A subscription system for the BBC is something to be embraced, not feared

Addressing a parliamentary select committee examining BBC funding last week, its Director General, Lord Hall, observed that if the Government stopped them using the licence fee to raise revenue, the Corporation might have to consider a subscription system. This appeared to have been couched as a threat; we should hope it is a promise.

If people paid per item for BBC services, the corporation would have to improve them. It insists its programmes are routinely excellent; but many have been cheapened in quality, for reasons of ideology rather than expense.

A few high-class offerings remain. The recent documentary series on Margaret Thatcher was thorough and objective. Much of Radio 3, despite its provoking tendency to patronise its audience, is outstanding, and many would pay the equivalent of the licence fee purely for this. Some BBC news coverage is superb, though it can no longer be used to justify the licence fee on “public service” grounds because of the exemplary quality of Sky News. High-quality news, films and drama are now available all over the internet – a medium, like satellite TV, unimaginable when the principle of the licence fee was established. In an age of such choice, the equivalent of a poll tax for those wishing to watch BBC programmes, or indeed own a TV, is unacceptable. Lord Hall, who is not stupid, doubtless knows this.

For years, the best programmes on

British television have been American imports – The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos and Mad Men, for example. By contrast, BBC drama is a boxticking exercise in inclusivity and social engineering, inflicting on the audience a metropolitan television executive’s view of the world, not that of the average licence fee payer. BBC television drama rarely entertains or educates; it indoctrinates, hence the obvious link between this approach and its plummeting ratings.

Its factual programming is increasingly dismal. BBC4, devised to broadcast the documentaries and arts programmes once screened on BBC2 when it boasted serious intellectual heft, increasingly presents programmes designed to lure people in through gimmickry rather than appeal to their intellectual curiosity. The frequent spectacle of the academic Dr Lucy Worsley, an architecture expert and Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, putting on fancy dress and fronting programmes on subjects in which she has no expertise – she recently opined on the American Civil War – reveals the carelessness and cynicism underlying the BBC’s factual programming.

If BBC4, and indeed the rest of the BBC’s output, were available by subscription only, the quality of the output would be forced upwards: as would that of its competitors in the independent sector. There would be less room for the patronising, politically-correct dross currently overpopulating the schedules, thanks to a price mechanism enabling consumers to choose what sort of programming they want. The only troubling aspect of this is that Lord Hall should regard it as something to be feared, rather than embraced.

There would be less room for the patronising, politicallycorrect dross currently populating the schedules