Broadcasters in the crosshairs

The BBC’s remake of Are You Being Served?

Have traditional broadcasters really hit a stale patch, stifled by a love for nostalgia and a reluctance to innovate? Raymond Snoddy dissects the latest in a series of assaults on television

In the television world August seems to be the month for soul-searching, navel-gazing, slaying sacred cows and sketching the future that should be.

The cataclysmic cacophony of charges against the television industry this time range from ignoring the young at the expense of the old, dipping into the past in a easy reach for former hits particularly in comedy, being risk averse, stale, failing – just failing.

Just look at all the splendid, edgy creative stuff that Netflix produces and they don’t even seem to care about ratings – or at least appear not to.

August is the month for self-flagellation rather than New Year or Lent partly because of the Edinburgh Television Festival, but not entirely.

One of the traditions at Edinburgh is that when in doubt about who to choose to give the MacTaggart lecture, which kicks the whole thing off, you choose a really rude person to lambaste everything the industry stands for. The MacTaggart lecturers who are nice, fulsome and praising are usually looking for a new job.

Years ago Rupert Murdoch went on the attack against public service broadcasting and all its sterile costume drama (and by the way the BBC should be much smaller so that Sky and I can grow more and make even more profit).

Son James later reprised the performance with an additional twist that the only really honest news came from the private sector and the profit motive – not long before the News of the World scandal dynamited the foundations of his argument.

Shane Smith, founder of Vice, who wants to be bigger than Rupert Murdoch and almost everyone else, was well up there in the rude MacTaggart category. He flailed the hapless broadcasters for their inability to make programmes that attract and reflect the interest of the youth of the world. News designed to attract the young was “a huge white space”.

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The best response came from ITV’s director of television Kevin Lygo when asked whether Smith was a genuine disruptor or was it a case of the emperor’s new clothes.

Lygo said he was “trying not to use the word odious” – without obviously trying all that hard.

We will get a better chance to judge Smith’s deeds rather than his abuse when his new television channel launches in the UK next month.

The young have different interests but it is far from clear that they should always be herded into rigid categories. Many of them watch the same sort of programmes as everyone else, such as The Great British Bake Off. And anyway, the absolute tests do not change.

In any category the question is: are the programmes any good or not, irrespective of age, category or gender?

As he moves to television, as well as expanding online, Smith is surely right about the BBC – that the decision to take BBC 3 online-only was a mistake. It has cost the Corporation a 20 per cent drop in youth viewing, an audience that has been gratefully lapped up by rivals.

The charge against broadcasters’ record on comedy from comedian Frankie Boyle seems to rest on firmer ground – that broadcasters are unwilling to take risks and instead search for retreads.

If Mrs Brown’s Boys is a hit, let’s try and find something similar, complained Boyle.

Everything is family-friendly and safe.

In short, a stale patch?

The BBC has certainly presented Boyle with a bit of an open goal with its ‘landmark’ Comedy series featuring remakes of sitcoms such as Porridge, Are You Being Served? and Goodnight Sweetheart.

At least they involve considerably more energy than merely running repeats of the original.

Perhaps the most telling August attack on traditional broadcasters such as the BBC didn’t come from Edinburgh, or from an outsider, but from Jane Lush, chairman of Bafta, in the Radio Times.

Lush attacked her former employer the BBC with gusto for creating “a tsunami of nostalgia” that recycles old programmes rather than creating original new ones, naturally citing “backwards looking commissioning” such as Are You Being Served?

Ms Lush, the former head of daytime television at the BBC, claimed that Big Brother was the last truly original entertainment format and ITV was creative when it ran Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? every night.

She is right to claim that broadcasters have to risk the pain of failure to achieve anything original.

Maybe, but Ms Lush goes a little off the rails when she praises Amazon and Netflix for freeing themselves from the tyranny of ratings and therefore free to experiment and take risks.

Of course they can. Amazon Prime’s principal product is next day delivery of parcels with telly thrown in on the side. They don’t have to chase ratings.

Netflix founder Reed Hastings insisted in a London interview that he doesn’t care about ratings although for someone who doesn’t care he is very reluctant to say what they actually are.

He runs a subscription business and the only thing he really cares about is the number of people paying each month.

For ITV and Channel 4, to a slightly lesser extent, their business is attracting eyeballs and they would be daft to ignore that necessary truth.

Because it is funded by a universal licence fee, the BBC cannot allow its ratings to sink too far without undermining its purpose and ultimately its existence.

Jane Lush is right, however, that a little more risk-taking wouldn’t go amiss and it’s only television after all.

The biggest risk of all is being faced by Hastings of Netflix who is investing $6 billion (£4.6 million) in original content this year, in the hope of driving subscriptions ever upward.

Hastings made it clear he believes as long as he continues spending the subscriber numbers will continue to grow. Perhaps.

In the last quarter Netflix added only 160,000 subs in the US and 1.52 million internationally compared with a forecast of 500,000 and 2 million respectively.

Only one quarter Hastings insists.

And even Netflix doesn’t do edgy all the time. There’s even more than a touch of nostalgia and backward looking commissioning about its latest effort Crown – a £100 million, multiple-part series on Elizabeth II.