Yes, the BBC is Broken. No, We Can’t Afford to Lose it
In all honesty, I have no right to throw my thoughts into the mix on this one, but I’ve seen some frankly stupid, impulsive, and dangerous rhetoric being spouted in the days since the BBC lost its Director General and CEO of news. It’s 2025, stupid voices are everywhere, but I firmly believe that losing the BBC would be catastrophic to British society.
That seems a bit extreme, so let me break it down.
What’s Happened?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that in the last week or so, Tim Davie (BBC Director General) and Deborah Turness (Head of News) both resigned their positions. This came after a BBC documentary appeared to edit footage of a speech by Donald Trump to make it look as though he actively encouraged the Capitol riots of January 2021.
In the fallout since, news outlets across the world have begun to speculate whether this is a signal of the end of the BBC. Controversy is never far from the broadcaster, especially in recent years, but this is a sudden and significant change that many are leaping on to decry the validity of the BBC’s existence.
Unlike most other controversies, where “defund the BBC” has been a predominantly right-wing pursuit, this seems to have united both aisles of the political spectrum. Why? Impartiality.
There’s no denying that the Panorama edit goes against impartiality rules, and the right-wing outlets have jumped to the Presidents defence. On the other side of the coin, left wing outlets are pointing out that this isn’t the first time the BBC has broken this golden rule. To them, it’s not even the most egregious. It’s just the first one that’s resulted in tangible consequences.
Pointing to coverage of the genocide in Gaza, the treatment of vulnerable transgender people, and several other apparent right-leaning stances, the left-wing of the political spectrum are accusing the BBC of being a mouthpiece or right-wing ideology.
Both may be right, but both are catastrophically missing the point.
The BBC is not a news outlet.
Well, not just a news outlet.
What the BBC Offers
Primarily, the BBC is a public service broadcaster. For over 100 years, they’ve provided a whole library of content to the British public and overseas territories. The one constant in that programming has been its news. As of right now, the BBC offers a whole range of news channels that run 24/7:
(TV) BBC News Channel
(TV) BBC Parliament
(Radio) BBC Worldwide Service
(Radio) BBC Radio 4
(Radio) Radio 4 Extra
From current affairs to a library of documentaries, the BBC is touted as one of the largest factual program broadcasters on the planet. They’ve even gone regional, with local radio stations covering every inch of the British Isles and beyond (I’m not listing them here, are you mad?).
But it’s not just programming. Their factual content is in classrooms up and down the country in their enormous Bitesize library of educational courses and content covering every subject imaginable.
If you want the latest political scandal, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, or just want to see what the weather is doing, the BBC is there.
Then there’s the lifestyle content. The Celebrity Traitors recently pulled in over 11 million viewers for its live broadcast of the series finale. Strictly Come Dancing is an annual staple of Saturday night television. There’re game shows, reality TV, and cooking shows on almost every second of the day somewhere on the BBC schedule. There’s even a crossover with news coverage in Have I Got News For You, which satirises the previous week’s news each Friday (R.I.P Mock the Week).
Did I mention the charity work? Children in Need and Red Nose Day draw millions of eyes to their annual fundraiser nights and raise millions of pounds each year. And no, the funds aren’t siphoned into Lenny Henry’s bank account. The crew that make the nights run are (or should be) paid for their work, but celebrities donate their time and energy to the causes.
We haven’t even talked sport yet! The Olympics without adverts. Wimbledon, Cricket, Formula 1, Boxing, and yes Football are all available broadcast live on the BBC without adverts. And if you miss any of the beautiful game, Match of the Day has got you covered.
And then there’s the drama. Doctor Who, anyone? Call the Midwife? Happy Valley? Peaky Blinders? Luther? Death in Paradise? The BBC has hubs all across the UK working hard all year round to make sure that there’s always compelling drama on our televisions, or at least some coming soon. The BBC has given planet Earth some of its most compelling and critically acclaimed drama, and is constantly working to make more.
It's not just serialised drama, either. Soaps have been a staple of British drama for nearly 75 years. Long running, unending ‘kitchen sink’ dramas that hold the modern world under a dramatic microscope. The Archers, Eastenders, and Casualty are still going strong despite a trend away from the form. Without Eastenders we wouldn’t have Ben Hardy’s Unicorn. Where would Kate Winslet be without Casualty?
Beyond that, the BBC even offer big screen experiences now. BBC Studios is going to be a driving force behind the upcoming Bluey film. BBC Film has given us the Nativity! series of festive films. Saving Mr Banks was a BBC collaboration. Even I, Daniel Blake was produced with the BBC.
I mentioned earlier about BBC Bitesize, but that’s not the only offering the BBC has for under-18s. CBBC has welcomed generations of children home from school with an array of cartoons, dramas, and news tailored for younger audiences. Ask any millennial to recite the wives of Henry VIII or name all the kings and queens of England, they’re almost certainly going to burst into a Horrible Histories song. Ask any of them who their first male crush is, and you’re likely to get a cast member of The Sarah Jane Adventures or Young Dracula. You can’t blame us for that, we are after all just normal men…
Younger again and we have Cbeebies. Story Makers, Come Outside, and a whole range of programming can be found to give parents a breather (while also somehow sucking them in to the shows they claim to hate). And yes, I know those references are out of date, but I can’t see any three-year-olds commenting on this article to slag me off for it.
Have I missed anything?
Yes. I haven’t mentioned BBC Radio 1, the country’s leading pop music radio station and host of live events like the Big Weekend. I also haven’t mentioned any of the other music-based radio channels that cater to every music taste (apart from maybe movie soundtracks) OR the annual BBC Proms. I haven’t mentioned BBC Three and its collection of drama, comedy, and factual content for young adult audiences. I also haven’t mentioned the range of sitcoms and comedies the BBC has given us over the years, or the talk shows and game shows that defined generations.
What does the BBC offer? A LOT.
Here’s a recap of just some of what the broadcaster offers:
News
Weather
Educational Content
Drama
Comedy
Soaps
Movies
Live Event Coverage
Live Events
Sport
Children’s TV
Documentaries
Charity Fundraisers
Podcasts
National Radio
Regional Radio
… and all of it available on iPlayer for £14.50 a month. Where else are you going to get that?
What Happens if we Lose it?
On this point I will defer to a man with decades of industry experience, Russell T Davies, who so succinctly laid out what British audiences would get if the BBC were to disappear.
Nothing.
Using the HBO model as an example of what might replace the BBC, Davies pointed out that a subscription-based model would see a catastrophic reduction in value for the customer. All that stuff listed above? Gone.
Well, not gone, but redistributed. Redistributed where? Some of it may go to Channel 4, our other public broadcaster. Most, however, will be sold to the highest bidder, and we’re in short supply of moral philanthropists at the minute.
I could wax lyrical about the societal impact of losing the BBC, and I will, but first I want to address something that everyone is going to get behind.
Adverts.
Because the BBC is funded through the license fee, you can turn on whatever program you want and, you know, watch it. If you think football hooligans are volatile now, just wait until they’re forced to miss the goal of the century because DFS have a sale on.
It may seem a silly, small thing, but the British people respond strongest not to global trends, but to mild inconveniences. Yes, Fawlty Towers does have ad breaks on Gold, but you don’t like it, do you?
Okay, onto the more serious stuff. The BBC is publicly funded. That means money doesn’t set the agenda of the day. ITV’s Good Morning Britain has an agenda. GB News has an agenda. To survive, they need to generate ad revenue. This means that clickbait headlines and opinion-based news aren’t just an editorial choice, they’re a survival technique. If GB News ever actually recognised a transgender person as being a living, breathing human being, they’d be off the air within a fortnight.
Privately owned news outlets aren’t news. They’re opinion dressed up with good copywriting.
It’s in the middle of this warzone that the BBC finds itself in. Raise an opinion too loudly, and it’s a breach of impartiality. Don’t raise one at all and it’s seen as cowardice. But it does its best with what it’s got, and right now cowardice may be the only way to survive.
Because despite not being funded by a private corporation, the BBC is funded. By us.
If the BBC took the scientifically and historically supported stance on the existence and validity of transgender people, the right-wing leaning audience would likely riot, stop paying their fee, and the BBC would collapse.
If the BBC explicitly came out in support of Israel and outright ignored the evidence of genocide in Gaza, the left-wing leaning audience would likely riot, stop paying their fee, and the BBC would collapse.
Without the BBC’s cowardice, the news would stop being the news. It would become propaganda.
It’s undeniable now that fascism is on our doorstep. As of right now, the only thing capable of holding back the tide is the BBC simply existing.
So without the BBC we would suffer more than just losing all that valuable content, we could find ourselves on that slippery slope that only ends in one place.
How to Make Things Better
I think it’s well established now that I’m a big supporter of the BBC. But I’m not an idiot. They didn’t breach their impartiality rules in a Panorama documentary about Donald Trump. They didn’t breach it when they release headlines about Israelis being killed and Palestinians simply dying. They didn’t breach it when Eastenders showed their first gay kiss, or when Basil Fawlty openly mocked German guests by pretending to be Hitler.
The BBC has never been impartial. In fact, I’m not sure any of the top brass could define the word.
According to Dictionary.com, Impartial is defined as “not prejudiced towards or against any particular side or party; fair; unbiased”.
Essentially, to fulfil its brief, the BBC needs to be a dictionary made manifest. If they did that, they’d lose license fees out of sheer boredom of their audience.
In all honesty, they can’t make things any worse, so they might as well just do something. Start calling a spade a spade.
Nigel Farage is a right-wing leader in training and there’s historical evidence to prove it. Transgender people have existed for thousands of years and the rhetoric against them is exactly the same as was used against gay men in the 1980s. When someone says something that is fundamentally untrue and there’s evidence to support it, the impartial thing to do would be to call it out.
Right now, the British public need a public service that is a bastion of truth. While it could cost them dearly in the long term, doing nothing WILL cause its collapse and with it our countries strongest hold on free speech.
So fight for the BBC to that the BBC can fight for us.
