A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL WORLD

A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION
Wales told us at our event in Cardiff that “a
fully developed national television service
should go beyond news and sport and should
help create and define a wider culture. We
need to be entertained as well as informed.” 356
A similar picture affects the prospects for
BBC Alba where small pockets of funding
from the Scottish government and the
BBC allow for a mere 1.7 hours of original
material per day with a 73% repeat rate
overall. Despite its popularity with Gaelic
viewers, its director of development and
partnership, Iseabail Mactaggart, told us that
insufficient funding “creates really serious
audience deficits” that need urgently to be
addressed. 357
Years of declining output and spend have,
therefore, hindered the ability of broadcasters
to more effectively cater to national and
regional audiences and, in the case of some
communities, have done little to dispel the
idea that a centralised UK television system
could ever adequately recognise their distinct
needs and identities. The TV producer Tony
Garnett, who has a distinguished record with
the BBC, now talks of a “Central London
Broadcasting Corporation” that “steals from
the rest of the country by taking its money
and spending it on itself.” Instead of truly
reflecting the diverse lives of its population,
the BBC – the main, but not the sole, target
of his criticism – “reflects distorted slivers of
privileged life, for the international market;
then it goes downmarket to caricature
everyone else in soaps.” 358
There is ample evidence that, as Garnett puts
it, “patience is wearing thin”. For example,
most audiences are firmly convinced that
television is disproportionately composed of
people from London and the South East who
make up only 25% of the total population.
Some 53% of viewers think they see someone
from those regions every day on TV, almost
double that of any other single region. While
only 4% of Londoners think that they don’t
see enough of themselves on television – and
one has to wonder which programmes they
watch – some 42% of those from Northern
Ireland and 20% of Scottish viewers claim to
be under-represented. 359
Indeed, only 48% of Scots polled for BBC
Trust research argued that they were
sufficiently well represented by BBC News
and only 51% by BBC entertainment and
drama, the lowest figures for the UK. 360
Research carried out for the 2016 Charter
Review found that Scots were “significantly”
less favourable towards the BBC and that
just over a third of them thought the licence
fee offers good value for money. 361 This
data is deeply worrying sign for the BBC if
it is to sustain a case for universal funding
across all the parts of the UK. There remains
considerable anger following the 2014
independence referendum when, as the
BBC’s Audience Council for Scotland put it,
“members questioned whether, overall, the
coverage had captured the popular nature
of the campaign and the increased role of
social media.” 362 Others were more forceful.
The Herald columnist and blogger Angela
Haggerty told us that there is now “rapidly
356
Comments at Inquiry event, Cardiff University, April 6, 2016.
357
Comments at Inquiry event, Royal Society of Edinburgh, April 13, 2016.
358
Tony Garnett, ‘The BBC should explore the world beyond London’, Guardian, April 17, 2016.
359
Ofcom, PSB Diversity Research Summary, June 2015.
360
NatCen Social Research, Purpose Remit Survey UK Report for BBC Trust, 2015, p. 36.
361
GfK Social Research, Research To Explore Public Views About The BBC, 2016.
362
Audience Council for Scotland, Annual Review 2014-15.
118