TG4’s €9m slice of licence fee hits RTE drama plans
The national broadcaster should stop blaming everyone else for its financial woes and finally learn to live within its means,
MORE than €9m diverted from the TV licence fee to TG4 means there’s less money to spend in RTE for big homegrown productions, new documents reveal.
RTE’s dire financial circumstances were laid out in stark detail to Communications Minister Denis Naughten ahead of a meeting with senior figures from the state broadcaster.
Huge drops in revenue and less spending on Irish productions — similar to Love/Hate and Rebellion — were outlined in the briefing prepared by his officials.
The briefing reveals that RTE’s commercial income dropped by approximately €100m since 2009 and licence fee income has dropped by around €18m a year — including more than €9m diverted to TG4 — which means “less spending on Irish productions”.
An estimated 300 jobs have been lost in the independent sector because RTE can only spend the bare minimum on outside productions, the report states, adding that RTE is “actively looking at how it can maximise the yield from its Montrose site”.
In today’s Sunday Independent Business section it is revealed that RTE believes that up 500 homes could be developed on a portion of its Donnybrook site currently being prepped for sale.
The level of TV licence evasion stands at 13.75pc, almost three times the 5pc rate in the UK.
Last week the Sunday Independent revealed that RTE staff are bracing themselves for further cost-cutting measures as losses for the year approach €20m.
Senior managers briefed employees to warn them of the worsening financial position and flag the possibility of redundancies and other cuts.
Mr Naughten has ruled out an increase in the licence fee but plans to bring in measures to tackle evasion.
The briefing by his officials — released under freedom of information — came ahead of Mr Naughten’s meeting with RTE chair Moya Doherty and outgoing director of news Kevin Bakhurst on June 21.
The document notes that TV licence income has suffered as a result of the 2011 decision to cap Department of Social Protection contributions for ‘free licences’ at 2010 levels and a further cut of €5m imposed in 2014.
Such income was also hit by the decision to use €9.245m of licence fee receipts to partfund TG4.
“This has reduced RTE’s licence income by approximately €18m per annum — meaning less spend on Irish productions,” the officials state.
They also note that RTE’s spend on independently produced commissions has fallen from over €70m in 2008 to around €40m in 2014 — the minimum it’s statutorily obliged to spend.
The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) has twice recommended increases to the licence fee in line with inflation in recent years, the document says.
But it notes that the Government has “made clear that no consideration of increased funding should be undertaken until the scope of further efficiencies in RTE has been examined”.
Along with highlighting licence fee evasion, the report states that 8pc of households say they don’t have TVs.
Asked what the Government is doing to help RTE amid its financial difficulties, a spokesman for Mr Naughten said: “The Minister recognises the challenges that face the existing TV licence system and considers that the immediate focus should be on improving the operation of the licence fee system to provide an improved basis for funding into the future”. This would include measures to tackle the “current unacceptable levels of TV licence evasion”.
He said any consideration of the decision to divert licence fee funds to TG4 would be “confidential” as the estimates process for Budget 2017 is ongoing.
FATHER Ted had a catch-all answer to every religious controversy: “That would be an ecumenical matter.” Working for RTE is a bit like that too. Every crisis in Irish broadcasting is greeted with the same simple formula: “That would be a public funding matter.”
Before stepping down earlier this year, RTE’s outgoing director general Noel Curran once again warned that disaster would strike unless more money was forthcoming. Now it seems that it has.
Two weeks ago, the Government reportedly told RTE that it wouldn’t be getting a licence-fee increase. Suddenly, RTE comes out and declares that staff might have to take career breaks in 2017 in a further bid to cut costs. Presumably if that doesn’t work either, they’ll be forced to put a gun to a kitten’s head and demand: “Cough up, suckers, or Tiddles get it.”
What’s strange is that RTE’s financial report for 2014 showed a small surplus for the second year running — despite a €5m drop in public funding in the Budget.
Moya Doherty, chair of the board of RTE, was full of praise: “With the challenges posed in recent years by an increasingly competitive market, this is noteworthy financial management.”
So if it was “noteworthy financial management” back then, is it financial mismanagement now?
All we know is that by the end of 2015, RTE was once again posting a deficit of €2.8m, with even greater losses predicted for this year, thanks to the huge costs of the 1916 centenary coverage.
Boom and bust has always been RTE’s way, and the identical excuse gets trotted out when it’s the latter. Last year’s gloomy report put the losses firmly “in the context of seven years without any increase in funding”. That would be an ecumenical matter, after all. Though it doesn’t explain how there was a surplus in 2014 after six years without a funding increase, does it?
So far new director general Dee Forbes has concentrated on calling for a crackdown on licence-fee dodgers, while making pessimistic noises about the effect of Brexit.
Ah, Brexit, the catch-all excuse for every ill. The cheque’s in the post… the dog ate my homework… blame it all on Brexit. The truth is that advertisers will come if the audiences are there, Brexit or not. Channel 4 just paid £75m (€87.5m) for the rights to The Great British Bake Off for three years. They don’t seem unduly worried about filling ad breaks. Maybe RTE’s programmes just aren’t good enough?
There are some losses that RTE must endure as part of its public service obligations. The good news is that these are only a small part of the overall budget. It’s the rest of RTE that gobbles up the lion’s share , and what do licence payers get back for their generosity?
RTE television still seems to rely on a few old staples, pretending every year that because a million people tune in to watch The Late, Late Toy Show or the All-Ireland finals that Irish broadcasting is answering the public’s need rather than simply masking the real problem. These are blips. They don’t constitute a strategy.
Imagine that the small fortune which is spent on the Rose of Tralee each year was channelled instead into commissioning half a dozen new shows, any of which might prove successful enough to finance further new projects in turn.
That, though, presumes that RTE knows how or what to commission, and there’s not a great deal of evidence for that. Love/Hate was overrated, and The Ray D’Arcy Show felt like the brainchild of someone who hadn’t watched TV since the 1970s. Still RTE pumped money into it as if it was a guaranteed cash cow, including €136,000 on the set alone. That’s quite a bill for a sofa, a desk and some lights.
RTE’s response to criticism was that “Saturday nights were refreshed” by the show, which says it all about the cocooned world in which these people live. The 2015 report trumpeted a series of similar “successes”, such as the fact that @rtenews was “the number one media Twitter account”, and RTE News Now was the most downloaded app, and they won some awards in New York. Well done, but none of this actually makes any money.
It even boasted how Saorview got a rebrand and new logo “underpinned by consumer research”.
If you’re looking for a warning sign, that reference to research is as good a red light as anything. It points to the reliance on reams of data rather than a flowing river of ideas to shape RTE’s future; on jargon rather than creativity.
In that same report, Moya Doherty made the following statement: “The contemporary creative space is one where partnerships, collaboration and collective planning are key to success and RTE can lead this with a commitment to open and inclusive programming.” Translation, anyone? No?
Most people really couldn’t care less if programming is open or inclusive. Their main concern tends to be: is it any good? Do I want to watch it? If the answer to both questions is “yes”, then life is good, RTE makes money, and everyone is happy. It’s when the answer becomes “no” too often that problems arise. In the hope of finding out how to turn a no into a yes, RTE points to its relationship with the Audience Council through which this information is “filtered”, as well as citing “key research projects” into what people want to watch, when the real evidence is available practically by the hour in terms of audience figures.
What comes through RTE’s official statements is fear. Commissioning must be done on “objective evidence rather than on some kind of intuitive understandings”, it declares; but must it really? Objective evidence can only ever be retrospective. It can tell you why this or that programme was successful last year, but it can’t tell you what will work next year.
Danielle Lux was a commissioning editor at the BBC who gave the green light to Have I Got News For You?, The Weakest Link and The Royle Family, among many other titles. When she left to return to her original home at Channel 4, the BBC praised her “intuitive feel for entertainment”. Clearly no one told them of the folly of intuition.
Public service broadcasting is a strange business, in that it has to do things no other cash-strapped business would ever do; but it is still a business, and when businesses are on the ropes they have two choices. They can either cut costs or find ways to make more money.
RTE has always avoided that stark choice, preferring instead to wait for the magical arrival of more public funding. It’s been going on for decades. The 2015 report even says that if Broadcasting Authority of Ireland recommendations on increased public funding had been implemented, then RTE would have posted a profit. Yes, and if I’d won the lottery last week, I’d be rich. But I didn’t. You have to deal with life as it is, not how you’d wish it to be in ideal circumstances.
RTE has flirted with the idea of selling off part of its huge Donnybrook site to raise money, or finding ways to monetise its vast, unique archive, but there are things that could be done sooner.
Nearly €4m went into 2FM last year. Why are we spending public money on a pop music station with no public service benefit when there are scores of commercial stations doing exactly the same thing and funding themselves solely through advertising?
That sum is dwarfed by the millions that go into keeping RTE2 afloat. And for what? A diet of Neighbours, The Simpsons, Home And Away, Top Gear and old episodes of Friends. Most households are multichannel, they don’t need
‘RTE has always avoided making hard choices, preferring to wait instead for more magical public funding’
to pay to see these shows on RTE.
There are other parts of RTE’s network that most Irish people probably don’t even realise exist. Did you know, for example, that 2FM has a digital sister channel, 2XM, devoted to indie music, or that there’s an electronic dance music channel called RTE Pulse? RTE even has digital stations for children, with negligible viewing figures. These luxuries cost money.
If RTE can compete with commercial television, producing international hit after hit, then it should stop dithering and making excuses and hiding behind endless reports and just get on with it. If it can’t, then it should get back to its core purpose, using the licence fee to produce public service broadcasting serving Irish audiences on modest and realistic budgets.
If we must pay the licence fee, most of us would surely prefer the money to be spent on Irish-interest programmes which simply wouldn’t be made otherwise, rather than in churning out feeble knock-offs of shows that have already been successful in other countries and which we can watch for free elsewhere anyway.