Pat Younge

The late chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks came to speak to a group of BBC leaders in the early 2000s, at the invitation of the then-director general Greg Dyke. Sacks began by thanking the BBC for the quality of the recent programmes we’d done on Passover, and said that in a world of increasing personalisation and algorithm-driven “narrowcasting,” the BBC had not only reflected this important festival back to Jewish viewers but helped others develop insight into the Jewish faith. This was, he said, the unique power of public service broadcasting—the ability to overhear other people’s conversations, to challenge people with views and perspectives outside their echo chamber, to open their eyes to new ideas.

The BBC’s most important cultural role is to provide representation for all parts of the UK, to reflect the UK back to itself and to others abroad. For that representation to be meaningful it needs to be authentic—and factor in geography, race, gender, disability and class far better than it does today. But it is the BBC’s USP, and should be the core of any defence of the broadcaster.

Why does the BBC matter? There’s a crisis in local journalism in Britain, with local newspapers closing or becoming platforms for aggregated content, and local commercial radio stations becoming increasingly centralised. For much of the national print media, it is increasingly hard to separate the self-interest of the owners from the “journalism” served up to the public, while tech platforms are the home of mis/disinformation. On the international front, for all the talk about competition from streaming services, not only do they commission (and therefore employ) a fraction of the production staff employed by the BBC, but many of their shows are set in a mid-Atlantic “otherwhere.” As brilliant as Netflix’s Sex Education may be, you would never know from watching it that it is filmed in south Wales. There is a similar absence of place, culture and identity in many of the streaming platforms’ other non-US shows.

The BBC’s current commitment is to spend 60 per cent of its money outside London. So far, so good. But for the strategy to really work it will have to decentralise decision-making. A BBC that’s closer to the audiences that depend on it will be a BBC that better serves everyone.

Pat Younge is a director at Cardiff Productions and a former chief creative officer of BBC Television Production