CONVERGING CHANNELS

I just turned on BBC1 (at 5.12pm on Saturday December 30th) and it was screening The Weakest Link. It's not a programme that I care for, so I switched to BBC2. And that channel was showing ... The Weakest Link. How fabulous is that? Isn't it wonderful that we cannot watch television at all without paying the BBC's licence fee and yet the BBC treats us with such contempt?

I am not of the party believing that the BBC should be funded by advertisements. If the collection of the licence fee is not to continue to be the means by which the Corporation is financed, then it should be done through a direct disbursement from taxation. But the BBC needs to pull up its socks in a big way. I mounted a comprehensive criticism of its present state in my book Common Sense – freely downloadable from the link in the right margin – but I did not therein explore very far the increasing lack of distinction between the multi-channel broadcasters' respective suites of channels.

ITV has no discernible policy for the scheduling of its four channels, save that the lack of news bulletins on ITVs 2, 3 and 4 allows for movies to be placed to start at useful junctions without worrying over much about where they might end. ITV3 shows a lot of serial drama repeats but no drama series or one-offs. (The one-off play is the great missed opportunity of the proliferation of channels, where all sorts of archived treasures could be disinterred to surprise and delight an audience that has forgotten or has never known how creative and stimulating the pre-satellite broadcast world could be). ITV2 in particular would appear to be an entirely pointless entity.

Channel 4's support channels, E4 and More4, mostly allow a pattern of repeats, sometimes with the first screening taking place on More4 and the follow-up appearing on C4, much as BBC2 carries selected repeats from BBC4 and even BBC3. Even when it was a subscription house, you never needed to worry about movies on Film4 passing you by because they always turned up sooner or later on C4 and they continue to do so. Sky Two appears to be a channel wholly dedicated to reruns, while Sky Three's schedules seem unfamiliar but contain nothing that any sane viewer might be moved to sample (eg "Monster Waves: accounts of giant walls of water that crush everything in their path" according to the Radio Times billing for today). Five Life and Five US also look like schedules of unseen material with no appeal – I can't imagine anyone I might know being drawn to a title like Pimp My Ride.

BBC3 is a closed book to me and I take as definitive the remark made of it (which I can no longer source) that, while switched to it, "you are never more than an hour and a half away from a repeat of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps" (I swear to any god you care to cite that I just glanced down at Radio Times in case that title was in view so that I could verify that I had reproduced it exactly and there it was directly under my eye, at 11.25pm today). BBC4 has become the repository of the kind of programming that used to make up BBC2. New and archive editions of the arts magazine Arena, which originated on BBC2 and became a staple of that channel, are now only to be found on BBC4. Documentaries about popular culture – often really very popular culture and presented in a patronising way, replete with 'celebrity' contributions and dramatised scenes – have become the characteristic form for BBC4, the kind of programming you might think would be perfectly marketable on BBC2 or even, not so long ago, on BBC1. There is nothing remotely demanding on BBC4 but its output is considered – by the BBC planners and presumably elsewhere – as the nearest thing television now approaches to what used to be called the highbrow. I can vouch that, 50 years ago, much more demanding fare was frequently broadcast on the BBC's only television channel, to audiences far larger than any that BBC4 might dream of today.

BBC2 is now the home of repeats of Porridge and Dad's Army, Strictly Come Dancing and Match of the Day off-shoots, Dan Cruickshank and Adam Hart-Davis, Simon Schama and Bill Oddie. It's an awful long way from the BBC2 of Michael Peacock and, in his controller phase, David Attenborough. If it can overlap an edition of The Weakest Link with an edition showing on BBC1, it really does have no separate identity left. In which case, what is the point of it?

What's more, all the terrestrial broadcasters' channels are losing audience, save at present C4, both with their terrestrial and with their Freeview satellite channels. That their schedules have sacrificed character and definition is clearly a large part of their problem. There must be a significant audience for what became known briefly in the 1980s as "quality programming" that would cleave to BBC2 if it became apparent that such programming might characteristically be found there. But as BBC2 has got down in the garbage can with everybody else, it no longer commands a loyal following, only defining itself by such viewers who have always shunned it because they thought it was elitist and fancy. Boy, are they out of date.