Going After the BBC : Critics Charge That Controversial Thatcher White Paper Will ‘Turn the System on Its Head’

LONDON — Some say they see the ghost of Airey Neave in the British government’s plans for the future of its broadcasting industry.

Neave was the architect of Margaret Thatcher’s successful 1975 campaign to head the Conservative Party. And from then until he was killed by a car bomb as he drove out of the House of Commons parking lot only weeks before she became prime minister in 1979, Neave was Thatcher’s personal secretary.

The assassination of the war hero and Tory veteran, whose strong views on the press, patriotism and freedom colored Thatcher’s own, deeply affected her. And when BBC Television broadcast an interview soon afterward with a representative of the Irish National Liberation Army, which claimed responsibility for Neave’s death, the prime minister was reputedly livid.

Like Neave, she believed then, and continues to believe today, that publicity is the oxygen of terrorism. And that those who provide terrorists a forum share their guilt.

“I will never, ever forgive them,” she is reported to have said of the BBC after that long-ago interview.

Her government’s recently published White Paper--as policy papers here are known--on “Broadcasting in the ‘90s: Competition, Choice, and Quality” has, on the face of it, much more to do with technology and free-market ideology than with terrorism. The government proposals are intended to restructure and overhaul broadcasting operations in the face of increased competition from expanding channels.

However, according to many analysts here, in the background of it all is what Peter Jenkins, a columnist for the newspaper The Independent, described as “the Prime Minister’s personal pique with the broadcasting authorities.”

It’s a pique fueled in the years since Neave’s death by what Thatcher saw as insufficiently sympathetic coverage of Britain’s war against Argentina in the Falkland Islands, and a critical Independent Television expose of the killings by British security forces of three Irish Republican Army operatives in Gibraltar earlier this year.

In this admittedly paradoxical view, many proposals in the White Paper are meant as much to bring British broadcasters to heel as to accomplish what the document cites as its primary purpose: “To give the viewer and listener a greater choice and a greater say.”

“There’s an element of revenge in it,” charged Roy Addison, spokesman for Thames Television, the largest of 15 regional licensees that make up Britain’s Independent Television network. “This is the broadcasters being cut down to size.”

Whether motivated by animosity, conservative ideology, or both, the critics contend that Thatcher’s plan for reshaping British television risks destroying one of the institutions of which Britain can be most proud.

“Other countries stand back amazed at its quality,” wrote lawyer, playwright and author John Mortimer. “Americans, sick of flicking through 35 channels of identical rubbish, find PBS, the public-service station which mainly relays British drama, and are enthralled.”

Mortimer sees proposals in the White Paper as a disaster--”the most ill-informed and destructive document since Guy Fawkes jotted down the Gunpowder Plot” to blow up Parliament in 1605. Instead of the steady diet of original drama and current-affairs programs to which they have become accustomed, he predicted, British viewers can look forward to “reruns of American serials, old movies, mindless game shows and a little news done on the cheap.”

Others, like Patricia Hodgson, head of the BBC’s Policy & Planning unit, are more sanguine. A lot of the uproar, she said in an interview, is “the very natural reaction to this moment of change. . . . It may actually not be quite so dramatic when it settles down.”

But that there is major change ahead is unarguable.

“The only comparable upheaval would have been (the introduction of) commercial television” in Britain in 1955, Hodgson said.

Most viewers here now have access to just four television channels. Two are run by the government-controlled BBC; they are public-service networks, broadcasting without advertising, and financed by a television license fee charged to every set-owner in Britain. The other two are commercial, albeit required by government charter to meet rigorous standards of quality and variety in their programming. Channel 3 features the regional Independent Television (ITV) stations such as Thames in London, while Channel 4 is a national station that shares advertising revenue, news and some other programming with ITV.

Within a year, however, the number of channels available is expected to quadruple, and by 1992 there may be close to 100.

Most of that upheaval is the inevitable result of new technology, such as direct broadcasting by satellite, which is only now entering the British market. A medium-powered satellite called Astra, launched earlier this month by a Luxembourg company, will beam several new channels to Britain beginning in February. All that viewers will need to receive at least some of them is a special dish antenna expected to cost the equivalent of $350-$550.

A higher powered satellite, launched by British Satellite Broadcasting Ltd. and requiring a smaller and cheaper home antenna, is scheduled to begin operations next fall. And following not far behind are plans for local stations using microwave transmission.

The 45-page document contains scores of specific proposals, some of which would require enabling legislation. It invites public comment before the end of February with an eye toward having a new regulatory framework in place by the end of 1989.

Among its principal recommendations:

--Replacement of the current Independent Broadcasting Authority, which oversees commercial television here, with a new Independent Television Commission having a less rigorous regulatory mandate over the wider range of new, non-BBC offerings.

--Introduction of pay-TV, or “subscription” services on at least one of the two BBC channels with an eye toward the day when “The Beeb” will no longer be financed by license fees.

--Introduction of a fifth terrestrial channel in 1993, and possibly a sixth later.

--Restructuring of Channel 4 to make it independent of ITV advertising revenues.

--Overhaul of the system for granting ITV franchises, easing quality requirements and mandating that the final selection be based on an auction in which the highest bidder automatically wins.

The government’s theory, as outlined in the White Paper, is this: “As viewers exercise greater choice, there is no longer the same need for quality of service to be prescribed by legislation or regulatory fiat. The point is crucial and can be simply put. When there was only one television channel, it was natural and right for the BBC to take great care about the balance between different types of programs on that channel. When there are 10 or more channels within the reach of the average viewer, he and she can increasingly sort this out for themselves provided that the choice before them is sufficiently varied.”

But critics, led by ITV franchise holders, such as Thames in the London area, are worried. “Track record will count for nothing” when those 15 regional franchises are up for renewal in 1992, said spokesman Addison.

The independents argue that either the quality threshold envisioned in the White Paper must be raised or the proposed franchise system changed so that it’s not simply the bidder with the deepest pockets that wins.

“What a sensible system should do is protect what is good in the current system instead of trying to cut that down too,” said Addison.

In the current environment there is incentive for the commercial stations to produce hard-hitting investigative journalism and such high-quality, original drama as “Brideshead Revisited” or “Jewel in the Crown,” they argue. But the White Paper would turn the system on its head. “The major investigative programs will effectively fall by the wayside,” Addison predicted.

The Church of England’s chief broadcasting spokesman, the Rev. John Barton, said the changes threaten both childrens’ and religious programming, and mean the transfer of power over the airwaves to advertisers.

“Genuine choice includes the freedom to keep materialism in its place,” he said. “For the first time in Britain, advertising agencies will be the broadcasting landlords.”

While the BBC is under less immediate threat, it’s clear from the White Paper that the government wants pivotal changes there as well.

It says the BBC “will continue as the cornerstone of public-service broadcasting.” However, it adds, “as new television services proliferate, the system of financing the BBC television and radio services by a compulsory license fee alone will become harder to sustain. . . . The government looks forward to the eventual replacement of the license fee.”

Some see that as a death sentence for the BBC and for public-service broadcasting in Britain. Why would someone pay to watch the BBC “if he could watch television with advertisements for nothing but an invisible surcharge on his cornflakes?” Mortimer asked rhetorically.

BBC officials were worried that the White Paper would recommend that the corporation be put on a commercial basis immediately. Relieved that it didn’t, their criticism of the White Paper has so far been muted.

But Financial Times media reporter Ray Snoddy, for one, thinks the BBC is “living in a fool’s paradise. The BBC will be sorted out in the fourth term,” he said, referring to what is seen here as Thatcher’s inevitable reelection in 1991 or 1992.

In the meantime, analysts such as Christopher Irwin, a special adviser for policy and planning development at the BBC, foresee an extraordinarily rough-and-tumble battle ahead for what he terms the $12-billion annual “television honey pot.” (The figure includes money spent here on televisions and video recorders as well as television advertising, license fees and video tapes.)

At present, according to Irwin, ITV takes the biggest share of viewing hours here, with 41%; BBC-1 follows, with 36%; BBC-2, with 12%, and Channel 4, 9%. Video accounts for the balance.

Based on his projections for 1994, which consider both viewers’ physical ability to receive new channels and their willingness to pay for the services, the existing terrestrial channels will still be taking 84% of the market, with the new Channel 5, cable, satellite and microwave channels all fighting for the rest.

Irwin forecasts BBC-1’s 1994 market share at 31%--a level sufficient, according to Hodgson, for the network to retain “a pretty good claim” on the mandatory license fee seen as its lifeblood. About 90% of viewers tune into BBC at some time each month.

As for the apparent contradiction between the Thatcher government’s desire to tame the broadcast media and the free-market philosophy that decrees less rather than more regulation, perhaps The Independent had the answer.

“Less-regulated commercial television, its profits squeezed by growing competition, will find less time for current affairs,” it wrote.