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

A FUTURE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION
to their origins.” 365 As people grow older,
have children, buy homes and plan their
recreational time, so their appetite for local
information and expression grows. The
celebrated phrase, ‘think global, act local’
reflects the significance of supra- and subnational
spheres of interest and the idea that,
paraphrasing Daniel Bell, the nation-state is
too small for the big problems in life and too
big for the small problems.
So there was real pressure in the late 1990s
on the BBC – as the ‘national’ broadcaster –
to address its deep-seated metropolitan bias
and to shift some production from London to
other parts of the UK. The generous licence
fee settlement granted in 2000, shortly
following John Birt’s term in office as director
general, had very clear ‘out of London’
requirements which were then supported by
the new DG, Greg Dyke. Once the argument
had been accepted inside the BBC, Channel
4, which already had a strong pedigree in
culturally representative programmming, was
left exposed and immediately followed suit.
There had already been a BBC ‘regional
directorate’ throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
Scotland had lobbied especially hard against
being seen as a ‘region’ and so in 1999, Mark
Thompson was appointed as director of
national and regional broadcasting followed
in 2000 by a new director of nations and
regions. Stuart Cosgrove was given the same
title at Channel 4 not long afterwards.
The 2004 Building Public Value initiative
and subsequent charter review process
emphasized the BBC’s commitment to
meet the needs of an increasingly diverse
and fragmented UK. The BBC promised to
strengthen its programming for the devolved
nations, to step up its local services, both in
the nations and in the English regions and
to develop its network of ‘Open Centres’
and ‘digital buses’ where less well-off people
could access online technologies for no
additional cost, seven days a week. 366 Whole
departments and channels were to leave the
London base with Salford announced as the
main destination.
However, the main focus of this strategy was
on increasing network output in Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland with only a very
limited expansion of local services in the
English regions including the launch of a
local television pilot that was subsequently
refused permission by the BBC Trust
following heavy lobbying by the newspaper
industry. In 2008, Jana Bennett, the director
of BBC Vision, unveiled proposals that she
described as a “radical shift in the whole set
up of broadcasting” 367 : a promise that spend
on network programming in the nations
would go up from 6% of total spend in 2007
to 17% by 2016, representing their share of
the overall UK population, and that ‘out of
London’ spend overall would rise to 50% by
2016 (still significantly below its share of the
population). For the first time in many years,
the gravitational field in British broadcasting
was due to change – a situation that would
be further cemented by the requirement
imposed on Channel 4 in 2014 to allocate 9%
of its budget to ‘out of London’ productions
by 2020.
This strategy, it could be argued, had an
inescapable logic and an underlying sense
of fairness. ‘Sustainability’ was seen as a key
objective of the BBC’s approach in which just
365
TSB, Homebirds, 2015.
366
BBC, Building Public Value: Renewing the BBC for a Digital World, BBC, 2004, pp. 75-77.
367
BBC, ‘Jana Bennett unveils major TV production shift outside London’, press release,
October 15, 2008.
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