There is no such thing as bad publicity. Where there’s muck there’s brass. Nobody ever lost money underestimating the taste of the British people. All such sayings apply to the Big Brother farrago. But I must stop. I try to make money overestimating the public’s taste.
The glorious tiff over racism on Big Brother has comforted every corner of the realm. In most countries the public would look in, mutter and switch off. In Britain the row has invaded those sensitive temples of grace: the class system, race, the empire and public service broadcasting. Channel 4, which aired the programme, found itself in the doghouse on the very day that the BBC subsidy was being given its six years of blessing by government. Just as the shimmering palace of public service broadcasting was being sprayed with golden money it was spattered with mud by its raucous sibling.
The show itself was a publicist’s dream. It allowed every antiracist group to explode in righteous indignation. Politicians were given an opportunity to appear relevant. Gordon Brown in India tried clumsily to invoke Gandhi and Big Brother into one round of soundbites. The media “deploriat” ran amok, attacking not just the programme, Channel 4 and the foul-mouthed working classes, but anyone who dared criticise the programme, Channel 4 and the foul-mouthed working classes. They savaged Shilpa Shetty, the Indian actress, for being a hifalutin’ toff and the British chavs for being brainless twits. Trash television could be damned and watched at the same time. We now await the Archbishop of Canterbury to add his mitre and the Vatican to put the pontiff back into pontificate.
Meanwhile, even deeper in the gutter, the affair has met all the requirements made of Big Brother by Channel 4. Ratings have soared. A dire formula rightly languishing at 2.6m viewers shot to 7.8m. Channel 4’s Andy Duncan took it on himself pompously to “confront the truth” of tastelessness and racism in Britain by giving them the widest and most lucrative distribution.
He then satirised democracy by inviting viewers to respond by voting either woman off the show. This denying of all responsibility for taste was presented as fashionably “empowering” to the public while netting a cool 50p per vote — until, that is, it said it would give the money to charity. The programme has lost £3m in sponsorship from the Carphone Warehouse, which in turn has been able to publicise its antiracist conscience and its brand name before the world free of charge.
So fat this has been a true win-win situation. Endemol, the show’s backer, deliberately went in search of an Indian actor from the subcontinent because Big Boss, the local version of Big Brother, which started just three months ago, is limping along on a diet of empty tea-party talk. The demure and aristocratic Shetty was a sure-fire butt for Big Brother’s inexhaustible supply of repellent English ladettes. The tactic has been successful. Indian television stations are delightedly running their own telephone polls in support of Shetty, depicting Britain awash in racism and foul-mouthed women.
This is fine. Great television. Let the cameras roll. But does it need the statutory underpinning and subsidy of public service broadcasting? Channel 4 was meant to be a poor man’s BBC, a channel for the tie-less ones. It took profit from the supposedly lucrative commercial stations and put them into experimental and quality programmes that those stations would not air unbidden. Channel 4 might say it needs trash to sustain the quality, which is what the BBC says (but “good” trash). But that was not the remit.
That argument held in days when there were a handful of terrestrial channels. It cannot do so today.
Meanwhile, across town, Tessa Jowell was announcing what has been spun as absolutely the final last saloon for government payouts to the BBC, now running at more than £3 billion a year. The corporation had astonishingly asked for an increased subsidy of inflation plus 1.8%, at a time when schools, hospitals, trains, even defence, were facing cuts. Either the BBC was unaware of this or its highly paid managers (the highest in the public sector) thought cuts did not apply to them — probably the latter.
The BBC was asking for more when its private-sector competitors (including, I should add, the publisher of this newspaper) were smarting from a decade of BBC predation of their market. Most of them were seeing revenues plunge.
The corporation was behaving not as a public service broadcaster but as a fully fledged global media mogul. It has a secure hypothecated tax stream enabling it to compete with the private sector in live entertainment, film-making, orchestras, CDs, books, magazines and, above all, a complete range of internet services. It can offer product placement and partnership deals to advertisers. It is a parastatal with a finger in every media pie.
Humility before its paymasters might be thought prudent, but not a bit of it. Jowell’s licence fee settlement was, in the circumstances, generous. BBC turnover will rise roughly in line with inflation. Certainly it is tough for the BBC to bear the social cost of the government’s policy to switch from analogue to digital. But “social” is what the BBC is about. As for decentralising to Manchester, why should that save every other government office money and yet “cost” the BBC — unless the BBC’s London property portfolio is even more chaotic than is all too visible to the naked eye.
