scte long read
defunding the BBC remain unclear, since the same critics demand the abolition of other quintessentially British institutions including the NHS, RNLI, ECHR, the Monarchy and the National Trust all in the name of Keeping Britain Great. It is nothing less than extraordinary, against all of the above, that the cost of today’s licence fee at £174.50 per year is considerably lower in real terms than it was in 1968 (£219), and covers TV, live broadcasts, live TV on any channel and the yawning, award-winning archives of BBC iPlayer, especially as few of these platforms even existed 57 years ago. The BBC would do well to remind viewers, especially the angry ones what a great deal they’re getting. While the licence fee may be excellent value for money in 2025, it isn’t really fit for purpose anymore. Nobody I spoke to feels it can remain as it is; television as a concept and a business has evolved beyond recognition since 1946 so the funding model requires urgent reform to retain the goodwill of the people paying for it. The Royal Charter, a constitutional framework for the BBC is reviewed every ten years and covers the governance of the BBC. It is up for renewal in 2027 so discussions are underway about how the licence fee will be paid for going forward.
was introduced in 1946 at an annual cost of £2 (£105 in today’s money). Colour television required further licencing and was introduced in 1968 for £10 (£219 in today’s money). A legal requirement for all viewers, enforcement, if it happened at all seems steeped in myth: from people disguising their televisions as microwaves in the kitchen to state-of-the-art detector vans creeping around residential neighbourhoods at night. There are vociferous arguments online even now that detecting a television being switched on like this simply wasn’t possible in the 80s, despite effective public information films frightening people into paying up; there were no Internet forums back then for speculation to fester. Detector vans may be mythical (NB: they aren’t: the technology did exist, rudimentary though it was in the 80s, and there is a detector van on display in the Science Museum) but debt collection isn’t; one industry expert told me his daughter is being chased with threatening red letters about her outstanding licence fee payments, even though she has deliberately opted out of paying (see previous page, Gen Z ambivalence). “And that’s got to stop, because that’s destroying the opinion of the BBC amongst young people,” he pointed out. In recent years as populism has dominated politics, the licence fee has become an unfortunate political football of its own. Rightwing politicians and social media influencers regularly demand the licence fee be abandoned and the BBC defunded, amid accusations of bias (this comes from both left and right, so the BBC must surely be doing a fairly decent job of remaining impartial). Complaints that the licence fee is unreasonably high amid a cost-of-living crisis are frequent, but restricted to the more toxic quarters of X (formerly Twitter) and occasionally the Telegraph; how serious these calls are for
said “there are definitely some big policy questions around how terrestrial TV could either be reduced in scope or completely eliminated. Those will take quite a bit of time to run through because you do still have an older audience in particular that’s very loyal and reliant on linear TV.” It’s a smaller number than it was, but it is still a larger demographic than the disinterested Gen Z demographic. Richard Lindsay-Davies, Chief Executive Officer, Digital TV Group (DTG) stressed the industry is well aware of the dangers of digital exclusion, while scaling back linear TV. “Television is inclusive, we’ve got to make sure it stays inclusive.” He went on, “The DTG have just done a piece of work for Ofcom with Goldsmiths University on older audiences and how they use television. We tested those candidates on other things like searching through a programme guide, searching through a broadcast app like iPlayer or ITVX, and then an actual search typing stuff in and then a voice search. The findings suggested that we introduced a layer of complexity to each stage and ultimately lost 25% of them in the process. “That shows us the importance of making sure for those that need it, there’s a television experience that is just like a television experience today. Over-stimulated old people staring at a Samsung or LG home screen, looking at everything on there, channels have sold bits of real estate everywhere and the whole commercial model is bewildering; they’re just terrified. We also used eye tracking technology; if people’s eyes become furtive and dancing around, that’s a direct indicator of anxiety and stress levels. There’s nothing worse than seeing someone trying to use a television but getting anxious about it. “We will have to intervene to make sure usability functions in future; there will probably be a level of requirement on broadcasters to make sure television has a simple interface. They clearly are on broadcasters to make sure that we manage harm and offence and safety and cultural relevance; it all forms part of the experience.”
The big questions
Richard Welsh raises an important point. “If terrestrial broadcast is going to be switched off in 2034, and the whole consumption of content has changed so radically, it does make the question of a licence fee difficult to justify.” The implications on the wider media industry if the licence fee is actually abolished, on the grounds that £174 is too much to pay and the model is outmoded, are chilling.
Business models
Meanwhile, on the ‘other side,’ as viewers of a certain age will remember referring to the BBC/ITV dichotomy, the terrestrial switch off has all kinds of implications. The BBC, whose licence fee
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SEPTEMBER 2025 Volume 47 No.3
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