The considerable downsides of the ‘new’ BBC Three
The greatest danger facing the ‘new’ BBC Three is not that it will be hopelessly bad – but that it will lack traction and purpose as it disappears into the endless abyss of the Internet.
You have to admire how imaginatively BBC executives have dressed up the plan to close BBC Three as a television channel and replace it with a financially impoverished online version.
To director-general Tony Hall it is one of the “most exciting and ambitious proposals” he has seen since returning to the BBC.
So far as Danny Cohen, the BBC director of television and a former controller of BBC Three, is concerned the plan was further proof that “necessity is the mother of invention.”
For Damien Kavanagh, the BBC executive who led the project the new BBC Three, as they are calling it, it “could be a pathfinder for the digital age and for the future of the BBC.”
Kavanagh, who insists that BBC Three is not closing, merely being reinvented, notes that the BBC is the first broadcaster in the world to take an existing channel off air and pump it out only online in the form of daily updates.
It is, by any standards, a courageous decision and one driven largely by shortage of cash, as the BBC admits.
It is almost impossible to judge in advance the overall merit of the juggling act that is being performed.
But it is surely clear that you cannot take £50 million a year out of a £75 million budget and not end up with a lesser offering. If it is not so, then someone would have had to have been seriously misusing £50 million a year for a long time.
On the plus side, £30 million more will be available for new drama and there will be a two-hour daily expansion of children’s programmes on CBBC.
There will also be the entirely sensible launch of a BBC One + 1 catch-up service for those who do not have the BBC iPlayer.
The downsides, however, are considerable. Whatever way it is dressed up, BBC Three is being closed as a television channel and the fact that there is a BBC Three website is a poor substitute. It has the sound of an archive service about it. What, for example, does it mean that the online service will be updated daily? How many new programmes will that entail once you kick over the discipline of having a linear schedule?
It could indeed turn out to be revolutionary – but visionary BBC executives might pause for a moment to reflect that there could be a very good reason why not a single broadcaster in the world has so far chosen to go down this route.
As Kavanagh notes, online viewing already accounts for 28 per cent of average daily viewing of 16-24 year-olds – which of course means that 72 per cent of their viewing is not online.
Those numbers could change of course, but the greatest danger facing the “new BBC Three” is not that it will be hopelessly bad but that it will simply disappear into the endless abyss of the internet and lack traction and purpose.
The BBC Trust, whose approval is needed for the change, should ponder long and hard about whether this really is the best way to reach and serve young adults.
There is another clear and present danger: that this elegant manoeuvre could become a template for a series of further retreats in the face of necessity.
It is noticeable that BBC executives are reticent when it comes to guaranteeing the long-term future of BBC Four; to many the best thing the BBC does.
How long before another visionary comes up with a package to reinvent BBC Four? First cut its budget in half, then strengthen the BBC Two schedule with some of its programmes and shuffle the channel off to have a half-life online. After all, most of BBC Four’s more up-market viewers surely have access to the internet.
And why stop at BBC Four? Radio is just made for the internet. How long before the mother of invention strikes again and it starts being suggested that a lot of money could be saved if some specialist radio channels could become internet only?
The trouble is that it will inevitably take a year or so to judge whether “the new BBC Three” is unleashing a new wave of digital creativity which brings in a new generation of writers and performers, or is sinking without trace.
By then it could be too late. Once a broadcast channel is switched off it never returns.
If the current audience cares about the continuation of BBC Three as a broadcast channel then it should make its views known vigorously to the BBC Trust. There is history here. Listener power overturned misguided plans by BBC executives to close 6 Music, a service that still goes from strength-to-strength.
There is potentially a larger point here than the ultimate future of BBC Three; there is a danger of the BBC developing a pre-emptive cringe in the face of its many critics.
The political outlook is uncertain this side of a general election that is almost impossible to predict. As a result, the Corporation appears to be sitting on its hands waiting to see what turns up, keeping its powder dry.
There never was a greater need for the BBC to be making the case for proper funding of public service broadcasting in this country. It is a case that could go by default while waiting for the most appropriate time to intervene.
That case will certainly not be made by eviscerating BBC Three while trying to make it all sound like a triumph of the human imagination.