By Laurence Lee, director of media
This is just a personal view on the BBC cuts announced today and doesn’t represent any opinion of Porter Novelli other than mine. But I’m saying it anyway as someone who worked at the Beeb for 10 years and who left in disillusionment at the lack of direction and mucking about with the system that John Birt undertook (eg if you were working in Birmingham and wanted to hire a CD from the music library in London they would charge you 20 quid – cheaper to go and buy it. Absurd).
After Greg Dyke showed such signs of promise we’ve now had the spectacle of the BBC first swamping everybody else’s market with public money and now, suddenly, and with an eye on the elections and historic budget deficits, trying to rein it in sufficiently as to ensure they can remain publicly funded and not have to get their hands dirty with – perish the thought – the private sector.
The problem is that they’ve now got so many fingers in so many pies that they can’t make decisions as to what to keep and what to lose without being accused of double standards. Why cut the Asian network, for instance? It’s a true public service that the commercial sector would really struggle to provide. Why not lose BBC 3, or Radio 1, which are precisely the kind of things that others can do, and already do, just as well.
There’s a large part of me that agrees with James Murdoch that the way in which the BBC swamped the internet with its news sites may in part have caused the great decline in commercial local news – why pay for it when you can get it for free – and there are still dozens of jobs advertised in the BBC magazine which sound like something out of Stalinist Russia.
I just don’t think it’s that difficult. It’s a bit like the banks in one way – what is their core purpose in life? With banks it’s to serve customers and to keep their money safe, not muck about in derivatives markets. With the BBC, it’s to make TV and radio programmes which are IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST and which add something to the sum of human knowledge and the gaiety of the nation. Back to basics, please. Lose the lowest common denominator stuff and keep the quality. After all, it’s not as though they have advertisers to please, like the rest of the media.
Laurence Lee