Channel 4 can’t afford Carol Vorderman and says it needs more cash for its public service remit. Nonsense, writes Neil Midgley: it is mass-market television that needs help
Carol Vorderman has, apparently, become too expensive for Channel 4’s game show Countdown. Gone are the carefree days when Channel 4 could afford to poach Paul O’Grady from ITV to chase teatime ratings. Now, says C4 chief executive Andy Duncan, it can only fulfil its public service remit if someone — most likely Gordon Brown — gives it a new £150 million a year subsidy. Similar bleatings come from senior BBC executives when- ever the future of the licence fee is discussed (despite the fact that the BBC can evidently afford £6 million a year for Jonathan Ross). Yet the BBC and Channel 4 — both publicly owned — rake in £4 billion a year between them, and the licence fee is guaranteed until 2013. It is ludicrous for their millionaire bosses to claim that public service broadcasting is in any danger in the UK. What is in mortal peril, as eyeballs and advertising revenue both migrate to the internet, is the future of mass-market commercial television. For, say, ITV, even a mathematician like Vorderman will soon find it hard to make the numbers add up.
Traditional British television faces an uncertain future. As digital switchover approaches and people spend more time online, more TV channels are competing for fewer viewers. In this rapidly changing business, only one thing is for sure: public service broadcasting (PSB) is in no imminent danger of extinction. The BBC has a guaranteed income of well over £3 billion a year until at least 2013 and Channel 4 has an annual programme budget of over £600 million. Yet the Culture Secretary Andy Burnham and Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards worry vocally that the digital world will see a loss of ‘plurality’ in PSB. What Mr Burnham and Mr Richards are wilfully ignoring is a much more important — and more pressing — possibility. If they don’t stop focusing all their energies on PSB, this country could be left with no commercial television of any scale or ambition at all.
The arithmetic is simple. Only three broadcasters commission a large volume of original television in the UK: the BBC, Channel 4 and ITV. Public ownership of the BBC and Channel 4 means that Britain can hope — at best — for only one commercial TV company of any size, in the shape of ITV. To imagine that lots of decent British programmes will ever materialise from any other commercial broadcaster is fanciful. It’s a strong ITV, or it is nothing. And the cultural and economic benefits of a strong ITV are huge.
Proper competition for ratings, motivated on at least one channel by profit, ensures high-quality programmes all round. (Look at the Saturday night fights between Strictly Come Dancing and The X Factor.) The search for profitable shows boosts the UK’s creative economy, and ensures that we have slick TV to export to commercial broadcasters in other countries. (Look at American Idol.) And the preferences of government ministers — recently voiced all too loudly by Mr Burnham as he championed ‘standards’ and regional news — must at least jostle with the preferences of the people they represent. (Look, if you can bear to, at Channel 4’s ever more dull and hectoring schedule as it begs for government cash.)
Despite knowing all this, Mr Burnham and Mr Richards currently insist — through a unique and outmoded regulatory structure — that ITV becomes weaker by the month. The benefit to ITV of its position as the analogue third channel has always come with attendant PSB obligations (regional news, regional production quota and the rest). But analogue television is losing value so quickly that by the end of 2008 the costs may well outweigh the benefits. To make matters worse, ITV1 is also subject to uniquely tight restrictions on the number of ads it can sell and the amount it can charge for them.
Mr Burnham and Mr Richards pay lip service to the difficulties faced by ITV. ‘They’re feeling this debate in a very real and a very present way,’ said Mr Burnham in June. Mr Richards is currently midway through a statutorily mandated review of PSB and, when he published his interim report in April, three out of his four proposed future models imagined ITV with no specific PSB obligations at all. But these words have not yet been backed up by any action. Ofcom’s PSB Review and another review, of ITV’s advertising restrictions, are proceeding at a New Labour — rather than a new media — pace.
If only ITV’s online competitors were so gentlemanly. In 2002, ITV’s revenue was nearly 20 times what Google managed in the UK. Next year, Google may well overtake it. There is a real prospect that, hobbled by its current level of regulation, ITV will soon simply not have enough money to spend on a full schedule of original programmes. At that point, Mr Burnham’s strongly expressed ‘disappointment’ that ITV failed last year to meet its regional production quota would suddenly sound relevant. The government and Ofcom must urgently deregulate ITV, both its advertising and its programmes, before it is too late.
Of course, not all of ITV’s woes are of the government’s making. Many of its programmes are derivative tripe, and successive changes of management have failed so far to do much to address that basic problem. But in signing a co-production deal with the US network Fox, it has at least started to address an overwhelming change in the way television is made and sold worldwide. As national TV markets shrink and programmes are increasingly distributed over the (borderless) internet rather than the (parochial) airwaves, new shows must have an international appeal to succeed.
The BBC, ironically, is more alert to this new commercial order than most, and has co-produced several big series — Rome, Five Days — with US network HBO. Some Channel 4 shows, too, have translated into US hits, not least Supernanny and Wife Swap. Which makes Channel 4’s current argument — that it must be bailed out by the government to the tune of £150 million a year if it is to continue to show UK-only programmes such as Channel 4 News and Dispatches — both quaint and alarming.
Channel 4 makes little money from international sales, as all its programmes are made by independent production companies. But those international hits came when Channel 4 was at its most nakedly commercial in the UK — and, not coincidentally, also at its most creative and innovative. Now, its editorial priorities defy popularity: hour after hand-wringing hour of free-range chickens, radical Muslims, and Cherie Blair lecturing us about knife crime.
The British public gets greater service from a strong creative economy than it does from documentaries or news programmes which, as the ratings show, few of us want to watch. While there is no particular point in privatising Channel 4 or, indeed, in changing its remit of innovation and experimentation, the government should insist that it at least makes ends meet. As an outward-looking but unsubsidised public service broadcaster, Channel 4 would have a chance of being popular at home and successful abroad — the only reliable recipe for its long-term survival.
Another welcome side-effect of a less worthy Channel 4 would be to shine a spotlight on the ever-increasing commercialisation of the BBC. The Corporation’s incantation that it must chase high ratings to reach every licence-fee payer is no excuse for its paucity of serious current affairs, documentaries and particularly arts programmes. Cookery, lifestyle and daytime are lavishly served by the commercial channels: the BBC should have a greater (though not exclusive) focus on areas where the market simply will not provide.
The BBC will, of course, be this country’s p rincipal public service broadcaster for a long time to come. Channel 4, even if it were forced to break even, would still provide publicly owned ‘plurality’. ITV, freed from its regulatory straitjacket, could be a strong international player and creator of British jobs. And to engineer this happy scenario, all that Mr Burnham and Mr Richards need to do is to stop reviewing and get out of the way.