Our unique television culture needs friends in high places

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/08/british-tv-channels-need-friends-in-government

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We take it for granted that a TV series as remarkable as Wolf Hall, with its inspirational acting and astonishing portrayal of Tudor England, should be on our screens. Only last summer, the BBC’s no less extraordinary The Honourable Woman held us spellbound. ITV’s still compulsive Downton Abbey meets, in its own way, high standards.

Want a change of tempo? There could be a revelatory documentary series as good as Educating Yorkshire, while Channel 4 News offers a hard-hitting take on the day’s events. Laugh with the offbeat The Wrong Mans. Watch, bewildered, as the nation succumbs to The Great British Bake Off or wonder at your daughters and nieces partying while watching the final of Strictly. And on Saturday night, BBC4 will treat you to TV noir from Europe.

In any week, British television serves up a feast. It is great for everyone, and if you are infirm, ill or old, it is a lifeline. Except if you are a Conservative activist, commentator or backbench MP. They stare glumly at British television in the hands of an allegedly liberal, well-paid mafia undermining the moral fibre of the country, abusing the “poll tax” of the licence fee unashamedly to advance a liberal worldview and consistently airing the grievances and stories of enemies of the Conservative party. The BBC may be admired, even loved, by most of the British and regarded with amazement by the rest of the world – but in Tory circles it is hated.

Nor is there much regard for the other public service broadcasters – ITV and Channel 4 – who, together with the BBC, make up the unique ecology that brings such brilliant TV. The whole lot should be dismantled, sold off and humbled. British broadcasters must now take their chance in the global marketplace where new technologies are transforming the rules: the regulatory protections scrapped and owners found who will be as Tory-friendly as the press proprietors. It is Tory doctrine anyway that ownership does not matter as long as it is private and the unalloyed market must rule everywhere. Television should live and die by the same sword.

This has been the Conservative agenda for a generation. The privatisation of Channel 4 was first floated in the 1990s but the Major government did not have a secure enough majority to pull it off. George Osborne revived the proposition last year but it was firmly vetoed by business secretary Vince Cable.

Replacing the BBC’s licence fee in some way has been consistently aired since the late 1980s. The Conservatives have not had the parliamentary majority since 1992 to pull that off either. Which is one more reason why this year’s election is so important. Nobody knew that after the last election the Conservative party would unveil its radical plan to reorganise the NHS, so that essentially it would no longer be a health provider but a health commissioner. Equally nobody knows that, post-2015, the Conservatives intend to dismantle the public service broadcasting system. Enter the world that Bruce Springsteen sung about so memorably – 57 channels and nothing on.

The first easy target will be the privatisation of Channel 4. The Treasury and Department for Culture, Media and Sport have well-developed plans for immediate use. The channel is to be privatised not as a public benefit corporation but as a straightforward PLC along the lines of the Royal Mail. It will be “ freed” from all but residual public service obligations. Regulator Ofcom will be simultaneously “slimmed down” and its regulatory ambit curbed, as David Cameron suggested in the run-up to the last election.

This should ensure the sale proceeds are well in excess of a billion pounds. The channel will be transiently owned by the global asset management companies and investment banks who will inevitably buy the majority of shares on flotation. They will, no less inevitably, sell them in the ensuing battle between global media giants to buy the channel. This will brutally end what will have been a very short-lived independence. Its job then will be to commission programmes that can be sold globally. No more “self-indulgent” documentaries or original drama and comedy.

The Ofcom “reforms” will make the takeover of ITV even more likely, freeing any potential buyer from public service obligations and making objections on public interest grounds less capable of being policed. Liberty Global would dearly love to bid, having bought Rupert Murdoch’s stake last summer, as part of its well-signalled ambitions to create a pan-European TV presence. But the company has doubtless judged, if it has not been privately warned by Conservative ministers, that a bid now in the run-up to the general election would be toxic. Better wait until afterwards when a victorious Tory government can fix the system to allow the bid to be nodded through.

And finally, the BBC. By happy coincidence, the BBC’s charter renewal and new licence fee settlement have to happen in 2016 – the first full year of the new government. The Conservatives know the institution is trusted a great deal more than politicians, and it would be terrible politics to kill or privatise it. The licence fee may be a fraction of Sky’s subscription fee and superb value, but few voters are going to refuse, say, a cut if it were offered.

Further, most will sympathise with the apparently plausible argument, now peddled by the Tory establishment, that people who cannot afford to pay the licence fee should not suffer the indignity of being criminalised. Few will point out the counter argument: without the threat of criminal sanction – there is none other – non-payers will unfairly free ride on those who pay, and the whole system unravels.

The Conservative aim is to cut licence fee revenue back even more, perhaps recycling it to other broadcasters. On top of which, expect an inquiry into whether the fee should be scrapped completely. Already the corporation is struggling to pay for the World Service, for which it recently assumed full responsibility; these cuts will ensure scaling it back. And the inquiry into its future will keep the corporation suitably timid. By 2017, a Tory government will have transformed Britain’s TV landscape. Public service broadcasting will be a minority interest, and a dumbed-down multi-channel future will await us. Business leaders vie with one another to tell us how chilling they find the prospect of a Labour government. Perhaps one or two could instead speak up for British television. After all, if they are not tax exiles they watch it too.