The BBC AND THE future ofPublic Service Broadcasting

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• Stephen Fry
• Will Hutton

THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING

Drawing on his long history in television production, Sir David Attenborough considers the lessons from the past that can point the way to the future of Public Service Broadcasting. Do niche channels really offer a future for PSB and can commercial broadcasters be trusted with a slice of the licence fee?

This lecture is about the future of public service broadcasting or, to give it today's fashionable acronym, PSB. I am saved the need to define PSB because OFCOM, in the person of its Chief Executive, Ed Richards, has defined it for us. He says it is broadcasting that aims to do four things: to increase our understanding of the world; to stimulate knowledge and learning; to reflect the cultural identity of the United Kingdom; and to ensure diversity and alternative viewpoints.

You could argue that good situation comedies - like Porridge - increase our understanding of the world; that gardening programmes stimulate knowledge and learning; that East Enders and Coronation Street reflect a UK cultural identity; and that even reality television such as I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here ensures diversity and alternative viewpoints.

But I am pretty sure that programmes like those are not what OFCOM means by PSB. There must be something missing in that definition and I suspect we all know what it is. When we talk about PSB these days, we are referring to programmes that, for one reason or another, only attract small audiences.

I have been unable to discover who first used the phrase Public Service Broadcasting or when they did so. But those of us who were working for BBC Television back in its early days in 1952 would certainly have said that it was a fair description of what we thought we were doing. But we didn’t use the phrase very much - because we didn’t need to define our kind of television. BBC television was the only kind of television there was in this country. We were a monopoly.

All television in those days came from two small studios up in North London in Alexandra Palace. It was all in black and white of course and produced very coarse-grained pictures – 405 lines instead of the later 625 lines. It was also all live because there was no form of recording – at least none that produced pictures of a transmittable quality. The cameras we had – not just the design but the very pieces of metal – were the very first cameras in the world to have produced a publicly broadcast television service.

And very quaint they were. They were filled not with tiny transistors but large glowing glass valves and they were each the size of a very large suitcase. They were alarmingly unreliable and constantly broke down, even during transmission. You could start directing your programme with four cameras and end it desperately improvising with two – or even one. The main camera was able to move around because it was mounted on bicycle wheels and had a second man to push it. The others were supported on awkward pedestals with castors and had to be shoved around by the cameraman himself. And then there was one that was virtually immobile, called the Iron Man. Each had only a single lens with no zoom, so to get a decent close-up of a speaker, the camera had to be within two or three feet of him or her. Of course, you could put on a special close-up attachment, but that took 10 minutes and you couldn’t really do it during transmission - though occasionally we did try.

With such equipment and from those two small studios came an extraordinary output of great ambition and variety. There were, of course, quizzes and music recitals, interviews and discussion programmes. Remarkably there was also, every week, a play – usually a special production of one that had been written originally for the commercial theatre. The production had its premiere, usually on a Sunday, and then – because there was no way of recording it – it was given a second live performance, all over again later in the week.