The radical shakeup just announced will lead to BBC schedules that increasingly resemble American television
Ever since broadcasting became established as a major industry, a version of the same debate has taken place at regular intervals, encouraged by economic recessions and technological advances. At issue is the point at which changes in the quantity and conditions of staff have a noticeable effect on what viewers and listeners receive.
The radical BBC re-organisation announced on Thursday under the rubric Delivering Quality First (DQF) ? a phrase recalling, in both its wording and optimistic spin on grim conditions, the slogans printed on party conference backdrops ? can already be predicted to trigger a bloody and public battle with the broadcasting unions over jobs and conditions. Audience recognition of, and reaction to, the changes will be slower but may ultimately be as profound.
Although this will be no consolation to those left uncertain about whether or where they will be in the BBC by 2016, the current convulsions are significantly different from those in the past. Traditionally, restructuring of the corporation has been driven by a reforming director general (John Birt remains the exemplar of this trend) with a radical new vision of how programmes should be produced or consumed.
In this case, though, the ideological pressure came predominantly from outside. DQF ? which, broadly, envisages fewer BBC staff, more of whom will be based in the north of England, producing reduced output ? is an emergency response first to the Blair government's determination to make the BBC more regionally diverse, and then to the Cameron-Clegg administration's decision to reduce brutally the licence fee in real terms.
However, the reforms encouraged at political gunpoint contain several dramatic reversals of prevailing beliefs in television. If enacted, they would amount to the biggest change in the experience of watching the BBC since digital multichannel expansion.
The first of these retreats is a rejection of the concept of TV as a 24-hour, constantly replenished presence. New daytime programmes will largely disappear from BBC2, with a greater proportion of repeats on that and other networks outside of peak time. This is a smart tactical move because ? given that the term "daytime TV" has become pejoratively associated with low-budget, low-intelligence products ? there seems unlikely to be a mass campaign, of the kind that preserved the radio station 6 Music, to save the post-lunch and pre-supper services. But this forced economy may also be a necessary recognition of the fact that the vast spaces of air time created by digital broadcasting often led to scheduling dictated by length rather than depth.
But a favourite game of populist newspapers is to tot up the repeats in a particular time period and howl that the BBC has ceased to be a superstore and become a junk stall. Now, though, this print-driven idea that new material is the norm and repeats an aberration will surely have to be rethought. At times of day and year, the BBC schedules will increasingly resemble American television, where there are so many repeats (in order to maximise franchises) that fresh episodes are excitedly touted as "all new!".
DQF's biggest experiment, however, rests on regionality. With a further thousand jobs being shunted north to join the already large production base developing there, the BBC will by 2016 be ? at least by the measure of employee headcounts ? the least London-centric it has ever been.
The biggest victims of this will be BBC employees in the smoke who are unable to relocate their families or (like some senior executives) to gain agreement to commute; the winners, at least theoretically, will be viewers who receive a fuller picture of the UK. As often in broadcasting reforms, though, this decision is potentially compromised by another one: the simultaneous suggestion that some local programming may be cut to save money.
And problematically, the question of the relationship between the postcode in which a show is made and its content and reception is as recurrent a conundrum as the one about the connection between staff numbers and quality of output. ITV's greatest ever company ? Granada ? made in Manchester shows (The Jewel in the Crown, Brideshead Revisited) that had national and international appeal, with only a small part of the output (notably Coronation Street) being regional in both subject matter and production.
There is a strong suspicion, though, that the political architects of the blueprint for a more northern BBC envisage shows that declare their origins in sound and look ? because an invisible revolution in the location of BBC staff would have no political advantage.
This question is a good metaphor for the tension over these reforms. Many BBC staff will be affected very painfully and personally. The BBC director general, Mark Thompson, seems dedicated to keeping the impact on the viewers and listeners to a minimum. But his Whitehall masters seem keen that the audience (especially in the area of regionality) should notice what is going on. The document released on Thursday raises rather than resolves these paradoxes.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/06/bbc-biggest-change-american-schedules
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