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

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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
CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL WORLD growing discontent with the BBC and broadcasting as a whole in Scotland. There is a severe lack of trust and a lack of confidence in the coverage among many people…The status quo of broadcasting in Scotland is no longer acceptable.” 363 So the key question for us is, at a time when more viewers are associating themselves with a ‘sub-national’ UK identity, how should policymakers and television executives react and what steps should be taken to best meet the needs of viewers from across the UK? We From 1999 to 2014, first-run original output produced for the ‘nations and regions’ by ITV, BBC and S4C had fallen from 17,891 hours to 13,814 hours a decline of nearly 23%. Source: Ofcom first examine the emergence and impact of the ‘nations and regions’ strategy and then consider some alternatives. Going ‘Beyond the M25’: the emergence of a ‘nations and regions’ strategy Simply put, fundamental shifts in the UK’s political tectonic plates, and an indefensible imbalance in investment in the UK creative economy provided the key motivations for developing a ‘nations and regions’ strategy especially for the BBC and Channel 4, organisations without the regional structure that ITV at least used to have. The licence fee is collected in every corner of the UK yet for most of its history, the vast majority of spending took place where only a minority lived. In 1992, 80% of BBC network television programmes were made in London and the South East which then had 25% of the UK population 364 and which are areas that are not culturally, politically and socially representative of the entire UK. Demands for a more decentralised service also reflect the realities of everyday lives, many of which continue to be lived locally despite increasing patterns of mobility and migration. According to research carried out for TSB in late 2015, people live on average 60 miles away from their childhood home with some 60% of people continuing to live in the same area where they were born. “Even in an age of easy, cheap travel, instant global communication and the chance to experience life across the world, a significant proportion of Brits remain firmly connected 363 Comments to Inquiry event, Royal Society of Edinburgh, April 13, 2016. 364 John Birt, The Harder Path, London: Time Warner, 2003, p. 312 119
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A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVIS
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Contents Foreword by David Puttnam
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To instruct democracy, if possible
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Welcome Television is leading a cha
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CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL
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PSB channels 71.9% All other channe
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Why television matters Television i
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1982 1990s 2012 The BBC-ITV duopoly
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Time for action Today’s policymak
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Basic principles At the core of pre
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The multichannel revolution Perhaps
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The BBC For most people, the BBC is
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Page 67 and 68: Channel 4 If the BBC is the most im
Page 69 and 70: CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL
Page 71 and 72: Only 8% of Channel 4’s total spen
Page 79 and 80: ITV and Channel 5 The focus of atte
Page 85 and 86: The changing face of ITV 1993-2002
Page 91 and 92: New sources of public service conte
Page 103 and 104: Television and diversity We have ea
Page 107 and 108: THE PEOPLE SHOULD BE TELEVISED If t
Page 115 and 116: Nations and Regions Public service
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Page 129 and 130: Content diversity One of the key wa
Page 135 and 136: Sports content now accounts for som
Page 145 and 146: Talent development and training In
Page 153 and 154: Conclusion Television is changing.
Page 155 and 156: Recommendations General The UK’s
Page 161 and 162: Appointing the BBC board Sir David
Page 163 and 164: APPLICATION OF THE NOLAN PRINCIPLES
Page 165 and 166: BAFTA members’ survey delivered i
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Public service broadcasting, public
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Inquiry events Do we still need pub
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Acknowledgements Inquiry Report Con
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A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION CONTENT AND PLATFORMS IN A DIGITAL WORLD

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