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• Sir David Attenborough
• Will Hutton

Many of us are likely, whatever our professions, to have an attachment to the kind of broadcasting we grew up with, a fierce pride in the staggering history of quality and innovation that has characterized British television and radio for fifty years. A pride, a sentimental loyalty that causes us to raise our well modulated, well educated voices loudly against any perceived barbarians at the gates. At a price, we saw off the Tebbit and print media attacks on our ramparts, a price that included many of us becoming extremely rich – damn you capitalism! – and now there is another attack imminent, at least a new report is beating its wings above us and stirring the air once more. And so once more we have to think not of how things have gone on, and how they are going on, but how they will go on. The future beckons. What will happen? As Neils Bohr, the great Danish physicist once said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”

This new report is not from a grand panjandrum like my lords Annan or Peacock, but rather – o tempora o mores – it is an OfCom Review of Public Sector Broadcasting. A new kind of cat has been put among the pigeons. There is nothing ideologically gross for us to moan at, nothing personal, philistine or crassly commercial to deprecate with elegant disdain, but a simple honest proposal. If we still want the broadcasting landscape in this country to be dominated by grand mountains and valleys of quality programming that can inform, entertain, educate and enlarge the horizons of the British viewer then perhaps we should accept a new ‘model’ for the financing and husbanding of such a landscape. Let the income from the licence fee now be shared amongst the BBC and its rivals. Let it be sliced, as the jargon has it.

Wow. A beguiling thought. Neat. And how appealing to our political masters. The Blairite/Brownite benisons of public/private interbreeding can be allowed to combine with the wholly reasonable recognition that in this fierce new world of rich-spectrum, multiple-bandwidth broadcasting, resources must be shared – all must be allowed to wet their beaks.
I stated earlier that Peacock ‘prevaricated’ in not creating a wholly commercial landscape; it might be truer to say that the BBC won part of the argument back then because it was successfully proposed, by Andrew Graham and Gavyn Davies, inter alia, that broadcasting is a special case, that the rules of the market place don’t apply. As in the armed forces, coastal defence, policing and other fields, capitalism red in tooth and claw cannot be unleashed here. If we stopped husbanding the Yorkshire Moors or the Lake District the result would be weeds, scrub or desertification, not more efficient productive landscapes from Germany or South Korea providing consumer choice and real competition. If innovative, cutting-edge, new and risky programming is not subsidised, the weeds will blow in too. This was the argument and it prevailed. But. But it was ultimately an argument that applied to a spectrum poor, low bandwidth broadcasting world. Gavyn Davies and others were able to argue that there would be no real diversity and choice in a free market dismantling of the licence fee because it was not foreseen how staggeringly multifarious the technical possibilities of programme rediffusion, distribution, ownership and rights management would be twenty or so years later. Private competition meanwhile continued to hammer home its counter-message. ‘Actually the market does work, it only doesn’t work when it’s unfairly dominated by subsidised monoliths like the BBC. Take away their distorting effect on the market and all will be well. Choice and diversity will reign.’ I remember Hugh and I wrote a sketch in which I played a waiter who recognised a diner in my restaurant as a Tory broadcasting minister. I clapped him on the shoulder and told him how much I admired his policies of choice, consumer choice, freedom of choice. I then was horrified to notice that he had only a silver knife and fork for cutlery at his table. ‘No, no, they’re fine,’ said the puzzled politician. But my character the waiter raced off and soon returned with an enormous bin liner which I emptied over his table. It contained thousands and thousands of those white plastic coffee-stirrers. ‘There you are,’ I screamed dementedly at him, virtually rubbing his face in the heap of white plastic, ‘now you’ve got choice. Look at all that choice. They may all be shit, but look at the choice!’ The sketch ends with me trying to strangle him. Heavy handed satire perhaps, but that was how it looked to me we were in danger of going: thirty or forty channels but all filled with drek. Peacock had been made to see the danger of that too and the BBC’s unique funding model was safe – for the time being at least.

Meanwhile the free market is great, it has proved just how greedy for money even the most socialistic TV programme maker is – just watch them scrabble for the millions as their production companies are floated.

And as for broadcasting, well after a mad diversion of believing that it was all about distribution, every media boss now repeats the mantra Content is King.

‘We repent,’ they seem to be saying, ‘being a media boss is no longer about owning as many stations, networks, nodes, outlets and ports as possible – it’s about production, about making things. I see that now.’
‘Hurray,’ shout the programme makers, ‘finally you’ve understood. So, give us the money then.’
‘What money?’ say the media executives, ‘there is no money. We spent it all buying up companies and their back catalogues. We needed content in a hurry, because – in case you weren’t aware … content is king, you know.’
‘Doh. Hang on … but what about new content?’
‘Good lord no. Are you mad? Far too expensive.’