WHERE PRINT AND AIR-WAVES MEET
that the re-born Listener
must be a different infant
THE decision of the BBC and ITV to re-launch a jointly owned Listener resur- rects an ancient controversy, albeit in a new form. The paper's heyday was in the golden age of wireless, especially of the `talk', when the spoken words of luminar- ies like Bertrand Russell and J. B. Priestley adorned its pages; at one time the sales were as high as 160,000. It now sells less than 34,000 and for the first time has been overtaken by the Spectator. For many years it has lost a good deal of money, though the exact figure has sometimes been concealed even from its editor. Ab- out £300,000 a year, possibly a little more, is the bill the BBC (i.e. the licence-payer) now has to pay. The Listener has had flourishing periods even in recent decades (notably when Anthony Howard was edi- tor) but at present it seems lacklustre and unsure of its role — its editor has left and a deputy is in charge. So a re-birth is timely. But it must comply with the important principle involved.
Britain has for centuries enjoyed a free commercial market in print publishing, and anything else would be unthinkable (Chur- chill's state-financed British Gazette, pub- lished as an emergency venture during the General Strike of 1926, evoked strong criticism, not all of it from trade unionists). With the coming of broadcasting shortly before the first world war, a new concept was introduced. Partly because of naval priorities in wireless, partly because of the limited frequencies, it was accepted that government must administer use of the air for broadcasting. When the BBC itself was set up in the 1920s, as a publicly owned and financed corporation, there was very little commercial opposition. The original tech- nical reasons which led to a public monopoly in broadcasting no longer exist, the system became a duopoly in the 1950s, and clearly it will be further opened up in the 1990s. But that is another story, and the point remains: access to broadcast publishing has always been restricted, government-supervised and until 1955 uni- versally subsidised too.
For this very reason, the invasion of print-publishing by the BBC raised a highly controversial principle. That the BBC
should publish its programmes seemed acceptable (though it is not reasonable, in my view, that the BBC or ITV should exert monopoly rights over their details). But in 1929, when it first introduced the Listener, as a general magazine, other weeklies protested that this invasion by a subsidised monopolist was unfair competition. A de- legation went to see the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and as a result a memor- andum was drawn up, and accepted by the BBC, whereby the Listener undertook that no more than ten per cent of its contents should originate outside broadcasting.
This arrangement mollified the indepen- dent weeklies, though they were never happy about the Listener being subsidised or getting free advertising on the BBC (denied to its competitors, even if they offered to pay). They also grumbled that the ten per cent limit was often exceeded. It posed problems for the Listener, which ran excellent book reviews, under such notable literary editors as J. R. Ackerley. The reviews themselves took up ten per cent of the paper and more, and it was difficult to assert that most of them arose from broadcasting. The joke ran that if the 'I decided to get a mobile home.' paper wanted to review a book on campa- nology, it had to begin 'Those of you who heard the bells ring on the Home Service last Sunday morning may have noticed. . . .' At certain times, the Listener's eva- sion of the quota was so flagrant that formal protests were made, and the BBC bureaucracy cumbersomely responded with guidelines to the editor (who also got instructions on when he could refer to ITV programmes or accept their advertise- ments).
However, the Listener was both broadly acceptable and editorially satisfactory so long as the talk remained a prominent feature of broadcasting and formed the bulk of the paper's material. But in recent years it has almost disappeared as an art-form. The classic BBC talk is now rare, and whenever I try to listen to one I find it is badly prepared and atrociously deli- vered, usually by an obscure academic. The BBC evidently will not spend the time, trouble and money to preserve the art and find those who practise it — Alistair Cooke is now almost the sole survivor to show how it was once done. As a result the Listener is short of first-class legitimate copy. Television transcripts are no substi- tute. It has thus declined in quality, and so in circulation, and has been driven to commission articles, like any other weekly, to the point where the Baldwin Agreement has become meaningless.
The decision to re-launch the paper under joint BBC-ITV backing thus raises the original problem in acute form. The money and commercial skills of the ITV companies could make the New Listener a formidable competitor to the few remain- ing independent weeklies, dependent on their own resources. It is unjust that they, who operate in the open market, should have to face a privileged rival subsidised both by the BBC, with its licence-fee monopoly, and ITV, with its monopoly of television advertising. If the weeklies form up, as they did in 1929, and put their case to Mrs Thatcher, they will find an even more sympathetic audience than Baldwin. Clearly some restrictions on editorial con- tent will have to be imposed. The old ten per cent rule is no longer workable. The right solution is for the New Listener to cease the increasingly desperate attempt to be a general weekly and become what it should have been right from the start: a high-quality specialist paper dealing with all aspects of broadcasting. This is a rapidly expanding area and an increasingly impor- tant field of policy debate. No existing publication covers it in a sophisticated and comprehensive manner. The 1990s are going to be an exciting decade in broad- casting. If the editor of the new paper were given a specific mandate to cover it, with the duty to express all points of view, it could become a valuable and successful part of the weekly scene, without arousing any objections from rivals who have to make their living the hard way.
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