Matthew Revell

BBC Three is rebranding. It’s not just a new logo, though: it’s also “a huge step forward in multi-platform”.

Danny Cohen - the channel’s controller - is credited with this banal quote in the official Beeb press release:

“BBC Three is aiming to become Britain’s most ambitious multi-platform network – combining television and the web into a single, integrated offering.”

In other words, BBC Three is going a bit YouTube and a lot Nathan Barley. Just as content was king in the 90s, today user-interaction is the media mantra. The channel that brought us such programming delights as “Fuck me I’m a hairy woman” has set itself the lofty aim of having “regular slots for user-generated content in prime-time”, while “interactive ideas will be placed at the heart of many programmes”. Some may welcome the broadcast of viewers’ own mobile phone videos of hairy women but I imagine the new BBC Three will make many nostalgic for even the shoddiest examples of reality TV.

At a time when the BBC is cutting funding to current affairs and wildlife - two of the genres that strengthen arguments in favour of the BBC being funded through taxation - BBC Three’s £93.4 million annual budget looks hard to justify.

Although BBC Three doesn’t help itself by commissioning shows with childishly shocking titles (see Paxo’s famous interview with BBC chairman Michael Lyons), that’s almost a distraction when considering whether the channel should exist.

The first two questions we need to ask are:

• Is BBC Three providing a service that would not be provided by the commercial sector?
• If it is, are the benefits of that service sufficient to justify funding it through taxation?

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport sought to ensure BBC Three would be “genuinely distinctive, genuinely public service and genuinely innovative” when granting approval. The conditions it attached were sufficiently wooly - e.g. programming must be of high quality - or otherwise of questionable benefit to the tax paying viewer - e.g. the BBC had to agree to promote digital uptake - as to be of little help in answering our two questions.

A quick trawl through the BBC Three schedules shows that, alongside the self-consciously yoof shows, unfunny comedy and the odd rerun of a Hollywood film, it has some examples of what makes the BBC great: The Mighty Boosh, Ideal, Japanorama, Nighty Night. However, each of those shows would have sat happily in the schedules of BBC Two in the 90s.

So, here’s why I think BBC Three is so important to the BBC that its budget remains in tact while other, arguably more important, areas of output are cut: it’s the gateway drug of the Beeb. We all hear meeja punters telling us that the BBC will find it difficult to justify the licence fee in the non-linear age where TV channels will no longer exist and we’ll all have hovering servant robots. As BBC One shuffles along in its desperate bid to become ITV1 and BBC Two has lost its commitment to risk-taking, there’s nowhere in the BBC’s output for the yoof audience. When they’re not busy drinking alcopops and watching happy slapping on t’interweb, they’re watching commercial TV. That’s no good if you need to justify the medium-term future of the tax/licence fee that funds your organisation. Perhaps that explains why BBC Three fairly quickly abandoned its government mandated target audience of 25 - 34 year olds for much of its programming. 30 year olds are already hooked, for the most part.

I think there is an argument for public service broadcasting aimed at people in their late teens/early 20s. However, I’m not sure BBC Three is serving that audience well - nor its 25 to 34 year old mandated audience - and I certainly don’t see how turning it into some sort of Web2.0, hand-wavey, social networking whore goes any further to justifying the use of £93.4 million of our money.