How I'd reform the BBC

My master plan for a British cultural renaissance

This is my bid to overthrow Tim Davie. (Legally I am joking).

The BBC have been irrelevant and out of touch for my entire adult life just because they are trying to be relevant. But this is a new media age - as long as they’re still commanding the pre-planned infrastructure of TV and radio they will never ever be closer to the cultural zeitgeist than someone who simply uses their phone a lot.

The answer is to ignore the zeitgeist altogether and embrace a) the everlasting symbolic potential of Britain, b) the possibilities of cultural production when you are not entirely beholden to the market. You can make things without celebs attached - people will still watch them just because they’re on! You can be cool and experimental on your own terms! There can be fairy rings and chalk horses! Below are my suggested reforms for a new-look BBC.

Total commissioning reform

Being a BBC commissioner should be like jury duty for the very weird. Having sound soft skills or being “tapped in” would exclude you from the job. Instead, we should choose the 50 individuals in the country with the oddest outlook on life and the most eclectic taste in very specific things. Reject all the usual trappings of a job interview - drop the STAR questions and get people to nominate their weird neighbour who still has a large VHS collection, or the random teenager who makes DJ sets on a pirated version of Ableton Live. The “commissionership” would be well-paid and last for eighteen months, at which point the next 50 strangest and most eclectic people would take over.

BBC commissioners will also personally function as talent-spotters. When not in a meeting, they will be tasked with prowling the country and going into pubs to ask if anyone local would be “good on the BBC.” They will go to am-dram productions and school plays and tiny open mic nights. Ideally, after five years of this, every single person in the country will have encountered a BBC commissioner. Commissioners will have a set budget each year and very minimal red tape - producers will work for them, and it will be entirely within their power to get a few things made the way they want every year.

Institute limits on how many times an entertainer/presenter can be on the BBC within a five-year period

To a foreign observer it probably appears that the UK has five presenters and about ten living comedians. To a domestic observer, it appears that we are culturally stagnant and that the BBC is opaque and unreachable to everyone outside a very limited clique (thus less entitled to taxpayer funding). The answer here is to regularly rotate the BBC workforce. Everyone will get their fifteen minutes of fame. There will be open auditions for actors and presenters every weekend in various regional centres. Open calls for TV and radio will last year-round; underemployed literature graduates will be tasked with reading the thousands of scripts and passing the serious ones over to temporary commissioners.

This quick overturning of the workforce - manufacturing ‘breakouts’ as quickly as possible - will actually encourage reinvestment in other bits of the British media. If the BBC has given you a large fanbase and a healthy salary then you will probably aim to keep said fanbase by using some of the salary to create media startups, so you have something to fall back on once you’re no longer allowed on the BBC.

Use the BBC to engineer our own version of the “Hallyu Wave” (ie. Produce 101 UK)

The pageantry of talent filtering in South Korea

South Korea is one of the biggest cultural success stories of the past 20 years. Their government invested in cultural production (the “Hallyu Wave”) and it worked. People everywhere are legitimately invested in Korean celebrities and media companies. Producers, graphic, set and costume designers and video directors use the regularity and forced experimentation¹ of the K-pop industry to launch their careers. The national broadcaster has funded several Making the Band-esque “survival shows” as well as Music Bank, a competitive Top of the Pops-esque spectacle designed to showcase talent while encouraging album sales and streams.

This would be a fantastic model for our own Department for Media, Culture and Sport, who have to reckon with a simultaneous fall in soft power and loss of internal morale. I think if we target our resources in the right way we could have our own Hallyu Wave (ie. a job-creating, much-envied ‘dream industry’) within 5 years.

We are struggling with this right now. There’s a misperception that the mass interest in K-pop is down to its rigorous training regimes (initially a cultural curiosity, but actually very boring and often needless), and not its production value, mixture of personalities, and systemic filtering of the talent pool. Case in point - the BBC have already made a K-pop show, obviously featuring an ‘intensive training camp’ (🙄) but they messed this up by 1) partnering with high-production juggernaut SM Entertainment and not taking advantage of their production value (???) 2) starting with a few singers they had seemingly handpicked from thin air (thus no vested, longitudinal interest from potential fans).

We need to make the point that Britain is a place with a lot of aspirations and a lot of cultural potential, and that it’s safe to invest in long-term; we need to place a theatrical emphasis on our own power to sift through an enormous pool of potential pop stars. This is to say: we need a British version of the Korean reality show Produce 101, and the BBC should be the ones to pay for it. The point of Produce 101 is that you gather 101 potential pop singers, get to know as many as you can, and allow the nation to vote off all but 11. They become a temporary pop group and stay active for around a year. Get someone from Girls Aloud to present - and get Xenomania to write the songs. For your initial investment you get a huge head start on manufacturing 30ish celebrities, all of whom will bring unforeseen eyes and cash to the BBC and the larger British cultural scene.

A proper lowbrow-highbrow Books and Ideas show

Hunter S. Thompson’s writing routine was apparently not real and actually an elaborate joke. It is still the exact spirit I would like from a BBC Books and Ideas programme.

This would air daily. The main point would be to enliven our literary culture while recreating both the working-class intellectualism of the pre-TV age and the eclectic, anarchic spirit of the Modern Review in the 1990s. Have serious academic philosophers and romantasy authors sitting next to each other to debate the same sort of thing. Make obscure internet literary drama go national. Invite questions from the most combative members of a live studio audience. If two writers hate each other then invite them on together to max out the possibility of a televised fight. Feed everyone a copious amount of whisky beforehand (this is how we harness the spirits of the Beats).

I absolutely LOVE that the BBC still thinks highly enough of the British public to keep commissioning intelligent and experimental films by Adam Curtis (and I’d probably put him in charge of casting my mythical Books and Ideas show). But we need more! There should be something Curtis-esque on every day, including by people who aren’t him! And when they DO have Adam Curtis doing stuff, there needs to be a section afterwards with citations and recommended reading!

Revive the Museum of the Moving Image, but as a locus of magic and crime

Blanche Fury (1948) - a gorgeous British melodrama with no modern-day reputation but infinite mythic potential. (I loooove how luminous the Technicolor looks here - were I in charge of the whole Department for Culture, Media and Sport, I would try and bring this look back with a system of tax incentives)

The physical remnants of British film history have loads of potential as mythic relics. The collapse of the original MOMI, and the sale of its collection to the V&A, has been a total disaster for national morale. We have had a good go at making our own films but if you look around it’s like we were actually a barren wasteland. America gets the mega-high-profile Ruby Slippers (stolen at one point, BTW) and the multimillion dollar white dress from the Seven-Year Itch; we’ve got costumes and props from British films, but if you ask the V&A those are apparently not even worthy of display in their designated Performance wing.²

We desperately need to mythologise our own film studios the way the Americans have mythologised Paramount, MGM, and Warner Brothers. We should found a new MOMI, sponsored jointly by the BBC and BFI and with all profits reinvested in British cultural production. Margaret Lockwood’s film outfits should be displayed in a kind of glittery crypt; at some point the new-look BBC should pick the most exciting one and then stage a mysterious theft and link it to a nationwide crime ring. Perhaps one with links to the very old Gainsborough-adjacent tradition of highwaymen. This should be major news for at least six months, with ample airtime on the BBC’s news programmes; if done right it would contribute, Mona Lisa-style, to a resurgence of interest in our 1940s film culture.

Live trailcam in Buckingham Palace

This is my maddest idea but I think it could work. Get one of those night-vision trailcams, do a 24-hour recording, and stream it on a special ‘BBC Palace’ channel. Not a high-traffic area - perhaps a corridor just outside of a broom cupboard, so interested viewers are mainly greeted with a Lubitschian feed of the Windsor domestic staff. Any actual sighting of, eg. King Charles in his pyjamas will be a massive news event. Keep the stream on mute to preserve some layer of mystery. What are the maids saying? Are they plotting? Is it treason? Is it Guy Fawkes Part Deux?

Two televised undergraduate lectures a week

This would massively improve public engagement with the academy while simultaneously destroying our insidious turn towards credentialism (ie. you can still get yourself some education without the piece of paper and cash and just for fun, if you’d like). Some of the 100 commissioners would be dispatched to various universities and told to check out the lectures. The most accessible interdisciplinary ones would get an airing on the BBC, at a generally very low cost but with additional visuals where needed.

---

Sneaky links

• Felice Basbøll
  and I have been working very hard on our books podcast
  Reading the Room
  and you can listen to it right here on Substack! Our newest episode is on McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy. More to come soon! (Also please appreciate my rebrand…)

• I wrote a pro-nepotism column for the New Statesman (GASP!) Everyone assumes I’m a nepo baby but in fact my incredibly tenuous connection to Thomas Mann has never got me anything. Keep your eyes peeled for me on the website!

• You should listen to Faye Wong’s self-composed Fable song cycle - it’s the best 20 mins of downtempo Mandarin pop you will ever hear and at points it legitimately surpasses Ray of Light (!)

• Please help my friend produce her short film 🤩

1. For all the perfectly reasonable concerns about K-pop, the producers and designers never really stop innovating and making cool stuff - it’s the mixture of competition (easier to be creative when you’re trying to outrun everyone else) and convention (creativity is more workable within limits). I think some of this was going on in Classic Hollywood too.

2. If I could restructure the V&A Performance wing it would be an enormous hall lined in red velvet, it would be relocated to the old Ealing Studios site, and it would be STUFFED with ‘charmed relics,’ like the ethnography area in the Pitt Rivers Museum. Contemporary curators seem bemusingly unaware of the concept.