Don’t Cut BBC Local Radio - Axe EastEnders Instead.
BBC Local Radio faces big cuts, despite having more than 5-million listeners every week. But the BBC should be focusing on unique services that cannot be found elsewhere.
What, as it enters its second century, is the point of the BBC?
Why, in an era of limitless choice, should we continue to fund it? What is it about the BBC that makes it worthy of this special status?
For most of its life, the BBC has done a bit of everything, from Top of the Pops to opera, Jackanory to the FA Cup Final.
It had to, in part because it initially was our only broadcaster, then one of a tiny handful — but also because of the way it was funded. If we all pay for the BBC, we should all get something out of it.
Back then, it mattered that tens of millions of us spent Christmas Day with BBC 1, or Saturday evenings watching the Generation Game. Television was a shared experience, and by bringing us together the BBC cemented its place in our lives.
But now a hostile government is freezing the BBC’s income at a time of high inflation, while loading more costs on it - even welfare benefits like free TV licences for the elderly.
Cuts are inevitable, but it’s BBC managers who decide where those cuts are made. And, as so many times before, they have made the worst possible choice.
The BBC’s thirty-nine local radio stations are facing cuts which, if implemented in full, will leave some in tatters. Programmes will be shared with one, two or three neighbouring stations after 2pm on weekdays and much of the weekend. At night and on Sundays, it will be networked across the whole of England.
Some of the combinations are bizarre. Listeners in Southampton and Portsmouth will share programmes with those in Oxford. A vast region is created in the east, stretching through Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk. It’s quite a stretch to describe that as “local”.
These stations, between them, have more than 5-million listeners a week. A significant proportion never listen to any other BBC station — more than a-million never listen to anything else. But these stations are set to be dismantled without “our BBC” bothering to ask what we think.
The fear of the provinces
The BBC never wanted to get into local radio in the first place. The corporation’s 1960s managers felt it beneath them, and feared the consequences of giving people in “the provinces” any control of the airwaves.
What changed their mind was the realisation that an incoming Conservative government was set on creating local commercial stations, and no BBC rival would be tolerated, unless it launched first.
It’s a mindset identified by Jeremy Paxman, who complained of the BBC’s “unfortunate history of never seeing an area of broadcasting.. without feeling the need to get into it itself.”
That slightly sniffy, patronising attitude to local radio never really went away in London — witness the astonishment that local radio presenters were able to hold a failing prime minister to account just a few weeks ago.
Managers tended to be in the capital, and as far as they were concerned Radio 4 was London’s local station, certainly not Radio London, which they probably couldn’t even find on the FM dial.
While many of those managers have since been moved out of London, those attitudes remain. BBC local stations have had decades of being dictated to from the centre. They are told what music to play, even if their listeners hate it.
Dozens of specialist programmes, across the whole of England, were swept away overnight in 2020 under the guise of a streamlined, Covid-era schedule. The vast majority never returned.
Presenters now find themselves on air for four hours at a time, while producers and reporters remain at the studios, desperately filling shows as cheaply as possible.
And after years of being told to concentrate on the older audiences abandoned by Radio 2, they were suddenly told to find new, young listeners, even if that meant repelling their existing, loyal audience.
BBC director of nations Rhodri Talfan Davies, on BBC Radio 4, 1st November 2022
Their heads spinning from constant lurches in editorial direction, they carried on providing a vital service to their communities, as audiences fell. Just the right conditions for a dramatic shake-up.
As local radio producers and presenters were being told they were now at risk of redundancy, the manager overseeing these changes was on Radio 4, insisting stations would remain local “when it really matters”, which apparently is between 6am and 2pm on weekdays.
It must be a great comfort for those about to lose their jobs to be told their bosses already think what they do doesn’t matter.
Let’s axe EastEnders
Time and again, the BBC targets its most unique services for cuts, while protecting funding for the generic and derivative.
No-one else spends serious money on children’s programmes, but the CBBC channel is being shut down and moved online. The same fate awaits BBC Four — despite the online-only BBC Three being such a disaster it had to be brought back to linear TV years later.
The BBC has the biggest broadcast news operation in the country — yet it’s to close its domestic News Channel, and replace it with a relay of its commercial worldwide service.
Now local radio is lined up for devastating cuts, that will leave communities across England with no voice. Good luck getting BBC Radio Manchester, Merseyside and Lancashire to turn up to your protest in Carnforth. Or persuading BBC Radio Norfolk-all-the-way-to-Buckinghamshire it’s worth taking an interest in school budgets in Peterborough.
These cuts are an extraordinary act of cultural vandalism, and while the government may be tightening the screw, it is the BBC that is choosing where the axe should fall.
So, what should the BBC stop doing? Well, how about scrapping EastEnders?
Thirty years ago it was the biggest programme in Britain, pulling in more than 20-million viewers. Now it limps along, attracting maybe 3-and-a-half million. Fewer than the 6 o’clock news or the Antiques Roadshow, far less than Coronation Street or Emmerdale on ITV, and less than half the size of BBC local radio’s weekly audience.
Of course the BBC should still invest in drama and entertainment, in Strictly and Doctor Who. But does it have to rip off every ITV shiny-floor entertainment show? Did we honestly need a seventeenth revival of Blankety Blank? What is genuinely unique about huge chunks of the BBC 1 primetime schedule? Or, for that matter, Radio 2?
A dull, derivative BBC, chasing ratings because it’s what it’s always done, isn’t something many of us will fight to protect. But a BBC that gave each of us something unique, something we couldn’t get anywhere else, would be one many would cherish. We may spend less time with the BBC in future, but that time could be so much more precious.
Local radio is as central to a unique BBC as the Proms or CBeebies. The only people who don’t seem to recognise that are the people who run the BBC.
