definitely not The National Gallery. It turned out to be a very poor excuse for properly funded, BBC made, arts programming.

pinefox I understand where you're coming from, and I sympathise. I think it's important is to ask what kind of broadcaster should the BBC be. Well it has a royal charter. It has a mission and public purposes. So there is an answer to that question. Most famously it is to 'inform, educate and entertain' and it is to be a universal service. It should reach everybody, and it should be relevant to everybody. A tall order!

But for many years the public has said in surveys that it recognises that the BBC is good, high quality, etc, but that mostly it's just not "for them". It's for other people. What do you do with that information, if you're running the BBC?

If you see the BBC as being akin to the National Gallery, a steward of cultural heritage - an organisation that makes the shows commercial broadcasters won't make - then you run it a bit like Tony Hall did, the previous DG. You pour money into "prestige" programming. Some of which is very good! But then I think you're probably getting closer to what Chomsky was talking about, where your institution becomes increasingly irrelevant to more and more people. You become a "market failure" broadcaster that only does the worthy stuff of interest to an affluent, well-educated niche. That's what the Public Broadcasting Service has become in the US. Highbrow dramas on Sunday nights, high quality news, a few kids' programmes, and that's it. And then it's easy to just consign it to irrelevance. This is not the BBC's model. The BBC has an obligation to reach everyone.

The last 10 years have totally upended the BBC's centrality. 10 years ago, the Official Charts were on Radio 1 on Sunday afternoons and were the barometer of pop success. Today, my 13-year-old and my 10-year-old haven't even heard of the Official Chart, and they're obsessed with pop music. Radio 1 used to break new bands. This is just not the way it works anymore. It's a similar story with talent. 10 years ago, you had YouTube stars like Dan & Phil begging the BBC for a show. These days it's the other way around - it's talent that has the audience already, and the BBC goes begging to them. 10 years ago Disney+ didn't exist, AppleTV+ didn't exist, Netflix had no original programming. The BBC isn't the biggest on the block, even within the UK, and it probably will never be. So what can it be? It can be the most relevant. But to be the most relevant it's going to need to feel like it's for everyone - not just listeners who can recite the cast of the Goon Show.

For way too long the BBC coasted on its market dominance and now it's realising that to reach fickle audiences who have more options than ever before it needs to work very hard at it. So this new DG is I think doing the right thing - cutting niche channels (though not for another 3 years at least!), and putting more money into programmes for audiences who don't feel the BBC is for people like them, as well as into the digital products that will be the way most people access media in 5-10 years time. (pinefox there's an app you can get for your phone called BBC Sounds - it's got all those stations on it and more :) I think it's responsible and I think it's egalitarian.

Tracer: I partly recognise realities that you describe, partly respect the conclusions you draw from them, in some cases am sceptical; but also think we are somewhat talking past each other.

To throw in 3 points:

* I maintain the thought that even if, hypothetically, the changes to the BBC were good, they might not be as much in the BBC's self-interest as you hope. Basically because when parts of the BBC are cut, it loses support, and in this case, I would say, the support is lost from the very people (let's say, Guardian readers for instance) who were most likely to be happy to pay the licence fee and even to defend the BBC in public and make arguments for it. You can say it's OK to lose these people, they're a minority, but I don't see many people in the rest of the population bothered to take up the defence of the institution.

* re "the BBC is 'not for me'" - I think your implication is that this is working-class people saying the BBC is too high-falutin and middle-class. As a middle-class person who happens to read quite a lot of books, I also sometimes feel it's "not for me" because too much of it is too crass and vulgar. But another reason I think this can be summed up in two words: Laura Kuenssberg. That is: many many people (again, including people who would have defended the BBC) have been put off it - permanently? totally? - by its disgusting and poisonous coverage of socialists and their political opponents, in the last c.7 years.

Again, people like me are a minority. But it seems to me that in this world where, as you rightly say, the space for the BBC is getting narrower and narrower, it also repeatedly alienates many people and destroys what's left of its own base of support.

* you raised, earlier, the issue of social class and how to broadcast on that basis. I reflect on this and I would really just say it's a can of worms. Class is a complex subject and a moving target over time. It is difficult to talk about the relations between class and culture without being entangled. There are all kinds of dubious arguments that one can quickly find oneself in, in this area - eg "X is good because working-class people like it" (this statement is often clearly false), "X is working-class because he has a regional accent" (Gary Lineker was once working-class, I believe), "we shouldn't show complex and difficult things because working-class people don't like them" (but there is a centuries-long history of working-class emancipation through culture of various kinds).

I don't at all think that you, Tracer, would make bad and reactionary arguments about this (it happens that I agree 100% with almost every political statement I ever see you make), but I do think that many people (at the BBC and beyond?) would find "appealing to the working classes" a convenient excuse for transmitting even more garbage than before.

This last point in particular is not meant as an "argument" that you or anyone should seek to controvert, but just an indication that I think that one of the areas that has been raised has massive historical and political complexity and the best approaches to it are not obvious.

PS: I don't present Gary Lineker as the ultimate exemplar of someone with a regional accent (he was a red herring in that context), but as a fair exemplar of someone who probably once counted as working-class (his father a market trader), who is now famously the best paid BBC presenter (and not, I would submit, working-class), who also happens to present a slice of BBC content that probably does have relatively high working-class appeal (as it also does to me).

Alan Shearer was once working-class. Whether he is now may be a matter of opinion. But that's probably a whole other thread, preferably with Grace Blakeley invited.

I think your implication is that this is working-class people saying the BBC is too high-falutin and middle-class

'Twas ever thus.

well now that most w/c people (by Grace Blakely's definition or just anyone who is skint) are locked out of Higher Education, then anything approaching almost to slightly middlebrow will confuse their simple ignorant branes!

Look don't get me started, I'd axe the orchestras too

i'd like bbc4/radio4+ to get more adventurous with the archives, but then i guess the archives already have their hands full.

and yeah, generally against having things only accessible to people with internet connections (and defaulting to HIGHEST POSSIBLE QUALITY like it does) - bandwidth costs money. (even though this is literally my job)

Yeah I'm not sure that the consequences of providing a 'universal service' entirely over the internet someday has quite sunk in with everyone yet. It starts to get party political! You're going to need to subsidize or otherwise pay for literally everyone to have a reliable broadband connection!

Sounds like communism, to me

first 4 episodes of The Roads to Freedom are up on i-player with the rest to follow. It makes a change being able to watch the good stuff on i-player rather than downloading it from torrent sites. Mind you I could never even find this on the torrents and it is brilliant.

Daniel Massey's internal monologues in this are fucking hilarious. Must have been quite shocking in 1970!

Britcom graveyard

Shut it down, people

(Looks at the schedule) Jesus. It used to be the highbrow channel, what happened?

it's this week only, probably a birthday thing

i'm sure it was happening last week too?

no, it looks normal (he says, digging the listings mag out of the recycling). there were two episodes of ever decreasing circles on the Tuesday but that was it.

there have been a lot of story ville documentaries recently, or maybe I've just been catching up with them. the Herzog one about volcanologists was last week and i watched one about midwives.

Friday Night Music nights are just terrible now, an hour of 70s variety performances (they have done Cilla Black, twice!) then two TOTP (ok this bit is good) then one of the 20 or so music documentaries they seem to cycle through, then a dull/predictable clip show, then a live film (which never seems to be any good, they had a 2-hour Status Quo concert from 2010 a few months ago for example - two hours! from 2010!) - I know they are operating under tight restrictions and barebones staff, but with their resources & library it's ridiculous that they can't put something better together.

the wretched schedule on bbc 4 wouldn't be so bad if the rare good stuff they occasionally play was up on i-player for more than just a month. For example The Roads to Freedom that was broadcast a couple of months ago is back to not existing anymore.

I was looking forward to getting around to watching that… one day.

I guess tricky licensing issues with older stuff.

BBC Four reshowing the Amis/Finney/folk horror Green Man from tomorrow:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p031d01y?fbclid=IwAR372ZVTKpQMhfcblAPrPuvV3x1PRttfKW5SR_1bO35ptcC1cdeHSR7lYJg

caught a bit of Schama's History of Britain in passing last night and i'm sure i've noticed and been annoyed by it before but the big melty dope repeats the "rule of thumb" myth as if it was a true fact and were i in a shouting mood i would have shouted at him that he's supposed to be a fucking academic ffs

his basic shtick is tarting up trite cliched cack and passing it off as insightful. The Two Winstons episode from History of Britain was really bad. I hate to think there might be young people who are having their knowledge of history shaped by this pillock! But on the other hand it's probably still better a lot of the other shite they've put out in the last decade.

The last thing I saw him in was that ego trip of a series where he basically put himself in the middle of various 20th century events.

where he compared brexit to the nazi invasion of czechoslovakia, obv just making this up but you never know.

replacing the Saturday night foreign drama with Glastonbury is one thing, it being the manic Street Preachers is twisting the knife.

anyway, Beck back next week (and I'm watching the French thing from More 4 which is her from Crimson Rivers sneaking around so I'm ok for the moment)

Yes Minister is lazily written Tory bullshit and its status as an alleged classic is rubbish