BBC should cut daytime dramas like Father Brown, says ex-Editorial Director

By Lidia Molina-Whyte

Published: Wednesday, 26 January 2022 at 12:00 am

By: Roger Mosey

The BBC isn’t perfect. The Government believes the way it is funded is due for an overhaul, and many of the corporation’s senior staff agree – though they have seemed further apart because of all the political noise coming out of Westminster.

Nobody would argue that demanding a licence to have a television set is the perfect answer for the digital age, but Auntie Beeb has got caught up in Boris Johnson’s battle for survival. The newish director-general Tim Davie has acknowledged criticisms of the BBC’s record – he has said, for instance, that they need to work much harder on impartiality – and seems open to new methods of funding.

The argument is about how far to go. At its worst, the Government has gone in for Beeb bashing with briefings to newspapers about “whacking” the corporation and the end of “state-run” television. For the BBC, the aim has been to have a grown-up discussion about what reform might mean and how public service can be maintained, though underlying it is a fear that the money really might be about to run out.

We now know that the cash is going to be very tight indeed. The settlement announced by the culture secretary Nadine Dorries means there will be a freeze on the licence fee for two years, at a time when inflation is soaring.

It will be a relief for hard-pressed families, but it also means a squeeze on the BBC’s finances that will have an impact on what’s on our screens and radios. Davie says the funding gap will be £285m by the final year of this deal. Already, the quality and range of the news output has been diminished by the hundreds of job losses among journalists; there are more repeats on radio services such as Radio 4; and parts of the television schedule are looking thin.

The best course of action for BBC bosses is to do what they’ve talked about for decades and to focus on “fewer, bigger, better”: stop making the lower-grade stuff that’s schedule filler and concentrate on programmes that viewers can describe as “worth the licence fee alone”.

We know what they are: Strictly Come Dancing, Sir David Attenborough on natural history, Peaky Blinders, Line of Duty, Wimbledon – and some of the gems that we find, usually on the radio networks, that only the BBC could create. What might be jettisoned would be all new programmes in daytime TV – it could be farewell to Father Brown – and it may be that it’s finally time to merge BBC2 and BBC4 to make a single better-resourced channel.

With the BBC iPlayer a major success, and available 24 hours a day, there’s less need to fill all the linear channels. It’s therefore an odd move to now bring back BBC Three as a channel – one could argue that it was scrapped at the wrong time, but revived at the wrong time, too. Holding on to younger audiences is crucial, but they are the people least likely to be influenced by a traditional schedule. On demand is what matters.

It’s understandable that programme controllers want to defend the traditional services. Netflix would kill to be able to launch a drama to millions of people simultaneously at 9pm on a Sunday night. But the controllers have cluttered up the schedules with tired formats. A typical Saturday night has featured The Weakest Link, The Wall, Pointless Celebrities and The Wheel, one after another, before what seems like the 1000th series of Casualty. It would be better to focus on the kind of content that you wouldn’t find on all the other non-BBC channels. I May Destroy You is a brilliant model.

I also hope the BBC protects its news services, especially in the nations and regions. Serving the communities of the UK, and reflecting all of this fascinating, diverse country should be the corporation’s core mission. The regional programmes are rewarded by big audiences at 6:30pm every night, and we should keep faith with those viewers. Education matters, too, as the BBC showed during the pandemic.

There is now renewed urgency in working out how the country should fund the BBC if the licence fee is scrapped. In the meantime, if the cuts mean holes in the schedules, it will be the price we all have to pay for the Government’s freeze. If Father Brown faces an untimely end, we should look for the culprit in Whitehall, not in Broadcasting House.