Reach for The BBC Today: Future Uncertain, a new book from the innovative Arima Publishing stable, and you’ll find an fascinating account of how Tony Hall threatened, slightly melodramatically, to close BBC2, BBC4 and local radio stations if George Osborne did not provide funds to offset the cost of licence fees for over-75s. Retreat of stout government party, apparently: BBC leaders more muscular in fighting their corner than originally believed.
But perhaps the most interesting thing about this Ray Snoddy story is the choice of sacrificial services – notably excluding reporting parliament (over £10m a year), subsidising Welsh-language programmes on Channel 4, and beaming Arabic and Farsi TV programmes to the Middle East. There’s so much pressured spending at the BBC – the wizened fruit of external pressures past – that it’s surely worth putting such burdens in the front window. If the licence fee is worth saving – a separate chapter in Future Uncertain by yours truly begs to doubt it – the battle for independence and autonomy has to be fought line by line, item by item.
