BBC3 is as appealing to the young as a church hall disco. So what a ludicrous waste of £80m to revive it
Flaunting dinner plate earrings and a blonde barnet hairsprayed with concrete, Pat Butcher’s face twists with emotion. ‘We’re in it together, ain’t we?’ gasps the pearly queen of EastEnders, played by Pam St Clement.
She’s one of the unmistakable faces in a two-minute montage of video clips stitched into a social media advertising campaign, reminding us to treasure our state broadcaster at all times — with the hashtag #thisisOurBBC.
there’s no mention of the £159 annual licence fee, a compulsory tax imposed on every household with a TV, which funds the corporation’s £3.7 billion budget.
and there is no explanation of why this advertising offensive has been unleashed just days after Culture Secretary nadine Dorries hinted heavily that the licence fee will be abolished in 2027.
it’s simply a collage of feelgood images: alan Partridge stuttering, the Vicar of Dibley boogying, gregg Wallace gurning, tess Daly glittering.
there are drag artistes and gangsters, a streaker on a football pitch and Morecambe and Wise dressed as Christmas reindeer.
Soundbites run together, to proclaim: ‘the BBC is... a unique experiment’ (ooh, that’s Chris Packham). ‘it’s a reflection of who we are... every one of us’ (ahh, lovely David attenborough).
But the most telling snippet, the one that reveals the BBC’s real socialist ethic, is of a 1970s union leader, gesturing to the strikers on picket duty around him. ‘it’s something that belongs to all of us,’ he growls.
if that’s true, why do we need an expensive ad campaign to sell us what we already own?
in an era when viewers have the options of netflix and amazon Prime, Disney+ and now TV, BritBox and apple TV, as well as
the limitless free archive of Youtube, it’s more accurate to say the BBC isn’t ours at all. it’s a subscription service with no opt-out; an obligatory purchase that millions cannot easily afford — and one that is increasingly irrelevant to swathes of
young people.
CurrEnt teen slang for traditional television is ‘the Boomer box’. try telling them that the BBC is their heritage. they don’t want it...so why on earth should they face a lifetime of paying for it?
tweedy Beeb types have been scratching their heads over the question of ‘what the Young People of today really want’ for decades.
their answer this week reveals the paucity of their inspiration, because it’s exactly the same solution they tried 19 years ago.
BBC three relaunched on tuesday night after six years off-air, when it was available only via the streaming video iPlayer service.
the decision to bring it back to TV — at a cost of £80million — is quite extraordinary. Even the guardian, where criticism of the BBC is regarded as thought-crime, has called the scheme ‘a huge and probably futile gamble’.
On its opening night, the spotlight shone on Cherry Valentine, a 28-year-old drag artiste from Darlington who grew up in a traveller family. Cherry was the subject of an hour-long documentary, gypsy Queen and Proud, about her ‘identity’ as a gay performer.
‘identity’ is the BBC’s favourite buzzword, a shorthand for everything to do with race, sexuality, gender and self-esteem.
the bitter irony is that BBC three has no identity at all. With its outmoded ‘yoof’ agenda and acres of sports coverage shored up with repeats, its schedule looks like the contents of the wastepaper basket at radio times.
Senior executives at new Broadcasting House seem to think this is their best tactic to lure in young viewers. When it first aired in 2003, the target audience was people aged 16 to 34.
BBC three attracted a small audience at first, but over the next few years, with the help of lots of licence fee cash, this became a really tiny audience. By 2014, the director-general at the time, tony Hall, was struggling to make cuts of £100 million across the corporation. Eventually, with a soft sucking noise, the way the light goes out when a fridge door closes, BBC three went off air in 2016.
But if it was hard to persuade teenagers to tune in to the Beeb during tony Blair’s era, the notion is completely preposterous now.
the current obsession among young viewers is tiktok, a social media platform that enables anyone to upload 15-second video shorts and then gorge on innumerable other snippets.
BBC three offers nothing that can compete with social media. it’s oldfashioned telly of the worst sort — created by the middle-aged in a patronising attempt to win the approval of the young. it’s the broadcasting equivalent of a church hall disco, where the music is chosen by the vicar. restoring BBC three to the Freeview box makes as much sense as restarting the radio 1 roadshow with ‘Kid’ Jensen.
Presiding at the relaunch party on tuesday night were radio 1 DJs Clara amfo and greg James — a bloke in his late 30s.
Once they’d stopped hyperventilating, we were served a condescending five-minute news bulletin called the Catch up (because every teenager loves being patronised).
Setting the standard as low as humanly possible, the first real offering was a pair of episodes of Eating With My Ex. this reality TV format, which has been around since 2019 and is now in its fourth series, brings together celebrities who used to date.
First to face each other across plates of congealing seafood were Chloe Veitch, currently starring on C4’s Celebrity Hunted, and former boyfriend Kori Sampson. they met on a scripted dating show, netflix’s too Hot to Handle, and conversation without cue cards was clearly impossible.
the questions they had to ask each other were printed on their dinner plates: ‘Did you think i was hot?’ ‘Why did you mug me off?’
the main event was a BBC three stalwart, ruPaul’s Drag race, which enjoyed its greatest vogue ten years ago. With its outrageous costumes, overblown choreography and lots of miming to pop music, it now looks as up-to-date as Pan’s People.
Mel C of the Spice girls was guest judge. She is 48, or three times the age of BBC three’s ideal viewer. Still, she’s Baby Spice compared to ruPaul, born in 1960, making him older than Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer.
A15-MinutE sketch show, lazy Susan, followed, opening with a skit about middle-class professionals comparing mortgage rates: ‘Fixed-rate tracker, 1.5 over base, very competitive.’ that must have had the sixth-formers in stitches.
then came a second helping of drag queenery in the shape of Cherry Valentine before the station settled down to four hours of what it does best: repeats.
naturally, it started with one of its proudest moments, Fleabag. this simply served to remind us that even the biggest ratings hits end up as late-night fillers.
BBC three has produced successes. gavin and Stacey began life there. Stacey Dooley carried out her first investigations for three and its afghan war sitcom Bluestone 42 was also a minor and under-rated hit.
Even while off-air, a few shows continued to be made under its banner, broadcast on iPlayer. Some were quite good, such as the drama normal People with Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal, and those ended up on BBC1. it seemed a sensible solution.
But the job of commissioning editors is to identify sitcoms and dramas that will make great viewing before filming begins.
the licence fee should not be funding BBC three as a laboratory for testing TV formulas. the station was always a dumping ground, giving space to series that were not quite dead but no longer merited a slot on BBC1, such as the school soap Waterloo road.
it hosted sports events for niche audiences — a function it fulfilled again this week, with Match Of the Day live using BBC three to screen semi-finals from the african Cup Of nations.
the channel’s revival is an open admission that no one at the Beeb has a clue what viewers want.
if they carry on like this, they’ll get the answer they are dreading — we want our money back.