As the BBC licence fee climbs to £180, huge questions are rising about its value and necessity. TV critic Garry Bushell gives his view.
Question Time should be renamed the Fiona Bruce show (Image: BBC)
When I read that the cost of the BBC licence fee will shoot up to £180 in April, I thought immediately of Tony Blair. I once asked the then-Prime Minister what would become of this archaic tax on watching television. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Oh that? That’s going.” Naïve fool that I was back in 2000, I believed him. Now the telly tax will rise by £5.50 in April “in line with inflation” (unlike most wages) and is on course to reach £200 by 2030.
So what, say the BBC’s defenders, it’s still a bargain; still cheaper than say a premium Netflix subscription (£227.88 a year). They miss the point. If I subscribe to Netflix, or Prime without ads for £130.88 per annum, that’s my choice. If I own a TV set in this country I have by law to pay the licence fee even if I never watch a single BBC programme. How is that fair? And now we’ll be shelling out even more not to watch it. If you don’t pay, and get caught, you face a fine or a custodial sentence. You could be banged up for refusing to subsidise the Fiona Bruce Show, also known as Question Time.
But why should we be forced to pay for it when its output is riddled with liberal prejudices, its new comedy is either laugh-free or underwhelming, and its journalism is untrustworthy? The Beeb’s claim to be the zenith of impartial news reporting has gone down the gurgler faster than a stone turd. In November, we discovered that an episode of Panorama, Trump: A Second Chance?, edited Donald Trump’s speech to make it sound as if he had been encouraging unrest at the 2021 Capitol demonstration. He was doctored to say, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.” In reality the last two sentences came fifty minutes after the first ones.” It was propaganda worthy of Joseph Goebbels.
That same month it was revealed that BBC Arabic has had to make 215 corrections and clarifications over the past two years on stories that were found to be biased, inaccurate or misleading. That’s not including BBC TV’s Gaza: How to Survive A Warzone documentary which misled viewers by not disclosing that a child narrator’s father was a Hamas official. So how can we trust them? Their news agenda is suspect, their lack of balance in the run-up to the EU referendum is a matter of public record, Question Time is absurdly skewered… I could go on.
What happened to classic TV hits like Only Fools and Horses (Image: BBC)
They still have Attenborough of course, but where is today’s equivalent of Robin Day and no-nonsense Jeremy Paxman? Certainly not Huw Edwards or Martin Bashir, who have both joined the Corporation’s long list of shame along with Savile, Rolf, and Gregg Wallace’s autistic trouser-dropping. Where’s the gravitas? Where’s the balance? Don’t mention the Lineker debacle, the Question of Sport disaster, commentators who don’t realise less is more…
The BBC once made most of our all-time greatest sitcoms: Hancock’s Half Hour, Only Fools & Horses, Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers, Porridge Steptoe & Son and many more. Their last breakout hit was Gavin & Stacey, whose 2024 Christmas finale reached 19.1 million. Last year’s Amandaland reached 7.4m (after 28 days of iPlayer). That’s a huge gap with no sign of anything decent coming to fill it, leading us to conclude that the people running their comedy commissions just don’t understand popular humour.
Problem two is there is nowhere for new comedy writers, outside of the inner circle, to get a break. Historically, people could send in their jokes and sketches to The Two Ronnies, or Roy Hudd’s The News Huddlines, and if they were funny they’d be used and paid for. How can they start now?
Some dramas deliver, especially Blue Lights and the semi-pornographic Industry which would have fried Mrs Whitehouse’s brain, but shows like that would exist in a licence-fee-free world anyway. And if any independent TV channel had allowed an overly woke writer with no skill in crafting science fiction ruin Doctor Who and blow their Disney+ partnership, heads would have rolled. Don’t get me started on Celebrity Mastermind, the drag queen obsession or the BBC’s lazy and one-sided ‘satire’.
There is no way out of this crisis. Dogged with controversies about biased coverage and thousands switching to streaming services, the BBC is rudderless, bloated, and yet still insufferably smug. Will the boss that replaces Director General Tim Davie challenge their group-think and reverse their decline into Guardianista TV? Or will they just carry on sucking on the public teat until a new government has the strength to order a radical rethink? A tax on telly might have made sense when the BBC was a monopoly but it makes no sense in today’s TV market. The media landscape has changed completely since the licence fee’s inception, making the compulsory fee seem irrelevant in today’s competitive world. Especially when the Corporation’s traditional strengths have been undermined by poor decision-making and questionable commissions.
They could delay their decline by making bias-free news and earthy comedy for majority audiences, and having casting based on talent not DEI box-ticking, and producing dramas that aren’t yet more man-hating, Britain-hating, freedom-hating balderdash. But ultimately the gig is up. More than 300,000 households stopped paying the licence fee in 2024 and 3.6million now say they don’t have or need a licence fee. The BBC should be a public service broadcaster driven by the pursuit of excellence and love of British culture in all its glorious elements. For everything else, it should either rely on advertising or become a pay-as-you-watch service. Then we’d know how many people truly think it’s their BBC.
