The BBC’s spring and summer schedule, released yesterday, signals the Corporation’s capitulation in the battle with ITV for high ratings. Perhaps the recent strong performance of ITV during peak time (see Goldeneye Nets 52% Share For ITV), since the Network dropped the News At Ten, has led the BBC to rethink its position in the nation’s viewing habits.
The £320 million season of programmes is heavy on documentary, science and drama and light on light entertainment, game shows and the surely-exhausted docu-soap format. The BBC’s director of television, Alan Yentob, is keen to rekindle the Corporation’s public service ethos in the face of ITV’s more populist approach:
“Today, in television, to be popular is good, but it isn’t good enough. The challenge is far more complex. The BBC needs to thicken the plot – to cross the threshold of people’s lives and engage with them on new levels and in new ways,” he says.
In order to do this, the BBC has commissioned an adaptation of Great Expectations by Tony Marchant, two psychological thrillers – The Dark Room and the The Cyclist – and an investigation by professor Robert Winston into the world of identical twins.
The only game show listed in the schedule’s highlights, Families At War, comes from Reeves & Mortimer – a pair unlikely to bring in the weighty audience figures of Chris Tarrant’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? over on ITV. There is also shamelessly high-brow programming in a series on thinkers and philosophers Nietzsche, Heidegger and Satre.
The BBC channels’ events coverage is to include a live broadcast of the solar eclipse on 11 August, coverage of Glastonbury and the Proms and matches from the Cricket World Cup.
This schedule marks a change of approach by the BBC, the catalyst to which was ITV’s decision to move the News At Ten thus freeing up the Network’s peaktime schedule. The recent (but well overdue) axing of the long-standing Noel’s House Party from BBC1’s Saturday nights is telling of this new approach.
However, whilst the BBC has stressed that it is not in the business of pandering to the greatest audience share, a significant move away from ‘the lowest common denominator’ programming could see the Beeb’s viewing figures falling to a critical point: the point at which its funders, the licence fee payers, question their willingness to cough up the cash.
Reviewer: Scott Billings
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