Greg Dyke Lays Out Future Of The BBC

The following is an edited version of the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, delivered by Greg Dyke, director-general of the BBC, at the Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, on Friday.

In 1994 my lecture was about broadcasting and politics. My concern then was that the relationship between Government and broadcasters was in danger of becoming unhealthy; that as the world of broadcasting was changing broadcasters were always wanting something from the Government and, as such, were less likely to be brave in their programming when standing up to the Government of the day.

I still have that concern – in fact the danger has grown. Broadcasters today want more from Government than we could possibly have imagined just six years ago. That is why the Government’s decision to give the BBC a seven year licence fee agreement, right through to the end of the current BBC Charter, is important. It gives the BBC the freedom and independence to be brave.

However we all still need to be vigilant in the area of political independence and I am particularly concerned when I read of proposals for a single content regulator across the whole television industry. I believe we have a far better chance of resisting political pressure if, between us, we have more than one content regulator.

Pluralism in regulation is as important as pluralism among broadcasters. But tonight I don’t plan to talk about politics, I want to talk about change and why it is difficult to bring about in an organisation like the BBC. I believe the stark choice facing the BBC today is that we either change or we simply manage decline gracefully and none of us joined the BBC to do that. The changes happening in technology; in the wider society; and in our competitive environment are what make this one of those times in history when change at the BBC is essential.

One thing I have learned in my years in the television industry is that money matters when you’re trying to make outstanding programmes. It’s not enough on its own – at some time or other most of us have spent a lot of money producing a very average programme – but trying to make fantastic programmes without the right budget is incredibly difficult. In fact I believe one of the problems of BBC Television today is that too many of our services have been under funded.

BBC1 certainly needs more money, particularly for drama and quality entertainment and two of our digital services, BBC Choice and BBC Knowledge, were started without enough money to commission truly original and inspiring programmes, programming of the quality people expect from the BBC.

If we want to spend more money on our traditional services, and we do need to, there are certain consequences. Firstly we have to find the money and secondly we have to limit our plans for new services to what we can afford. I believe the potential for savings is significant. The BBC currently spends 24% of its income on running the institution of the BBC. Our target is to reduce that figure to 15% over the next three years which will give us an extra £200 million a year to spend on programmes and services if we achieve it. I’m hopeful that over five years we can do better than that.

I also believe we can increase our commercial income from BBC Worldwide and BBC Resources Ltd – and we’ve established BBC Technology Ltd with the aim of bringing additional revenue into the BBC. We’re also looking at whether there are more commercial opportunities in the world of new media than we’re presently exploiting.

The second thing we have to do, if we want better funded services, is to limit our ambitions for expansion. A criticism of the BBC over the years has been that it has tried to do everything the commercial sector has done. Those days have to be at an end. We cannot possibly afford to have a tank on every lawn, or compete in every area of the market place. We need to agree the range of services which people will get for their licence fee and then call a halt.

In this financial year we will be spending £100 million more on programmes than last year, and that doesn’t take into account the cost of covering the Sydney Olympics, which is extra. Next year we plan to increase that by a further £250 million above inflation and the year after by another £130 million. That means in the year 2002/3 we will be spending £480 million a year more on our programmes and services than we spent last year – a 30% real increase in programme spend over just three years. This amounts to the biggest increase in programme expenditure in BBC history.

So what are we planning to do with the money? We believe that in the age of digital television it will not be sufficient for the BBC to offer only two mixed genre channels which are somehow supposed to meet the needs of everyone. That is not how audiences will want to receive television in the future. We need a more coherent portfolio of channels.

As we are inevitably constrained by money, this means we must limit the size of this portfolio. But there is another more important reason for limiting the number of channels we plan and that is the principle of universality. What universality means is making all our publicly funded services available in all homes.

We must avoid the emergence of a digital underclass, a world where some are information rich while others are information poor. In order to achieve this principle of universality it means we are only going to offer a portfolio of channels now, which, within a reasonable period of time, will be available in every household in the land. The Government’s proposals for analogue switch off, possibly in the latter part of this decade will make this achievable.

In practice what all this means is that we believe we should offer a portfolio of seven services across five channels. BBC One and BBC Two will continue as the mainstays of BBC Television for the foreseeable future and be the only BBC channels available in every home until analogue switch off. Getting these channels right for the future is a big challenge. In the early years BBC One and BBC Two will still have to be aimed at people who only have analogue television, the majority of homes until at least 2003. However over time they will need to evolve to become part of a BBC five channel offering which will eventually be available in every home.

BBC One needs to have a greater impact on people’s lives. It needs to be more modern, more in touch, more contemporary. It needs more programming that you simply cannot miss. While this may mean that some old faithfuls disappear and others move from the fringe of BBC One to peak time on BBC Two, it does not mean we are banishing all current affairs, documentaries, religion and arts to other channels. Far from it. But programming in these genres, just as in drama and entertainment, needs to more engaging, more exciting, more gripping if it is to be on BBC One.

Now all this is going to cost and we plan a major injection of cash. More than half of the extra money to be spent on the BBC overall will go on improving and modernising BBC One and Two, with most going onto BBC One. Next year alone BBC One’s budget will be increased by £95m and the year after by a further £55m, with a lot of this additional money to be spent on drama.

Let me move onto news. News is the cornerstone of public service broadcasting on the BBC and I think I can say with some confidence that the BBC is now Britain’s pre-eminent news supplier. Currently we have a 66% share of all network television news consumed in Britain. On BBC One we have created a highly successful news hour between six and seven with the BBC’s six o’clock national news convincingly beating the six thirty on ITN.

We now want to turn our attention to the mid evening slot. After a great deal of thought we have decided that we will move the BBC’s nine o’clock news to ten o’clock next year. Editorially we believe it is a better slot, after the US markets close and in time to report on Commons divisions, but the main reason for the move is that we believe that more people will watch it, it’s as simple as that. Ten is a more secure slot for the BBC’s main evening news in the digital world.

Currently in digital homes audience share for the nine o’clock news often falls below 10%. In the multi-channel world the nine o’clock slot, the start of the post watershed schedule, is a lot tougher than ten. The move to ten o’clock also gives us the opportunity to expand in an area which is increasingly under threat on ITV – regional news and regional programming.

Let me move onto BBC Two. This is a success story with the channel achieving a higher share of the audience now than it had ten years ago. But it is also a channel with a split personality. It’s the channel of the Open University at the same as being the channel of Gimme Gimme Gimme and The League of Gentlemen. In the long term we plan that BBC Two will increasingly focus on intelligent specialist factual programmes, our key leisure and lifestyle programmes, thoughtful analysis, creatively ambitious drama and comedy, and specialist sports.

That won’t be for some years, maybe not until analogue switch off. Until then BBC Two will continue to offer a rich and diverse range of programmes. It will still be the test bed for edgy comedy and entertainment aimed primarily at young audiences, some of which will graduate to BBC1. It will retain, of course, its wide ranging commitment to serious programmes of all kinds. It will also provide a peak time home for some of the programming which is currently shown late night on BBC One.

Now for the new channels. Imaginatively we’ve given them the working titles of BBC Three and BBC Four.

BBC Three will offer original British comedy, drama and music as well as providing arts, education and social action programming delivered in a way likely to be attractive to a young audience. We’ve also been piloting a very different sort of news bulletin that breaks many of the conventions of traditional news services.

I suspect in developing BBC Three we will need to break a lot more rules before we’re through. BBC Three will emerge out of BBC Choice but will have a significantly higher budget.

BBC Four will be very different. It will be unashamedly intellectual, a mixture of Radios 3 and 4 on television. It will be based around arts, challenging music, ideas and in-depth discussion. It will be serious in intent but unstuffy and contemporary. It will be a style of television which you can’t find anywhere else.

We know there’s a potential audience, the challenge is to attract it to the channel. I am also very keen for us to deliver a rolling breakfast time business news on BBC4. Just as interest in politics has waned in recent years interest in business has grown. I don’t think British television has yet caught up with that.

BBC4 will be developed out of BBC Knowledge. But again it will have a significantly higher budget. In all we plan to spend £130 million a year on BBC’s 3 and 4.

Our fifth channel will be News 24. It seems obvious to me that the world’s biggest news gatherer, the BBC, needs a 24 hour news service as part of its channel mix. Increasingly this is how the viewer will watch news and I believe it’s the BBC’s responsibility to provide news in the way people will want to receive it. We saw the value of News 24 when reporting the Concorde air crash in Paris. Instead of a news flash on BBC One, we simply switched to the News 24 service. That’s the first time that has happened, but it is the pattern for the future.

Finally we plan two new childrens’ services to be played in the daytime on the channels occupied by BBC3 and BBC4 in the evenings. One will be for pre-school children and the second for children aged between six and 13. These will have separate identities from BBC3 and BBC4 if only to enable them to be easily found in the children’s section of the electronic programme guide.

We have done preliminary research on our proposals for BBC3, BBC4 and the childrens’ channels and the response has been very positive. However we cannot go ahead with these without further consulting the public and then seeking the approval of the Secretary of State. We plan to do both this Autumn.

Finally we do plan to continue with BBC Parliament on the same basis as now, which means it will be fully available on digital satellite and cable but digital terrestrial homes will only receive an audio signal.

Together the channels will deliver the BBC’s core aims. All will carry predominantly British original productions. All will make a contribution towards achieving our educational goals which I regard as one of the principal aims of my period as Director-General. All will include a broad news and current affairs agenda, and all will carry challenging factual programmes. However over time each channel will develop its own personality and will increasingly be aimed at particular target audiences.

So is all this public service broadcasting? I believe it is. The BBC’s role in our society will always be complex – we’re the guardian of impartiality and political independence, we’re arguably the country’s most important cultural organisation, we’re a major player in the world of education, and increasingly we’re Britain’s leading global media player.

But in the digital era I believe the BBC’s single most important role will be to make possible the production of great British programmes. Our channel strategy is a means of achieving this – a way of commissioning, producing and broadcasting original British programmes of all kinds on a mix of channels which will make sense to audiences in the digital age. Over time the channels will inevitably change – perhaps in ways we can’t yet forsee – but the commitment to creating exciting British programmes will not.

Over the past forty years both the BBC and the commercial sector have contributed to building a vibrant British television production industry across a broad range of programming. However to repeat what I said earlier, and it bears repeating, the market is changing. I’ve talked about what this means for the BBC but it could have more dramatic consequences for commercial television.

Sitting here tonight, none of us can be sure that advertiser funded television will, in a decade’s time, be able to continue to play its part in funding and producing the full range of high quality television. Channel fragmentation alone will gradually erode the current revenue base of Britain’s commercial channels.

If in the commercial world you lose share year after year, in the end you either change your cost base dramatically or fall off the cliff. And when you combine channel fragmentation with the introduction of new technology which makes recording programmes and then skipping the ads very easy, the medium term economics of ITV, Channel Four and Channel Five start to look fragile.

In fact, according to recent research, two thirds of all viewing in TiVo homes in the USA is of recorded programming and nearly 90% of TiVO viewers spin through the ads. If advertiser funded television starts to struggle, the responsibility for the commissioning and production of British programming will fall increasingly to the BBC. This is why I believe the public service role of the BBC could well be far clearer in ten years time than it is today. To sum up then.

We’ve started our digital journey. We’ve changed the structure inside the BBC, we’re making considerably more money available for programming and we’ve got a coherent plan for our channels. But this alone is not enough. Making television is a creative process and if we really aspire to be the engine of a new era of great British production in all genres of programming we have to be able to attract the best talent to work with us, both inside and alongside the BBC.

This means creating inside the BBC an environment in which talented people can flourish.

So let me end by reminding you of my rather simple definition of the purpose of the BBC in the digital age. It is to make and commission great British programmes. Everything else is secondary.