Déjà vu all over again for BBC Worldwide
Raymond Snoddy on BBC Worldwide maintaining the status quo and rocking all over the world.
Everything to do with BBC Worldwide ends up with a sense of déjà vu – all over again.
Today’s Financial Times (Wednesday) reveals that the BBC has been in early stage discussions with Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse about the possibility of floating at least part of its commercial arm.
Naturally the BBC says there are no plans for either a partial or a total float and that no such talks have been taking place. But there again culture secretary Ben Bradshaw has asked the BBC to look at the possibility of at least a partial sale. And Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust has said he has an “open mind” on matters such as floats and ownership.
It is all so very familiar and has been going round in an open loop for at least five years.
In 2004 it was the Financial Times which claimed that the BBC had in effect offered Worldwide for sale to a number of media giants such as Time Warner, Disney and Bertelsmann.
The BBC rather grumpily said everything was under consideration from retaining the status quo all the way to an outright sale and said it had been talking to a much wider range of companies.
“We’re consulting. That’s not putting the business up for sale,” said a careful BBC spokesman.
The fact that all the same elements – from status quo all the way to sale or flotation – have been rattling around for years in the Corporation and the corridors of Government suggests both horrendous complexity and unresolved issues about what Worldwide is actually for and what it is meant to do.
Here too there have been familiar cycles. There has been the hot to trot, straight expansionist periods when the role of Worldwide has been to maximise profits so that the greatest amount can be ploughed back into the BBC to relieve pressure on the licence fee.
This leads to pressure building from the private sector to limit the activities of Worldwide and then suddenly we enter a cooling phase of the sort indicated by Sir Michael yesterday (Tuesday). Now it’s time to put on the brakes and make sure rampant expansionism comes to an end.
There will be no further expansion – except of course for the biggest one of all, the possible acquisition of the 50% of UKTV the BBC doesn’t already own, from Virgin Media.
That’s an exception. And although there will be no more acquisitions on the scale of the Lonely Planet equally there are absolutely no plans to sell the business.
It’s virtually impossible to have any rational thoughts about the future structure of Worldwide until it is first decided what its purpose is supposed to be and there seems to be little agreement on that, which is why the cycle keeps turning.
It would be entirely possible to sell with conditions or even outsource the operation under licence. At least one former chief executive of Worldwide believes the BBC would actually receive more money if the business were run for profit in such a way. How the BBC’s name was used could be protected by legal agreement.
When in doubt it is always useful to come up with a three-year plan as Sir Michael did yesterday. By definition you have given yourself a useful breathing space because in all fairness you can’t judge the outcome until the end.
If a three-year plan is good, perhaps a five-year plan would have been more efficacious.
Naturally the BBC line is that although we are going to sell some assets we can’t actually tell you what they are because that would hit the price.
But what exactly is the BBC doing in a joint venture with Hello magazine in India anyway and surely BBC magazine production should be more closely aligned with BBC programmes.
Some perfectly sensible things have been said this week – that what Worldwide does should be consistent with the BBC’s public purposes and that two thirds of the loot should come from abroad to limit the furore at home.
That’s all fine as far as it goes but it remains a very vague, ill-defined prospectus and t also sounds very familiar.
Talks are said to be still continuing with Channel 4 and a deal is more than possible. That too sounds familiar.
The only real change could come as a result of the political dimension. The current government has no time to do anything. Any incoming Conservative government will only be interested if it has a clear working majority and can do what it likes.
Best guess at the moment would have to be that in another five years the FT will have another dramatic front page story that the BBC has been talking to merchant banks about the possibility of a float. By then it might even be true.
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