BBC Charter

Lord Bragg Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bragg (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest: I work for the BBC as an independent contributor. Another interest is that at different times in my life I have been educated, entertained and informed by the BBC in a way that I believe is not available in any other way in any other country. As has already been said, it would puzzle an outsider to unravel why there are any doubts about the value and the greatness of the BBC. It has failings, but if you do not fail sometimes, you do not succeed at any time. Try. Fail. “Try again … Fail better”, as Samuel Beckett wrote.

If one puts aside the inherent weaknesses of large and complex organisations that the noble Lord, Lord Birt, spoke about, and some of the individuals within such organisations, what emerges is still a broadcasting phenomenon that is almost 100 years old and arguably in better shape than it has ever been. The broadcasters that I know around the world look at it with awe, as the noble Lord, Lord Patten, indicated, as do ever more listeners around the world who receive its programmes in the increasingly powerful tides of progressive globalisation which the BBC rides so successfully.

Much of weight and value has been said. I want to ground my thinking in the BBC’s briefing notes. It reaches 97% of the UK population every week, with an average of around eight-and-a-half hours of TV and more than 10 hours of radio per head. There are nine television channels, 10 national radio channels, 39 local radio stations and all the online and mobile services, including BBC3, iPlayer and bbc.co.uk, all at 40p a day.

In the BBC briefing note which all your Lordships have received there is an omission that I would like to treat as an opportunity, because, for me, the BBC is the sum of its programmes. There are comprehensive details in the note of channel after channel and station after station, but there is nothing about Radio 4. I am sure that no one is to blame; it is just W1A, or maybe it is a deliberate error. Still, for some, Radio 4 is the BBC’s pole star. It reaches almost 12 million listeners a week, about a quarter of whom are young, “future generation” listeners. There are 2.5 million podcast downloads a week, 600 hours of drama a year—it is far and away the biggest drama commissioner in the UK—1,000 documentaries or features and much more, as I am sure many of your Lordships know.

I hope your Lordships will excuse what I am about to do, but if you do not, it will not take too long. As my mentor, the late Huw Wheldon, said, you ignore the obvious at your peril. Let me mention just some of the programmes on one channel on one day—tomorrow, Thursday 13 October, 2016 on Radio 4. At midnight, there is a comprehensive news bulletin. There is the “Shipping Forecast” at 5.20 am, rightly chosen by Judi Dench as one of her desert island discs, celebrated in a fine poem by Seamus Heaney and the best way to wake up to the idea of our island’s history—as well as the crunching of all those wonderful coastline consonants. There is the state of our land on “Farming Today”, and then with a trumpet of Tweets comes the “Today” programme, with an unparalleled team, on for three hours to deliver the state of this and other nations with high-end news, features, politics and sport. We know that it is so important that if John Humphrys stops talking for more than 17.3 seconds, the PM presses the button to send our hydrogen bomb wherever it has been programmed to go.

Then three leading academics will talk about plasma, and on to the age-defying, septuagenarian “Woman’s Hour”. We have the authoritative “From Our Own Correspondent”, “You and Yours” analysing through conversation our daily life, and then another cracking news bulletin at 1 pm with Martha Kearney. We move on to drama and literature with Mariella Frostrup’s “Open Book”, and films, Eddie Mair and “Front Row”, with Ritula Shah at 10 pm. And at 11.30 pm, there is the climax and crown of the schedule, “Today in Parliament”. And did I mention “The Archers”? Billy Connolly once suggested that its title music should be our national anthem. And this excludes the comedies, quizzes and quiddities which notch up our days as surely as Big Ben. The energy and spectrum of this channel is like nothing else anywhere in the world. Nothing comes even close. It is so good that we take it for granted. I have worked out that, given the number of television, radio and other channels that the BBC delivers, Radio 4 costs us less than one penny a day.

I congratulate the BBC on arriving at such a good overall result in this charter negotiation—and, fair play, the Government have acknowledged much of the BBC’s case, worked it through and improved on it. It has changed the composition of the unitary board completely—now it will consist of nine BBC appointees and five from government. The DG will have editorial control, and the mid-term review will not consider the public purposes of the BBC nor licence fee funding. They are told that they will make distinctive programmes. I agree with my noble friend Lord Alli on this: what does “distinctive” mean? Who in Ofcom will define it? How is it better than the producers, the writers and the TV executives at defining such a thing as distinctiveness? It will be a very interesting philosophical debate. I am still rather apprehensive about what happens when the notorious Osborne/Whittingdale factor—that is, £700 million of licence fee payers’ money to be spent on social engineering for old-age pensioners—unravels in 2021. Could the BBC walk away from it? That would be very difficult, so what will be the real consequences? And there are worries about the BBC within the BBC. As Private Eye points out this morning, the world news budget is being slashed at a time when more than ever we need to state our new case to the world. Caversham, the gold standard monitoring service fatally wounded by the Cameron Government’s withdrawal of funds, will dwindle away—another loss of a world leader. We have only so much family silver.

Overall, this is a positive result for the BBC. We can see its unequalled spectrum of programmes moving to its second century with its cylinders intact and the licence fee still delivering. It is a positive result, too, for those of us who watch and listen to programmes. The noble Lord, Lord Hall, and his troops have done well and deserve our congratulations, as do the Government. He has marched them up to the top of the hill and long may they stay there. And long may they get the support they deserve and already widely enjoy from the British public. I welcome the agreement.