The BBC’s biggest problem

As I write this, the director-general of the BBC is being quizzed on the corporation’s future by people who were around when Sir John Reith kind of set the whole thing up. A cheap crack, I know – and I have nothing against the House of Lords. Anything which mediates our dangerous experiment with democracy is to be welcomed – the peers, the royals, the judges etc. I have been dipping in and out of the event and have yet to hear Tim Davie asked if he plans to bring back It’s That Man Again or whether or not the injunction ‘sod off’ is suitable for post-watershed viewing. If only they would ask this kind of thing, in a way – the crisis is rather more existential today.

Davie has a lot on his plate, not least the fact that when he took up the job he seemed to accept Auntie dressed to the left and in the intervening 34 months she has swung even further in that direction. More pressing, of course, are his troubles with Huw Edwards, who has been accused of paying a person much younger than himself large sums of money so he might gaze in awe at their resplendent nakedness. In the moronosphere of the internet, the left has decided that even if these allegations are correct, Huw has not broken the law so there is no case to answer.

This is a bizarre stance to hear parroted by people who spend half of their lives demanding that right-wingers should be sacked from any positions they hold because of their unpalatable opinions. I assume they would be every bit as protective of the presenter were he called Piers Morgan or Andrew Neil. Surely the truth is that if you are a social conservative you would find Huw’s behaviour – if the allegations are true – a bit, y’know, off colour. But if you were a leftie you would definitely be appalled at the exploitation for sexual satisfaction (one assumes) of the voiceless and powerless. Either way, the question of illegality does not even arise. It is a chimera, introduced by idiots to make the Sun look bad, when all the newspaper did was bring to our attention an astonishing lack of concern shown by the BBC towards parents who had lodged a serious complaint.

Huw, though, is a temporary distraction from the main issue, which is whether or not the BBC should exist at all in its present form. The news for Davie here is unremittingly grim. The number of people who pay the statutory licence fee dropped by 700,000 in 2021, 300,000 the following year and another 500,000 this year. Audience figures for Radio 4 fell by 1.2 million year on year, after a previous decline in September 2022, while BBC Scotland’s audience figures dropped by 38 per cent between 2020 and 2022. One of BBC Scotland’s flagship programmes, The Nine, averaged an audience of 12,000 – compared with independent rival STV’s News at Six, which brought in 321,000. Then there’s Newsnight, which in the first years of the present century had audiences approaching one million and now struggles by on about one third of that. Similarly, Question Time has seen its viewing figures almost halve since the pandemic.

I have little doubt that the BBC’s unceasing wokeish bias is exacerbating the national stampede for the off switch. As I’ve mentioned here countless times, Radio 4 has become almost unlistenable, with only the science shows and very occasional bits of imaginative programming (such as Sliced Bread) being exempt from the network’s unceasing obsessions over race and gender. It seems that every drama commissioned by Radio 4 must have its resentment angle (usually race), and this weird, almost psychotic mindset is replicated in programmes such as Front Row, The Food Programme and the embittered whinge-fest of Woman’s Hour. The cliché has it – go woke, go broke. The station is no longer run for the entertainment and edification of its listeners; it is there instead to hector the oppressive white bastards who are stupid enough to continue listening to it.

You wonder how on earth they cannot see this, given the plummeting audiences – and the probable answer is that they can and don’t give a toss. That is the problem with which Tim Davie must grapple: a workforce whose doctrinaire views are deeply at odds with the majority of people who pay their licence fees. The problem is only a little less acute on BBC1, which seems determined to genuflect before any and every social justice warrior’s complaint.

Still, wokeism is not the main cause of the BBC’s declining audiences, merely a contributory factor. The real force driving people away from the BBC is the extraordinary change in the marketplace and the profusion of channels from which we can pick and choose what we want to watch and when we want to watch it. Those audience figures I quoted above, together with the declining proportion of us who are prepared to pay the licence fee, are evidence of a rapid and unstoppable decline – which is why the BBC should cash in its chips right now, with a captive audience which still exceeds 20 million, and shepherd itself towards being a quality subscription channel, with 24-hour national news, local news, drama productions, radio and online service. If it did so, it would be operating in an arena where it still has an awful lot of public loyalty and could be a cheaper yearly option than Netflix (and much, much cheaper than a Sky subscription). The alternative is to allow the decay to progress until there is scarcely anything worth saving.

Nobody with any authority, however, is prepared to bite that bullet, any more than they are able to look at our other much-loved but moribund national institution, the NHS, and decide that it has outlived its usefulness. We cling to these immense bureaucracies not because we value them now, but because we loved what they once were.