I Told You So!

By Alan ‘Smug’ Hamilton

Within all of us lies a deep dark trait that most of us would viciously deny was part of our personalities, and yet the desire to wield it in the right situations is so overwhelming that I doubt that there are any of us that can resist. I�m talking about smugness; well, of course I am. It pools man�s greatest desire, to know and predict the future, with a healthy dash of schadenfreude and there is the product, the phrase which doesn�t even need to be uttered, a knowing lift of the eyebrows with a tight lipped grin is enough, but if you must, you must: �I told you so!�

Good now we�ve got that out of the way.

It was reported over the weekend that Jana Bennett, the BBC�s Director of Television, is to reduce the number of corporation-plugging trailers regarding their new channels and Freeview from the number they are at the moment. This is because the trailers are annoying viewers. I love the fact that in this case I can demand as my right to be extremely smug about this realisation on the part of the BBC.

Their face-pulling antics have been one of the most smug set of adverts for anything that I have ever seen in my long televisual watching life � �Look at us and our eight channels aren�t we great, and there�s a new package that allows you to get them all for �100 (on top of the licence fee that you already pay us for our service) quick sign-up for the magic jamboree.� At least the ITV idents, that they flash up before every programme � the ones where their �stars�, a collection of Coronation Street actors and sports presenters, are circled by cameras on an empty set � show the true calibre of their �stars� and are honest in their mundanity.

Also in the article which announced this climbdown was an interesting quote from Caroline Thomson, the BBC�s controller of public policy, from a speech at an Oxford conference earlier in the year: �The licence fee is an enormous privilege and an enormous responsibility�It is right and proper that we should have to justify our continued access to it, and that access should only come if we are seen to be living up to the obligations it brings.� Fine sentiments.

However, there was one word that kept coming back to me as I thought about her words, and that was �access�. She is talking, of course, about the BBC�s continued access to the licence fee as their means of support. Now for their continued access to that fund they must be seen to provide high quality public broadcasting for the British public. Now lets come back to that, they have to provide for the British public as part of getting the licence fee.

They now have eight BBC channels, of which only two are available to the majority of the British public. The other six are not, unless, as they helpfully suggest, you spend an extra �100 on Freeview, spot the misnomer there, or get cable, satellite or digital from another provider. So where is the access for the majority of people to what they spend their licence fees on? Surely this is a blatant contravention of the BBC charter.

However, as I have said previously, I think that the BBC�s expansion is admirable. There will be a severe challenge to their benign televisual hegemony in this country when the analogue signal is eventually turned off; the competition on the digital medium will be immense. However, by alienating their viewers with smug adverts for products that they the viewers are paying for but don�t have access to, the BBC are setting themselves up for a fall, flaunting their charter and making themselves look, frankly, a bit silly.