I remember the first time I fell in love with the BBC. I was 15 and had just returned home from a house party. It was a November Friday night. On my walk back home, tightly hugging my coat to shield myself against the biting cold, my mind was a whirl of tense emotions – does that girl fancy me or not? Did I annoy that guy? – but when I got back and switched the telly on I suddenly felt at peace; all my worries had gone. This was because I got back in time to watch The Review Show on BBC2.
The Review Show was an arts strand that ran under different titles from 1994 to 2014. In the version I watched it was hosted by Kirsty Wark and Martha Kearney and featured three guests each week to talk about the latest film, book, television, theatre and exhibition. I loved it because it was so intimate and low key, a small studio and four adults civilly talking about what they watched or read. Yet it opened up a vast world of culture and learning to me from my home in suburban London. It was my little secret treasure room, a place I could go to to escape from my quotidian life into a glamorous world of erudition. It was also fun. Some of the discussions, especially those featuring Germaine Greer, John Carey and Ekow Eshun, had an exhilarating bite and energy.
The BBC has provided this experience for many other people; their cultural education has been shaped by the rich reservoir of radio and television programmes on offer.
During the summer of 2012, my mind was not just consumed by the extravaganza of the Olympic Games. I also watched James Fox’s extraordinary series A History of Art in Three Colours (gold, blue and white); I listened avidly to Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo on BBC Radio 5 Live on the best and worst films of the year; the online archives of In Our Time provided a more engaging education than many of my subsequent university courses. All of this was underpinned by the three principles of the BBC’s founder, Lord Reith: inform, educate and entertain. It is why the BBC is often called Auntie Beeb. You love your parents, but it is Auntie Beeb who will tell you about a book or a film that will remain your favourite for the rest of your life.
As the BBC recently turned 100, it is facing greater competition for our time and attention than ever before. We are spoilt for choice. We have so many options when it comes to television. We can watch a true crime documentary on Netflix; the latest Marvel show on Disney; a fascinating crime drama on Apple TV; a fly on the wall documentary about the football team we support on Amazon Prime; and so much miscellaneous content on YouTube.
This explains why the BBC is planning to make lighter dramas and comedies. According to Ofcom, it is not attracting enough poorer and younger audiences. There is only so much Strictly and Match of the Day one can watch. The BBC doesn’t want to lose this audience to other channels and streams. It is in a different position to the other broadcasters: its universal licence fee funding model means it has to serve everyone. But this shouldn’t come at the expense of high quality.
It is patronising to suppose that the only way to appeal to more marginalised audiences is by making “light entertainment”. What I hear beneath the euphemistic gloss of “light entertainment” is “dumbing down”. The BBC should instead aim for excellence; this is how it would continue to stand out from the rest. The people who are interested in “light entertainment” have a variety of other options – why would they suddenly be fascinated by an old institution trying to ape the formulas of commercial television?
This is not to say the BBC should only broadcast variations of The Review Show. That would be absurd. The solution is to produce shows that marry quality with wide popular appeal – more of wonderful shows such as I May Destroy You and the silly but deliriously entertaining SAS Rogue Heroes; less of naff shows in the mould of Eating With My Ex and Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents.
This is a generational issue. More older people still have an intuitive attachment to the BBC. I don’t watch much on it except for football and the occasional TV drama and like many young adults I consume media through a laptop.
Ofcom has recently given the BBC permission to open up more of its archive on iPlayer. This is an excellent idea. In 2020, Mike Leigh’s play Abigail’s Party was made available on BBC iplayer and I watched it for the first time. Released in 1977, it was part of the BBC television anthology series called Play For Today, a gripping tragicomedy that skewers the pretensions of the new suburban middle class of 1970s Britain. It constitutes the very best of the BBC.
I was fascinated by the idea of an anthology series of television plays; I wanted more dramas like Abigail’s Party. So I clicked on the iPlayer website searching for other plays in the series. I found nothing. I’ve just recently checked again, and four shows are on. The BBC should put the whole series on the iPlayer. There are many young people waiting to fall in love with the BBC again or for the very first time. They will not be served by light entertainment. They will be served by great entertainment.
• Tomiwa Owolade is a contributing writer at the New Statesman
