The BBC’s plan to cancel culture will cost it dear
NewsWhat we know so far is that BBC4 will be taken off air and put online with a minuscule budget from 2025.
BBC4 is the only UK television channel apart from Sky Arts which has a declared cultural remit.
Also to be scrapped is Radio4 Extra, a channel with intelligent documentaries and discussion.
And the BBC orchestras have been told to find their own funding, with no indication where they might turn. We will end up with fewer orchestras.
Taken together, it is clear that the BBC hierarchy have chosen to penalise the serous part of the broadcasting spectrum in order to protect the trivial.
That, in many people’s view, is a betrayal of its charter.
Come 2025 we may all stop paying the licence fee.
Whatever the government giveth, the government can taketh away. Maybe that’ll make some of you reconsider your views on government-funded art, but this crowd seems incapable of seeing past its political biases to recognize the unintended consequences. You get the government you vote for.
Surely the BBC is responsible for the way it allocates its money, not the Government. June Sarpong and her department?
Too many fingers in too many pies.
And private sponsors can change allegiance.
The assumption that a market/private based classical music sector is more reliable than government funded arts is laughable. Comparing the American orchestra and opera scene with the one in Germany and elsewhere it is not difficult to see which one is more stable and varied. Too bad that you seem incapable of seeing past your political biases to recognize the unintended consequences.
With FPTP, you don’t really get the government you vote for!
Do you live in England or America, Hunter?
What culture on BBC4, exactly?
Endless repeats of Top of the Pops and archived pop music shows and compilations?
It wouldn’t be so bad if there some occasional classical* or dramatic content, even if only from the archives, which must be pretty vast.
*not including the annual, self-congratulatory Promsfest, which become more of a joke every year, both in content and presentation.
There used to be a lot, then they announced it would be ‘repeats only’ about a year ago (and it went to pot). Probably to lay the groundwork for this next step, by now arguing they can do ‘more online ‘. Ugh.
I agree entirely. BBC4 used to be a great channel, but is now a complete waste of time. The same goes for many programmes on R3. The morning programmes are a complete joke, especially Essential Classics. Never trust any programme that has ‘essential’ in its title! On Saturday morning, Record Review has been whittled down to accommodate This Classical Life, and Through the Night has been shortened on the same day to host other crap. Where does it all end? Call me a musical conservative, but who the hell are these new audiences that the BBC are trying to attract?
BBC4 is basically for the uninitiated! The presentation on BBC4 and who they’re aiming to reach has got worse every year as I fear that has not got new audiences for either the Proms or classical music in general. Mercifully we still have Radio 3.
they pay zoe ball. over 1 million pounds. beyond a joke. and they charge me a lad nearly 90. for a
tv licence.
Yep, direct result of the (Tory) Govt’s determination to have no dissenting voices for us sheep to turn to in times of doubt. It is the (Tory) Govt’s view that must prevail even if it rings so desperately false and hollow. Besides, they don’t even believe what they say themselves.
Shame on you for making it look as though the BBC itself has chosen these options when the (Tory) Govt has forced this on them.
And yeah, do exactly what the (Tory) Govt wants you do and stop paying your licence fee. Do its dirty work for it.
Nothing to do with the Conservative Government. The whole commercialisation of broadcasting has gone on for years plus technology has advanced at a pace. Many people don’t even have a television. How people get their programmes of whatever sort has changed. Don’t think ITV or Sky are any better. Don’t see many of your Labour party turning up to concerts as many Tories do in all parts of the country.
Of course it’s to do with the tory govt. The free licences for poorest pensioners used to be paid for by the govt, and now it has to be paid for by the BBC. Plus the BBC have had been made to function with one hand tied behind their back for the last decade..
It baffles me that the BBC pays a fortune for coverage of (for example) the Football World Cup and European equivalent and the Olympics when independent television could cover these and pay for them through advertising revenue. The public would still have access to their fix of these items at no extra cost.
I think they were trying to stop subscription only for sports. I don’t have a Sky package, but I have friends who do and about £70 or £80 a month.
I would lament the loss of Radio 4 Extra immensely — they also run, or I suppose re-run — excellent drama programmes. This very week I am listening to the last of their 10-part series, The Raj Quartet, a wonderful version of the same books that made up The Jewel in the Crown TV series. I listen to it almost daily year-round. It is there that I discovered the radio work of Mark Tavener and found many other plays that have given me incalculable pleasure over the years.
I believe you are right — I am not sure about the TV implications, but for BBC radio listeners, this is a dire move. I feel quite sure that the vast majority of radio listeners among the cherished yout’ market do not turn to the BBC as their station(s) of preference. Their numbers may show something different, but if they are going to compete for the now widely fragmented audiences of the various forms of popular music, they are indeed going to abuse their mandate.
I became a lifelong devotee of the CBC as a student who did not have her own TV at University, and who chanced upon a very original interview show called As it Happens one evening. (All these years later it still goes on). I was thereafter tuned only to CBC and came to know its full line-up, due to the vagaries of class scheduling. We all listened to it in my set, and at that time it carried the odd BBC programme, including Just a Minute and My Word and My Music. We played Just a Minute in the Common Rooms, with rigorous application of the three restrictions! I listen to Just a Minute to this day, often on Radio 4X where it is repeated in season. (My Word I revisit on Fourble).
What I am saying is that I learned of all these wonders because they were THERE. And got my first shortwave radio, in the days before online, to hear more BBC. One of the great pleasures of my time in Hong Kong was the late-night BBC Relay. But, back in Canada, I remained devoted to CBC until its woke and youth-oriented agenda drove me away, resentful as they gradually, then with more acceleration, cut drama and classical music and upped the indigenous content to a disproportionate degree, to the point that I have rarely turned it on lately without running into a native issues show. A special series, Canada Reads, which I had followed annually for years, drove me away as it replaced literate and well-read authors and critics and replaced them with people who, though apparently they still knew how to turn pages, were clearly less so but represented the worlds of hip-hop and “street” and various minority groups, as did nearly all the book selections. A long way from Harriett Gilbert.
I came to BBC online as I was withdrawing from CBC, and although it seems radio 4 and 3 will still be with us, I wonder for how long. 4X always seems to have more spring in its step than Radio 4.
I do get that broadcasters have to think ahead and build audiences, but they remind me a bit of orchestras looking for subscribers — but doing less and less to retain them. I wonder what the sell-by date for listeners is to the BBC — 34? 45? In order to get that scrap of the youth market that has not committed to the private stations of its choice by the age of 10? They are indeed driving away the segment of the market that pays the licence fee in order to seduce their otherwise-engaged kids.
And it was not what it was created, and funded, for. I do not wholly approve the moralistic approaches of Lord Reith, but he got the BBC started on a level that was aimed to elevate, not to dumb-down.
The government does not want an educated population
Not forgetting the World Service too.
Excellent commentary. Thank you for sharing these valuable thoughts. I hope the right people listen. I feel the BBC is not only the bar-setter and custodian of excellence for the UK, but a beacon for the whole world, at its best. Just try living in the US to get some perspective. Dropping the bar will have disastrous ripple effects for the cultural soul of the entire world, which is already suffering the invasion of crass banality at every turn. Just a few minutes ago, I listened to Dmitri Hvorostovsky singing Rachmaninov songs and literally cried, not just at the beauty of his voice and the music, but at what the performance represented, holistically; humanity reaching upwards towards its most transcendent. It is a very general and perhaps over-emotional point to make, so indulge me, but how rapidly we can become barbarians in the absence of intellectual, moral and spiritual integrity. The BBC has always served as a great preserver and conduit of those values. For the whole world! We simply can not allow the destruction to outweigh the creative in “creative destruction”.
Far right asset strippers are in power here. The UK is being broken down and sold off:
Culturally, institutionally and constitutionally.
Fascist vandalism. Be afraid.
Oh come off it! Why is it people always yell ‘fascism’ when it is merely that the BBC is hopeless. The BBC pays more attention to millionaire ex-football pundits than it bothers about the arts.
What does Sheku kanneh-mason have to do with the topic of this article? Why use this photo?
Only recognisable ‘culta’ musico to the populist audiences
Shame!
No orchestra should be reliant on financial handouts from Government (directly) or The BBC (indirectly) which are funded by the public, who have no say in how their money is used. Classical music and opera are extreme minority interests (and I am in that minority) and orchestras and performers cannot go on relying on public handouts for their future.
Manchester has three orchestras, the Halle, BBC Phil and Manchester Camerata. Why can’t the Phil relocate to Norwich , Bristol, Carlisle or Exeter, relative musical wastelands, and if the answer it would not be economic (read, there is no demand for an orchestra) then like many other professions people may lose jobs and have to retrain for other professions, do have a chat with financial sector workers, engineers, steel workers, miners etc, all of whom had to face up to such dilemmas in the last 40 years or so.
“Artists” are not a protected species (well not according to the WWF) they have no “right” to employment than any other worker in the UK………this is called real life.
To quote “Field of Dreams”, if you build it and they perceive it is of value, they will come………..you just have to offer the right product at the right price in the right place and promote it effectively.
Now await the wailings of the musical cognoscenti………………
Carlisle is currently served by Northern Sinfonia.
Which is based in Gateshead, time to get your Atlas out!
Northern Sinfonia are based in Gateshead but regularly visit Carlisle as part of their remit.
I think he meant ‘served’ not based.
Whenever there is debate about the BBC orchestras, there are all the usual expressions of outrage we see here and on other platforms. But little consideration is given to the circumstances which gave rise to these orchestras – and more importantly whether they are valid today for an organization which has increasingly slender resources – although that must be balanced in great part because of its own absolute greed in the late 1960s and 1970s through its intent on grabbing a far greater share of the recently enlarged national broadcasting market.
Having created many orchestras after its founding, the problem the BBC faced in the 1930s was the arrival of a much larger commercial recording industry and a Musicians Union fearful that the BBC would start broadcasting a great many new recordings rather than live orchestral music. If that were to happen, the recording industry could lose royalty payments and the musicians work. So a tripartite deal was stitched up which permitted the BBC only a limited amount of “needle time” each week. The rest had to be music performed ‘live’.
Fast forward to the 1960s, the explosion resulting from the emergence of a whole new world of pop music, and of those clever entrepreneurs who realized that the BBC’s popular music output was so crashing boring, bland and patronizing it was turning listeners off in legions (remember “Workers’ Playtime”?) So they emulated the popular Radio Luxembourg which could be picked up in the UK, invested in ships, equipment and DJs and started broadcasting round the clock the latest in pop from the sea outside UK territorial waters. At one time more than 8 ships were operating in this way.
The BBC, the government, the recording industry and the Union panicked. These ships were soon banned and the BBC instead started on a major spending spree. It revamped all its programming and employed most of those previously seaborne DJs. Even the MU relaxed its needle time restrictions – although only a little. The BBC was also permitted to go on an orgy of expansion with the establishment of local radio stations around the country. Although these were technically put out to tender, the BBC ‘miraculously’ ended up with most of them.
This revamp and the massive expansion of the Corporation’s radio and TV output had to be paid for. Axing some of the 12 orchestras it then controlled became a BBC mantra. Over time it managed to get rid of a few – the BBC Scottish Radio Orchestra for one – but the outrage was such that the major ones were saved. Until
now, that is. The chickens have finally come home to roost and that massive expansion 50 years ago can no longer be afforded.
Those orchestras which survived the cuts in the late 20th century have certainly become more commercial since then. Beforehand, very few concerts were given outside BBC studios, for example. But ticket income hardly makes a dent not only in players and staff salaries but also in the dedicated facilities they use on BBC premises.
Public outcry helped keep some of the present orchestras in existence in the 1970s and 1980s. Will there be such an outcry now? Sadly I don’t see it! But if the BBC is cutting some of them, at least it should look to Tokyo and Japan’s national broadcaster, NHK. It runs the consistently fine NHK Symphony which actually does tour the country in addition to its regular concert series in Tokyo. It also has a dedicated arts TV channel with a lot of classical music and often opera. With the massive savings it will make, the BBC mandarins should at least use some to create similar channels on both radio and TV. Naturally with those presently in charge, it will never do so. And so very sadly the dumbing down will continue and the final shreds of Lord Reith’s maxim that the BBC should be a public broadcaster will disappear. Nothing is sacred.
“Now await the wailings of the musical cognoscenti………………”
Can’t help feeling that that is why you came here.
As I recall, financial sector workers, steel workers, miners and several other categories were receiving eye-wateringly massive subsidies a few years ago. Arts subsidy was nothing in comparison.
You are quite right, some of these industries did get subsidies, and then when they could no longer compete (even with subsidies) in the market place the subsidies were stopped and industries closed down and people lost their jobs. People had to retrain for new jobs and professions. So please explain to me how the “arts fraternity” are different, in that if there is no demand for their product then why should the government via the Arts Council and ultimately the public go on pumping money into them?
For someone who claims to be interested in music, your failure to understand how it works is baffling, although I think there is an element of trolling in your post. A case of British tabloid “toffs’ opera” syndrome perhaps?
There IS a demand for the product but, in most cases, it is intrinsically expensive to present. This limits the ability of poorer people to access some of our greatest achievements. The Glyndebourne Festival does not receive a public subsidy. It survives very well and has a fabulous theatre, but it is expensive. Try getting tickets.
You might be happy if classical music became more exclusive, I wouldn’t. Some orchestras would go, a few would survive, or we would become dependent on tours from Europe.
Do you apply the same logic to architecture? Should our greatest buildings and monuments, many of which are expensive to maintain, be left to the market, or should they be preserved for future generations? What use is Stonehenge compared with the local Tesco?
As for your ludicrous financial services analogy, I’m not even going to comment.
Yes, because you have no idea.
It’s not the BBC they are having to do what the Government and Dorries tells them. The Conservative party hates the BBC as they consider it to be too Left wing.
The Labour government used to consider the BBC too right wing. Probably means that they have the balance about right. The current Conservative party hates the BBC because it challenges, criticises and tries to hold it to account – which is its job. We have a Prime Minister that is too frightened and neither capable nor willing to even carry out a TV interview.
Clarification: the tories hate the BBC because it is not right-wing enough for them.
Unfortunately, it’s not a truly Conservative government. It’s not right of centre.
I suspect you’re not talking about the UK government here. It’s the most right-of-centre government we’ve ever had!
It is!!
The Conservatives (the party does of course have an 80 seat majority) do indeed despise the BBC (and with good reason). To suggest that the BBC is doing the government’s bidding is ridiculous.
What’s pathetic is that the government despises the BBC yet the broadcaster’s News arm might as well be its propaganda unit, such is its abject forelock-tugging and seeking for a spurious “balance” in its reporting.
The BBC over recent years has had to make cuts of over 30% to its budgets due to standstill licence fees etc. I wonder how an institution like the NHS would manage that or Sky? This in a world that has Netflix Amazon etc with mega budgets.
The current cuts include the merging of BBC World and BBC domestic news. The Radio 4 Extra and BBC4 will still be available ( for the moment ) on line. It is a sign that they are scraping the bucket already that the performing groups have been told that funding will not continue at the same level. The BBC has more orchestras than any other broadcaster. So cut an orchestra one might think but they are often connected to a nation or the lead orchestra ( BBC Symphony ) or make money in their own right ( BBC Concert Orchestra). Also cutting an orchestra would begin to threaten the
Proms and whatever one thinks there is nothing like it.
BBC 4 only has Top of the Pops repeats on a Friday. Last week there was a programme about the friendship between Holst and Vaughan Williams as well as a concert series called Inside Classical.
Remember too that the BBC has to have popular programmes ( football etc ) so that it can claim to give something for everyone who pays the licence fee.
Until recently Sky Arts had 2 channels. Now its one. They too have many many repeats on the channel.
The BBC has its roots in the culture of this country. It tries ( not always successfully ) to adapt to the times but it is now being undermined by the government through its funding. If the barrel is scraped much more the bottom will fall out and it will be useless and we will all be the losers but it will be too late.
I remember when I was younger that the National Ballet of Canada had one of its productions aired on CBC every year. They had a director, beloved of the dancers, who trusted him because he understood ballet and knew the “product” and how to shoot it. The question every fall was which ballet would be chosen, and they mixed, as do companies, between the old war horses (Swan, Beauty, etc.) and newer offerings by rising choreographers. I wonder how many young people turned to their parents and asked for lessons, or older people who decided that they would like to experience this live on stage.
The “because it’s there” argument I tried to advance above is a tough sell, I know — only small fragments of “target markets” get caught up and become interested in something to the point of supporting it later. But it has to be there to have a chance.
When there was still classical education, there was still an audience for classical arts. But for over a generation education has basically been replaced by “training.” And these trained young people — who seem to be trained only to “market,” and whose entire philosophy of life is sales-driven, are now running schools and institutions and we have people who are so utterly ignorant of anything before them that they are incapable of seeing any value in minority interests, let alone the concept of enrichment that does not mean capital gains of actual shekels. In a world where Kardashians can become billionaires, and admired (for what?) and a standard to aspire to, what hope is there?
We are facing a future without doctors, dentists, architects and engineers because it is too hard, too unglamorous and, comparatively, too unrewarding. In past bleak times, the arts helped get through the worst of nightmares — the concerts and ballets and theatres that played on through the Blitz being a case in point. But those without any interest past yesterday will have no arts to call up — I wonder how soothing rap music will be in some future horror?
Music grows and tastes change, but music is not as good as it can be when kids never learn how to read music, or anything about where chords came from. Theatre is not as good in the hands of people who have never learned to speak Shakespeare, even if their lives will be spent on modern plays. Writing is not as good when it has no reference to the history of literature.
TV could be so expansive to horizons, but it is becoming increasingly reductive. I know people who got interested in classical music because of Morse — where now do you see a detective who relaxes with a book or a Mozart recording? Who now reads a poem because they were intrigued by Rumpole’s constant throwaways of Wordsworth and the rest? TV cannot even adapt old novels any more without making young white men into characters who are female and black? There is more anti-racism in Shakespeare than in any EDI department. But the people running them do-not-know-that, because they-have-never-read-him.
There’s been very little classical music on the BBC in the last twenty years (as Norman Lebrecht has mentioned). If there had been and if the current affairs programmes hadn’t been ridiculously biased to the left, the BBC might have retained the support of the Conservative party.
‘Last week there was a programme about the friendship between Holst and Vaughan Williams’
It was a repeat of a programme from 2018. Not complaining; just pointing out that there are not many programmes being made about classical music (despite the BBC’s perhaps incomparable archive).
That is dreadful news if correct. Good excuse to not pay the licence fee in future
Don’t pay, and we will simply lose even more. I don’t want to watch Top of the Pops! I would happily pay my licence fee just to get the World Service for myself, and be broadcast practically to the world in countless languages. It is wonderful that you can tune into Radio 4 FM wavelength in Nairobi and Bujumbura, and and elsewhere, and get the World Service.
The World Service is a shadow of its former self. I’m ashamed that this is broadcast around the world.
I couldn’t agree more. The complete trashing of quality, cultural programmes is an outrage. It’s as if the BBC has decided to be the frontrunner in the race to the bottom.
BBC 4 showed The Duchess of Malfi recently. I would have killed to see that.
It’s available to watch on iPlayer if you’re in the UK
The Government wants the BBC to compete in the commercial sector by either becoming a subscription service or being funded by advertising.
If it is going to survive after the abolition of the licence, it will need to make money. No commercial broadcaster supports culture and the arts because there’s no money it.
Nadine Dorries is the Culture Secretary but she seems determined to wipe out culture.
What culture? There is rarely anything worth watching on any of the BBC’s channels.
This is what happens when you put middle class,left wing,woke morons in charge of anything.I expect them to tear down Lord Reith’s statue anyday soon.What with our PMs lies,drunken parties in No10,vomit left for the morning cleaners etc,etc,we are a pretty lot aren’t we.My licence is due in August,so it will be goodbye BBC.
The BBC lost its way in 2007 when it thought it appropriate for a public service broadcaster to buy the Lonely Planet company for a vast amount of money, only to sell it 6 years later at a loss thought to have been in the region of £80 million. This indifference to waste may begin to explain why the BBC also considers it appropriate to pay Gary Lineker £1.36 million to talk about football.
Some will blame the Government, but the BBC as currently organised and funded is an arrogant, bloated, over-extended organisation that knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. And as for its arts coverage – on TV there is nothing other the Nutcracker at Christmas, the VPO’s New Year’s Day concert, and whatever random Proms concerts they consider fit to air.
A little while after making my impassioned plea above, I read more about the BBC cutback proposals. It seems Radio 4 Extra will continue online.
Much more serious is the proposed curtailing of more essential services, like regional news programming and the dropping of longwave services that are apparently more reliable than digital in remote areas. These are lifelines to already underserved people.
I think the battle for more cultural and clever programming will have to come from vigorous lobbying. It may depend upon whether there is a national will for a public broadcaster.
‘essential services, like regional news programming’ – The BBC’s local news programmes are made by morons for morons .
Why attack the BBC, when they are clearly being ground down and undermined by this philistine Government?
Was there much more classical music on the BBC between 1997 and 2010, when there was a Labour government? I think you’ll find a typical Labour voter has far less interest in classical music than a Conservative (and Conservatives have little enough). How much interest does the muslim population have in higher-brow culture?
I disagree with your assertion that interest in classical music is tied to political affiliation or so-called social class. I was brought up in the Welsh valleys in the 1970s and was lucky enough to go to a school which then had music on the curriculum. Great music is for anyone with an open and inquiring mind, but definitely not for those who are led by marketing.
Radio 4 Extra is the only thing worth listening to these days, the occasional foray in R3 aside. This is very sad news.
The BBC has become a cauldron of hate directed at anything deemed to be white, male and middle class. That’s the culture you’re taking about by the way. I stopped listening to Radio 3 over a decade ago. It had become more like a world music station run by a bunch of fish wives. My wife stopped listening to Radio 4 not that much later. Sick and tired of hearing how all men are rapists and wife beaters and how all the troubles of the rest of the world have been created by white people, especially white males. Good riddance in my view.
Correct. BBC Radio 4 – black people talking about being black, homosexuals talking about being homosexual, ‘transsexuals’ talking about being ‘transsexual’; if we’re lucky the occasional white, heterosexual talking about science, history, economics etc. Nearly everyone speaking on BBC Radio 4 nowadays (and they’ll probably be using Estuary English) is thick.
The BBC have no real choice. The government are moving effectively to a scrapping of the licence fee and to a subscription based model (ithat will happen – no question). Unfortunately the reality is that classical orchestras will be cut. I go regularly to see the BBC Phil. The Bridgewater Hall is two thirds empty, and the seats that are filled with patrons of mostly over 60 if not 70 (not a representation of the licence fee payers). There is also the Halle that is not funded by the tax payers which undertakes wonderful cultural activity. Lets no get into the number of orchestars in London – there is just no requirement for the BBC Symphony. I love classical music but in todays world there is no need for numerous big budget orchestras whose remit is well filled by other privately funded orchestras. There are other priorities that need to be addressed first.
First they came for BBC Three but I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a yoof…
Oh well. I guess you’ll all need to figure out how iPlayer works.
Totally correct, Norman. If they pursue both the trivial and the left-wing, they can seriously bugger off.
BBC3 used to be online, but was brought back as a broadcast channel. It is aimed at a younger audience. BBC4 would appeal to an older audience. As another post remarks, apart from the televised Proms and some history documentaries, it isn’t the channel it was.
Having said that, I think a younger audience are more likely to watch online.
But I suspect I am not alone in hardly ever watching what is now known as linear TV when I can watch online at a time that suits me and see a whole series in one go.
At least you got your country back, from the EU claws. (Sarcasm)
Some of you blame the Government? Take a look at the yougov BBC polls. One says 55% of people think the licence fee is poor value for money. Any business with customer feedback like that would be in serious trouble. That’s why the BBC is.
Instead of listening and reshaping at a very early stage, BBC execs and programme makers, festooned with progressives in ivory towers, were given the freedom to promote the ideologies that have switched a nation off.
As was predicted people just don’t want to pay for this. Licence fees started being cancelled in staggering numbers.The Govt. is actually only reflecting the public’s malaise with the Corporation.
In the final stages the BBC will do exactly as you see: take myriad opportunities to streamline for the better – and manage to get that wrong as well.
What a shame. Didn’t we all want a decent BBC?