If Six Was Nine And Two Was Four

BBC3’s gone from being an actual broadcast channel to being an online-only, iPlayer-led thing. I won’t miss it that much, apart from the Friday evening Dr Who repeats when there’s nothing else on to watch over dinner, but then I’m not 3’s demographic.

What concerns me about the loss of 3 is that it’s a precedent. Don’t kid yourselves; there are plenty of people out there who’d love nothing more than the selling-off of the BBC, or at least its gradual attrition into something that they can say isn’t worth licence fee’s money any more.

Now that 3’s going, why not the Asian Network? Or Alba? Or Radio4Extra? They don’t cost that much, it’s true, but if savings are to be made, they’re to be made in the smaller things. Minority channels that hardly anybody watches or listens, but which are exactly what the BBC is there for. It’s the world’s foremost public service broadcaster, and it should be doing exactly what commercial channels cannot do. BBC3’s schedules may sound pretty much like something you can find down around the 200s on the EPG, but in amongst the Snog, Marry, Avoids (a programme I’ll admit to drinking deeply from more than once – everybody needs a break from highbrow every so often) there’s been a good few well-made popular documentaries that wouldn’t have reached the right audience if they’d been on BBC Two or even BBC One. Don’t forget the comedies that were launched by 3 either, or the dramas.

So now 3’s gone, can Four be far behind? Four’s audience figures are lower than 3’s, and its demographic is something that A Very Important Man at the BBC admits is already well served by Two and One.

Despite being exactly who Four is aimed at, I wouldn’t object too strongly if it too were to disappear. It’s very much the default channel in this house, what with its serious news programme at seven and its Friday night music that isn’t played by comedy-haired idiots and its repeats of slightly-obscure sitcoms. But despite this, if it were to go away, that’d be fine, so long as one very important thing happened as a result.

BBC Four is what BBC Two once was and should still be: if we’re to lose Four, turn Two back into the popular arts and documentary channel we deserve.

When Two opened, it was almost exactly what Four is today: intelligent programming for intelligent people. There were programmes like Horizon, bringing science to those who may not have had A-Level Physics and may not have understood the basic principles of the see-saw, but just might have mucked about with a chemistry set and stained their fingers with potassium permanganate, and kept a hold on the curiosity engendered by those thrilling, tablecloth-igniting experiments. There was Jacob Bronoski’s Ascent Of Man, James Burke’s Connections, Robert Hughes’ Shock Of The New, Lord Clark’s Civilisation. I, Claudius. Edge Of Darkness.  All of them piquing minds with vast education or none into thinking new things about old subjects, introducing them to worlds unknown, showing them that there’s so much more than just the same old showbiz.

Two did all this just by being there. How many people were suckered in by some camp old comedy show and then, realising there was nothing much elsewhere, stuck around for the history programme or the science doc? I know I did. I know many more people would do the same if Two were like that today. In the increasingly atomised world of television, where every interest has its own channel, too many viewers find what they like and stick with it. They’ve lost the giddying feeling of coming to the end of a programme, trying the first few minutes of this thing that’s on next which they have no real interest in and finding – blimey! They like it!

The other thing the BBC could do, of course, is to realise that even with a Charter renewal coming up, even though it made some mighty godawful mistakes in the past that have hit it badly in the present, it’s a damn sight more valuable to this nation than any passing Government, and refuse to cower before or kowtow to the pinheads who would see it emasculated or euthanised.

And what we could do, of course, is refuse to let those pinheads do such a thing.