Examination of Witnesses (Questions 340-351)
24 APRIL 2007
MR MARK
THOMPSON AND
MS CAROLINE
THOMSON
Q340 Chairman: But every newspaper
is investing huge amounts in going online.
Mr Thompson: In my view, if you
actually look at what is available on the BBC News website in
terms of global coverage of news around the world, my contention,
and you may disagree, would be that there is still a strong case
for the BBC providing that service, but, if you say to me, "Should
the BBC provide an online encyclopaedia?", I would say that,
in addition to any commercial offerings that are available, with
the existence of something like Wikipedia, which is quite an interesting
category of publicly minded, universally available content on
the web, you would say that the BBC should not provide an online
encyclopaedia. I would say that the task of the BBC, first of
all, on the web is to look at those areas, and I would make the
case that journalism is one of them, where we can do something
which is distinctive and which adds to the richness available
on the web, but for the BBC, firstly, not itself to assume that
it should do everything on the web, we should not and we do not
and we will not, but again in a sense I think you have to apply
the same kinds of tests in the context of the PSP and, rather
like Channel 4, it seems to me clarity about what is the remit,
what are the public purposes which are being set here for the
PSP, how will they be governed and how will the performance of
it be judged against its objectives. Now, you may or may not support
them, but, if you look at the White Paper, the Charter and Agreement,
the public purposes of the BBC are laid out there and there is
an entire regulatory mechanism set in place to try and hold the
BBC to account against those public services and, in a way, that
kind of process, it seems to me, is something that you want to
go through at the start before you start throwing money or throwing
your cap in the air about an idea like the PSP.
Q341 Helen Southworth: I was fairly
astonished to find out that with digital television there are
now 23 dedicated channels providing programmes for children, yet
that is not necessarily making people feel particularly comfortable
about the quality of the provision that is available to children.
Can you tell us just a bit about what you think is happening to
the market at the moment and then about what the BBC is going
to do as a leader in this process?
Mr Thompson: I think there are
two or three things happening and it is worth noting them all.
Continuous channels work very well for children and young parents
so that they can watch whenever it is convenient to them, and
we are seeing, and have seen over time, a shift from viewing of
children's programmes in general networks like ITV1, BBC One,
towards continuous channels. Secondly, on those channels, children's
appetite for animation, for cartoons, particularly American cartoons,
is very high. The products, the cartoons, are relatively cheap
to buy and you can run them on very high repeat cycles, so running
such a network is a relatively lean operation, as a result of
which there are a very large number of such networks and, because
of that, because of the elementary supply and demand issues, the
value of the commercial impact, the actual value to advertisers
of such channels is quite low, so the money available to go ahead
to, for example, make original British children's content is very
low which is why, although there is some on Disney and elsewhere,
there is very, very little indeed. Most recently, the Ofcom decision
in the matter of the advertising of unhealthy foods in advertising
slots where children are likely to be watching is going to have
a further depressing effect on the amount of money available for
investing in original British programmes. Therefore, the BBC's
position, I think, goes like this: that we believe that our principal
mission, and we run some cartoons, some animations, in our schedules
and that is partly because that is a way of getting children to
watch programmes like Newsround and Blue Peter,
but our view is that we remain committed to providing mixed schedules
of high-quality, British programming for British children, so
a programme which, in various ways, reflects our national children's
literature and the best of modern writing for children which,
with programmes like Newsround, tries to bring journalism
to children and so on, that is what we want to try and do and
it is a matter of concern to us that the market as a whole does
seem to be closing in at the moment.
Q342 Helen Southworth: There have
been suggestions that the market is getting critical. What do
you think?
Mr Thompson: I think that, because
of the factors I have talked about taken together, my own view
is that plurality of supply of British children's programming
is not quite as critical as plurality in the context of news,
but it is clearly desirable that there should be a range of providers
of British programming not least because, if you are a maker or
if you are, for example, an independent producer making children's
programmes, it is nice to have more than one organisation to sell
your wares to, so I am not sure whether the term "going critical"
is perhaps overstating it, but I think there are some really quite
serious concerns about how much original children's commissioning
and production there will be beyond the BBC.
Q343 Helen Southworth: Are you setting
specific targets for the work that you are going to be doing to
commission for children's television over the next period?
Mr Thompson: Well, the children's
networks will have, under this new regime, service licences and
agreements with targets for the origination, for the minimum proportion
of independent commissions in that mix and all the rest of it.
We are also looking at ways of more effectively linking what we
do on television, the radio and the web together, but our ambition
is that, where we can, we want, in a sense, to work well with
parents to deliver the best possible services that work in Britain's
households. For example, we do not make programmes for very small
children, two and under, and, when we do make programmes for younger
children on CBeebies, wherever possible we try and make sure that
it is done with expert advice on child development, linguistic
development and so forth, so programmes like Teletubbies
are intended actually to be useful in child development. We would
not recommend that children watch many, many hours of television
every day. For older children, we are very focused on helping
them find ways of using the Internet safely, for example, so safety
on the Internet and, more broadly, media literacy are a big part
of what we try and do. We try and make sure that, for children
in the classroom, there are opportunities to use our news website
and our news programmes to learn more about citizenship and about
society, and we have recently done a very big thing called School
Report, inviting thousands of schoolchildren to effectively
take part in making their own news programmes, so we are trying,
where we can, to work with parents, with teachers and with children
themselves to produce environments for children which have got
decent, valuable content which are safe and where both children
and parents know what to expect and when.
Q344 Helen Southworth: You spoke
earlier about the public service concept as, in your view, being
not just about plugging a gap in the market, but also about quality
and standard-setting and sort of ratcheting up expectations that
viewers could see could be achieved. How important, do you think,
is the role the BBC has in children's television in that area?
Mr Thompson: I think it is an
incredibly important example actually. I would say that it is
incredibly important which is why, when we have the problem we
have had recently on Blue Peter, it feels like such a very
serious mistake to us, and it has been so mortifying for everyone
who works on that programme because we try and set ourselves high
standards everywhere, but, in our children's programmes, we know
that one of the good things about the BBC at its best is that
the public have learnt to trust the BBC and what it stands for
and we must not abuse that trust.
Q345 Helen Southworth: We have been
told that quite basically, without further intervention, the BBC
is likely to become the only supplier of UK-originated children's
television. Do you think that that is a reasonable statement and,
if so, what, do you think, needs to be done?
Mr Thompson: I think that my prediction
would be that you will continue to see some entertainment and
music-related programming and probably some factual programming
being made for the commercial children's channels. In fact, already
today it is true that we are, I think, almost on our own in terms
of children's drama. We think that providing drama for children,
whether adapted from classics or contemporary drama, is very important
and we also are now trying to produce rather more family-orientated
drama, and programmes like Doctor Who and Robin Hood
are an attempt to provide programming which children can enjoy
in a family context. Already I think we are today pretty much
on our own in making drama for children.
Q346 Helen Southworth: What about
teenagers? How significant is the BBC in terms of that very, very
important group of children?
Mr Thompson: Well, teenagers and,
in particular, looking at younger teenagers and, in particular,
younger girls, 12-15, was one of the things that we said we wanted
to find some more output in our licence fee bid. They are obviously
a very important group, they bump into the BBC in the classroom
and, if they are interested in music, they might well bump into
us on Radio One, but there is not, for someone like BBC Television,
much drama and in fact, if you take British television, there
is not much drama, particularly for younger teenagers, which speaks
to them and sees the world from their perspective, but it is a
good example of something we have to weigh up against all the
other priorities that we see in front of us.
Q347 Helen Southworth: Is the Board
going to be taking this very seriously, the entire issue of children's
television?
Mr Thompson: Yes, I think that
certainly the Management Board does and I would expect the Trust,
just as the Governors historically have done, to regard, in the
broadest sense, our service to young people as being particularly
important to them, but also crucial to their parents. It is one
of the things that the British public look to the BBC to do really
well.
Ms Thomson: Just as a supplementary
on what could be done to help provide more production, children's
programmes production, in the UK or indeed in the EU, one of the
interesting things is of course that the Television Without Frontiers
Directive has suggestions for quotas of EU production for television
channels, but says that they apply "only where practical",
or something, so traditionally they are not applied to the satellite
channels. Actually, if each of the commercial satellite children's
channels was just encouraged to make half an hour of original
content every week, so only one half-hour a week per channel,
you would pretty well have as much commissioning of content in
the UK as you get from the whole of ITV Children at the moment,
so there are ways of at least moral persuasion perhaps for some
of the channels which are operating big in the British market
for children where a lot of them will have corporate social responsibility
programmes and so on, and one half-hour a week of production,
if they all did it, would help the production base a lot.
Mr Thompson: When it comes back
to the idea of top-slicing the licence fee, what we have got though
in CBBC and our children's department is a kind of critical mass
of people who are passionate about making programmes and content
for children and who often will start in one area of entertainment
or factual programming and go into drama and all the rest of it.
If you split that up, split up the investment, I am not sure you
could keep that college going, I am not sure you would keep that
sense of critical mass going. It is recognised around the world
as being the strongest, single kind of critical mass of this kind
of talent and, in a way, although I can understand the arguments
for splitting the BBC's resources, I think you would end up in
the end again probably undermining the one last piece of really
strong children's production.
Chairman: We need to move on to our next
session, but, before we do, there is one other issue which we
have already touched on which impacts upon our next session.
Q348 Paul Farrelly: Last year, you
piloted what has come to be known as "ultra local TV"
and that, on my patch, included Staffordshire TV which, I am afraid,
rather passed me by and I never saw it. I was invited to go and
see it being made, but actually fitting that in was difficult
and I was never dragged out to College Green while down here or
called up locally and asked to appear on it, so it fizzled out,
as far as I was concerned. That briefly said, Chairman, on paper
I am quite keen on that sort of local television because what
we find around the country is that a lot of news is delivered
by local newspaper monopolies and quite often we, as politicians,
think, "Thank heaven for BBC radio", but, particularly
as a former journalist, I believe that competition actually increases
standards in journalism and more competition would be healthy,
so after the pilot scheme and after the licence fee settlement,
which means you have got to order your priorities, what is the
future for the BBC in providing that sort of local form of television?
Mr Thompson: I think that the
pilot as a whole, and I am sorry that we missed at least one star
during the pilot—
Q349 Paul Farrelly: Maybe it was
very good editorial judgment!
Mr Thompson: I think the pilot
was quite interesting and has raised some quite big questions
for us, in particular, what is the best way of getting such a
service to the public. We tried broadband, we also tried a wheel
on satellite so that you could get news from Staffordshire at
10 minutes past the hour, sort of thing, every hour. I think there
are some quite big questions about, in particular, satellite distribution.
I think there are two more things I would say. Firstly, listening
quite carefully to the anxieties and objections of the local and
regional newspaper lobby, in a way, one of the things I would
like to try and do as we think about local television is again
engage more closely with, if you like, our critics and try and
work out whether there are ways of addressing their concerns in
the eventual proposal we make. The brutal thing to say is that
this is a really good example of effectively a new commitment
which I think inevitably you have to put a big question mark against,
given the settlement that we have got, and I certainly cannot
today give you an undertaking that we are going to proceed with
it. I can see the benefits of it, I think it would complement
what we do with local radio and on our Where I Live sites,
but, I have to say, in a tight licence fee settlement it is a
good example where you might have to say, "Well, we can do
something, but we certainly perhaps can't do the original vision",
so we will just have to look at it and line it up against the
other priorities we have got.
Q350 Paul Farrelly: Is one of the
options you are considering possibly launching in selected areas
in the future in co-operation with local newspapers and, if so,
how would you address the competition point of view?
Mr Thompson: I think that, whatever
happened, such a service would have a roll-out over time. BBC
English local radio began in the late 1960s and some would argue
that the roll-out is not yet complete and there are one or two
areas which are still underserved by local radio, so there would
be a roll-out over time and, as a corporation, as I have said,
what we need to do is to figure out, after the pilot, but also
listening to the local and regional newspaper groups, whether
there is a way in which, if we do propose something in this area,
we can do it in a way which does the best it can to allay their
fears. I have to say, there will always be some people who, in
a sense, will say that, no matter how little, frankly, practical
reality there is behind it, in theory, they might at some point
wish to do this and, therefore, it would be quite wrong for the
BBC to come in and foreclose the market. I think that the dialogue
that we have had with the newspaper groups actually has been so
far a constructive one, I take their concerns seriously and, as
we develop the proposal, if we do decide we can develop it given
our funding, I hope we can do something which, as far as possible,
goes at least a long way to allay the fears which have been expressed
about the service.
Paul Farrelly: I was going to move on,
but have been instructed not to because of time, to show platform
prejudice to distinguish between the news which is a free on PCs
against news delivered through mobile telephones which people
pay for, but we will move on to that and the impact of the market
when we see the Trust. I only mention it now so that my old Reuters
colleague, Mark Wood at ITN, knows we have not forgotten him!
Chairman: We will be seeing you again
in July, I believe, so we will return to some of these things.
Q351 Mr Sanders: On this question
of local television, is this not precisely the area that you should
not be involved in? If there is a demand for local television,
leave it to the marketplace.
Mr Thompson: I think what I want
to say to Mr Sanders is that the BBC is already present in media
up and down the country with local radio stations and with local
websites. To some extent, this debate, when you get right down
to it, is not fundamentally about a completely new service, but
to what extent the websites should include rich audiovisual content,
reports from our reporters with lightweight cameras as well as
with microphones for the radio and so on; it is about an evolution
of local provision which you can see happening in many other parts
of the world already. What I would say is that my presumption,
if you look at a couple of things and, firstly, if you look at
the local radio environment, by and large actually, the path of
BBC local radio and independent local radio editorially has been
diverging. In other words, I think BBC local radio is today more
distinctive, more focused around speech, debate, news and information
and in most markets, not in all, but in most markets actually
local radio is moving towards a much more music-driven package
and we have seen one or two, and I can think of Saga, for example,
speech-based models actually moving more towards music. It is
not obvious to me that this is an area of market convergence necessarily
around a particular editorial proposition. The second thing, I
think, to say is that it depends on what we actually propose.
There are very big categories of local media, for example, classified
advertising, for example, information about local entertainment
and a click-through to buying tickets, where the BBC again should
not be involved. That is absolutely appropriately left to the
market and indeed my view is that we should actually link from
our sites to places where people, if they want to do those things,
can find us, and I see much more of a partnership model where
the BBC, if you look, for example, at our pilot in the West Midlands,
we were at every count of last year's local elections, every single
count. Now, we have never been able to do that in our history.
We can bring the detail and the texture of local democracy to
the audience in pictures as well as sound in a way we have never
done before. Honestly, nobody else in the market is going to do
that, so I would say, "What can the BBC do which is going
to be useful and valuable and what can the market do?", and
let us see if there is a way in which we can co-exist.
Chairman: I think that is a good note
on which to end. Thank you very much.
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