‘Please sir, I want some more’
John Wyver writes: Three weeks ago the BBC released a report titled Our BBC, Our Future (link to the report’s home page) which collated responses to an online questionnaire earlier in the year. ‘We asked you to tell us what you think the BBC does well,’ ran the press release, ‘what we could do better, and what you’d like us to focus on in years to come.’ I responded to the questionnaire, along with an 872,700 others, and the results were broadly very positive (link a downloadable summary in English.pdf).
As the report notes,
This is an important moment for the BBC’s future. The next couple of years will decide what the BBC will look like beyond 2027 and how we should best serve our audiences.
And there are frequent self-interested and profoundly ignorant and attacks on the BBC, the most recent of which Michael Savage highlighted yesterday for the Guardian. While it is very far from perfect, and while I have a specific issue with one aspect of the corporation’s operation, the BBC remains vital to the social, political and culture life of this country. A future without it is unimaginable. So why am I so irritated and frustrated by the report?
Let’s not fixate on the report’s mis-judged title, although I remain puzzled about the implied ‘we’ of both ‘our BBC’ and ‘our future’. Should it not at least be ‘your BBC’? I firmly believe as a licence fee payer that the BBC belongs in part to me (which is partly why I am so exercised about the changes to access at the Written Archives Centre). Indeed, even the report itself acknowledges that, ‘It is the public who own the BBC’.
As for whose future is being considered, is that the corporation’s – or the nation’s. Or am I being too literal and not recognising the smart elision between the two? While the match-up might once have been the case, I fear it can no longer in any way be taken for granted.
I am also not going to spend much time on the profound problems with the structure of the questionnaire, which are very well summarised by a highly recommended LinkedIn post back in May by the ‘mostly retired’ IT executive Matt Whiting. He was sceptical about the original survey’s structure, and so, as he wrote, ‘[t]o check my suspicions, I pasted the entire survey into a reasoning AI service and asked it to be rated for bias.’
Recognising the necessary caution in dealing with any AI-generated response, the conclusion is nonetheless revealing:
Overall, the survey is framed in a way that almost invariably steers respondents towards positive views of the BBC, so I’d expect it to produce skewed, overly favourable results... The survey is biased. It leads respondents to endorse more BBC services without ever exposing them to the reality of funding limits or alternative priorities. The resulting data will almost certainly overstate how much people want and value BBC expansion.
And as Matt Whiting wrote:
This concurs with my suspicions: the questions lead the responder to praise the BBC and its loftily-worded mission; to continue as-is; and not to reduce output or services. This bias is often overt but also subtle, in the choice of language used.
I agree, and this may be why the report appears to have had very little take-up in the press. But I want to highlight just one aspect. Recall that the questionnaire asked, in part, ‘what we could do better, and what you’d like us to focus on in years to come’.
My passion, as you may have noticed, and the concern to which I have devoted more than forty years of my professional life, is creative and distinctive arts television. I do not think it is controversial to assert that such television has now more or less disappeared from the BBC.
I believe, simply and straightforwardly that even in these times of funding crises there BBC should do more arts television. That it should be committed, as it once was, to producing intelligent and distinctive and challenging and complex and thoughtful and enriching and life-enhancing arts television. Which it is not.
So I wanted to use the questionnaire to tell the BBC that this was (part of) what I thought it could do better, and what I would like it to focus on in years to come. But there none of the elegantly designed slider responses allowed me to do this. And so I was reduced to writing it in in a kind of ‘Anything else?’ ragbag box.
I searched the report summary for any mention of ‘arts’ and was initially gratified to find six matches, only then to discover that each identified only the word ‘parts’. So no concern with the arts there then.
So I then went to detailed breakdown of responses, which is spread across a slew of web pages and divided into nine categories. In ‘About the questionnaire and who responded’, my search on ‘arts’ found only more ‘parts’ and several ‘charts’. Ditto in What you want the BBC to be’.
There was same absence in ‘What the BBC should stand for’, despite numerous bar graphs breaking down the nations and regions by geography and age. ‘How the BBC is doing now’ had lots more bar charts, but no mention of the arts.
Surely though, even if my write-in passionate plea escaped notice, there would be an acknowledgement of the need for better arts television in ‘Areas to address’. But again, among lots more bar charts, not a mention.
Then there’s a section headed ‘The type of content the BBC should offer’. And here there is a helpful list of what kinds of content we might want to see more of: News / Drama / Comedy and Entertainment / General interest factual programmes and content / Documentaries / Children’s programmes and content / Sport / Music / Programmes and content for and about your part of the UK. But, and it will not have escaped your notice, not ‘Arts’.
Nonetheless, there is a sub-section here headed, slightly grudgingly I felt,
‘Respondents could also suggest other types of programmes and content that they wanted the BBC to increase or decrease’
That’s me, that’s what I responded to, that was where my contribution was!
As the paragraph notes, free-text boxes asked respondents ‘to write in This section of the questionnaire included free-text boxes asking respondents ‘to write if there were any other types of programmes and content not already mentioned that they would like the BBC to do i) more of or ii) less of.’ And apparently, buried remember deep, deep in the online version of this report, there is this recognition.
Responses given here tended to re-emphasise genres already covered – for example, calls for more drama or sport. In addition, a theme to emerge was the overall quality and variety of BBC output. Looking at types of programmes and content not already mentioned specifically, respondents gave a wide range of suggestions that we are working through.
Among the bigger areas stated for ‘more’ were: educational content, films and then science and technology, arts and culture and history. Among the bigger areas stated for ‘less’ were: reality TV, fewer repeats, soaps, game shows and quizzes, politics, bad language and violence.
Well who’d have thought it! At least some of those 872,700 respondents, as well as me, wanted more ‘science and technology, arts and culture and history’. Although there nis no indication of how many wanted these vital subjects which were once core BBC offerings. No sense of any relative balance between these areas. And no acknowledgement of the forcefulness or urgency or passion with which any of us might have argued for the ‘more’.
There are still two further sections of the report to work through, ‘Where to improve’ and ‘What next’, but the arts feature in neither of these.
Nonetheless, it would appear that the BBC has heard at least a few of us writing in with ‘please sir, I want some more’, asking not for another bowl of gruel but for more arts television. And of course we can take heart and congratulate ourselves that the BBC is ‘working through’ this and other ideas from a ‘wide range of suggestions’. But maybe you can also now understand my irritation and frustration.
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