BBC chairman Sir Michael Lyons says the BBC’s technical innovation is a key element of public service, as heard by Julian Clover.
For all the repositioning of the BBC Board of Governors as the BBC Trust, from the outside it feels that little has changed, the chairman still championing the BBC against outside forces. There is the element of the job that requires Sir Michael Lyons to be on the side of the viewer, as if there was any other position in a country where most households contribute to the BBC Licence Fee.
As Sir Michael spoke to the Broadcasting Press Guild this week it was also refreshing to hear a voice that was prepared to make his views known, without deferring to others above, below, or resorting to perpetual consultation.
The BBC is free of the commercial pressures that accompany the public service obligations of ITV, Channel 4 and to a lesser extent Five. The sizeable licence fee income is looked upon with envious eyes, not only by the commercial broadcasters, but also their regulator.
Sir Michael said he was sceptical that Channel 4 could, as has been suggested, take on some of the PSB obligations currently shouldered by ITV, in what he described as a “quick fix” exercise. “I am sceptical about any suggestion that Channel 4 can take [ITV’s] place either in terms of structure or in people’s hearts.” Then there is the suggestion that BBC Worldwide, responsible for programme sales and the international channels business, might somehow be gifted to Channel 4. “Put aside for a moment whether this is actually legal, whether it might have problems with the European Commission in terms of state aid issues and the merits of removing £100 million a year of dividends that at the moment come back to the public via new BBC programmes into a different organisation. In what way might this make business sense for BBC Worldwide or Channel 4.” The claim, denied by the regulator, is that Ofcom has misunderstood the licence fee, though Sir Michael admits there could be deals between BBC Worldwide and Channel 4.
Director general Mark Thompson has already outlined potential partnerships, extending the type of co-productions that have been made with Discovery and HBO, but Sir Michael also highlights the work of the technical team, still, at Kingswood Warren. “Let’s not forget the BBC’s long heritage of introducing new technologies for wider benefit – from colour television itself to DVB-T2 and HD,” he added that the launches of Freeview and Freesat would not have been possible without outside partners. “When you go down to Kingswood Warren you find these extraordinary enthusiastic young engineers working ion the compression of signals to accelerate to move to high definition, talking to hardware suppliers and gifting them intellectual property, not in a sense that it matters to us, but because this is the public service we want to bring about.”
Curiously, I’ve never heard Kingswood Warren described in this way, but this is an element of public service as significant as the provision of local news. It could if studied set of a debate similar to that accompanies the BBC’s activities in other areas.
