Trust Us, It's Your BBC

I know, it's been way too long since I last posted to Radio Far-Far, for which I can only apologise. It's not as though nothing's been happening in the wonderful world of the meeja these past six months just that I hadn't thought there was anything sufficiently novel or inspiring to report back on.

Tonight's a worthy exception though. I'm just back from attending a historic event. Eighty years after the British Broadcasting Corporation came into being, from the 1st January 2007 it has a new charter and a new governance regime. Gone are the "Governors" of old, who in times past included many illustrious or sometimes infamous names, most recently Michael Grade who jumped ship for a job at rival ITV plc, the commercial TV broadcaster, just before the new body came into being.

The new "sovereigns" of the BBC are hand-picked (well, picked by the powers that be, not us) 'trustees' who are supposedly there to ensure the continuing independence, impartiality and all-round accountability of dear old 'Auntie' to the millions of nieces and nephews around the UK who are forced to support her in her dotage by means of the licence fee. The BBC Trust has now been in existence for just six months, and today saw its first ever Annual General Meeting at Centre Point, which is appropriately sited at the hub of London's home entertainment 'silicon city' at Tottenham Court Road.

Keen no doubt to air its clean new look and discard some dirty linen to both the assembled media types and ordinary licence payers, the BBC Trust invited the public to the meeting and it was an invitation too good to miss. Tickets were free and there was also the promise of refreshments both before and after the main meeting. I arrived in plenty of time to enjoy Dim Sum courtesy of the corporation, among various other goodies, but I didn't anticipate the dim sum of many of the views occupying the first half of the meeting.

Of course, I'm all in favour of free speech and generally speaking, it has to be said that the BBC's reputation for preserving this, particularly through the World Service, is intact. But tonight's meeting unfortunately but perhaps predictably brought out more than its fair share of oddballs who dominated a fair part of the meeting with a range of often quite extreme and off the wall views which, in my view, spoiled what could have been an interesting debate on the BBC's current and future plans and how they choose to spend our money. These may well have been voices deserving a hearing, but tonight in my view was not the place they should have been heard. Pre-chosen questions- though not ones the panel saw beforehand- could have led to a more orderly meeting than the shambles this was, at times, in danger of becoming.


Mind you, it's often said that the more things change, the more they stay the same and in many ways, I think this is particularly true of the BBC. Nearly thirty years ago now, the Beeb held a whole series of public meetings called "It's your BBC", at various venues around the UK. One of my friends from the British DX Club and myself attended one of these meetings, which I seem to recall was at York House in Twickenham. That meeting too, had more than its fair share of oddballs let out for the night, amusing at first but after a while just more than a tad embarrasing and frankly, clueless.

However, tonight's meeting was at least chaired by the excellent Jane Hill, one of the BBC's better news presenters in an otherwise rather bimboesque female TV team of late. Fortunately, this doesn't apply to good old Radio 4, which like the other BBC networks in their present form celebrates its fortieth birthday this September. There, at least, you can still find quality radio, impartial journalism, intelligent, innovative and enquiring programmes- can't you? Probably on balance, yes, but you be the judge. Many of tonight's early 'combatants' though, doing battle with the trust panelists who were like Christians before lions, or should I say Lyons, Sir Michael, for it is he of that ilk who is the new chairman of the trust, did their causes no help whatever by the forceful and lengthy ways they expressed them.

Perhaps it's no surprise that radio hardly came up during the course of the evening and upstart younger brother television took the lion's share of the debate and questions. However, it was interesting to note, during a film showing the work of the BBC's four national Audience Councils, that it was the Northern Ireland AC which got the BBC to instal more DAB transmitters in the province, after complaints from listeners unable to make use of the service there. People power still sometimes works, it seems.

However, these days of course you don't need a radio to listen to radio. The internet takes care of that, but hopefully it will be many years yet before the good old radio receiver is replaced by a new form of wireless set, geared up to streaming internet signals on a local network rather than signals passing through the airwaves for all to hear. But the internet is incredibly liberating, and provides the opportunity for communities unlikely ever to get Auntie's favour with their own radio stations to broadcast the roice of their communities on relative shoestrings and within the bounds of what is legal, under no official scrutiny whatever. Is this perhaps the future of broadcasting in the UK, sans Auntie BBC?

RADIO PECKHAM is but one example of an internet-only radio station (for the moment, anyway) which is every bit as good with it's megabit music and messages from the South London community all too often maligned, as anything the nation's original broadcaster could produce.

The last question of the formal session of the meeting went to Davis, a young representative of this excellent project, who wanted to know what the BBC was doing to encourage young talent out there to get into broadcasting. What indeed! I had quite an interesting chat with him afterwards, over wine and yet more dim sum and assorted savouries proffered up presumably from the licence fee.

While BBC Radio still retains much unique talent, its cost is often questionable, witness the furore last year over the telephone-number sums paid to some of its top stars such as Sir Terry Wogan. So can we really believe the BBC Trust will take a more pro-active approach to give the BBC's huge UK audience the radio and TV it deserves, or should we fear yet more dumbing down and increasingly a departure from the worthy yet all too easily ignored aims both of the corporation's original charter and its new one?

'Nation shall speak peace unto nation', still proclaims Eric Gill's 1930s sculpture above the iconic home of the BBC at Broadcasting House in London. But in an age where journalists such as the BBC's own Alan Johnston is abducted by desperate men and women in the tragic territories of the Middle East and held to ransom for the sake of publicity for a cause, can we dare hope, indeed trust, that the BBC will continue to just tell the truth and nothing but the truth? Let us Trust it will