Farewell to BBC Four

BBC4 will be gone by the end of the year. The decision is apparently driven by cost cutting because of the Coronavirus crisis. No sooner did the news break than there was resounding silence on Twitter. That pretty much tells the story of the decline and fall of BBC4.

When BBC4 started in 2002 it was branded as “a place to think”. The underground was full of adverts for it — moody black-and-white photos of Susan Sontag and Ian McEwan with the tag line, “Everybody Needs a Place to Think”. BBC Broadcast Creative Director, Ruth Shabi, said: “The core concept of the campaign ‘Everybody Needs a Place to Think’ reflects BBC FOUR’s aim to give viewers access to big ideas and brilliant people.” Presumably, she didn’t mean How the Wild West was Won with Ray Mears or Top of the Pops 1989 (both showing next week).

It looked so promising. When BBC4 began in 2002 it looked as if it was going to be for the 2000s what Channel 4 was for the 1980s — smart TV for smart people.

The first problem was timing. To watch BBC4 you needed access to Freeview. Now millions watch Freeview, but fewer people did so in 2002. By the end of 2002, BBC4 had 0.1 per cent of the audience share. Average weekly viewing of BBC4 was two minutes. The BBC lost its nerve. By the end of 2008, audience share was still only 0.5 per cent and Richard Klein was brought in to change things around.

Klein was not highbrow. No Susan Sontag for him. Within a few years it had become a mix of pop archive, biopics about famous British comedians and repeats. But dumbing down didn’t work. BBC4’s audience share was still only 0.8 per cent when Klein left for ITV in 2014. This isn’t really about Klein or even the dumbing down of the BBC. The bigger question was — what was the difference between BBC2 and BBC4?

For forty years, BBC2 was BBC TV’s smart channel. It’s where you could watch edgy arts programmes like Arena or The Late Show, alternative comedy and The Ascent of Man. True, from the beginning it compromised. In order to get bigger audiences there was always a mixed diet: arts and ideas, but also Pot Black and limited-overs cricket, cookery and DIY shows. It was always a pantomime horse, part-Jonathan Miller, part-Masterchef.

Then came BBC4. Was it BBC2’s smarter, younger sibling? Not for long. It dumbed down and became another hybrid: foreign-language detective shows like The Killing and Martin Scorsese documentaries but also Britain’s Best Drives and dramas about Fanny Craddock. But wasn’t that what BBC2 was? Tweedle-Two and Tweedle-Four.

There was always a more positive alternative. Since BBC2 has been going downmarket for years, why not move BBC4 upmarket, as it was originally intended, creating two distinct channels. Dumbing down didn’t work. It never delivered bigger audiences. It was like one of those bizarre Soviet experiments that went nowhere. Instead, why not go upmarket with confidence and ambition, re-launch BBC4 and sell it as something distinctive?

After all, something else has changed in the larger culture. Since BBC4 started, the culture’s smartened up. Take Michael Sandel. In the 1980s only a few academics had heard of Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard. Now he’s everywhere. Books, public lectures, his own TV series (bought in from PBS). The ideas he talks about, private greed and public squalor, have caught the mood in an increasingly unequal Britain. BBC4 could have become the channel for the age of Intelligence Squared, Hay on Wye and G2, an unashamedly smart channel for people who want smart TV.

Instead, they are axing it, apparently to create more money for BBC3. But the real elephant in the room is Brit Box, British TVs answer to Netflix, Disney and Amazon Prime. It’s supposed to be the best of British TV, our most loved BBC and ITV shows. But of course, it won’t work. It’s got disaster written all over it. But Brit Box has succeeded in doing one thing. It has killed off BBC4. Not even a room full of BBC executives are going to watch two TV channels full of BBC archive. So, goodbye BBC4, some money for BBC3 and lots more people wondering whether the licence fee is still worth it.