Auntie shall speak

NICK FRASER considers the future of the BBC in an age of the internet, Digital TV and editorial controversy

How many other survivals from the British cultural past possess the influence of the BBC? Both as an idea and an institution, the BBC has enjoyed a long life. As an idea it is associated with the notion that information is important and must be conveyed impartially and freely as a public good. Many core British beliefs – in the power of facts to sway argument, the idea that in conveying a vision of the world one must somehow be fair – either arise from this core BBC notion, or have been preserved by it.

As an institution, however, the BBC consists of buildings and people, and many of them. Imagine an old liner, in constant duty on roiling seas while decks are revarnished and new coats of paint applied. Or a slightly seedy, rambling house festooned with ceaselessly changing signs. This is what it feels like to work at the BBC in periods of change. And recently, as outsiders must have noticed, change has become permanent and bewildering. What might have seemed, just five years ago, to be isolated problems, easily dealt with, now appear as a comprehensive, life-threatening crisis.

This was the burden of Jeremy Paxman's well-argued, anguished speech at this year's Edinburgh Television Festival. He suggested that the BBC – in its television output, most of all – had lost its way. The cutting of corners in journalism was one sin among many. Having placed its trust in managerialism, the BBC had ended without a clear sense of its usefulness.

With creditable honesty, Paxman said that it wasn't his job as a journalist to find solutions. He did mention what has become the ultimate nightmare of BBC executives. At present the £3.6 billion required to keep the BBC going comes from the tax levied on TV users known as the license fee. It is argued that technology is making this tax obsolete, as the BBC's audiences shrink with that advent of digital channels and more and more viewers choose to view shows not via television but through the internet.

All broadcasters have lost audiences to digital channels. In reality the BBC – thanks to the strategy of launching new channels, sponsoring the Freeview service, has performed better than most of its rivals. Paxman and others, including Rupert Murdoch, have argued that digital television remains a threat to the survival of the BBC in its current form. Viewers will perhaps decide that they don't want to pay the BBC tax any longer. Is it so hard to imagine a government in ten years' time resolving to cut the license fee?

The BBC's most prominent mishap consists of having allowed a badly edited piece of tape featuring the Queen apparently stalking out of a photo shoot – as a consequence of which it stands accused of having lost the trust of its viewers. Much ink has already been spilt over this issue, and it was, unquestionably, a Bad Thing to Do. At the instigation of Director-General Mark Thompson, and the new BBC Trust, which supervises the organization, with a remit to act in the public good, procedures are being installed to make sure this doesn't happen again. A much-publicized effort to halt the faking of audience participation quizzes is also underway.

Whatever critics say, however, the BBC isn't immediately threatened by these editorial disasters. It may be pulled apart in the next years, but this need not happen. It should survive because of what it stands for, and not the number of people it employs or even the quantity of tasks it performs. The world has always needed something like the BBC. Perhaps the world needs the BBC even more than in the past. And yet the BBC will survive only if it changes more rapidly.

After what is seen as a less than generous license fee, the BBC is now required to find £2 billion of savings over a period of six years – a loss, it is estimated, of 1,800 jobs. Many of the savings have been found in the BBC's cherished factual programmes, leaving its entertainment output relatively unscathed. In defence BBC management insist that news cuts will not impair coverage, and that it will be able to make slightly fewer programmes at the same level of quality.

It is sad to contemplate the shrinking of cherished shows beside the large sums of money paid to presenters. But these are not irrevocable choices. If the BBC's natural history output does suffer, or Newsnight cannot function, money can always be moved from less touched bits of the BBC. Who knows, maybe the BBC will find a way to save on presenters' fees. This may seem optimistic, but it is hard to see the BBC abandoning its role as provider of information. How else can it justify so large a tranche of what is, in the end, public money?

Just as important is the choice implied by these cuts. Do we want a big BBC? Should the BBC, rather than trying to do everything, not instead focus on far fewer things? Although they promise a slimmed down BBC, the current cuts are in reality designed to sustain the idea of a big BBC – one capable of appealing to large audiences, thus keeping the license fee.

In reality the BBC has so far survived the arrival of so many choices. It is the prospect of television's ultimate replacement by the internet, with its promise of near-limitless choice, that is most jarring and challenging.

The BBC has flourished in a context of familiarity, where it can dictate what viewers must watch, certain that its own tastes coincide with that of the audience. Many old media companies have had trouble adapting to the internet, and for some years it appeared that the BBC had found a formula which eluded its rivals. BBC news transferred easily to the new medium, enabling the BBC to outperform sluggish print rivals.

However, the second, more substantial upheaval now beginning implies innovations such as downloading material, even feature films, at will – and, more subversively, constructing your own private network. In peer-to-peer media anyone can become a film-maker or a journalist.

To many, the old BBC values of reliability and objectivity appear obsolete. It will be hard, critics argue, to force people to pay for truth when so much parti pris information comes via blogs, easily tailored to consumer prejudice. Much of what the BBC at present shows can be found free on the internet, or is downloadable for a fee. The decision to include ads on the international website is a sign of things to come. The BBC will have to enter into many partnerships. Probably sooner rather than later, it will have to start charging for some of what it does.

However, there is a way, too, of conserving, or adapting what the BBC does best. In news the BBC values grow daily more valuable as the coverage of celebrity takes up space in newspapers and private TV, and governments propagate their own, tightly-controlled channels. Nowadays, with its world radio and TV channels, the BBC has come to seem like a prototype that has miraculously survived – a first, wholly successful stab at globalised information.

The BBC is still loved not for its size or “reach” but because what it says still matters. It is no coincidence that 1984, the most read British novel of the 20th century, incorporates as parody, in the guise of a dictatorship, so many features of the BBC. Deep within the best comedy routines of the BBC – the facetious self-parody of the Pythons, the lacerating jokes about spin and bureaucracy of The Thick of It – lies a rueful acknowledgement that life should be as the BBC might wish it: serious and comprehensible. This is a true BBC brand, and there is no reason why such wholly Anglo-Saxon attitudes shouldn't flourish in the digital age.

The most successful adaptations of old media to new are those where the essential function of the publication is rigorously preserved after ingenious adaptation to the market – think of the Economist, or the Guardian. These are niche publications, to be sure, but the BBC has its own niches, many of them highly successful. To date the BBC has offered itself as a large, easily identified object in media space. It should continue to do this, but think more of what it does – with people as well as programmes – that remains recognizably 'home-made': singular, quirky, appealing, often small-scale. In this way, not just one BBC will survive, but many, each of them distinctive.

Nick Fraser is editor of Storyville for BBC TV. This is a personal view.