NewsLine Column: BBC3 – How Was It For You?

Earlier this month the BBC’s new digital entertainment channel for young adults launched after a series of delays and setbacks. A number of strict conditions have been imposed to ensure that BBC3 remains distinct in an already crowded market, but Geoffrey Russell, director of media affairs at the IPA, discusses the wider implications of the £97 million launch.

For all those viewers who could raise the enthusiasm, BBC3 launched into the market the Sunday before last.

According to Jana Bennett, the BBC’s director of television, the network will “carry the BBC’s risk gene.” If so, she must be praying for advances in genetic engineering to lift what was a pretty uninspiring start to Auntie’s major bid to win over the youth market.

Of course, the Corporation has a huge amount riding on this new channel, not only in terms of helping to underwrite its licence fee, but in proving to the world in general and the Government in particular, that it can genuinely plough a new furrow which does not encroach on its commercial rivals.

From our side of things, we applauded Tessa Jowell’s decision to turn down the original BBC3 as not ‘distinctive’ enough from the offerings of Sky One and E4, just as we are now gratified by reports that Corporation executives will look to ‘reach’ versus ‘ratings’ when evaluating the success of the new set-up.

Bitter experience suggests, however, that such laudable objections in the bid to keep BBC3 on the hallowed path of public service broadcasting will suffer a severe battering if Greg Dyke decides that audiences so small that they fail to register on the radar of audience research, do not fit in with the more commercial goals he has set the Corporation since his arrival.

For whatever the press, and we, might think about this latest £97 million venture to be funded by the licence fee payer, it must not blind us from a number of important truths:

The Government sees the BBC as a key weapon in its armoury for driving audiences in the direction of digital television. (The Department of Culture Media and Sport must rue the day when Chris Smith laid down a target switch-off date of 2010). The BBC’s digital vision with its raft of radio and TV stations was not only the Corporation’s perceived lifeboat to the future, but also that of the Government’s broadcast policy. Equally, ministers will have breathed a sigh of relief when the BBC and BSkyB hammered out their Freeview initiative to preserve the option of digital terrestrial TV for those for whom either satellite reception was inadequate or pay-per-view stuck in the throat.

But the BBC is not naďve in these matters and its help and understanding will have been achieved at a price.

While virtually the entire world, or so it seems, has been pushing for the activities of the Corporation to be brought fully under Ofcom, the Government remains curiously deaf to such entreaties.

The single independent regulator set up to bring all broadcast media under one roof, to make sense of the ‘alphabet soup’ of its predecessors and bring light and stability to all, somehow misses Britain’s biggest broadcaster. The Corporation remains blissfully free to do largely what it wants, to cross promote across its multifarious platforms with bewildering frequency and to be its own judge and jury under the benign auspices of its Governors.

But what has this got to do with the BBC3? Well, it is true that the Government’s 12 key conditions for approving the channel have given it more power over a Corporation service than ever before. Equally, it is encouraging that the Secretary of State has suggested that there should be a thorough review in the future to assess what impact the new channel has had on the market.

But these are small, albeit welcome safeguards alongside the overall output of the Corporation.

The ultimate success of winning viewers to the digital format will need more powerful programming for BBC3 than the opening night’s offering – but this may come.

What is more worrying is that the Leviathan which created it is still free to bludgeon its way through the commercial sector elsewhere.

Alongside the antics of ‘Auntie’ the BBC3’s ‘Angry Kid’ is merely a pussy cat.

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