The Desolation Of Smug: The BBC in the Midlands

I love the BBC. I really do. But it’s hard sometimes. 

Gilded London palace...          Abandoned Midlands halls

I’m a big BBC fan. I see and hear inspiring stuff on the Beeb. More often than not, I give up in boredom, despair or disbelief watching and listening to anyone else. I use the BBC website every day. I respect Reithian principles. 

And I don’t side with those who want rid of the BBC; I disagree with beeb-haters. Last week, the Daily Mail cheerily relayed commercial radio's monotonously regular gripe that, as Radio 1 and 2 beats them hands down for listeners, those stations should be shut down, hobbled or sold, because... it's just not fair, and, besides, it means they're not making enough money. Hey, I thought it was all about competition, right? So, go compete, commercial radio. Get listeners, don't bitch about moving the goalposts. You could try putting more profit back into output for a start.

So I hope I’ve made this crystal clear. I believe in the Beeb, and I support them. 

But, and it’s a big but, this is an organisation that really does not make itself easy to love.

A bad year or three

After years of mind boggling disasters – Saville and his creepy pals, vast payoffs to senior management, botched upgrades, hideously macho attitudes to junior staff, expensive reorganisations every few years, huge overspends in London and New Broadcasting House, all delivered with arrogance and unaccountability, and all paid for by you and me – it’s getting tough to feel good about Auntie.

All that... and then you get to a regional policy which ignores local talent and exports local jobs.

There was a time when local BBC centres (like Pebble Mill) were populated by extraordinary people with immense craft skills, huge vision and talent, and the widest range of programming areas to dive into. Maybe they still are, elsewhere. But in the Midlands there's been a virtually complete demolition of the Beeb’s creative centres. Talent has been driven to seek work elsewhere; the craft skills base has been devastated; wonderful facilities have been lost; the chance of regenerating the critical mass of broadcast creativity the region needs recedes further day by day.

The great regional cash divide

There is no good reason for the Beeb to have taken such a cavalier approach to any of its UK regions, let alone a cash-cow region with the largest number of license fee payers in the UK. But it’s happened. For thoughts on why and how, here's a post I wrote last February, after attending a meeting of the Campaign For Regional Broadcasting, or CRBM.

I can follow the history, but I can’t accept the attendant implication that the Beeb should now not even bother to look for talent in the region… or, worse, that they have already decided there isn’t any.

CRBM has been valiantly campaigning for a more equitable spend of license fee revenue in England’s broadcast regions. Their position is that the Midlands should have parity with the North and the South English Regions.

You might think we do. But we don’t, we really don’t.

Of each £144.50 license fee collected, the Midlands gets a measly £12.30 spent back in the region, compared to £82.87 in the North and £65.80 in the South. (Figures from CRBM's research). The rest of the license fee heads south, to be spent in London. Due to its size and the number of fees collected, the Midlands region actually contributes more towards London BBC costs - all those six-figure payoffs - than Londoners do.

When I explain these figures, people are flabbergasted and outraged, as indeed I was when I learned how disproportionate it all was, and is.

A campaign... and a muted, aloof, reaction

For the past year, CRBM has been campaigning for a fair rebalancing of funds spent in our region. Parity with the other English Regions is only right. Local MPs get this: a rebalancing of funds means hundreds or thousands of local jobs. Gisela Stewart in particular has lobbied hard for the region. Local Councils have listened, bemoaned the revenue lost to their region… and, then, um, er, shuffled their feet a bit. The beeb has remained predictably lofty and aloof, although I am told there is discreet cheering from the reduced staff left working in the region. The local press have been supportive.

CRBM's campaigning was felt to have made a bit of noise and to have raised valid points. But reaction at the BBC so far has been sparse. Some training jobs - maybe 80 or so - will move to the region to fill a few of the hundreds of empty desks at the Mailbox. This is basic training stuff, by the way, not anything approaching creative work. It will bring a local spend of an extra £8 million a year. And there's just been a call for local extras to work on Peaky Blinders 2. That's a nice, if low-cost, PR touch; but it's a drop in the ocean. There’s a long way to go before the region achieves parity with the North and the South. Like another £400 million a year. 

There's also a lot of blue-sky talk of partnerships. I get that, it’s the new way: third parties doing work for the BBC under their direction. But the result in our region seems not to be a nurturing of an independent production sector, which is something worth working towards. Rather, a selection of HE fund-grabbers and institutional snake-oil salesmen have been jostling for, and getting, the BBC’s attention, suddenly claiming to have miraculously deep knowledge of broadcasting techniques and fund-generation. I’m not impressed. 

As Simon Woods pointed out in the Birmingham Post in December, Denmark has pretty much the same population as the Midlands (East and West). DR, the state broadcasting company, has given us the Killing, the Bridge and Borgen – masterful work, and there's more to come. What do we get to produce? Um, Doctors, WPC 56 - hyper-low budget stuff - and the odd daytime series like Father Brown. And let’s not forget the Archers. 

While on the topic of compelling and gritty TV, please, please don’t swallow the insulting line that Peaky Blinders was in any way a Birmingham show. Series 1 was made in Leeds (and the accents presumably concocted in some weird fantasy linguistic workshop). Peaky Blinders 1 brought no work to the region; just a location shoot fee for the Black Country Museum. 

That fact alone brought down an awful lot of criticism on the BBC's head. The corporation's attempt to pass off Peaky Blinders as a 'Birmingham' show struck raw nerves across the region. The BBC was justifiably lambasted. Somebody must have listened, because, lo, here's a casting call for series 2, taking place Saturday 11th January. Maybe it's a (very) small step in the right direction. Hey, if you're a potential Brummy Artful Dodger, why don't you head on down? 

Note the delicious irony: They are looking for 'local people from Birmingham' for a 'number of new roles' in the new series, which presumably will still be mostly shot in Leeds, where the London-based production company, Tiger Aspect, has a production office. 

From the look of it, these are support artist roles, but, hey, at least there has been some minor reaction at some level to the criticism. And it will look good in press releases. 

Then and now

Looking back, this was a region that made brilliant radio for Radio 3, a region that banged out very successful specialist and mainstream output for Radios 1 and 2. This was a region that delivered fantastic documentaries, features, drama and comedy for Radio 4, tapping into great local writing and acting talent.

Now? At radio, a few specialist shows are made from the Mailbox for Radio 2. To my knowledge, there are two presenters who work on national radio who live in the region, but their shows are delivered from London and Salford.

The impact on the local music scene

And, by the way, this matters to musicians too. If you’re a hot new act based in the Midlands, I’m sure you’ll be delighted to learn that, Janice Long excepted, there is nobody at presenter or producer level at Radios 1, 1Xtra, 2, 3, 4 or 6music who is based in the region. 

What does that mean for local musos? Simple. It means your chances of catching a national media break are, if not actually non-existent, severely reduced in comparison to your London and Manchester counterparts.
 

A shiny digital future?

There is a bright, shiny solution that’s been put forward: The Midlands region, and Birmingham in particular, will become a digital hothouse. Digital! Oooh, lovely! Lots of institutions, including Birmingham City Council, are jumping up and down rubbing their hands at how exciting it all is. That decision taken, the powers that be have effectively said to local musos, actors, crafts people, producers, writers, and interested parties – “Look, this is what we’re going to do. It’s going to be vibrant and cutting edge, Now be good, shut up, go away and stop bothering us, because we know what we’re doing, and you don’t.”

Except that digital is a tool, stupid. It’s not an end in itself. It is there to convey and distribute content, and I see not the slightest sign that the BBC might acknowledge that there is a vast talent pool in the region, that can generate that content, which should be recognised and supported. The aspirational waffle spouted recently ignores this. 

Decades of damage - what now?

I know there are good people at the Beeb. I know there has been a tacit acknowledgement that what has been done to the creative and broadcast industries in the region is unacceptable, and has gone too far. Fixing all this will take time: you don’t reverse two decades of damage in a few months.

But what we have now is wrong. It is unfair. It has done harm.

What has been destroyed can not be and should not be replaced; you don’t turn back the clock. But creativity and production needs to come back, for the sake of the talent in our region, and the license fee payers who pay for it all. 

And before anyone else in London and Manchester patronisingly dismisses this as a needy Brummy whine of entitlement – remember that the BBC is there to serve, represent and reflect the entire nation, not just London and Manchester, with nods to Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow and Belfast. Every part of the nation gets a decent slice of the pie, except the Midlands. This is an argument not just for equitable redistribution of the huge sums the region sends to the BBC, but also for recognition of the talent in the region.

I still love you, Auntie BBC. I will take arms against cack-handed commercial radio campaigns to destroy your amazing music channels in the pursuit of even greater profit. I will support your brilliant speech output. I will always side against further attempts to reduce your power and impact. That won’t change.

But, Auntie dear, you deny my region of a fair share of the huge amounts of licence money we pay you. Over the past twenty years, you have pretty much destroyed the critical mass of creative talent and production skills that we need, that we used to have; you have snuffed out career potential in the region; you ignore the talent that exists here; and you see no reason to even address these issues in public.

.
You do make yourself hard to love. 

See more radio and broadcasting posts on Radio To Go

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