Public enemy number 1: The BBC Trust

The closure of BBC Three as a broadcast channel sets a dangerous precedent as the BBC Trust will soon find out…if it survives long enough, writes Raymond Snoddy.

You would think that the BBC Trust already has enemies enough – without seeking to attract any more.

It just has.

Even the normally mild-mannered Voice of the Listener and Viewer, usually endlessly supportive of the BBC, “deeply regrets” the Trust’s “provisional” decision to shut BBC Three as a broadcast channel. That is strong language for the VLV.

The Trust, which is probably going to be closed down by the Government anyway, faced two major decisions, the first of any substance under the chairmanship of Rona Fairhead.

One was to approve BBC management plans to turn BBC Three into an online-only service and the other to give the go-ahead for an alternative BBC One +1 service.

Somehow they managed to get both decisions wrong – although it would be hard to do both because of the small matter of shared spectrum.

The closure of BBC Three as a broadcast channel sets a dangerous precedent as the BBC Trust will soon find out if it survives long enough. Will BBC 4 – one of the best things the BBC does – be far behind as the squeeze on BBC finances rolls endlessly into the future?

The Trust is “provisionally” allowing the closure of a service that reaches an average 11.2 million people a week with 925,000 of them using no other BBC service. Up to 80 per cent of that 925,000 could be lost entirely to the BBC, the Trust happily accepts.

According to its own analysis, the Corporation’s reach among 16-24-year-olds could fall by 3 per cent with up to a 5 per cent loss among black audiences and women in low wealth households.

They just happen to encompass the three groups in society most under-served by the BBC and who must be reached more effectively if you are going to continue justifying a universally imposed licence fee.

The number of viewers lost will almost certainly turn out to be an underestimate if, or really when, BBC Three slips off into the limitless competition of the internet.

The reasons the BBC Trust gives for its “finely balanced” decision are revealing.

The Trust is required to carry out public value tests on any significant BBC change of direction and found that the value of the BBC Three proposals were at best “low to medium”.

Presumably they only made it up to a possible medium with the accompanying extension of hours for the excellent CBBC.

Another factor stirred into the assessment was cost pressures, something that no-one can deny, although the Trust might have done more to insist that levels of bureaucracy be further reduced at the Corporation.

There is also the small matter that the Trust has suggested the new online service and the broadcast BBC Three are to be run in tandem for an unspecified period. It might be considered a reasonable compromise but it certainly is a curious way of relieving financial pressure on the BBC.

The key argument is the one that is most flawed.

“Online is the way of the future,” Rona pontificated vaguely.

Up to a point, Rona.

It is certainly true that more people are watching video more often online but it is still a small proportion of the whole and usually as a supplement to broadcast television. How long before such a future actually arrives, if it does at all, in that particular form?

Broadcasting from transmitters on hills – and even more significantly from satellites orbiting the earth – are unlikely to disappear any time soon and the rather vacuous argument that “online is the future” is a rather poor way of justifying the ditching of a broadcast channel.

Last year one of the smartest executives in broadcasting, Philippe Dauman, chief executive of Viacom, paid £450 million for Channel 5 in the UK. He could have launched an online service, couldn’t he? Curiously a hard-nosed businessman decided what he most wanted was a terrestrial channel.

Trustee Richard Ayre added to the mayhem by describing the move online as “a liberating opportunity” which could produce new types of programming not restricted to 28 minutes.

We will let pass the fact that BBC Three is not an advertising-funded channel and therefore it is already liberated enough to produce programmes of whatever length it wants.

The main thing that will be liberated will be the BBC Three audience which will find its entertainment elsewhere in the arms of the BBC’s competitors.

Having got its big decision wrong on BBC Three, the BBC Trust then compounded its error by making the wrong choice on its successor.

For years broadcasters around the world have offered “plus one hour” services, including ITV and Channel 4.

It is misleading to see them as repeat channels although there is little wrong with that concept either.

It would be a perfectly reasonable for the BBC to offer its audience, its licence-payers, another more convenient time to see the programmes they have already paid for and opportunistic for commercial broadcasters to claim it is a ratings-grabbing manoeuvre.

For the Trust to say it lacks “distinctiveness” is risible. Its distinctiveness lies in the quality of the programmes being broadcast and another opportunity to see them.

After all, not everyone has a PVR or remembers to set it or wants to wait for catch-up services. The complaint against the BBC should be that it has not offered such a channel before and even now made it dependent on the loss of BBC Three.

It is easy to be cynical about the “provisional” nature of the decision. First there is the period of consultations, then the original decision will be rubber-stamped. This will ignore hundreds of producers, actors and writers who see BBC Three as a broadcast test-bed for new ideas and the Voice of the Listener and Viewer.

This smells of a botched, piecemeal decision at a time when much larger decisions have to be taken about the future of the BBC.

The decision on BBC Three and what to do with what would be vacant spectrum should not merely be pushed forward until the autumn but postponed indefinitely until the overall purpose, structure and financing of the BBC has been finally been clarified.

BBC Three’s future should be considered as part of that overall reality rather than being lost amid waffle about the future being online.