THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022 25all made for their benefit, advertising-
free, for forty pence a day. “That’s pea-
nuts, really,” one respondent said.
W
ho would want to get rid of such a
thing? There is no logical case for
dismantling the BBC. But Reith’s found-
ing vision for the broadcaster wasn’t par-
ticularly rational, either. Starting in May,
1924, the BBC played a nightingale’s song
every spring for almost twenty years.
During its mid-century apogee, the cor-
poration’s director general, William Haley,
declared a godlike, circular mission: “The
BBC’s primary function is to be the BBC.”
The classic private-sector argument
against the corporation is that it is an
inefficient behemoth that somehow
squeezes the life out of other British cre-
ative, or journalistic, enterprises. The op-
posite is nearer to the truth. The BBC
has revenues of five billion pounds and
employs more than twenty thousand
people. Its license-fee income (£3.75 bil-
lion in 2021) amounts to 0.34 per cent of
British public spending: peanuts, really,
for the world’s largest broadcast-news
operation and commissioner of new plays.
Last year, the accounting firm KPMG
calculated that every pound of the BBC’s
spending generated £2.63 in the wider
economy. It is a virtuous blob, a media
spore. (My wife worked on a contract
for BBC Film between 2017 and 2018.)
The British right has always been
doubtful about the BBC’s true purpose.
It intuits, correctly, “something disturb-
ingly collectivist” about the entire corpo-
ration, Hendy writes. (The left has its
grievances, too, but they are more about
the broadcaster’s content than about its
form.) British political culture tends to
swing between two poles: are we build-
ing a new Jerusalem or unleashing sa-
cred freedoms? Churchill never got over
his distrust of Auntie, as the broadcaster
was known. “It is run by reds,” he used
to say. It was Churchill’s government, in
the fifties, that finally ended the BBC’s
monopoly of the airwaves. Margaret
Thatcher, who never met a public util-
ity that she didn’t want to privatize,
didn’t like the smell of the BBC, either.
Norman Tebbit, her minister and loyal
Rottweiler, once described it as that “in-
sufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naïve,
guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that
sunset home of third-rate minds of that
third-rate decade, the Sixties.”
In 1985, Thatcher’s government com-
missioned a free-market economist, Alan
Peacock, to investigate whether the BBC
should be funded by advertising and
subscriptions. The Peacock Committee
came up with the wrong answer: the
BBC would probably be all right, but it
might wipe out its competition.
The constant intermingling of the
BBC’s journalists and the country’s po-
litical class means that bust-
ups are as predictable as the
nightingale in spring. Even
figures instinctively sympa-
thetic to the broadcaster, like
Tony Blair, can end up con-
vinced that its coverage is
inherently unfair. Secret To-
ries or closet socialists stalk
the corridors, depending on
who is feeling paranoid at
the time. The BBC’s news
division accounts for around ten per cent
of its budget but close to a hundred per
cent of its periodic clashes with the state.“
To which one is tempted to add:
what is not ever thus?” Hendy
writes. But the outlook for the BBC’s
second century is depressing. In “The
War Against the BBC: How an Un-
precedented Combination of Hostile
Forces Is Destroying Britain’s Greatest
Cultural Institution... and Why You
Should Care” (2020), Patrick Barwise, a
professor at London Business School,
and Peter York, a cultural commentator,
argue that the corporation is now in ex-
istential danger. For the first time in its
history, the BBC is shrinking in both
relative and absolute terms. In the age
of the streamers and global tech plat-
forms, the corporation is a fading, re-
gional power. Netflix outspends the BBC
five to one on new content (the num-
ber of Netflix subscribers in the U.K.
surpassed the number of iPlayer accounts
in 2019), and it doesn’t have symphony
orchestras to maintain. The license fee,
a broad tax, is outmoded in a world of
hyper-individualized choice.
It’s easy to throw your hands up at
the march of the digital revolution, but
the true harm, Barwise and York con-
tend, is being inflicted closer to home.
For the past twelve years, Britain has
been led by Conservative politicians un-
usually versed in the wrongs of the BBC.
Before David Cameron entered politics,he was the director of corporate affairs
for Carlton TV, an independent fran-
chise. Boris Johnson flourished as a col-
umnist in the right-wing, BBC-baiting
press (although he first found fame as a
panelist on “Have I Got News for You,”
a late-night satirical news quiz on BBC
Two). Under the cover of austerity and
the faux-Churchillian vibes of Brexit,
which the BBC is alleged to have op-
posed, the broadcaster is
being cut to the bone.
Between 2010 and 2019,
the BBC’s budget fell by
thirty per cent in real terms.
Punishing negotiations with
the government have forced
the corporation to find sav-
ings of up to a billion pounds
a year. According to Brit-
ain’s National Audit Office,
it is now making reductions
from the “audience-facing parts of its
business.” Last summer, the BBC cut
“Holby City,” a popular, hospital-based
drama, after twenty-three years because
it concluded that its viewers were al-
ready well served by the broadcaster.
During the Tokyo Olympics, the BBC
had only two live streams (down from
twenty-four, at the Rio Olympics, in
2016)—all it could afford.
Skeptics of the BBC say its new mis-
sion should be “distinctiveness.” They
argue, along the free-market lines, that
the corporation should make only things
that commercial rivals would never
touch. But that is not what they really
mean. What was distinctive about the
BBC was its universalism and its in-
tention to improve people’s lives. “The
genius and the fool, the wealthy and the
poor listen simultaneously,” Reith wrote
in 1924. “There is no first and third class.”
Hendy rightly predicts that once the
BBC starts to retreat, and to apologize
for itself, it will cease to be the BBC.
“It has always been about more than
satisfying individual desires,” he writes.
“It has always been about contributing
to a reservoir of shared knowledge or
collective experience—and about secur-
ing benefits for society as a whole.” In
2015, the government asked the British
public for their views on the BBC and
received a hundred and ninety-two thou-
sand responses. Ninety-seven per cent
were favorable. It has always been about
more than broadcasting.