All 2 entries tagged BBC Three

Deja View

There’s been much oxygen expended recently on the question of the future of the BBC.

And all of it seems to have missed the obvious. The £100m question.

What is the point of BBC Three?

The channel feels like a box-ticker. It’s designed to appeal to that audience that the BBC doesn’t cater to particularly well. And yet, it doesn’t do the job much better.

Ratings

Firstly, how many people watch it? Well, each week, around a third of people living in ‘Digital’ homes (those with Freeview, Sky etc.) see something on it. Which doesn’t sound too bad. BBC One, for comparison, is at 85%. But when you look at share (how much of the week’s television is made up of watching BBC Three) the numbers are less good.

Its weekly share is just 1.5%, lower than ITV2 and even ITV3.

Now, BBC Three is only on from 7pm each night, so perhaps this isn’t a fair comparison. But with the massive promotion the channel gets on BBC One and BBC Two, you’d expect it to beat ITV2 for the number of people it reaches it week. It doesn’t.

Quality

Is this because the programs are rubbish? Well, not particularly. The channel’s boosted by the amount of high-quality material like Doctor Who, EastEnders and Gavin and Stacey. Much of what they show is far superior in quality and appeal than what you get on other digital channels.

Repeats

So that leads us to the real reason it doesn’t do as well as it should.

It’s full of repeats.

I looked through the TV guide yesterday and was genuinely astonished at the number of repeats. Last night (Sunday) had one new programme, which was actually a retrospective of a previous series. Tonight has just one hour of ‘newness’ – “My 22 Stone Dad And Skinny Me”. Not exactly ground-breaking or original. Tomorrow’s schedule has another hour of new programmes. And Wednesday has precisely none.

Across my sample 40 hours of viewing, the channel is showing 37 hours of repeats.

Believe it or not, the BBC is trying to extend the channel’s hours.

Now, let’s be clear. I’m not against the BBC having a repeats channel. It might be quite a good idea. But why market BBC Three to the one age-group least likely to be tempted by repeats? Why claim the channel is a test-bed for programmes before they hit other channels when they’re not making anything original (Gavin & Stacey and Little Britain being extremely rare exceptions)?

And why suck up around £90m a year when 90% of your output has, largely, already been paid for?

The BBC ought to admit that BBC Three is a pointless luxury it can’t afford right now.

Christopher Doidge : 19 Jan 2009 10:11 |  Tags: BBC BBC Three Media Television |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Scrap BBC Three. No, seriously.

Few things look as stupid as the Millennium Dome, the delays to Wembley Stadium, Daily Express front-pages or Britain’s Eurovision entrants.

But the BBC’s bid to renew the licence fee just about managed it. The Director General, Mark Thompson, tried to blackmail the government into giving the Beeb more money. He apparently suggested that if they didn’t, he wouldn’t move key departments up to Manchester, such as Sport, Childrens’ TV and 5Live.

Keeper of the purse-strings, Gordon Brown, laughed in Mr Thompson’s face, and gave him a below-inflation rise in the licence fee. As a result, the Beeb’s having to make millions of pounds of ‘savings’. Or ‘cuts’, to you and me.

Today’s Observer reports that BBC News is being asked to make cuts of 5% every year for five years. It’ll cost hundreds of jobs, almost certainly reduce the number of foreign bureaux and probably reduce quality too.

The alternative, the article says, is for major services such as BBC Three, BBC Four or some of the digital radio stations to be cut instead.

I have a feeling that few people would prefer the former idea to the latter one, and my personal preference would be to send BBC Three to the same place they’re storing Top of the Pops and Grandstand.

The main argument against doing this is that the Corporation struggles to grab hold of the youth audiences who will one day form their core demographic. BBC Three gets kids comfortable with the BBC brand.

If you ask me, this is an expensive waste of time. So-called ‘linear’ channels aren’t the way of getting 18-30 year olds interested in the BBC. I speak from experience here. We’re far more likely to watch something on YouTube or through the BBC’s forthcoming iPlayer.

I’m not saying that BBC Three’s programmes should be scrapped. Just that the genuinely original ones should be broadcast somewhere else. BBC Three’s content often isn’t that original (there must be more repeats than on any other BBC channel), and the original programming could return to BBC One and Two, where it used to belong. Or be a web-exclusive, promoted on TV.

And there’s another reason. Innovative comedy has been shifted to BBC Three, meaning any new comedy on BBC One is pretty much awful. See Ronni Ancona or Harry Enfield’s new series. Scrapping BBC Three ought to force the two main channels to innovate, rather than going for tried-and-tested mediocrity.

And there’s an important final reason.

BBC Three costs over £100,000,000 every year. It’s estimated that perhaps 10% of that goes on promoting the channel and its programmes.

Cut half of the programmes, put them online, and let them promote themselves for free, using viral marketing and embeddable video players (like YouTube).

You’ll have £60m+ left over. Plenty for BBC News.

Christopher Doidge : 03 Jun 2007 10:22 |  Tags: BBC BBC Three Media Television |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem