Two contrasting stories this week summarise the sound and fury that haunt the BBC’s run-up to its Charter Renewal this year. One is the latest complaint about any rethink of what the Beeb does and does not do. Midsomer Murders actor Neil Dudgeon declares the notion that Auntie should not make popular entertainment programmes is “cretinous in the extreme”.
So caught up in high dudgeon is TV Detective Dudgeon that he did not trouble us with a more interesting investigation. How many expensive popular shows should the BBC make against commercial rivals in order to uphold the argument that it can service all audiences satisfactorily?
That brings us to new research, which reveals that the amount of time children spend watching TV has just been overtaken by the time they spend online. Recognise the picture? The grown-ups in our household huddle around War and Peace or Call the Midwife. But the teenagers have fled to plug into video games and watch YouTube. It is doubtful that they will return to the same relationship their parents had with terrestrial broadcasting.
Indeed, Gogglebox, the sly sociological take on British television, might well end up looking like a bit of a museum piece, as more of us segment our viewing, doing less of it at the same time, in the same place or on the same device.
As a part-time BBC broadcaster, I have good reason to nod along with the campaign to maintain the licence fee. But selective boosterism will not save it from changes that are sweeping through the media. The default cry of Save the BBC fails the plausibility test, in the same way that most “Save the ...” campaigns tend to suffer from a deficit of forward thinking on what should be preserved and what needs to change.
So here is what I think will happen. The BBC has been offered a deal on reduced funding. Lord Hall is a highly pragmatic director-general who realises that big shifts are essential. While tutting publicly about the terms, he has accepted them in order to secure one last round of guaranteed public funding.
A TV channel boss, no less, has been sacrificed after BBC1 and BBC2 merged controllers. That is a recognition that great content is fast becoming more important than which channel it appears on.
The bigger difficulty is the BBC’s long-held argument that a £145.50-a-year licence fee means the same value to all of us. Patently it doesn’t, and that stretch will become more apparent. So those with an eye for the long game, such as BBC News chief James Harding, will “review” (ie prepare to diminish) expensive rolling news channels designed for the era of fixed-set televisions, when we can get instant responses to events on our phones.
Soon after the charter is agreed later this year, the Beeb’s brighter minds will begin to consider more seriously what the best mix of levy and subscription funding might look like. I suspect a more tightly run BBC would still thrive but it will have to think more carefully about what it does and what it leaves to others.
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The boundaries of empires change — and even the most revered broadcasting one is not immune. Auntie is going through a change of life, whether she likes it or not.
@annemcelvoy is senior editor at the Economist
