BBC presenter Andrew Marr has said a “trap is being set” for the BBC by critics who say it should not do popular programmes such as Strictly Come Dancing, saying the “whole thing would collapse” without them.
The BBC’s former political editor said a focus on “market failure” programmes would see a drop in audiences for the BBC’s services which would be seized on as evidence that the licence fee should be further cut.
Marr was speaking on the eve of the deadline to submissions to the government’s green paper on the future of the BBC, which singled out entertainment shows such as The Voice and said “concerns have been raised that the BBC behaves in an overly commercial way”.
“I know perfectly well the trap that we’re being set,” Marr told RadioTimes.com at the Cheltenham Literature festival.
“The minute we’re doing the non-popular stuff, they go, ‘Oh, far fewer people are listening to you, watching you, therefore we’ll cut your licence fee’. So you can’t win. This is a binary choice – we can either be popular or we can be upmarket and abstruse.
“I think we have to be upmarket and abstruse and sometimes difficult and challenging and do things that other commercial broadcasters won’t do but we must also have the big popular programmes – once you start to unpick that, the whole thing collapses.”
Culture secretary John Whittingdale has previously said it was “debatable” whether there was a public service argument for Strictly Come Dancing, the BBC’s biggest show behind the Great British Bake Off.
But he later said it was “admirable”, a U-turn highlighted by Armando Iannucci in his MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh in August.
Whittingdale used a speech in Cambridge last month to question whether the BBC should be broadcasting its main evening news bulletin at 10pm on BBC1, at the same time as ITV’s News at Ten.
Marr said it was a “terrible dilemma we’re always in – on the one hand so-called ‘market failure’. The BBC as a public service broadcaster should be doing things that other people don’t do or at least at times that other people don’t do them. Therefore if ITV have got a 10 o’clock news we shouldn’t have a 10 o’clock news..”
Marr said the BBC was being “pulled in different directions and very, very tough choices have to be made” in an era when it faces new competition from on-demand rivals such as Netflix, with which the BBC’s director of television Danny Cohen has said the corporation cannot compete on budgets.
He said the BBC would plough money into a “smaller number of high quality, high-end dramas which we’ll want to sell around the world. [But] we can’t be everything. We can’t be Netflix and the main global news brand and a very popular domestic service. We are being pulled in different directions and very, very tough choices have to be made”.
On the future of the licence fee, also under scrutiny as part of the renewal of the BBC’s royal charter, Marr said: “The problem with the licence fee is that nobody has yet come up with a better alternative. Some people in the government have been talking about a household tax instead which is fine but just as regressive and has all the same issues around it.”
Marr said direct funding from the government was “unacceptable, because I don’t want to be in a position where politicians will appear on my show and are going to be questioned about something they don’t want to be questioned about but can at any point say to me or any manager at the BBC, ‘Do you know what, any more of this and we might have to cut your money a bit’.
“It’s got to come from some kind of general taxation if it’s going to be a taxpayer-funded service and it’s got to come at arm’s length from the government.”
