BBC's Blues

Staff watch the studio monitors at the BBC News 24 television program in London, Britain, on July 20, 2006.

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Thompson's new plan reduces staffing (23,000 before the new round of cuts) and budgets but leaves the range of activities pretty much intact. There's a constant tension between the BBC's aim of making what Byford calls "brilliant, outstanding, special, standout content" and the need to justify its existence by attracting mass audiences, which, as Fox Television has proved, tend to gather at the bottom of the taste pyramid. Consider the huge popularity of reality TV, which is cheap to produce and capable of provoking controversy that hooks big audiences. Controversy is, of course, hard to control. Channel 4's last run of Celebrity Big Brother sparked riots in India after Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty was subjected to racial abuse from fellow contestants.

The British government isn't particularly happy with its national treasure either. In 2003 it fell out with the BBC over its coverage of the Iraq war. The current Prime Minister Gordon Brown seems to share his predecessor's lack of enthusiasm. At a September press conference Brown gestured to a journalist that it was his turn at the microphone. As the journalist identified himself, Brown motioned him to stop. The event had barely begun, and the PM had already answered questions from four BBC correspondents. Now here was a fifth. Brown didn't care that each journalist represented different BBC outlets catering to different audiences. To him, the BBC was the BBC, and enough was enough.

Byford concedes that BBC swarms at news events can seem "incoherent and duplicative." Plans to fuse TV, radio and online newsrooms and cut up to 490 jobs "should have been done earlier," says Byford. "We're a multimedia broadcaster increasingly organizing around a multimedia platform." But whether or not these cuts deliver the benefits he envisages, the spectacle of the BBC targeting core services and preserving frothier output fuels concerns that it has lost its reason for being. Richard North, author of the 2007 book Scrap the BBC!, calls the broadcaster a "grotesque monopoly" and advocates its privatization. "Broadcasting now needs no more control or support than the print media," he says.

It is an argument that has also been targeted at the U.S.'s Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The veteran nature-series broadcaster David Attenborough, whose critically acclaimed documentaries have appeared on public television in both the U.K. and U.S, insists that wide-spectrum public-service broadcasting still plays an irreplaceable role in British cultural life. So what if some people switch off nature shows? "The notion that you shouldn't pay for something if you don't use it is uncivilized," says Attenborough. It's no different, he adds, from having some of his tax money spent on, say, a public swimming pool or library "even though I don't use either."

The new vision for the BBC articulated by Thompson is that it will go on doing what it has been doing but with fewer people, a greater impact and higher standards. Quality is the key, whether it's straight news or comedy that spills out of a character's absurdly tight latex outfit. It's the only way the Beeb can bear out this claim by Byford: "The BBC is here to make the world a better place." Perhaps it has to start at home.