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- guardian.co.uk, Monday October 26 1998 14.18 GMT
When BBC chairman Sir Christopher Bland and director-general Sir John Birt sat down to be questioned by a House of Commons committee earlier this week, they must have suspected that they were in for a rough ride.
Hard on the heels of the news that Channel 4 had outbid the BBC for rights to home test matches, came stories suggesting that audiences for the revamped Radio 4 are in free-fall, Sky had snatched the rights to the Oscars, and Teletubbies had, on the face of it, been sold for a song.
All this at a time when the BBC had allocated £30 million to create BBC News 24, a channel designed to spearhead its march into the digital era, which for the moment is attracting average audiences of just 120,000. To cap it all, their appearance coincided with a three-hour strike by BBC staff enraged that Sir John had been awarded a 9 per cent salary rise, while their own had been capped at just 4 per cent.
John Birt's 'Mission to Explain' - the phrase he famously invoked to describe his vision of broadcasting - had unexpectedly acquired a new meaning.
Sure enough, the members of the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport didn't pull their punches. "The group as a whole has become lazy and arrogant," declared Conservative MP David Faber. Whilst Committee chairman Gerald Kaufman declared himself "at a loss to understand a system of priorities in which you lose mainstream, popular programming because you have no money." To be sure, broadcasting has entered a period of enormous upheaval, one which poses enormous challenges for the BBC. The arrival of digital television this autumn is arguably the most important event in British broadcasting since the creation of the ITV network in the mid-1950s. It heralds a huge expansion in the number of available channels, it will bring about vastly improved picture quality, and it will enable a formidable array of additional services - such as the Internet and home shopping - to be accessed directly from the comfort of the viewer's armchair.
But it also signals the advent of an era of uncertainty for our established broadcasters, an era in which they may find their traditional sources of revenue under increasing pressure as the audience starts to fragment. In this new digital age, the vitality and security of public broadcasting is likely to be seriously threatened by those who believe it has a diminished role to play in the brave new world.
What's certain is that in this new environment the ability to 'turn on a sixpence', to change strategic direction almost at the drop of a hat, will become increasingly critical to all organisations. That applies as much to the BBC as it does to commercial conglomerates such as News Corporation, Pearson and Microsoft.
That's why it's vital that the strategy of the BBC and indeed any public service broadcaster is sufficiently flexible to allow the Corporation to change course rapidly and dexterously in response to a digital marketplace which is evolving quickly and sometimes unpredictably.
To a greater extent than ever before, management will rely on talent to pull it through. This is a lesson the US movie industry has had to learn and re-learn throughout the century.
Now, in this new world of the Information Society, no public service broadcaster can hope to be involved in every single aspect of the digital economy. It must play to its strengths, its very specific and well-honed strengths. In an increasingly expensive and fragmented broadcasting environment, the BBC, well led and well motivated, has to re-establish the argument for the universal licence fee as one of the most equitable and truly sustainable forms of social justice of the modern era.
Its core role, its mission, needs to be defined as tightly as possible. To use a metaphor I've become increasingly fond of, the BBC needs to be more of a 'keep' than a 'castle', a possibly smaller organisation, but one with higher walls, guarding a unique national treasure-house of innovative talent, critical standards and most important of all, truth.
What does this mean at an operational level? Here I can do no more than sketch out a couple of examples which the BBC might choose to adopt in the digital age.
Like any other form of public service the BBC fundamentally exists to serve the community, all parts of the community - maybe even to reach those parts others cannot, or choose not to reach.
BBC local radio in particular can encourage that sense of community in a way that no commercial broadcaster is ever likely to consistently manage. This is one way in which the BBC can remain intimately identified with our national life; just as, over the last seventy five years or so, it has established itself as an essential element in the fabric of this country - in all of its diversity, its creative richness, and its complexity. Three phrases which as eloquently describe the Corporation as they do the Nation.
This raises the question of what happens to an organisation like the BBC when the very idea of a core national identity in itself becomes fragile as, in the near future, it surely must.
In an era in which devolution has ceased to be the subject of referenda and become a political reality, it seems to me vital that the BBC does all it can to strengthen its regional influence - and I specifically include the English regions - whilst at the same time retaining its role as an entirely coherent national broadcaster. Binding this nation together, whilst simultaneously leaving space for regional growth and ambitions calls for a delicate but balancing act.
There's an overwhelming need for a strategic recognition at the centre that the BBC could, and should, be doing more, much more, to reach out to regional and even local audiences; to drive its roots deep into the under-nourished soul of real 'localities'.
It's equally worth emphasising the vital role public service broadcasting has to play in nurturing and developing our educational system. It's a truth, more or less universally acknowledged, that watching moving images of one kind or another is now the primary form of leisure for most people in this country, in fact in most nations around the world.
As a result, an increasingly close relationship is developing between the audio-visual communications industry, at the heart of which lies television, and our ability to learn. It's a matter of the greatest public interest that the experience of long-established broadcasting institutions is brought to the service of education with as much energy, imagination and integrity as possible.
As the ITC's Report on The Future of Schools Television put it: "Learning from screen-based technologies such as television is an educational necessity in an information society. Television and media literacy skills should be part of teacher training, and television texts used in national examinations and tests." The public library service played a major role in allowing our parents and grandparents to expand their educational horizons. A public library service of the twenty-first century will necessarily be largely electronic, it's content available on screen and on disc. Broadcasters, like the BBC, must be actively engaged in the creation and delivery of such 'libraries'.
Undoubtedly, the Corporation must continually adapt if it is to survive. But this need not mean that we stultify every aspect of that spirit of creativity which without doubt lies at the root of everything it does and, more importantly, everything it does well.
There's absolutely no reason why this should be allowed to happen. In fact there's every reason to ensure that it is not allowed to happen.
Creativity drives everything that's good about the BBC. At its best, it's the lifeblood of the corporation. But this vital element has become dangerously marginalised over the past few years. A re-balancing of its mind, its heart and its soul is desperately needed. Without the blood pumping, the body dies.
In my experience creativity becomes stifled as soon as you attempt to over-manage it, if you constrain it too tightly within structures against which it will constantly, and for the most part unproductively, chafe.
I confess to being passionate about public service broadcasting, possibly to the point at which I'm even something of a 'zealot'. Some might identify the depth of that passion as counter-productive - needless to say, I don't.
Public service broadcasting was born out of passion, and a commitment to an ideal of 'quality' in the first half of this century - I believe that only similar passion will sustain it in the increasingly hostile environment of the next century.
The future almost certainly is digital, but there's absolutely no reason why that should mean jettisoning all, or for that matter, any of the very considerable achievements of the analogue age.
David Puttnam is a Labour peer and chairman of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts
