Mark Thompson sees the arts thriving in a digital future

---

Mark Thompson

---

Comment on this article
ot.editor@admin.ox.ac.uk

Culture and the new broadcasting

Volume 18 Number 2, Hilary 2006

The organisation that employs me is called the British Broadcasting Corporation. For most of the BBC's life, that middle 'B' has served us pretty well. Broadcasting was what we did, and everyone knew what broadcasting was. It was tall masts on hills beaming out radio and TV programmes to mass audiences. It was one-to-many. It was to all intents and purposes universal: by the 1980s there was comparable receiving equipment in virtually every home. It was public.

Broadcasting was also obviously different from what everyone else did. The phone company, the record company, the newspaper company: different devices, different business models, different consumer behaviours.

Today, in many areas these distinctions have largely disappeared. Younger audiences search and navigate as seamlessly across media as the technology will allow. More than two-thirds of the young people who took GCSE exams last summer used a BBC revision service called GCSE Bitesize. You can find Bitesize on interactive TV, on the web or on your mobile phone. We offer it on all these platforms because that's what the UK's teenagers told us they needed to get the most out of it, but I doubt many of them think for more than a second about which device they're using to access it at any one time.

Our websites now reach more than half of all homes and offices in the UK that have access to the internet. Our digital services - TV, interactive TV, radio, the web - are all growing fast. As choice expands, it's inevitable that some of our traditional TV and radio services will come under pressure. But the success of our new digital services suggests that public demand for the core BBC content - news, music and the arts, drama and comedy, documentary, education - is as strong as it's ever been. The difference is that audiences expect to be able to access and use all of these things whenever and wherever they want to.

We think the real action still lies ahead. The cost of electronic storage is collapsing. So too is the cost of at least some forms of distribution. As a result, choice for many viewers and listeners will become, in effect, limitless.

Traditionally, one of the weaknesses of broadcasting was the waste inherent in the linear, real-time transmission model. If you didn't happen to have the TV or radio on at the time, you'd miss the programme no matter how great the potential value to you. Most of the time, most people miss nearly all of the broadcasts they would most enjoy.

In this new world, we can fix that. Last autumn, we launched a 5,000 household trial of a project called MyBBCPlayer, an on-demand window through which licence-payers can catch up on the past seven days' worth of TV and radio programmes, explore the BBC archive and create their own news bulletin based on the stories that interest them. If the trial is successful, we'll be proposing MyBBCPlayer to our Board of Governors. If it receives their approval and all other necessary consents, we'd aim to launch it later this year.

MyBBCPlayer is not a separate service alongside BBC television and radio. It is television and radio delivered by other means. BBC News is now a service that transcends any one platform. On 7 July, 30 million people in the UK watched BBC News on television and tens of millions listened on radio. But it was also our biggest ever day on the news website, and the biggest day for pictures and sound delivered via broadband. Much of the rich audio-visual content the public wanted to see, by the way, was generated by members of the public: stills and videos of the London bombings uploaded to the BBC and then used across all our services.

The boundaries between broadcasting and other parts of the media universe are becoming indistinct. It's happening much, much faster than we thought it would - our predictions of even three years ago on the take-up of broadband in the UK look hopelessly conservative in retrospect.

Culture: a changing mission

The first stage of the digital revolution was mainly about new linear channels and about text-based services on the web. It meant the launch, for example, of BBC4, a new TV channel with music and the arts as a central part of its mission. It's hard to deny that BBC4 has significantly widened the range of arts coverage available to the more than 60 per cent of households in the UK that have access to digital television. We screen dozens of Proms rather than a handful. Chamber music - once a regular pleasure on BBC2 - is back on TV. So too is a significant commitment to foreign-language films and, especially through Storyville, a rich seam of British and international documentary. And BBC4 has begun to commission some interesting and challenging drama and comedy, from The Alan Clark Diaries to Armando Ianucci's brilliant The Thick Of It.

Tellingly, early reaction to BBC4 among opinion-formers was rather mixed. Yes, it might well represent more investment in and a wider choice of content across the arts, but wasn't the BBC in effect creating a digital ghetto? What about the arts on BBC2 and BBC1? The arts, in other words, not for the confirmed arts-lover but for the newcomer, for the public at large? One of the BBC's greatest strengths in culture has been the power of serendipity, the potential for a general audience to bump into something unexpected or intriguing, something which could be the start of a journey, a new discovery.

I think that point of view is right. I do think BBC4 plays an important role - a role equivalent in some ways to the role Radio 3 plays within our radio portfolio - but it must always be accompanied by a significant presence for the arts on our mass audience channels.

I want to go further. Over the past few years, we've come to realise that the greatest potential of all comes from ideas and projects that work across media, that use TV, interactive TV, radio, the web and broadband in concert with each service or platform doing what it does best. Moreover - and this is where it becomes really interesting - we've learned that an important part of any big idea is active participation by the public through personal choice, feedback, debate, creating content. Not all of this is new - fact sheets and audience research are as old as broadcasting - but digital technology has not only massively increased its scope, it's democratised it. It's handed the power to the people we used to call the audience.

Big ideas

I want to give you two recent examples. The first is The Beethoven Experience. The centrepiece of this was a really simple idea: to spend a week in June 2005 on Radio 3 broadcasting every single note that Beethoven composed. It was a revelation even to those who thought that they knew Beethoven. Alongside that was not only some high-profile television, but also extensive use of digital media both for two-way dialogue with the audience and for a rather interesting experiment in which we made performances of the nine symphonies available to download for a week each: we received 1,369,893 requests in total.

The Beethoven Experience illustrates a number of points about the future. First: uptake of the new media has moved far beyond the pioneers and the enthusiasts. Increasingly, we have to race to keep up with the public. And that seems to be true not just of teenage gamers but also of supposedly 'conservative' groups such as classical music-lovers.

Second: the public is only too happy to follow a big content idea - Beethoven, our recent Africa season or a major news story such as the London bombings - across media, knowing that different media are good at different things: TV for visual and emotional impact, the web for in-depth information, and so on.

Third: it's the ideas big enough to infiltrate and occupy every bit of the BBC that really punch through. This new multi-platform digital environment offers extraordinary potential both for learning in all its forms, but also for the kind of content that spurs people to action and to participation.

My second example had a more overt ambition to deliver tangible outcomes in terms of cultural education and involvement. Last summer and autumn, we ran a major Shakespeare event across all of our UK services. New productions of Troilus and Cressida and Pericles joined a whole season of new and existing performances of the plays on BBC Radio. On BBC4, a new drama by William Boyd, Waste of Shame, explored the psychological world of the sonnets, while Patrick Barlow celebrated some of the heroic attempts to improve on the Bard in Shakespeare's Happy Endings.

On BBC1, right in the middle of peak time, there were four new 'Tales From Shakespeare', written by four of our best contemporary writers. And behind those pieces, on interactive TV, we ran the texts, interviews with Shakespeare experts, the producers and the writers. The BBC1 pieces especially were intended to introduce an entirely new audience to Shakespeare and perhaps start them on a journey towards the texts and towards the theatre.

The Shakespeare project began in the summer when we teamed up with the Shakespeare Schools Festival and 400 schools across the country to create One Night Of Shakespeare. More than 10,000 students took part, performing their own interpretations of half-hour Shakespeare plays in the original text. Now BBC Learning is challenging young people across the country to take part in a national competition to shoot their own video interpretation of one of the Bard's works in 'Sixty Second Shakespeare'.

I hope these big projects show that we haven't lost our ambition not just to serve the committed, but also to create cultural doorways, to reach out boldly to wider audiences. What gives me the most confidence in the future of the arts on the BBC is the sheer intensity with which the public respond to events such as Beethoven and Shakespeare. Sometimes when I talk to other people concerned with the arts, I sense a kind of pessimism about the public themselves and their continued appetite for culture. Our experience is that while uninspired, merely dutiful output may indeed fail to reach viewers and listeners, content of real conviction works not just as well but perhaps even better than it's ever done.

Mark Thompson (Merton 1976) is the Director-General of the BBC. He is also a Patron of Oxford Inspires; this article is based on a speech he gave at the Oxford Inspires Cultural Platform at St Hilda's College on 21 October 2005.