Through a screen writer friend I've just come across an e-mail by Tony Garnett (a BBC producer) that's been doing the rounds at the BBC and was published in the Guardian back in July: http://bit.ly/2kIvNP.
It's rather grumpy but it makes me very happy. It restores my faith in... everything! When you have a vague sense that something's not right, and when after two or three decades the feeling still hasn't gone away you need somebody to come along and spell out precisely what's gone wrong, and that's what Garnett has done. It's not just BBC drama that's at issue. As Garnett says:
"I could have written this piece with few changes if I had been a nurse, a teacher, a social worker, a cop or almost anyone in the front line of any public service."
Now - I think the license fee is far too low and would gladly sell my house and all it's contents to help the BBC, but it's rare these days for the BBC to make its viewers go 'wow'. According to Garnett the BBC has become "just another marketing exercise":
"... every night, we die a little as we suffer what cynically they call entertainment. They fail to realise that good work is more than that. It lives and feeds our minds long after the entertainment fades."
The BBC is portrayed by its detractors as a Stalinist bureaucracy. Since the eighties the solution to this perceived problem has been the 'market' - it works in Hollywood after all and there's no denying that some great stuff has come from there. Ironically the Thatcherite zeal with which the market has been embraced over the past 30 years or so has resulted in a ridiculously top-heavy bureaucracy that manages to hinder the creative process at every opportunity.
The market 'solution' misses two important points: 1) to the extent that Hollywood works, it is because writers and directors are allowed to get on with their job - strong authorship is the sine qua non of successful US television; 2) US television is innovative only within fairly strict parameters - revolutionary innovation tends to be imported from elsewhere and then built upon in the US. Much of what we take for granted in broadcasting today - much of what now seems obvious - was invented by the BBC, and could only have been invented there. The market needs the BBC far more than the BBC needs the market.
The governing classes are as innumerate as they've ever been, which makes New Labour apparatchiks' enthusiasm for markets and metrics embarrassing as well as crass. The most insidious impact of the Thatcherite / New Labour market-driven mentality and its fetish for measurement is the way it robs us of our future. Like universities (also under attack from innumerate market economics) the BBC is both a repository of learning and the place where the pre-requisites for the future can be built. The true value of the BBC - the reason it is worth the license fee - is that innovation can happen there in a way it can't happen anywhere else. As Garnett explains:
"No one knows what that future will be like, until they try, fail, fail better and then come up with something wonderful and in retrospect obvious."