Comment Articles

Auntie opens her drawers

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 28 Aug 2003 15:45 BST

While BBC 7 can only broadcast so many hours a month, the archive will simultaneously publish thousands upon thousands of programmes: the paper agreements behind them may well specify that the BBC is allowed to do this, but it's a fair bet that nobody who signed those contracts ever envisioned this happening. Some will feel miffed, and we will have to wait and see whether the benefits to the creatives will be sufficient to mollify the sense of unfairness. That is the great unanswered question of file-sharing, and the Creative Archive's role in answering that question is in itself entirely in line with the BBC's remit.

One of public service broadcasting's most important functions is innovation. The BBC has a long and honourable history here, and not just in programme making. It's spent a great deal of time and money inventing and deploying high quality ideas from its Kingswood Warren R&D laboratory, an area of creativity often overlooked: stereo, teletext, NICAM, digital broadcasting and many other ideas we now take for granted have all benefited in many ways from the BBC's active involvement behind the scenes. But innovation implies experimentation, and whenever you try an experiment you risk falling flat on your face.

Failure is a great gift to the Corporation's critics: a terrible waste of public money on something nobody wants. Success is also easy to spin agin the Beeb: a terrible use of public money in unfair competition with the commercial guys. Of course, experiments will fail: in media as in science, you learn as much from the stuff that doesn't work as you do from the successes. The corollary to this is that the BBC can't judge its success from what gets said about it by other broadcasters and newspapers -- most of whom hate it with a passion -- or by politicians. The Conservatives have said that they'll consider shutting the BBC's Web site down, for example, an act of thundering cultural vandalism. That they don't mean it and would never do it is neither here nor there; it's a good example of the dire level of debate politicians think we deserve.

The only things that really matter to the BBC are the people it serves. We pay our licence fee not because we'll go to court if we don't, but because at a deep level we agree that the BBC is worth it. If we didn't, the licence fee wouldn't survive for a microsecond. Do we think the Creative Archive is a good idea? Overwhelmingly, yes. Will it be fair for those who make the programmes? I think so, but we'll have to wait and see. There are many decisions yet to make about the Creative Archive, and at each step it could go nastily and expensively wrong. But the BBC is positioning itself at the forefront of free information: we'll find out whether that brave new world we've promised ourselves will actually work. And that's far more exciting than EastEnders.