Government could ban BBC from showing top shows at peak times | Media | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/m ... peak-times

It's hard to even know if this is just the BS story to sneak other disgraceful behaviour through, Witless is that much of a cnut.

It's the most ludicrous thing he's come up with so far...

1) Define 'peak time' - the BBC show last year that got the biggest viewing figure of any show on any channel in 2015 is shown at 8.30pm on a Tuesday evening. Are we to have a rule that says the BBC can't show anything popular at all between 6.30 and 9.30 any day of the week? That's utterly impractical in any form.

2) what happens if the BBC makes a 'non-competitive' show in a prime time slot and it then becomes popular? They have to move it away? And what happens if the show that they replace it with also becomes popular? They have to move that away too? And so on and so on until the entire BBC schedule *except for* 7.30PM-9.30pm on a Saturday is filled with popular shows and ITV is bleating about how it's all so fair, even though their own short sidedness and lack of ability to actually compete is entirely the reason for it happening. Bear in mind, I doubt when a TV show about an amateur baking competition started anybody thought 7 years later it would be the biggest show on TV.

3) If ITV manages to actually make a great show it will be popular, it will get viewers. They don't want to do that though because that involves them spending money, they want BBC viewers to be as equally ill-served as ITV viewers are. They don't want to compete, they just want to stop anybody competing with them.

It's funny how offensive the Torys find competition when it's coming from a non-private enterprise.

"Be worse than ITV". That's going to mean programming at an H2 level and films from The Asylum.

The BBC has a unique method of funding that enables it to make lots of stuff that commercial operations cannot. Surely it is wasteful duplication of effort to compete for populist eyeballs against those commercial vendors.

As far as I am concerned they should make and launch any show they want, but if it becomes popular they should flog it to ITV or Ch4 and reinvest that income into something commercially less viable so as to better serve markets other than those of sufficient size guarantee service anyway.

Define 'populist' in this context? Crime Drama? Soaps? Sport? Baking? Ballroom dancing?

It is impossible to objectively define whether a show is populist, only if it is popular.


And if ITV don't want to buy this hypothetical show because, despite being popular, it is incredibly expensive to make and therefore would be hard to make it profitable, what happens then? The BBC just stops making something lots of people like? How is this serving the licence payer? How is it engendering competition in the market?

In fact, how is stopping the BBC competing in the interest of the licence payer at all? Isn't this supposed to be how it works? If somebody is doing better than you, you up your game and serve your customers better, therefore the customer gets a better deal?

What we have here is somebody doing better than ITV, so instead of upping it's game, ITV want the opposition hamstrung so there is no better choice than the mediocrity they happen to already be putting out. This is in fact the opposite of competition.

There can't really be an awfully large number of shows that are subject to this conversation. But Eastenders for instance doesn't strike me as something that can only be adequately developed and shown on the BBC. Likewise, well I don't really know, but I want to say Holby City and Casualty. I never watch any of the shows so I might be missing that special non-commercial quality they have. My point is that at least some shows like that could be sold at a huge profit to a commercial broadcaster. And maybe the money can be invested in something less likely to rake in the dough.

The BBC doesn't need large audience figures to get in advertising bucks, so that's an advantage which gives them scope to make riskier stuff. It also means that going head to head against ITV's big rality show with their own, or ITV's celebrity talent death match with their celebrity dancing death match may provide extra choice for a few, but it reduces choice for people who don't want to watch celebrities doing their fake surprise routines.

So let them make crime drama, and soaps, and sci fi and everything. But their incentives are designed to be different to the commercial sector, so perhaps they shouldn't be competing to beat those guys with the same sort of stuff in the same time slot.

If ITV doesn't want to buy a ratings hit for some reason, then that's their choice and presumably it stays. I wasn't suggesting they would have some right to veto a BBC production.

So your contention is the BBC should not be making programmes large numbers of people would want to watch, even though large numbers of people (i.e. most of the population) are required to pay for it? How is that fair at all?

At that point you pretty much have to get rid of the licence fee and at that point the real solution in this case is not to have a BBC at all, since the idea of having a TV network that is only allowed to make shows hardly any people are interested in is basically farcical. Also, they probably aren't going to be able to make enough money by making programmes few people watch to make those programmes in the first place. Say at that point you effectively say 'OK, now you don't have the licence fee any more you can compete with everyone else' and therefore you now have two ITV's competing for the same advertising budgets. I'm not sure ITVs long term plan is to halve their income.

These kind of changes invalidate the basic point of the BBC, which is it provides content for all licence fee payers because people don't have a choice whether they pay the licence fee, other than not have a TV capable or receiving broadcast signal. If you tell the BBC it can't make popular programmes (and you pretty much are, because nobody is going to make a show that might be popular if it's then going to be sold out from under them) then the licence fee becomes manifestly unfair. If the licence fee goes, there's no longer any point to having a BBC because it will be just like every other channel/platform.

Of course this is in fact the long term goal of pretty much all of Whittingdale's proposals. Make the BBC irrelevant to the point where nobody cares any more if it goes away.

The TV-licence funded TV in Germany is generally a lot like the BBC. It tends to make more expensive dramas, shows sport that would otherwise be on pay-tv and some game shows.

I probably watch more of this than I do the free commercial stations (I never bothered to get Premiere/Sky pay-TV over here).

But a lot of people want more of the day-time-TV "documentaries", where they have very poor actors trying to do "day-in-the-life" type stories on a cheap budget, which shows the unemployed that it could be worse and they aren't that badly off, really.

And they mostly claim that what the funded TV shows is too high-brow and the licence should be abolished.

If it was abolished, I probably would watch about 2 hours of TV a week...

The following article, from 8 months ago in the Daily Telegraph of all places, predicted this exact proposal and why it would happen...

The sly way to privatise the BBC

I don't think that dropping out of the peak time celebrity guerning competitions makes the BBC suddenly irrelevant at all. If anything the opposite. If the BBC pursues the same output as commercial TV, and gets the same audiences by doing it, then others might argue they are already fighting for proxy advertising bucks and may as well be funded that way.

The BBC doesn't get paid more for high ratings. It justifies its existence by ensuring that a broad spectrum of tastes are covered. Every time they throw a large part of their budget by going head to head vs ITV for the same audience in much the same way, they seem to me to be serving a vanity agenda at the expense of making TV that demonstrates the unique qualities of the BBC.

It's in the BBC's interest to make shows that people actually want to watch. A chunk of their revenue comes from exporting those shows overseas. Figures: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Worldwide




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Suddenly irrelevant? No. Increasingly irrelevant as audiences fall due to the lack of popular mainstream shows? More than likely. As the link I posted suggests, theplan is not 'Cripple the BBC, cancel it immediately'. The plan is 'Cripple the BBC, wait a few years until it's metrics are down the plughole, then cancel it on the grounds nobody wants it any more'.

The slight irony is of course that the BBC use this tactic themselves. There are numerous shows the BBC has wanted rid of for various reasons over the years, and the solution is to shift them around in the schedule until people who want to watch them give up trying to follow them, then cancel the show on the grounds nobody watches it any more.


Surely that has to include mainstream programming as well as niche programming? if the BBC is required to ensure it covers a broad spectrum of tastes, how can it do that if it's not allowed to make or continue to make programmes that appeal to a broad spectrum of tastes? if they only make TV shows that cater to niche/minority interests, who decides when they have met their remit?

There is no evidence that the BBC affects the advertising budgets of UK companies. If ITV can't attract viewers, that's their fault. If ITV wants to make more money, it should make more better programmes. The logic is that simple.

The only vanity here is in the heads of ITV executives who seem to think they have some god-given right to the eyeballs of British people.

It seems that whatever the BBC actually does, somebody will say it shouldn't. I get the rationale for why they should want big viewing figures in order to be seen as good value for the tax that supports them. I still think there is an equally good rationale that viewing figures are important to bodies funded by advertising whereas funding by other means should result in different incentives - I regard that as the peculiar value and best argument for that alternative funding arrangement to continue.

I have no interest in defending competitors of the BBC because I want them not to be seen as competitors in the first place. The real value of the BBC is (in my view) the whacky [LIFTED] like Dr Who (a show I despise in all honesty) that wouldn't have got made elsewhere. Also the dull televisual institutions like Antiques Roadshow which I also don't like, but without which we would somehow be culturally poorer.

I don't want the World Service's budget to be spent on celebrities doing dumb things that they could be doing on ITV. I prefer quality and dramatic risk to these things.

Here's the eternal conundrum though - a lot of people who pay the licence fee do want those things, and why should their wants be less valid than yours or mine? they pay the same money you or I do. It's a fundamental problem at the heart of the licence fee model in that it has to be seen to be democratic (in some form of the word) because of the requirement for everyone to pay it.

Now, I happen to be fine with the licence fee. I happen to be fine with the BBC making both niche and mainstream programmes because that's how everyone is served.

The people objecting here are ITV, who seem to think they should have a monopoly on 'popular' shows because they need to earn money. here's the thing - nobody has a right to earn money. The BBC earns it's money by providing good content across a wide range of interests and mediums - it justifies the licence fee by being both mainstream and niche, by being to a degree everything to everyone. Once it stops doing that, the licence fee becomes harder and harder to justify. The fact ITV's business model is basically dysfunctional - they can apparently only earn money when there's nothing better for people to choose - is simply not the BBC's problem.

If ITV were truly innovative, agile and forward thinking (you know - all the things private enterprise is supposed to be) they would be figuring out ways to maintain their business as advertising revenue diversifies to other media. As it is they've done pretty much none of that; seriously, find me anyone who would pay to access the ITV online streaming setup. What they have apparently done is appeal to the government to take one aspect of their competition away, like that would actually fix things in the long run. At a cost of every TV consumer in the UK getting a worse deal and less choice.

This is ITV's problem and if they don't solve it they'll die on their arse eventually anyway, BBC or no BBC. The money they assumed was theirs hasn't gone to the BBC, it's gone to Google and Facebook.

Jon