and the other element you ve said, katie, is the bbc is extraordinarily well funded compared to the commercial sector. and i think one of our concerns has always been that they appear to be so well funded that they can then go and do things which are simply not possible for us to compete with. whether it s launching new services on a whim without really checking whether they re filling a commercial need or outbidding the commercial sector for massive amounts of sports content on radio. in television, they ve opted out of doing that, but in radio they re still doing that and just spending money in a way that we can t compete with. if ijust bring you in, you know, you looked at bbc funding, i think when you were in government is axing the licence fee by 2028 a realistic possibility, do you think? actually, the period i looked at it was when i was supporting the dcms select committee as a specialist adviser during their inquiry into the wider public service broadcasting landscape. and of
at distraction, if you like. i mean, either borisjohnson is being badly advised or he s being very well advised and he s ignoring the advice. but, whichever it is, he s ending up trying to, as i say, sort of tick box populist policies to allow some of his potential critics on the backbenches to feel that their hobbyhorse issue is being advanced at the same time as the british public and the activists the tory activists can see that he looks a broken man, and those optics, i think, have a much more profound impact than any policy that he might try to put forward in a sort of kneejerk reaction. and helen lewis from the atlantic. i mean, in the sunday papers, various newspapers the telegraph and sunday times they were reporting it as a blizzard of crowd pleasing policies. you know, laura s touched on it but, you know, one of them was the announcement about the bbc licence fee. within a few hours, lo and behold, the culture secretary, nadine dorries, was tweeting
is subscription free there s no subscription for radio, it s a free to air service and no subscription company is going to throw £500 million, £600 million a year into the pot of funding free to air radio. then you get into whether or not you have to make the radio services ad funded. that then has a knock on effect for the commercial sector, as well as having, i should say, a huge effect on bbc radio, were it to be ad funded you can. sorry to interrupt, but basically, you know, we could talk about we probably will end up talking about this licence fee over and over on the media show. we ll look at telly but, you know, in terms of radio, which you know about, are you suggesting that actually it might affect the whole of radio in the uk, notjust the bbc? yeah, my rough back of a cigarette packet calculation suggests that if you were to divest bbc radio in its totality from television as a result of tv going subscription only you would have to, first of all, close down, i m afr
as a specialist adviser during their inquiry into the wider public service broadcasting landscape. and, of course, they did havejohn whittingdale in front of them at that time answering questions. and i think that. i mean, i went into that inquiry thinking, yes, why doesn t the bbc have the courage of its convictions around some of its great content? why don t they ask people to pay for it? and they could end up maybe making more money out of that than they do from the licence fee. but what i learned as you ve heard from helen and from phil is that we don t have the infrastructure that would allow that to happen. a key tenet of the bbc has to be universality. and if, ultimately, you went down a subscription route, you would end up disenfranchising or cutting people off from bbc content at the most vulnerable fringes of our society so people who are geographically remote, or perhaps don t have the money or the inclination to get onto high speed broadband and that would be the la
bbc local radio and all the nations radio. they simply are not commercially sustainable, given their audience level and the costs involved. nobody would touch them in a privatised world and try and make money out of them. they re simply not commercially sustainable. so this isn t about making a kind of kneejerk defend the bbc case? no, absolutely. this is about thinking about the rest of the radio industry. absolutely. ..and how the commercial world would be affected? well, not only would all those bbc local and nations services close down, the bbc networks collectively i, 2 3, 4 and 5 could just about survive if they were prepared to cut their content costs by about 60%. well, good luck saving the good bits of the bbc that people know and love if you have to take 60% off the cost. and then the third leg of this is that the commercial sector. if the bbc, if the networks were taking commercials,