Roy Greenslade: BBC is saddled with making cuts and will have to ride two horses

An American friend asked me a couple of months ago why the British people are allowing the BBC to be dismantled.

He said: “Don’t they know how good it is compared with what we have?”

Similar questions were asked during my summer months in Ireland, where BBC TV output is regularly viewed by a large slice of the population — none of whom pay a licence fee of course.

Outside Britain, the BBC is regarded with a mixture of awe and respect because there is nothing like it in any other country. Here, sadly, too many people take it for granted.

So, partly through apathy and partly because of an antipathy fuelled by a combination of political hostility and commercial rivalry, the corporation is being dismembered.

The announcement by the director-general Tony, Lord Hall, about the inevitability of some services being closed or cut this week was calculated to confront the British public with the dire effects of the frozen licence fee.

“The BBC faces a very tough financial challenge,” he said. “So we will have to manage our resources ever more carefully and prioritise what we believe the BBC should offer. We will inevitably have either to close or reduce some services.”

It might mean the end of BBC4 and CBBC along with other children’s channels. For those who do not bother with those outlets, this will appear a minor matter.

For those who like them, especially the parents of young children in the latter case, it will appear catastrophic.

The mooted closures illustrate the dilemma for Hall. The BBC’s creation of separate in-house TV channels is a microcosm of the wider fragmented digital media landscape.

People expect, and seek out, channels that provide programming that suits their needs and tastes.

If the BBC axes channels that the majority view as marginal then their overall audience will decline.

As the nation’s public service broadcaster, its task is to offer content that satisfies the appetite of as much of the population as possible.

When audiences drift away to commercial channels because their particular interests are not being catered for by the BBC, then the corporation will be accused of failing to live up to its remit.

That said, there is one big change that surely makes sense. It is suggested that the BBC News Channel could be replaced by a streaming news service for mobile consumption. Evidently, the video-based BBC Newstream will provide news that is “personal, portable and on-demand”.

That is just the kind of innovation that should be applauded, although I’m not convinced that it will save money and I am also sure commercial news providers will, yet again, see it as an encroachment into their domain. So be it.