Matthew Revell

Neighbours - the Australian soap - could soon leave the BBC after a 21 year run.

Some people think this would be bad - they’ve created a petition. The truth is, this can only be good for us, the licence fee payers.

ITV, Five and the BBC are all negotiating with Freemantle - Neighbours’ distributor - for the rights to broadcast the show over the next five to ten years. Media Guardian reports that Five has bid £100,000 per episode and ITV £80,000, with the BBC coming in at £70,000.

An episode of Neighbours runs for 22 minutes. The BBC has bid £3,182 per minute: that’s equivalent to 23 and a half years of your licence fee payments for one minute of Australian kitsch. Over ten years that’s £182,000,000 of our money, assuming five episodes per week.

Back in 1986, Neighbours was great value. The BBC was desperate to fill its new daytime schedule and nabbed Neighbours for next to nothing. It made international stars of its actors, offered a new casting pool for pantomime and attracted 18 million viewers at its peak. You could even argue it helped strengthen ties with Australia.

Assuming there’s a single antique vase left to auction or a house somewhere that still needs a glaringly inappropriate makeover, the BBC is no longer stuck for lower quality daytime programming.

If advertising-funded broadcasters believe they can make money from showing Neighbours, the BBC should step aside immediately. Audience size equates neither to income nor success for the BBC. That £70,000 per day should be invested in programming that the BBC’s commercial rivals could never produce.

Despite its many faults, I admire the BBC greatly. My love, though, is waning. I don’t dispute that it produces some wonderful content but when it bids £70,000 per episode for Neighbours - a show that commercial broadcasters would ensure remains on-air in the UK without the BBC - or gets into bidding wars over sports rights, then something has gone wrong.

The only justification for funding the BBC through taxation is that it fulfils a role commercial broadcasters could not or would not.