Time for an elegy?

The British Broadcasting Corporation building in London. A file photo. - CARL DE SOUZA/AFP

Does the U.K. government's plan to modify the management structure of the BBC mean the end of the Corporation's independence and excellence?

ONE of the broadcasting networks that have, over the decades, won widespread respect and admiration of people across the world is the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Indeed, it has become synonymous with excellence in programming and in independent reporting of news. The latter has, on occasion, brought upon it the wrath of political rulers; here in India the then representative of the BBC, Mark Tully, was asked to leave India twice by a furious Indira Gandhi. More recently, the BBC has been involved in a direct confrontation with the United Kingdom government - more particularly with the Prime Minister himself - and a series of events culminating in the suicide of a British Defence Ministry scientist and a judicial inquiry following it led to the resignations of the Chairman of the Board of Governors and the Director-General of the BBC.

Nevertheless, for many all over the world, including a large number of people here, the BBC represents the finest standards of public service broadcasting, whether in entertainment or in news reporting and comment. This is underscored by McKinsey and Company in a study done a few years ago on public service broadcasting, in which they found that together with some other major public service broadcasters the BBC not only dominated audiences but also was a market controller; private broadcasters had to fashion their programmes on the lines of the best BBC programmes if they were to attract viewers.

The news that the U.K. government is planning to modify the management structure of the BBC must therefore be a little disquieting to those who have been used to seeing it as more or less outside the purview of state interference. True, the BBC is funded by the licence fee charged on every radio and television set that fetches it a revenue of 2.8 billion annually; that is public money and the BBC has, rightly, to be accountable to the public for the manner it spends the money. But that accountability has been more directly to the public rather than through a government Ministry or department; so when a department produces a draft paper on what it proposes to change in the way the BBC is being run one cannot help wondering if that would lead slowly, perhaps, but inevitably, to the government telling the BBC a little more about how it should function. And, as we all know, irrespective of how enlightened the government might be, that way means the extinction of creative, independent programmes.

The U.K. government has been at pains to state, over and over again, in the "Green Paper" it has produced on the future of the BBC, its resolve to safeguard the BBC's independence. The paper is, in fact, called "A Strong BBC, Independent of Government". The Culture Secretary (the equivalent of our Minister of Information and Broadcasting, who is also Minister of Culture), Tessa Jowell, has declared in the paper: "The public demand a strong and independent main national public service broadcaster." That sounds nice, but in the paper itself the Minister speaks of a "responsive, more accountable BBC that would deliver quality services in the modern, multi-channel, digital world". Quality services? Is that, then, a concern of the present British government?

How Jowell proposes to change the BBC is by doing away with the time-honoured Board of Governors and replacing it with two bodies - a "new and transparent" BBC Trust and an Executive Board.

The Trust is "to oversee the corporation - with responsibility for the licence fee and for making sure that the BBC fulfils its public service obligations" and the Executive Board will be "responsible for delivering the BBC's services within a framework set by the Trust".

The responsibilities of the two new bodies have been stated fairly clearly; the Trust is to "act as the BBC's sovereign body and have ultimate responsibility for the licence fee... holding the Executive Board to account for delivery of services". The Executive Board will be responsible for the "day-to-day management of the BBC... . It will be chaired by the Director-General, or at the discretion of the Trust, a non-executive."

What this means is that full financial control will be with the Trust, and the Executive Board will function with such funds as the Trust makes available to it for specific purposes. The Director-General will not have any financial independence; that will move to the Trust. As far as I know, the Director-General has at present full financial control over the funds of the BBC, though he is admittedly answerable to the Board of Governors.

Tessa Jowell also says in her paper that the members of the Trust will be appointed by the Crown. That is by the government, that is, by her or at least by her in consultation with her colleagues. And apart from these government appointees, the Executive Board, which can, as we saw, be headed by a non-executive, can also have as members a "significant minority of non-executives who will support the executive members as `critical friends'".

All these features have built into them the capacity to reduce the BBC to something less than it is now, to an institution more responsive, shall we say, to perceived public requirements. Today, the government may be at pains to profess its anxiety that the BBC be strong and independent, but many will wonder whether its rather ugly confrontation with the BBC over the allegedly "sexed-up" intelligence dossier has not coloured Tessa Jowell's attitude to the BBC. One hears she is a staunch Blair supporter. If she is, she would certainly not have reason to be very fond of the BBC the way it is now. Is her blueprint then a means of ensuring, through the suzerainty of the Trust and the "critical friends" in the Executive Board, a more pliant BBC? And is the business of the renewal of the Royal Charter, and the continuation of the licence fee, something of a convenient trade-off?

If it is, then it will sadden a very large number of people who considered the BBC to be a standard-setting, vigorously independent public service broadcaster. To those of us who have had occasion to come into contact with the organisation in earlier years what remains as its truly memorable feature is the commitment, enthusiasm and fiercely independent nature of the producers and news correspondents. That enthusiasm and commitment drew out the creative talents that resulted in some of the landmark programmes of the BBC in every field, whether by in-house teams or commissioned production houses. And it has brought BBC news and current affairs an enviable credibility and technical skill that few networks in the world can match. All that may well fade away and the talent in the BBC drift to other networks and organisations just as the talent in the British film industry has all but vanished into Hollywood and elsewhere.

One may well ask what business it is of a columnist like me sitting in a Third World country to concern himself with the affairs of a British broadcasting network. The answer is simple. We live in a world that is increasingly becoming a global village, and as it does so we are increasingly surrounded by networks that are cheap, mediocre or at best dull. Some, very few actually, are good, but the icon, the model that sets the standards even now, is the BBC. So what happens to it affects us all, just as what the U.S. does is not only the business of the rednecks in middle America. If that icon were to begin to crumble and if the BBC were to become no better than the broadcasters around one, then truly the Dark Age of broadcasting will have begun.