When the contents of the BBC’s Strategic Review were announced, the internets were very congested with passionate calls about how to #save6music. I, and a few others, were more concerned with the fact that one of our national treasures seemed set on ensuring its own future irrelevance by ‘strategically’ conflating ‘content’ with ‘television;’ specifically ceasing to make ‘websites’ that have nothing to do with ‘programmes.’
My own view is this is directly analogous to a 1929 BBC seeing the new-fangled television as no more than radio with pictures, and choosing to make no TV that didn’t support programmes — that is, radio programmes. Of all the proposals in the review, the BBC’s executive telecentrism will eventually have the greatest national impact on public service content. It will profoundly damage creative exploration in and provision of interactive media, built for its platform, that does not treat us all as venues for commercial exploitation. I’ll explain one important reason why shortly.
The BBC’s own Public Purposes, stated in its own charter are as follows:
(a) sustaining citizenship and civil society;
(b) promoting education and learning;
(c) stimulating creativity and cultural excellence;
(d) representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities;
2(e) bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK;
(f) in promoting its other purposes, helping to deliver to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services and, in addition, taking a leading role in the switchover to digital television.
… all of which bellow for investment in network internet content, which will increasingly, inevitably, ineluctably do a better job of achieving these purposes than TV, whether broadcast or on-demand. The BBC may have decided that Channel 4 and other institutions should be left to use the internet to achieve these aims — Channel 4 Education and TheyWorkForYou.com are examples where this is happening, and without a direct public levy, too. If this is the case it is not stated in any language in the Review. Rather “the Internet” is again and again stated to be core to the future of the way the BBC reaches its audiences — but only if the output of the BBC is restricted to linear programming and the internet is a new pipe for this linear programming.
Given this focus from an executive of Somethin’ Else it may therefore surprise that the proposed closure of 6 Music will harm us more than any other independent content provider — we are a truly cross-platform business, and are the largest independent supplier of ‘stuff’ to 6 Music. We currently make, with passion and pride, four radio shows:
- Richard Bacon
- 6 Mix
- Dave Pearce
- The Music Week
and we also supply the network with a good deal of its independently made video.
Many believe the Review is in some way way a prophylactic anticipation of how a future government may balance the interests of the BBC and Rupert Murdoch et al. They may note the BBC is proposing to close a network the commercial sector will never replicate, and in doing so will damage small creative companies in the UK — this one in particular — that balance a commercial imperative with a love of public service content. This will happen in favour of large, mainly foreign-owned companies who see public service content as damage to their business plans.
We can have no comment on the BBC’s motives or thinking — but do believe the proposed retreat from creative internet content isn’t just a retreat from the imaginative and far-sighted interpretation of the BBC’s chartered public purposes. It’s 6 Music writ large — a direct commercial issue for Somethin’ Else and for dozens of companies that could be creating the future of content with public value: exploring how the internet can be used for new creative horizons; creating a generation of content creators better placed to make the UK world leaders in a medium that is already commercially more significant than television globally.
We regret the contents of the BBC Strategic Review, and urge the Trust to reconsider its contents.
