This had better be an April fool

Because otherwise, it’s both deeply worrying and deeply ignorant:

Official: BBC is too upmarket (The Observer, 1st April 2007)

…Lower-income families, particularly those in the north of England and Scotland, are less likely to watch digital channels such as BBC3, which is aimed at a sophisticated twentysomething audience, or tune in to BBC4’s high-brow output. By contrast, many higher-income groups make good use of a wide range of services, including Radio 4 and News24, and are better placed to take advantage of new ones – listening to podcasts or downloading programmes over the internet…

How patronising is that? Apparently, “lower-income families” (and how godawful a term is that?) only want to watch shit, and only “higher-income groups” want to listen to Radio 4. The BBC is apparently only serving the upper classes by providing programmes which aren’t shit. Therefore, the Observer concludes, the BBC should be making more awful Test the Nation, hiring more shock-jock Moyles wannabes and putting yet more controversy in EastEnders.

What absolute bollocks. Never mind that someone who doesn’t earn much might, honest to God, actually like listening to Humphreys et al – it’s every stupid class assumption crammed into a single statement. Quality television should, of course, be for everyone, but generally it is for everyone – subscription channels in the UK have pretty much always been lowest common denominator. The BBC already makes a lot of downmarket rip-off TV; Greg Dyke recently admitted that he was wrong to commission Fame Academy, for example. It does not need more.

[A possible April Fool-sign, however, is the mention of the BBC making shows like Dancing on Ice – which was of course ITV’s rink-based Strictly Come Dancing ripoff – but that just might be a missed subbing.]

The mention of BBC3 as being a quality channel is worthy of a laugh, however; its attempts at comedy are miserable and it’s filled with repeats of Two Pints of Lager (a downmarket programme if there actually is such a thing.) It’s either too arch or too downmarket and that’s where it goes wrong. And EastEnders is doing badly because right now it’s unrelentingly grim when compared to Coronation Street, which is able to mix dark and funny storylines correctly and smartly; adding another controversial character is just going to continue the decline. And Today gets almost as many listeners as Chris Moyles, and Wogan gets more than either (just under 8m listeners on the latest Rajar, compared to 6.2m for Today and 6.8m for Moyles.)

Of course, what the BBC does very well is TV that appeals to a wide range of the population. Would Doctor Who be as good or successful right now if it wasn’t aimed at the public as a whole? Would Top Gear be liked by people like me if it wasn’t funny? No and no. Yet this article suggests changing what doesn’t really need to be changed; what needs to be changed is the perception of things like BBC Four, not actually dumbing anything down. (If anything, some of the corporation needs to be smartened up – especially the people who recommission Test the Nation.)

There’s a place for elitism just as there is a place for EastEnders – both types of programming obviously appeal to different people – and the lowest common denominator is always a bad place to be. And yet if this article is true, the BBC could be making serious decisions based on the findings of a review which seems to be taking the idea that the BBC needs to go even further downmarket than it already is – and, let me remind you, there’s a police-based Casualty spinoff in the offing. Oh dear.