Stuart Pinfold

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Today, the BBC costs £0.000824133220101170000 per hour.

15 September 2008 at 01:42

A reminder, should it be required, that I am - as always - speaking personally, and the words I express here may not reflect the views or opinions of my employers.

TV Licence critics always have two themes in their arguments. Take the first two lines from this post on the MoneySavingExpert forums discussing Noel Edmonds' refusal to pay his TV licence:

"Watched Noel Edmunds [sic] interview earlier today, and it gets me thinking! Do I really care if there are adverts between programs [sic]?"

Edmonds' gripe isn't necessarily about the cost of the licence fee, but of the 'scare tactics' used to advertise enforcement techniques. However, there are plenty of others complaining about the 'high cost' or 'low value' of the fee - and these almost always follow the themes of "Television" and "Adverts".

"Television"
The "Television" argument goes along the lines of "Why should I pay £139.50 per year for EastEnders and endless reality shows which I never watch?". My own non-scientific study of programmes across the 4 main terrestrial channels for today (15th September 2008) shows that the BBC showed more news/current affairs, sport, children's and game shows than ITV1 and Channel 4 combined:

While it's true that, looking at single channel figures, both BBC1 and BBC2 showed more programmes which I categorised as "Reality/Property/Food" than either of its commercial rivals, the type of programmes differed: BBC programmes in this category includes Antiques Roadshow and What To Eat Now, while on the commercial side it includes Jeremy Kyle and Come Dine With Me. Of course, this is non-scientific, and to get a true idea of the scales, this should be done over an entire 7 days of programming... anyone want to volunteer? ;)

>> See the full figures (Excel document)

Either way, the figures show that the BBC shows a lot more varied programming across the day - exactly as its charter says it should. The licence fee is non-discriminatory; students, widows, parents, the unemployed all have to pay the fee - and they have the right to expect programming which is of interest to them. For this reason, the argument to scrap all but BBC1 and Radio 4 is non-sensical.

Another variation on the "Television" theme is getting into the trap of linking the "TV licence" explicitly with what comes out of the box in the corner of the lounge. Admittedly, this is partly the fault of the name - but the licence funds the whole of the BBC, not just television.

Radio, the website, television, engineering, archives, staff and pensions, buildings and property, insurance, travel - it all comes out of the licence funds. So when I hear people shouting "I don't watch anything on BBC television!" I get annoyed - do they really never look at bbc.co.uk, never listen to any of the 10 national, 6 regional or 40 local BBC local radio stations, have the travel RDS function turned off in their car, never read a BBC magazine, never watch archive programmes on UKTV or other non-BBC digital tv channels, never use iPlayer?

Well, they do:

"Well I was about to agree that I don't watch much on BBC, then I realised Strictly come dancing starts next week, and the spin off it Takes Two, both of which I watch avidly. And I also watch Newsnight and liten [sic] to 5live."

In fact, even including the soon-to-be-launched BBC Alba in Scotland, BBC network and digital television accounts for 153 hours of programming every day, while network, digital and regional radio overshadow that amount at 310.75 hours a day - and that's excluding the 40 local radio stations.

So, how much is the licence fee really worth? £139.50 a year, £11.63 a month, 38p per day, and - excluding local radio, bbc.co.uk, the iPlayer, interactive tv and the countless other services provided by the BBC, your licence fee is worth £0.000824133220101170000 per hour of network/digital programming produced. Still seem expensive?

>> See the full figures (Excel document)

"Adverts"
The second argument is the "Adverts" theme. They say that the only draw-back to not having to pay the licence fee is that the BBC would have a few advert breaks for every hour of programming. It may be that simple from the listener and viewers' point of view, but not from the industry's viewpoint.

If advertising were to start on the BBC programming, two things would happen.

The first would be that many, many smaller - and some larger - tv and radio channels would close down pretty much overnight. More advertising opportunities doesn't mean more advertising revenue. If your company wants to advertise, they don't have the money for two advertising campaigns, so they choose the one with the better impact. Following this logic, a company advertise wouldn't advertise on Local Station Y when they could advertise on BBC Station Z instead, with a larger audience and stronger brand association. Community radio stations would be gone, niche digital tv channels would disappear, and even mammoths like ITV would suffer with the same amount of advertising revenue potentially being moved to its competitors.

The second thing is that impartiality would decrease. We can argue until the dinosaurs come home about how impartial the BBC is - but the fact remains that, if Ryanair is paying you to make them look good through them advertising with you, do you cover the story of 3 recent Ryanair incidents in the last three weeks in your news? Is this why ITV news didn't cover the story of Barclays pulling out of talks to buy Lehman Brothers on Sunday evening?

Conclusion
Of course, the BBC is not perfect, and I know that a little blog like mine is not going to encourage thousands of licence-fee haters to suddenly realise the value of having good-quality, public-funded, public-service broadcasting. The BBC needs to do more shouting about how good it is - it started a few years ago with the "This Is What We Do" trailer campaign.

The films showed what it takes to get programming on-the-air, and - I believe - went some way to encouraging people to think of the bigger picture - news programmes don't just consist of what we see on-screen: a presenter and a few reporters. It requires camera operators, teams of journalists phone-bashing behind-the-scenes, producers writing scripts, engineers operating and maintaining studios, weather screens, microphones, satellite links... the list goes on.

But imagine a world where public-funded broadcasting in the UK didn't exist. ITV have already pulled all children's programming, as evidenced by the big fat 0 in the figures above. They are trying to lobby OFCOM to release them further from other public-service comittments, particularly news.

With the BBC broken up, what would happen to the BBC's 50+ national, regional and local radio stations? Who would be willing to finance a 24-hour news radio station to replace 5Live? Indeed, would anyone step in to launch a 24-hours news channel, or would we be left with the sole 24h news provider being Sky News - which isn't even broadcast on Virgin Media?

Now may be time to re-think the BBC's priorities and to re-assess the licence fee. But getting rid of all altogether or making it voluntary just isn't an option.

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