He started job of hauling corporation into modern era
The BBC news website now runs a constant diet of celebrity gossip and what is known in the business as ‘clickbait’
Universality must not be about doing everything badly. It must be about retaining its reputation for quality and trust
Tony Hall has always been good at concealing bombshell stories. In October 1995, as chief executive of BBC News, he told John Birt, the then director-general, that Diana, Princess of Wales, was about to record an interview with Panorama in which she would reveal that there were “three people” in her marriage.
The problem was the BBC’S chairman, Marmaduke Hussey. His wife Lady Susan was – and still is – lady-in-waiting to the Queen. So together, Hall and Birt contrived to keep the story a secret from him.
Yesterday, after his sudden resignation, Hall himself was at the centre of the shock headlines. For while the corporation was braced for storms in the run-up to its 2022 licence fee negotiation with an unsympathetic government, few had expected him to fall – or be pushed – onto his sword so soon.
He was, after all, the perfect candidate, the Janus-faced DG able both to look upwards to the BBC’S paymasters in government, and benevolently down upon the corporation’s more than 22,400 staff. Able to soothe and charm, network and politic in the corridors of power and come away with £3.7billion a year in funding, while simultaneously relying on a BBC lifer’s reputation to lead a hesitant institution into an era of streaming, on-demand, subscription service competition, where rivals had their own billions and, in the internet, a means of delivering them.
Not that Hall was unused to revitalising an organisation criticised for being wasteful and out of touch on the public dime. A decade in charge of the Royal Opera House, to which he had fled after being beaten to the top job at the BBC in 2001 by Greg Dyke, was an unlikely yet perfect preparation for the task he would face on his return to rescue the broadcaster as it listed in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal – a disaster which proved too much for then DG George Entwistle to survive.
Today, the crisis facing Lord Hall does not seem quite so lethal. But it is certainly toxic. In the last few weeks, focus has fallen once again on the amount of money the BBC pays its stars. This time it is not because of the annual salaries paid at various times to Gary Lineker (£1.75million) or Jeremy Vine (£700,000) or John Humphrys (£600,000) but because of the high-profile cases of female colleagues paid nothing like the same.
As the BBC scrambles to compensate women such as Vine’s colleague Samira Ahmed, or Humphrys’s former co-presenter on Today Sarah Montague, with payouts in the hundreds of thousands, some four million pensioners across the land are due to start receiving demands that they pay the licence fee. Only those on pension credit benefit will be exempt.
A political storm is in the making. And while it was eminently survivable for Hall, it is symbolic of a dilemma at the heart of the BBC that he has, for all his astute operating, failed or been unable to address: universality.
Hall is proud of his response to the Netflix challenge. The BBC iplayer is stable, used by millions, and has the potential to become a fully-fledged streaming platform, with programmes available long term, rather than just a catch-up service for those who have missed shows.
The BBC Sounds app operates as a similar driver of audiences to the BBC’S radio and podcast output. And Britbox is a subscription service (launched last year with ITV) that has shown some success even in America – home of the on-demand revolution – attracting more than half a million subscribers there.
As for content, Hall came in determined to focus the BBC on what it does best – drama and nature documentaries, for example. And from War and Peace to Bodyguard, to the latest high-definition David Attenborough extravaganza, he feels he has delivered. But the key question endures: What exactly is the BBC meant to be? And if the answer is “all things to all people”, then how, in an age of specialised, big-budget rivals, does it avoid the comparative mediocrity, which will be a faster route to its demise than any technological or political difficulty.
It may, for example, be about to start the compulsory billing of pensioners for its services, yet overwhelmingly it feels the need to spend that money on the young – on the 16 to 35-year-olds whom it has repeatedly been criticised by Ofcom for not appealing enough to. No doubt as a result, the BBC news website now runs not just news but a constant diet of features, celebrity gossip and what is known in the business as “clickbait” – stories of dubious journalistic value which attract audiences with often bizarre, animal-themed headlines, such as last week’s effort: “My boyfriend dumped me but how do I tell my cat?”
In this generational paradox lies the heart of its programming paradox: the fear of becoming irrelevant to some compels the BBC to become more like its rivals. But the only case for its existence and funding mechanism is that it become less so. That it is distinctive. That it does not, for example, tweet out spurious nonsense during an election campaign because its rivals do so.
It is getting universality all wrong. Indeed, the only area where the BBC indubitably is narrow – in its London dominated metropolitan news coverage – has been exposed by the recent election as a handicap, eroding its reputation and authority at a time when both are critical. The question for Hall’s successor, then, is how to retain and reimagine the universal mission and yet be distinctive.
Some suggest the answer could include a hybrid model: a core model funded by a reduced licence fee supplemented by paid-for add-ons. Imagine a Proms season in which the First and Last Nights are accessible to all, but for which a ticket to all other concerts, in HD, might cost £25.
In news, distinctiveness could and probably should mean leveraging the BBC’S network of regional journalists not just to report, but to shape editorial decisions. And combining that with greater analytical heft – particularly online.
The way to attract and retain younger audiences, some concerned friends of the corporation say, is not to commission madcap Saturday night tosh, or engage in pointless efforts to draw them to Radio 3 documentaries, or online clickbait, but to deliver the same distinctive, analytical, regional, quality content, in forms that suit them. The medium may change, the message should not.
Universality for the BBC must not be about doing everything badly. It must be about retaining its reputation for quality and trust, so that it remains, in a fragmented media world, the only place where the nation may still come together – to watch Strictly, or the World Cup.
Tony Hall knew that and started the job. Completing it proved beyond him. But his successor needs to harness the BBC’S unique resources to be as good as its rivals yet different from them – or risk losing its privileges forever.