Fight for the right to Strictly

Image credit: Bernard Zieja

The BBC should defend to the death its right to entertain. It should not allow politicians to mess with its programme decisions or meddle with the schedule. Hands off Strictly, let us hear The Voice! The BBC should remind the Government that its public service remit is to inform, educate and entertain. That’s right: entertain. Entertainment has been integral to the BBC’s success since the very beginning. The first Director-General John Reith knew this very well, scheduling an ample supply of variety acts on the Light Programme to balance the more austere diet of highbrow fare on the Home Service.

But surely BBC entertainment gems like Strictly Come Dancing are safe with this Government? Indeed Culture Secretary John Whittingdale, who has the future of the BBC in his hands, went on the record only the other day to say he admires the risk the BBC took in commissioning Strictly. However, this is a recent change of tune.  Just last year before he got his present job, he told the Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins that in some areas the areas the BBC is: “way outside the definition of what I call public-service broadcasting”, citing programmes such as The Voice which he felt copied a format already provided by the market. He said it was debatable whether there was a public-service argument for Strictly, and saw no case for transmitting it at the same time as ITV’s X Factor, accusing the BBC of chasing ratings. But ITV, which has also objected to the BBC’s scheduling of Strictly, would be upset if The Voice was scrapped: they just spent North of £355 million acquiring the company that make it.

The BBC has always had to to walk a tight-rope between ensuring it carries enough popular programming to retain wide support from the general public, whilst at the same time being seen to deliver on its public service aims. It risks being damned if it do, and damned if it don’t. If it becomes too popular critics and competitors accuse it of dumbing down and betraying its commitment to quality programming. They ask why it should enjoy the benefit of a licence fee. On the other hand, if it follows a strategy based upon compensating for market failure by emphasising its contribution to education, the arts and news and current affairs then it runs the risk of being accused of elitism, or worse, irrelevance. Audiences begin to ask why they are paying a licence fee for programmes and services they do not use. In the words of Hugh Wheldon a former Managing Director of BBC Television, its unenviable task, is “to make the good popular, and the popular good”.

So if it is to survive intact the BBC has no choice: it must fight for the right to Strictly.

Mike Flood Page (@travelinhope) is an academic researcher and former executive producer at the BBC and in the independent sector