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The BBC is 100 but can the Big British Castle survive its own government?

Difficult Second Century Syndrome beckons for the UK public service broadcaster as it battles global rivals and enemies closer to home

The BBC, jokingly referred to as the Big British Castle, has boosted the UK's soft power. But for how long can it sustain this role? Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA Wire
The BBC, jokingly referred to as the Big British Castle, has boosted the UK's soft power. But for how long can it sustain this role? Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA Wire
Laura Slattery's picture
Laura Slattery
Tue Oct 18 2022 - 05:45

The BBC’s first century has not been shy of special moments.

People prone to recency bias might even put a shout in for its finest hour coming just the other morning, when Miriam Margolyes merrily told Radio 4′s Today show that when she saw new chancellor Jeremy Hunt in the studio “What I really wanted to say was: ‘F*** you’”.

If you asked someone in the 1920s to swoon over a single highlight from the fledgling BBC’s output, they might cite one of its first outside broadcasts in 1924, when cellist Beatrice Harrison persuaded the BBC’s first head honcho John Reith to air a garden solo accompanied by a nightingale.

Alas, the nightingale on this wildly popular milestone broadcast was only this year exposed — via a programme on the BBC — as a human bird impressionist hired as backup in case the nominated duettists failed to grasp the concept of live radio.

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Inform, educate and entertain, Reith said. And if you can’t do that, fake it.

Despite not being alive at the time, I can confidently say the greatest ever BBC moment actually came on Good Friday, April 18th, 1930, when its news announcer declared “There is no news” and listeners heard nothing but piano music for the remainder of the 15-minute slot. This is just impossible to beat.

But past heights do, seriously, represent a poisoned chalice for the BBC, which today reaches its 100th birthday burdened with an inescapable sense that its influence has peaked. How can it not have done? Indeed, as the Economist wagered the other day, “the broadcaster’s second century is unlikely to be as successful as its first”.

This is the sort of cautious prediction I respect.

A large part of the problem is that the BBC — or the Big British Castle, as erstwhile BBC 6 Music presenter Adam Buxton dubs it — has comprehensively thrived for most of its life to date. I won’t be around to see out its Difficult Second Century, but if the cryogenic pods I first saw on Doctor Who are invented soon and I somehow manage to wake up in 2122, I’ll doubtless still be haunted by the memory of a 1989 episode of Casualty in which a lorry overturned leaking industrial acid everywhere.

I learned a lot — possibly too much — from the BBC during my 1980s Dublin childhood. I learned about communism and sticky-backed plastic from Blue Peter, about Aids from an episode of Bergerac that won’t have aged well, that I should just say no to heroin from Grange Hill and that It’s ‘Orrible Being in Love (When You’re 8 ½) from Saturday Superstore.

I still have a copy of an official BBC reply to a letter I sent then children’s presenter Phillip Schofield in the pre-Dempsey’s Den summer of 1986. (”Don’t skip queues in 2022,” I warned him.)

Terrestrial BBC television once had first-mover advantage here. The first households in the Irish State to own television sets were tuned into its unnumbered service some years before Ulster Television (now UTV) arrived in 1959 and Telefís Éireann launched on new year’s eve 1961.

As far as the breadth and quality of programmes were concerned, the BBC provided an awkward point of comparison for the markedly less flush RTÉ for decades. But as the industry opened out into a multichannel digital paradise, its television audience share in the Republic collapsed to that of an also-ran. This September, for instance, TAM Ireland figures show BBC One had a mere 5.4 per cent share. BBC Two had 1.45 per cent and most of that is just me watching Cunk on Earth.

Today, the BBC is so bad at media colonialism, it won’t make its on-demand iPlayer available overseas — even though lots of people would pay for it — opting instead to rack up programme licensing sales. It has, to be fair, bankrolled several Irish-set, Irish-themed programmes from The Young Offenders to Normal People and it remains a beacon for ambitious Irish broadcasting talent. The gem that is the BBC Sounds app is eminently downloadable.

But it is Netflix and its streamer friends, including 99-year-old Disney, that set standards for younger viewers now, including those in the BBC’s own home market, worrying phalanxes of executives who can remember more dominant days and wonder how future finances will hold up amid the twin pressures of international competition and dwindling political support.

In the red-hot entertainment business, everything except Miriam Margolyes’s propensity for swearing is changing fast. The BBC is signing up to once unthinkable but now necessary commercial alliances with global rivals, extending its footprint but diluting its brand. Meanwhile, inflation means its current licence fee freeze is forcing it to make deep cuts to the BBC World Service, ceasing the production of radio in Persian, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi and six other languages and shedding almost 400 jobs. The domestic BBC News Channel, too, is being gutted.

Is the Big British Castle crumbling?

If the BBC, and the BBC World Service in particular, helped the UK profit from soft power, especially in the postwar decades when its economy was in the toilet and its empire shrinking, the question now is whether the broadcaster’s sway can sustain itself independently of its own government’s policies, which seem to hurt it at every turn.

The Conservatives have taken the UK out of the European Union and slashed its international aid budget. More meaningful trade deals are engineered on the market stalls of Walford than in the corridors of Westminster. It will be tough even for the BBC to counter the double disaster of isolationism and complacency and avoid falling into lockstep with the waning status of post-Brexit Britain.

“Whenever I come to London in the last three of four years, I have a feeling of great depression immediately [when] I arrive. I think the English are not facing up to reality ... that you are no longer a No 1 power.”

So said Irish fashion designer Sybil Connolly on BBC television in January 1957, duly sparking telegrams of complaint.

This Saturday, someone on Strictly Come Dancing will do a Viennese waltz to the theme music from Line of Duty and BBC One will be a glitzy and wonderful place for two hours. But beyond the dance floor, the cold reality of being 100 years old may soon dawn for the BBC. It can inform, educate and entertain only until the money runs out.

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