Abolish the Licence Fee

I feel about the BBC rather as Richard Dawkins feels about God: I find it both frustrating and inexplicable that so many people, despite all the evidence to the contrary, continue to believe in it. Like religion, the Licence Fee (and the BBC itself) may once have served a useful function. In a different world, the BBC (like the church) was an important institution that served as a bulwark of culture and intelligence. It reflected and enhanced national life. Without thinking too much about who or what it was for, it found an appropriate balance between the popular and the highbrow. But that was a long time ago. Now, like a church that has ceased to believe in God and thrown away its traditional liturgy (I mention no names) the BBC is sustained largely by inertia, and exists principally to perpetuate itself.

The present BBC set up exhibits a kind of logical conundrum. In order to justify continuing to fund itself via a compulsory poll-tax euphemistically called a "licence fee", it must produce output that attracts a mass audience. Otherwise it would face charges of expropriating money from the masses to spend on the entertainment of educated middle class elitists. A sort of glorified Royal Opera House, perhaps - except that bills marked "Opera tax" don't arrive in everyone's mailbox. In today's demotic culture where making a fool of oneself on reality TV qualifies as aspirational the old idea that intelligent programming might broaden the mind, might increase by some margin the national IQ, is still trotted out when the corporation is called upon to justify its privileged status. But it is ever less visible in the output itself, which offers, on a typical night, a diet of low-rent soaps and formulaic dramas set in hospitals and police stations leavened with "documentaries" about car-chases or heart surgery and talent contests indistinguishable from those on other channels. This kind of dross is relatively cheap to make and attracts sufficiently high viewing figures to convince BBC bosses and politicians that it is fulfilling its remit to serve the general public.

But in servicing a mass audience, the BBC is merely duplicating the output of the commercial or subscription channels. Increasingly, BBC1 resembles ITV without the adverts, while BBC2 is generally inferior in its creativity or intellectual weight to Channel 4. The cases of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross, currently at the forefront of people's minds, are relevant here. Both, leaving aside the recent confirmation of their boorishness and arrogance, are talented performers who attract large audiences. If their puerile conduct is found to be off-putting by Grumpy Old Men or Daily Mail readers, it is nevertheless a reflection of the depravity and shallowness of contemporary culture. Would that so many listeners could be attracted by lectures on Plato.

Many of the voices raised in their defence over the past few days have pointed to the outrageousness and danger of their work as a justification in itself. And of course there is a place for both, and for the deliberate causing of offence, and for envelope-pushing, even, in the right circumstances, for bad language. But that place is not a publicly funded network which threatens those who would prefer not to pay for its services with prosecution or even jail. If Ross and Brand are worth their large salaries, then they should earn them in the marketplace and not live as parasites on the public purse.

If the BBC declined to pay Ross £6 million a year, and drastically curtailed the salaries of other overpaid personalities such as Jeremies Clarkson and Paxman, Graham Norton or Chris Moyles, then it would have more money to spend on programmes of genuinely high quality. And such do exist, although the decline in the intellectual level of arts programming or historical documentaries is sad to behold. A BBC tightly focused on producing (or at least broadcasting) material that the commercial channels were unable or unwilling to supply would of course gain noticeably smaller audiences, which in turn would lead to grumbles about the fairness of charging every household in Britain for the great privilege of watching the TV. This, presumably, is why the corporation continues its long-running process of dumbing down.

Yet a BBC whose output is indistinguishable from its commercial rivals no more deserves the lavish public funding its receives than would a BBC which catered principally for a discerning minority. There should be no justification - or indeed tolerance - for forcing the public (on pain of large fines, a criminal record, or even imprisonment) to pay either for crap they do watch or for high quality public service broadcasting they might not. The switch to a multi-channel world ought to have made the anomalous and anachronistic position of the BBC glaringly obvious. Instead, the corporation had been permitted, indeed encouraged, to colonise the various digital platforms - as they have colonised cyberspace - to the detriment and exclusion of commercial operators. Rather than being phased out, the Licence Fee has shown a tendency to increase ahead of the rate of inflation. The BBC now functions as a kind of black hole at the centre of British broadcasting, distorting the space around around it and sucking anything that gets too close into a vortex from which no light can emerge.

The BBC and the Licence Fee exist in a close, mutually-supporting embrace. Neither is imaginable without the other. The BBC is as it is because of the Licence Fee, which in turn is justified as being the best way of funding the BBC in its current form. It's a classic circular argument, and like all circular arguments is difficult to break out of. Yet neither would be imaginable if they didn't already exist (just imagine what the public reaction would be if TV were entirely commercial, or the BBC funded out of general taxation, and a Licence Fee were proposed). Neither, I believe, would be much missed. Some TV programmes are commercially sustainable. Others would attract funding via subscription, or (if considered in the public interest) might receive direct grants from general taxation. I would put Radio 4 and possibly Radio 3 in that category. Some programmes and channels would disappear, but only because there is no need for them. Radio and television would look and sound remarkably similar, I would guess. We would just all be £140 better off.

Who, though, will bite this particular bullet? Not the present government, which sees in the BBC a mirror-image of itself, not just politically but socially too. Nor, sadly, the Conservative party. The Tory MP Christopher Chope recently introduced a private member's bill to abolish the Licence Fee, only to be told by the front bench spokesman Ed Vaizey that "I want to put it on record that I am a firm supporter of the licence fee, as is the Conservative party." He went on, depressingly,

I can happily cast self-interest aside and speak genuinely of my love and adoration for the BBC. I believe that it is fantastic and that most people in this country regard it as a great organisation and as family. The family analogy is important: we give the BBC the nickname “Auntie”, and, by and large, we like the BBC, but we also feel free to criticise and have rows with it. Sometimes, those rows are incoherent—rows for the sake of having a row, as most of us have in our own families.

Do most people still regard the BBC as a loveable old Auntie? A terminally senile one, perhaps, cared for by relatives who know that deep down they will feel relieved when she's gone. It strikes me as more like a friendly neighbourhood gangster, making its money from a classic protection racket. Of course, if a couple of million people suddenly stopped paying, the whole thing wouldn't last a week.

I began this piece with a religious metaphor, and I shall end with one, for it does strike me that the BBC and its Licence Fee have many of the characteristics of an organised religion. Call it Beebism. There's a creed of sorts: certain highly questionable propositions - quality, impartiality, accountability - are clung to like unimpeachable articles of faith. There is a revered founder, Reith, whose example is held up even as his precepts are betrayed. There are saints (David Attenborough, Stephen Fry) and even a recognisable devil-figure in the shape of Rupert Murdoch. Challenge a Beebist by pointing out the corporation's political bias or the low quality of most of its output and you'll be met by a kind of anguished denial similar to that of a Christian fundamentalist confronted by contradictions in Scripture.

In this theological closed circuit, the Licence Fee is imagined not as pragmatic and outdated solution to the BBC's funding but as somehow morally virtuous. Like God or the church, the BBC takes on a mystical significance as bearer of the national spirit; it is something, as the quote from Vaizey reveals, with which people feel they have a personal relationship. But that's an illusion, of course, as anyone who has come up against the BBC's self-justifying and haughty bureaucracy will have discovered. Just as the late medieval church preached poverty and humility while its cardinals built themselves palaces in Rome, the BBC has become the paradise of a self-regarding elite utterly convinced of their indispensibility.

Yet all is not well. Like the Church of England, the BBC frequently alienates its traditional audience with desperate attempts to draw in younger people who are nevertheless watching it less and less. The habit of TV viewing, like the habit of churchgoing (though more slowly, and later) is on the way out. The Licence Fee and the present structure of the BBC ought to be unsustainable in such a climate. Don't bet on it, though. Beebism, like theism, dies hard.