A hybrid licence fee and subscription model is one of the options under consideration for the future funding of the BBC. Steven Moffat has joined other well-known names from the worlds of film and television to sign a letter to the Prime Minister defending the BBC and “place on record… our concern that nothing should be done to diminish the BBC or turn it into a narrowly focused market-failure broadcaster”.
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Those on the right believe that the BBC is biased toward London and the left. Both claim to address the looming realities of the digital age – but in radically different ways.
But Mr Whittingdale told Sky News: “We haven’t reached any conclusions yet but I hope as many people as possible contribute to that discussion”. Understandably, some commercial media companies would wish Auntie vacated the scene.
The BBC licence fee could be replaced by a subscription in the long term, the culture secretary has said.
The debate around the broadcaster’s future is a high profile, politically-charged one. BBC news journalists were furious about this limp-wristed response, especially as many felt Hutton had judged the Corporation too harshly and should have laid more blame at the door of the Blair Government.
It’s the way governments hobble public broadcasters the world over. In the House of Lords this week, the Conservative peer Lord Fowler led a short debate on the BBC.
Steve Hewlett, a former BBC editor who is now a media commentator, said the BBC has weathered similar storms before and will do so again. The cards are marked and somewhat stacked against us.
Steven Moffat makes his living from the BBC, of course, as do many members of BECTU but it would surely be a mistake to dismiss all of this as simply a case of vested interests speaking out when they see the prospect of their livelihoods being threatened.
And there is the crucial paradox.
Helen Boaden said: “The decisions made about the BBC’s future has to be in the interests of licence fee payers, like the millions of listeners of Radio 1 and Radio 2”.
“Saint Tony [BBC director general Tony Hall] has finally woken up and realised he has an existential threat on his hands”, added Claire Enders, a media commentator and head of Enders Analysis.
It’s an argument often put forward by people with a very narrow – often very commercial – agenda.
Graham Norton – one of the BBC’s flagship presenters – has voiced his support for the BBC, praising the corporation’s varied programming and predicting panic from viewers if it is ever axed. Nor does the British public.
It is expected to include plans to reduce the amount of light entertainment the BBC produces, alternatives to the licence fee to pay for programmes and scrapping the BBC Trust which oversees the organisation. It will last 12 weeks for the public and industry to feed in views. What is the BBC’s contribution to the creative economy in the UK? Take the time in 2005, post-Hutton, when Mark Byford, the deputy director-general who stepped into the shoes of outgoing boss Greg Dyke, promised that BBC news would not be in the business of seeking exclusives as Auntie lay on the canvas, beaten. “The statement they issued today is as punchy as the BBC gets”.
It is an opportunity not just to ask what sort of BBC we want, but also what sort of Wales we want.
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Britain has a love-hate relationship with the BBC. “The public will not forgive them if they did”.
