The Lady Begs to Differ

The world of the media had in common with that of the arts a highly developed sense of its own importance to the life of the nation. But whereas the arts lobby was constantly urging government to do more, the broadcasters were pressing us to do less. Broadcasting was one of a number of areas -- the professions such as teaching, medicine, and the law were others -- in which special pleading by powerful interest groups was disguised as high-minded commitment-to some greater good. So anyone who queried, as I did, whether a license fee -- with nonpayment subject to criminal sanctions -- was the best way to pay for the BBC, was likely to be pilloried as at best philistine and at worst undermining its "constitutional independence." Criticism of the broadcasters' decisions to show material which outraged the sense of public decency or played into the hands of terrorists and criminals was always likely to be met with accusations of censorship. Attempts to break the powerful duopoly which the BBC and ITV had achied -- which encouraged restrictive practices, increased costs, and kept out talent -- were decried as threatening the "quality of broadcasting." . . .

The notion of "public service broadcasting" was the kernel of what the broadcasting oligopolists claimed to be defending. . . . The practice was very different. BBC and ITV ran programmes that were increasingly indistinguishable from commercial programming in market systems -- soap operas, sport, game shows, and made-for-TV films. To use Benthamite language, the public broadcasters were claiming the rights of poetry but providing us with pushpin. Good fun perhaps. But did our civilization really depend on it?

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