Media Leader: Once again, the BBC is dressing up cuts to BBC Four and CBBC as tech 'necessity'

Story from Media Leader:

Tim Davie is proposing to kill off programmes that are performing perfectly well on linear, but are not doing enough to drive viewers to on-demand. Is he punishing viewers who won’t adapt quickly enough?

It is extraordinary how accepting the media universe is becoming about extraordinarily damaging policies emanating from this Government.

It is almost as if its Parliamentary majority and democratic will is leading to a collective shrug of the shoulders.

It has happened already with the woeful intention to privatise Channel 4 now that it has been included in the Holy writ of the Queen’s speech. Silence.

Barely a peep, other than the reporting of the facts, that the BBC is being forced by Government induced financial pressure to end the broadcasting life of BBC Four and CBBC, to close Radio 4Extra, merge BBC News and World News, cut 200 hours of new programmes a year and reduce some regional services.

As a result 1,000 posts, if not actual jobs, will go. The response has been muted mainly because the decision to freeze the licence fee for two years was taken long before the current cost of living crisis, making cuts always inevitable.

If nothing were to be done, there would be a black financial hole of £285m a year by 2027.

The only big voice to be raised so far is that of Sir Lenny Henry who has argued that the decision to move the CBBC children’s channel to online only would make it harder for youngsters “to find stories about themselves.”

The Daily Mail hailed the changes, suggesting that for BBC director-general Tim Davie the penny was finally starting to drop. Praise from such a source might give some of the BBC’s traditional supporters pause for thought.

The least worst option.

Before the cause of the continuing squeeze on the BBC is largely forgotten, it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the two-year licence fee freeze announced in inflationary times, though nothing like what has subsequently developed.

There seemed little logic in the Government imposing a two-year freeze followed by four years of inflation linking other than perhaps a dash of malice and a desire to be seen to be cracking a whip on the Corporation.

For a Government committed to a future of high skill-high pay jobs there is little sense in putting 1,000 of such jobs at risk.

Levelling up, to the extent that the concept has any meaning, would have benefitted from the survival of more jobs, rather than less, many capable of being deployed into poorer areas.

And as we all know broadcasting, media and the wider creative industries are growth areas and a sector of the economy where the UK is, if not world-beating, then at the very least internationally competitive.

That horse has long since bolted and Davie decided he had to find £500m in savings, to bridge the gap and free a further £200m or so for innovation and modernisation.

It is always easy to carp when faced with a reduction of what we already have and that runs into the inevitable question: what would you do?

Davie has almost certainly got it right in deciding to actually make cuts rather than continuing with the historic course – salami-slicing every budget.

Yet has he made the right cuts?

The debacle of turning BBC Three into an online only channel and then, recently, reversing the decision, for very good reasons of impact and visibility, should ring alarm bells.

It was argued at the time that this was the future and that anyway the channel was aimed at young adults who were most digitally adept. Yes but…

The clients of CBBC are even more digitally adept but it is still easy to underestimate the prominence provided by a broadcast presence and exaggerate the speed with which streaming will entirely replace broadcast.

Davie, as the BBC has always tended to do, dressed up cuts in the clothes of technological necessity.

He told staff: “The market challenge is clear. Though broadcast channels will be essential for years to come, we are moving decisively to a largely on-demand world. Today around 85% of the time people spend with the BBC is with linear broadcasts.”

Pardon? 85% is one hell of a percentage, Tim.

Naughty viewers to blame?

And yet, in the very next sentence, the BBC director-general said: “Too many of our resources are focused on broadcast and not online.”

Perhaps there is an element of the naughty viewers being blamed for not quite getting the future yet, or at least Tim Davie’s future. How dare they keep on watching traditional broadcast television? Don’t they know we are moving a largely on-demand world?

Rather more alarmingly, Davie is actually proposing to kill off programmes that are performing perfectly well on linear but are not doing enough to drive viewers to on-demand with a number to be cancelled this year.

What? Sounds more like just driving viewers away, period.

The Davie vision also involves moving more of the 34 million people who listen weekly to linear radio stations to become habitual users of BBC Sounds. Good luck with that, Tim.

Then there is BBC Four, still one of the best things the BBC does despite being hollowed out and turned into a repeats channel, to be pushed out into the endless online soup.

Many will make the effort to find it, but not all fans, discerning viewers of a certain age, may be so digitally-equipped.

There are also worries about merging the News Channel in the UK and the international World News into a single TV channel called BBC News.

Sounds sensible, but a tricky business editorially to serve such different audience with a single stream of news.

At least Davie has done something at last to tackle the well know Oxbridge bias in the BBC. Dedicated TV bulletins from Oxford and Cambridge will end and will be merged with South Today and Look East. That’s telling them, Tim.

A lot of the Davie reforms will not happen immediately, so we can hope there are still opportunities for discussion and the identification of alternative methods of saving money.

One possibility is the reported £50m the BBC plans to spend on research to find out what viewers and listeners do and want. While knowledge is good, if anything like that sum is correct, there have to be cheaper ways of finding out what the audience wants, building on the mounds of information which is already available from the likes of BARB and Ofcom.

Perhaps you could even save enough just there to keep BBC Four as a broadcast channel.

After that the BBC director-general should listen in a more organised way to his staff – they are the ones who know best where money is being wasted and where savings can be found on the way to an on-demand world.

This post is a views of Raymond Snoddy who is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays.

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