The BBC is our national broadcaster, covering all areas (and regions) of British public life. That includes sport. But the BBC has more or less given up on televised sport. It doesn’t do the national game: cricket. It does Wimbledon and a few extra tournaments: no use to a real tennis fan. Rugby union on any consistent basis, Formula One, boxing, horse racing and now golf are gone, all gone. Snooker and darts look doomed after the latest round of cuts. Athletics rises increasingly slowly out of the blocks. And football – the national winter game – is confined to recorded snippets and one set of cup fixtures. Need to scrub £35m more from somewhere? Hit sport first. It’s thin, thin gruel anyway.
And it also – in hard facts rather than emollient verbiage – makes the case for a profound change in licence fee policy. The fee, whether top-sliced or not, doesn’t buy any sport that people pay in numbers to watch. Anyone for lacrosse? Put Sky, BT, ITV and Eurosport ahead now: the BBC is in fifth place and falling. So there’s no point maintaining a facade of coverage. Keep radio sport: give up on TV. Be frank about what you can afford and the resources HMG will allow. Let Salford run something else from its stately pleasure domes.
It’s daunting and unfair for Tony Hall and his cuts team, sweating over every shortfall and preparing for more grief to come. But, for sport at least, there is no other rational way. Unless, of course, you want to build a sport-designated service courtesy of a subscription base of your own that could win major fixtures back from Sky and BT, playing them at their own game.
And unless, too, you shift the £210m weight of website operation to a separate, paywall basis, rather than giving it away free. If it’s unfair that you can watch BBC programmes via iPlayer on your laptop without paying a licence fee, it’s also palpably unfair to dole out the goodies of bbc.co.uk to all and sundry in Britain, whether they’ve ever bought a licence or not. Stop ducking, diving and trimming. Don’t press the red button for self-destruct. Define the core that demands a fee, then – from necessity – start making the choices you must secretly know make sense.
■ The correction-cum-clarification of the year is picked already: plonked on the end of a New York Times review of Adele’s new album. “An earlier version of this review misstated a song lyric. Adele sings ‘Hello from the other siiiiiide’, not ‘outsiiiiiide’.”
If not today, then tomorrow
Nick Robinson came back, joining Today, then went away again after a couple of difficult mornings with a lousy cold. His voice – that damaged voice – couldn’t take the strain.
It may not have seemed the ideal return: a bold step too far in the serious business of overcoming grave illness. But it was also a moment to remember. For us listeners weren’t passive as Nick battled on; we were engaged, admiring, concerned, willing him to get through.
And that’s a new factor as Nick comes back. The people who listen to him are part of the story now: an audience committed to happy endings.
