Events | 2010.02.26
BBC to make cuts after Tory pressure
Savings including fewer foreign shows will be reinvested in original British programmes
BBC may lay off quarter of online staff and close 6 Music
BBC \'to axe radio stations and halve website\' in strategic review
The BBC faced protests from listeners and presenters today after it emerged that it plans to close two radio stations and cut internet services as part of a strategic review which it says will lead to it investing hundreds of millions of pounds in new public service programming.
The cuts outlined in the report, Putting Quality First , include closing digital radio stations BBC 6 Music and the Asian Network, halving the size of the corporation\'s sprawling internet operation, capping spending on TV sports rights, slashing expenditure on foreign shows such as Mad Men, and a selloff of BBC magazines such as Top Gear. Up to 600 BBC staff and freelancers could lose their jobs. The proposed cuts sparked a furious reaction, with #savebbc6music one of the most popular messages on Twitter and more than 60,000 people signing up to a Facebook page to rescue the digital radio station.
The BBC director general, Mark Thompson, is believed to have brought forward briefings on the new strategy to next week after the proposals leaked. They still need to be scrutinised by the corporation\'s governance and regulatory body, the BBC Trust. Thompson\'s decision to dramatically cut the BBC\'s scope and expenditure follows increasing pressure from the Conservatives, who have threatened major cutbacks if they come to power at the general election, and rival media organisations struggling to compete with the corporation\'s activities. The BBC has found itself squeezed between the cost-cutting warnings of the Tories and Rupert Murdoch\'s News Corporation newspapers preaching an anti-BBC agenda .
The report has been drawn up by senior BBC executive John Tate, a former head of the Conservative policy unit who co-wrote the Tory party\'s 2005 manifesto with David Cameron.
The proposed cuts could save the BBC hundreds of millions, which it has pledged to re-invest in high-quality, original British programming. The BBC plan outlines five key tenets that it will focus on: "producing the best journalism in the world; inspiring knowledge, culture, music; ambitious UK drama and comedy; outstanding children\'s content; and events of universal resonance."
However, the plan will come at a cost to many current BBC services, with the web operation expected to be one of the hardest hit. Under the plans:
• As many as 350 staff, about 25% of BBC Online\'s workforce, could lose their jobs as the operation\'s scope is halved and £134m budget is cut by about a quarter. The BBC\'s web operation will see the number of web pages halved by 2013, with fewer stories published in favour of more original video and audio content. The proposals also include the closure of cross-media brands BBC Switch and BBC Blast, which are aimed at teenagers.
• BBC 6 Music and the Asian Network are put forward for closure. However, tens of thousands of people have already signed an online petition to save 6 Music and the issue has become a hot topic on Twitter .
• The BBC\'s £100m-a-year budget to buy foreign films and TV shows, such as Mad Men and Heroes, will be cut by at least 25%.
• A cap will be introduced on the amount the BBC spends on TV sports rights, such as football highlights and Formula One, at 8.5% of the licence fee, or about £300m a year.
• BBC Magazines, the division which publishes magazines including Radio Times and Top Gear, could be sold off or titles licensed to commercial companies to publish. The division was heavily criticised for its £90m acquisition of Lonely Planet in 2007 as being unnecessarily damaging to commercial companies.
The general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, Jeremy Dear, said the union would oppose cuts, with industrial action if necessary. "If true, these cuts will result not just in the loss of hundreds of jobs, but the loss of valuable, quality output aimed at young people and the Asian communities. We will fight them with all our might," Dear said.
Richard Bacon, a presenter on both 6 Music and Radio 5 Live, said shutting the station would be "naive" and against the "very proposition of the BBC". He said there was "no logical rationale" behind closing the station, which had an average weekly reach of 695,000 listeners in the final three months of last year. "Far from being an example of what\'s wrong with the Beeb, 6 Music is a beautiful example of the BBC at its best."
Thompson will be hoping that the proposed measures will go far enough to appease the Conservatives\' desire to clip the corporation\'s wings. However, the BBC has not gone far enough to placate Rupert Murdoch, with a leader in the Times, headed Big, Bloated and Cunning , arguing the corporation would still be too large. The shadow culture minister, Ed Vaizey, said: "Mark Thompson seems to have responded to some of the key criticisms. It may not please Mr Murdoch and this is not the final word … but we don\'t want to beat up the BBC. We want a smaller BBC because it is doing down its commercial rivals and this seems to have addressed a number of issues."
The flipside of the review is that a number of core BBC services are likely to benefit from millions of pounds of investment in areas including quality drama, children\'s shows and overseas journalism. BBC2 will be a major winner with an increase of about £25m in programming budget and a remit to boost quality drama output by over 50% in the next three years. Spending on children\'s shows is also thought to be likely to benefit from a £25m investment, although the BBC is set to pull back on targeting teenagers. BBC1 will also increase drama output. BBC3 and BBC4, which had at one stage in the review been considered for merger, will remain intact. However, BBC4 will screen more high-end documentaries.
A BBC spokesman said: "The BBC will remain fully committed to online and to digital television and radio. But the new strategy will lay out ways of focusing and concentrating licence fee investment on areas and services which are distinctive and best fulfil the BBC\'s public purposes, which meet the expectations of licence payers but also leave plenty of space for commercial media providers."
Commercial companies, which have been increasingly alarmed by the expanding BBC, particularly newspaper and magazine groups affected by the corporation\'s web operation, will take some cheer from Thompson\'s plans.
A number of closure plans will require public consultation, which could mean that some of the proposals may not be delivered. "\'Examples\' of cutbacks are not set in tablets of stone," said one BBC source involved in the strategy review. "However, if a value for money review determines a service shouldn\'t close, something else will have to be cut."
Guardian writers assess the BBC departments facing curbs or closure
6 Music
First, the case for the prosecution. There are obviously sections of British society less well catered for by the media than the 30-50 year-old music lovers BBC 6 Music sets out to target. There\'s certainly an argument that the corporation\'s Asian Network, also apparently for the chop, is a better use of the licence fee than a station that occasionally sounds like kind of Sealed Knot recreation of a student indie disco circa 1989. And there certainly things wrong with 6 Music, not least the noisome presence of George Lamb, who seems to have been employed by the BBC after a concerted and ultimately fruitful search to find a DJ more irritating than Radio One\'s Chris Moyles, an impressive feat he achieves by the expedient of continually lapsing into faux Jamaican patois.
Equally, there is a sense that losing 6 Music would create a hole in British broadcasting. It does things that no other national radio station does, not least employ knowledgeable, enthusiastic, music-first presenters during the daytime, Lauren Laverne and Steve Lamacq among them.
In an age when a lazy, ironic detachment is broadcasting\'s default setting, where everything from pop radio to children\'s TV to early evening light entertainment comes with a knowing smirk, it\'s actually rather startling to hear.
There are shows you can\'t imagine finding a home anywhere else on the BBC network: Jarvis Cocker\'s intriguing Sunday Service, the Classic Rock Sequence that trawls the BBC archives, and, most notably, Stuart Maconie\'s peerless Freak Zone, a repository for music that everyone else ignores, and perhaps the most challenging and eclectic "rock" show in Britain. Playing free jazz, abstract electronica and, in one notable incident recently, Spanish Christian psychedelia on a Sunday teatime seems to fit perfectly with the Reithian model of broadcasting on which the BBC is founded: not a phrase you could apply to, say, BBC3, unless of course Lord Reith made some unreported remarks about the necessity to keep commissioning terrible sitcoms with Ralph Little in them. Alexis Petridis
Foreign imports
Really? Really, you\'re going to chop the budget for foreign (for which read "US") acquisitions and give the money to BBC2? Great – bigger snooker balls! More colours! Or maybe it will invest in new, 1-D technology and issue green monocles to everyone. Ah – wait. The 25% reduction in the US imports budget will be used to create more "original content" for the channel. That would sound less frightening if the phrase "original content on BBC2" didn\'t still translate instantly into most viewers\' minds as "Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps". Those memories – of unremittingly abysmal modern British sitcoms – die hard.
The Wire. Damages. Mad Men. The Sopranos. Nurse Jackie. Battlestar Galactica. The late, lamented Arrested Development. The best of the US best – which is largely, though not exclusively, what reaches these shores – generally shames the native output, outdoing our efforts in number, quality and consistency.
Viewers, I suspect, would rather have the best in the global marketplace than the nearest. You don\'t even have to worry about airmiles before you settle back to enjoy a televisual import. Until our native land can routinely compete with what the States has to offer, how does it benefit us to have our choice restricted in this way?
Ah, but how can we compete if we don\'t have the money to develop our own industry? Two points: the first is that even the most ardent BBC worshipper would have to concede, particularly in the light of recent and ongoing revelations about corporate pay and expenses, that there is money to be found elsewhere in the system that is riper for reallocation than the acquisitions budget. The second is that access and exposure to the current leaders in the field encourages others to raise their games in a way that such cultural protectionism as is proposed simply does not.
We should give thanks that we speak the same language as the experts and keep buying until we\'ve caught up. The Colbert Report is the apotheosis of civilisation and currently available for purchase. Two Pints ran for eight series. You still owe us. Lucy Mangan
BBC Sport
As with everything from politics to pop music, so with games. When sport on the BBC is good – whenever a summer or winter Olympic Games comes around, for instance – it is peerless in its disposition of resources and expertise. When it is bad, as with the Saturday night smugfest currently masquerading as Match of the Day, you want to kick its bottom and sell it off to the nearest Murdoch-owned outlet.
The BBC was deeply involved in sport long before the explosion in popularity and prosperity of the last 20 years. For many of us, it was how we first saw – or heard, for let us not forget radio\'s pioneering role – an international rugby match, a European Cup final, a grand prix, the Boat Race or a match on Wimbledon\'s Centre Court. That fine history gives the corporation the right to maintain an active interest even in the highly commercial environment of the 21st century.
But it also means that it must live up to its traditions by avoiding excess in all its forms, even in an age when excess is the prevailing mode.
If the new cap of 8.5% of the licence fee means making cuts, then perhaps the programme producers should consider the possibility of relying on one knowledgeable, experienced and above all eloquent commentator or summariser rather than three or four retired athletes trying to grub a living from the media they once affected to despise. Be more assiduous in grooming the new Longhursts, Arlotts and Wolstenholmes, and leave the rest to Rupert. Richard Williams
Asian Network
The case for keeping the Asian Network can be made with one single figure: 2.3 million. That\'s the sum total of people who at the 2001 census described themselves as being of Asian origin. It amounts to 4% of the population, and a fair chunk of licence-fee payers – and yet they are barely catered for by the BBC. This is not my assertion; it\'s the suggestion of the Corporation\'s own audience research. How could it be otherwise? BBC executives certainly acknowledge the presence of British Asians – as token families on Albert Square, or glossy-haired presenters on news bulletins. But when was the last time you saw an item on, say, the 10 O\'Clock News that reported what Asians were up to, as opposed to further enthralling coverage of The Muslim Problem?
It is that huge vacuum of under-representation that the Asian Network is supposed to fill, in what must be the toughest remit in radio.
How does one cheaply-run station cater for listeners living in this country but coming from a vast subcontinent of three nations, 1.4 billion people, with followers of several religions and speakers of dozens of languages? The answer is: by doing a very patchy job. The Adil Ray breakfast show is funny and well-produced, lunchtime presenter Nihal is likeably blokeish and some of the small-hours music programmes are refreshingly experimental, but much of the rest of the schedule drifts.
More seriously, the network commissioners haven\'t given enough thought to how to cater to an Asian audience that is now well into its third generation in the UK.
They try and please the auntyjis with religious songs, while pandering to the lads in baggy jeans with modern Bollywood, but rarely does the station address these disparate parts of the same family all at once. News and documentaries are surprisingly weak.
But these are reasons to improve the Asian Network, not axe it. This is after all far closer to the notion of public-service broadcasting than the 6 Music game of playing "classic" Elastica B-sides to fervent 30-somethings.
And besides questions of output, the Asian Network also represents a valuable resource for the rest of the BBC: a pool of often very talented producers and presenters with knowledge of one of Britain\'s fastest-growing communities. Does the BBC really want to break all that up just to pay more to the (ahem) national treasure that is Chris Moyles? Aditya Chakrabortty
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/feb[...]ic-asian-network-radio-closure
