This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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“Never miss a beat! The Proms!

On iPlayer and BBC Sounds!”

Through July, August and September, this promotional message was ubiquitous on BBC Television. But it was subtly misleading. Every one of this season’s 73 Proms from the Royal Albert Hall was indeed broadcast live on Radio 3, and can be heard again on BBC Sounds. But on the iPlayer, you will find just 26 of them.

Only one concert — the Last Night — was televised live. Another half dozen were recorded on the night and transmitted after a delay, allowing the interval to be excised. The others were recorded for later broadcast — days or weeks after the event, some even after the end of the season. Just six Proms featured on BBC One (part of the Last Night) or BBC Two. The rest turned up on BBC Four or CBeebies (which hosted two special concerts for children). Concerts can be a visual as well as an aural feast: but, year after year, BBC television declines to let us partake in full.

You might have thought that BBC Four — like Radio 3 — was tailor-made for broadcasting the Proms. Yet night after night its schedule was instead filled with old travelogues or even older sitcoms. In the age of streaming, the iPlayer is a perfectly acceptable place for overflow live content: Wimbledon is a case in point, but seemingly not the Proms. Why the BBC chooses to treat one of the jewels in its crown so shabbily is puzzling.

Some commentators have suggested that the BBC’s declining commitment to classical music may be connected with last year’s decision by the media regulator, Ofcom, to allow the BBC to drop from its operating licence (which Ofcom issues) the requirement that BBC Four broadcast 175 hours of new arts and music programmes each year, in exchange for a promised doubling of spend by BBC Two on arts and music.

Ofcom acknowledged this might lead to a reduction in programme hours, but, in truth, the BBC has been part of a system-wide fall in arts output over the last two decades by the so-called “public service broadcasting” (PSB) channels. Indeed, one of Ofcom’s tasks — as set out in the 2003 Communications Act which created the regulator — is to report on the state of UK PSB every five years.

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The story Ofcom tells is a dismal tale of political and regulatory failure. Yet it all started well, with Margaret Thatcher’s surprise creation of a publicly-owned Channel 4 in 1980 (it began broadcasting two years later).

An ingenious funding model — whereby ITV sold the channel’s airtime in return for providing its budget — allowed the channel’s first CEO, Jeremy Isaacs, the freedom to commission a wide range of public service content: defined as programming the market would not otherwise supply, but which a regulated system could require from those granted access to publicly-owned spectrum.

Under this system, ITV licensees — chosen on the basis of proven or promised performance — were already delivering high quality network and regional output. Every decade or so, licensees that under-performed risked being replaced in a beauty contest. ITV’s programming success challenged the BBC to emulate: a virtuous circle. Isaacs introduced not just new public service broadcasting content, but a source of supply (independent producers) that transformed the industry. The 1980s were the golden age of PSB.

The first blow to this system came with the ITV licence auction in 1990, followed by a rule change that allowed ownership of the ITV licences to be consolidated. Since then, no licence has changed hands: each could be renewed by direct negotiation with the regulator, eliminating the messy auction process. ITV plc could focus on dividends rather than PSB.

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Then, the Blair government brought in the 2003 Communications Act, which torpedoed public service broadcasting, first on ITV, then on Channel 4 and eventually — by imitation rather than necessity — on the BBC.

The areas of output defined as “public service genres” by successive regulators were news, current affairs, regional programmes, children’s, arts, classical music, religion and ethics, education, and some types of documentaries.

The idea behind the 2003 Act was to merge telecommunications and broadcasting regulation, in the facile belief that, as the two industries overlapped, they should be managed as one. Unfortunately, the new regulator created to oversee them both — the Office of Communications, or Ofcom — lacked any expert knowledge as to what constituted broadcast quality; nor possessed, as it happened, the powers to deliver it.

The 2003 Act claimed as one of its objectives the “maintenance and strengthening” of the public service broadcasting system. But it eliminated compulsory quotas for all the genres that constituted public service broadcasting, other than news and a modicum of current affairs. Children’s programmes, education, music, arts, religion and ethics, along with serious documentaries, were optional. Even regional content — the original raison d’être of the ITV federal system — was not ring-fenced. This left Ofcom largely toothless.

As quickly as it could, ITV disposed of religious programmes, arts, children’s (shunted off to the largely unwatched CITV channel), and nearly all its current affairs and documentaries.

With regional output, a brief advertising recession allowed ITV to justify deep budget cuts. Ofcom resisted, but not for long. ITV saved tens of millions of pounds a year. The advertising recession soon ended, and subsequently ITV has paid out some £5 billion in dividends, but the cuts have never been reversed. Over the years, a hollowed-out ITV has also shed 60 per cent of its drama output and nearly all its comedy.

As Director of Programmes at Thames TV in the 1980s, I could provide news, features, current affairs, documentaries, opera, ballet, classical music and even drama, all specifically for the London audience. Today, ITV provides one of the world’s richest cities with little more than local news bulletins.

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Michael Grade succeeded Jeremy Isaacs as chief executive of Channel 4 and secured the right for the channel to sell its own airtime. He thereby significantly boosted Channel 4’s income and solidified all the public service commitments Isaacs had originated. These became the famous “remit”.

In addition to promoting innovation, supporting independent producers and providing an alternative to ITV, a series of genre broadcast quotas were adopted: four hours a week of national and international news, four hours of current affairs, seven hours of adult education (which was allocated 15 per cent of the Channel 4 programme budget), six hours of schools programmes, three hours of multicultural programming and one hour of religion.

Over and above this, Channel 4 committed itself to investing in British feature film production and to broadcasting a substantial volume of documentaries and arts programmes. In those days, Channel 4 commissioned operas as well as relaying opera performances. In 2004, just as the 2003 Communications Act was coming into force, Channel 4 met or exceeded all these requirements.

However, the temptation to dilute Channel 4’s public service provision, as opened up by the 2003 Act, was impossible to resist. Multicultural output was abandoned, to be replaced by a catch-all entitled “diversity”, which embraced disability, varieties of sexual preferences, religious beliefs and ethnic groupings. Much of this new objective is met by broadcasting the Paralympics.

Meanwhile, religious programmes disappeared, along with nearly all arts programmes, classical music and education. Schools were shunted into night-time transmission (for overnight recording) and then off to video distribution, before being effectively abandoned. Adult education soon followed. Channel 4’s last head of education was made redundant in 2010. Although Channel 4 has a statutory obligation to provide programmes of educational value, it supplies virtually none.

Remarkably, in 2014, Channel 4 claimed to have broadcast 2,622 hours of “education”, at a cost of £98m. This was simply false. The true figures were nine hours of original educational material, at a cost of £6m. Last year, Channel 4 claimed to have shown 260 hours of current affairs, with Ofcom reporting that 142 of them were in peak time. What these programmes were is a mystery. Neither Channel 4 nor Ofcom offers titles.

The 2003 Act invited broadcasters to state their “media policies”. Ever since, Channel 4 has done so, at inordinate length. These policies are effectively meaningless. Channel 4 creates its own targets, then decides whether it has met them. They are mostly non-measurable in programme terms.

Channel 4 still has a UK origination quota. But the requirement for this to be first-run, rather than repeat, has gone. The pre-Ofcom obligation was 60 per cent first-run origination across the schedule and 80 per cent in peak. Channel 4 meets the reduced “origination” quota of 56 per cent, but nearly half of that is made up of repeats. In fact, Channel 4 could be Ofcom-compliant without showing a single first-run programme other than news.

Not only is Channel 4 itself offering much less PSB, but its portfolio channels — More4, Film Four, E4, with no PSB obligations — have syphoned off half its audience. These days, the average viewer consumes one minute a day of PSB from Channel 4: a feeble return from a public asset worth between £1 and £2 billion.

Ofcom appoints all Channel 4’s non-executive directors. It could have stopped this collapse. Instead, it serves as an apologist, claiming that E4 and Film Four have value because they serve audiences keen on comedy and films. Yet, overwhelmingly, output on these channels is U.S. content: sitcoms such as The Big Bang Theory and Hollywood studio movies. Both channels routinely fail the most basic of Ofcom requirements: that they schedule 50 per cent European content.

Why channels delivering primarily US content need to be owned by the British government is a mystery. But then, the case for public ownership of Channel 4 itself is minimal, unless you happen to be one of the channel’s 1,200 employees costing taxpayers over £100,000 a year on average. Jeremy Isaacs never needed even 300 employees.

These days, Channel 4’s mission statement is “to change the world through entertainment”. Good luck with that.

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Until recently, the BBC regulated its own PSB output, but the 2003 Act required Ofcom to report every five years on delivery across the system, including the BBC. This revealed that the BBC, noting the falling away in the commercial sector, has cut its own public service content in parallel. So, as ITV reduced its regional spend by £41 million between 2004 and 2008, the BBC cut by £34 million. As Ofcom has commented, with its guaranteed income, there is no excuse for these BBC cuts.

The 2009 report logged a 28 per cent decline in educational output across the PSB system in just five years, along with 32 per cent cut in arts, 34 per cent in religion, 39 per cent in regional programming and 48 per cent in children’s output. Viewing of music, arts and education programmes, pushed to the edges of the schedules, fell even further: 52 per cent, 58 per cent and 70 per cent.

By the time of the next review, Ofcom reported that provision of education and religion “has all but ceased”. By the time of the fourth, the system was spending just 0.52 per cent of its budgets on children’s output, 0.25 per cent on arts and 0.08 per cent on religion. The 2016 White Paper on BBC funding commented that just 0.01 per cent of the BBC’s TV output could be classified as educational.

Ofcom became the BBC’s output regulator in 2017. Its fourth PSB review, published in 2020, revealed yet further retreat, not least by the BBC. There was “limited provision” of key at-risk genres. Total hours transmitted of arts, religion, education and schools came to less than 300, with total spend about £60 million. Sky Arts, which is free-to-air, broadcasts more hours of arts programming than the entire PSB system.

In 2017, when Ofcom issued its first operating licence for the BBC, it name-checked the at-risk genres, but did nothing to protect them. Last year, a modified licence removed a swathe of obligations, including the BBC4 origination requirement. The BBC is simply required to “set out its plans” for public service content. Nothing can or will be enforced.

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Fifteen years ago, perhaps sensing that the underpinning of PSB provision was already under threat, Ofcom floated the notion that the supply of first-run UK origination (FRUKO) might be an acceptable alternative to actual PSB genres as public service provision. This might have seemed a bright idea in 2004, when the PSB system delivered 97 per cent of all FRUKO.

But today, FRUKO spend by the PSB channels has dropped from £2.85 billion to £2.2 billion, excluding sport, evenly split between the BBC and the commercial PSBs. Since 2018, BBC FRUKO spend alone has dropped 21 per cent. Last year, Netflix spent more on FRUKO than the BBC. So did Sky and the other satellite channels (again, excluding sport). The PSB share of FRUKO spend is barely 40 per cent.

So the BBC’s reduction in arts spending and broadcasting of arts programmes is part of a much wider decline across the PSB system as a whole. Ministers and mandarins must share the blame. Ofcom, unrealistically tasked with “maintaining and strengthening” PSB, has done neither. Most recently, it has been drawn into the dangerous relativism of describing any type of output — even shiny floor shows and baking competitions — as “public service”, provided they are “British”. Sic transit gloria.

The BBC’s treatment of the Proms has another dimension: an aversion to a particular form of funding. I will explain that in my next article.