BBC Three bid: not such a crazy idea
The independent production companies outlining a proposal to bid for BBC Three should be congratulated for their creative thinking, rather than dismissed, writes Raymond Snoddy.
When the makers of Russell Howard’s Good News and Have I Got News For You get together and make a £100 million offer for BBC Three someone’s got to be having a laugh. Right?
Its definitely topical and funny but could never happen in the real world, could it?
Perhaps not, but what the offer from Jon Thoday of Avalon and Jimmy Mulville of Hat Trick has most emphatically done is crystallise both arguments and value around a television channel that the BBC plans to eviscerate and turn out to the darkness of the internet from where no television channel ever returns.
But let’s just for a moment, as any creative person should, ask the What If question. Are Thoday and Mulville off their heads, or is there any merit in their bold suggestion?
The two insist to the Guardian that this is no “PR stunt,” as a BBC executive called it, and that there would be no problem funding a £100 million acquisition and that the money would come from private British investors. The channel’s commissioning budget, due to fall to £30 million a year, would instead rise by 20 per cent from its present figure to £100 million if Thoday and Mulville were in control.
The pair believe that an advertising-funded channel, which would have to be rebranded in the Dave mode, could make a profit of between £10 million and £30 million a year.
Thoday also makes the telling point that no-one, so far as he is aware, has ever successfully launched a new show with new talent online. The young will go to the internet, of course, but mainly to find things they already know about and rate.
Thoday could also have asked how many established broadcasters have ever taken an existing broadcast channel, slashed its budget by £50 million and then expected it to prosper online. If such phenomena can be found they will surely be acts of gross desperation akin to some of the acts of the weaker local press publishers, hardly something that the BBC should countenance.
Such a sale could never happen, could it?
Except that the BBC is perfectly happy to sell 49.9 per cent of BBC America for $200 million to AMC Networks and work alongside first Virgin and then Scripps in a 50-50 joint venture in UKTV. There is a spectrum of acceptability here.
Different circumstances maybe, but not that different, and the same BBC is perfectly happy to open up virtually all its production, apart from news gathering, to the private sector.
It looks, in potential outcome, if not initial intent, like a step on the way to privatisation of BBC production.
And if you consider whether young viewers would prefer a properly funded, expanding television channel or a hollowed out online version capable of producing only one new drama a year the answer would be clear.
The BBC knows all this and is trying to make the best of a bad argument. Research for the BBC found BBC Three was “highly valued” by its audience and tries to justify its decision by calling it the “least-worst option.”
The ever-cunning BBC even came up with a new psychological condition to try to undermine the value of audience opinions. They were “loss averse” – just as they were also loss averse when the BBC tried to close down 6 Music against their wishes. The radio station has just celebrated a new record of 2 million listeners a week.
It has also been pointed out that the move online will, despite the budget cut, dramatically increase the cost per hour for each user. Because of a reduced audience the cost per user will rise from 6.9p in 2013/14 to 23p an hour. Clearly this would be an economic triumph for the Corporation and one the BBC Trust should not ignore.
There is also the usual BBC slight of word in denying that BBC Three is closing. It is closing – as a linear broadcast channel – and for many people that is all that matters.
The really cunning bit by the BBC top brass is to hopelessly entangle the future of BBC Three in other unrelated issues: the launch of BBC One + 1 – something that should have happened years ago.
An extension of broadcasting hours for CBBC? – terrific and who can argue against the merit of injecting an additional £30 million into BBC drama.
Except that the merits of such developments have little, intrinsically, to do with whether BBC Three should live or die.
Each should be judged on its merits.
The members of the BBC Trust surely are smart enough to see through the smokescreen of managerial obfuscation.
The BBC Trust should seriously consider the ideas of Thoday and Mulville – before rejecting them in their present form.
The two independents themselves accept their plan represents the second best idea for the future of BBC Three. The best remains continuing the channel in its present form.
However, before rejecting their second-best plan, BBC management should be sent off to consider more modest proposals to prevent BBC Three being closed as a broadcast channel.
Perhaps turn it into an international channel controlled by BBC Worldwide in which a consortium of independents – or an outside investor – has a 49.9 per cent stake. Or set up a Trust to manage such a channel in the public interest with the BBC retaining a majority stake.
If no such acceptable structure can be found then the BBC Trust will have to do its duty and send the BBC management away to think again about the future of a channel that is “highly valued” by its audience and one that has spawned hits for other BBC channels.
Above all the future of BBC Three should be judged on its merits and de-coupled from the surrounding camouflage.
However great the BBC Three problem, the answer is not an online replacement capable of commissioning one new drama a year.
There are many who think that the BBC has a long way to go in tackling bureaucracy and waste on non-programming activities before closing a linear broadcast channel and one that just happens to reach out to the young.
Whatever the outcome, Jon Thoday and Jimmy Mulville are to be congratulated, rather than dismissed, for creative thinking on a decision which once taken can never be reversed.