This New Noise (19 page)

The BBC's research and development department in west London contained an area known as the Blue Room, a space in which the latest tech and gadgets were laid out ready for curious employees to discover. Here, for example, demonstrators showed me an Oculus Rift: an item of snorkel-like headgear enabling one to experience a 360-degree virtual-reality space. It was financed originally on Kickstarter, was bought by Facebook, and when I visited in 2014 had not quite reached the open market. I placed the equipment on my head and suddenly I was ‘in' a Tuscan villa, rendered in detailed if slightly clunky computer-game-style graphics. I wandered jerkily through it, out into its walled garden with cypress trees, and the view of the hills beyond. It made me nauseous all afternoon. But it was also clearly a thing of immense, if somewhat uncanny, possibility – and not just for gaming, perhaps its most obvious application. The BBC had already been experimenting with filming musicians from the BBC Philharmonic in 360 degrees: imagine being able to ‘walk among' the musicians, hearing the balance of the music change as you move. Ralph Rivera, the director of BBC future media, had joked to me about the BBC's building a holodeck – the virtual-reality space that, in
Star Trek
, Starfleet personnel enter for recreation (or, perhaps more accurately, to explore the ontological problems posed by the scriptwriters). But it wasn't quite a joke: this is what he meant – a future in which storytelling could be made absolutely enveloping and deeply immersive.

The Blue Room also contained examples of lightfield cameras, which allow photographs to be refocused and
perspective changed, creating what might be thought of as a 3D image. Matthew Postgate, controller of R&D, gave me an example of the kind of early thinking the BBC is doing with such technologies:

These were visions of a future BBC in which storytelling might exit the flat surface of the screen and embrace and envelop the audience – an audience that might be increasingly active in moulding the story itself. But the Blue Room also contained something of perhaps more immediate concern to the corporation. One section of it was arranged so as to resemble a teenager's bedroom – bunk beds, football posters, the usual detritus. A real fourteen-year-old's activities on his computer were tracked after he came in from school one night, and visitors could watch the way he used his screen – he mucked around on Facebook, watched football highlights on YouTube, Skyped his friends, did a spot of homework using Wikipedia. He did
not at any point access BBC material. According to figures assembled by the BBC in 2014, sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds consumed less television (ITV and Channel 4, too) than their older counterparts. BBC1, for example, had a reach of 59.2 per cent in this age group, as opposed to 77.6 per cent for the general population (these figures related to watching on television; they did not include viewing on computers, tablets or phones). Whether this was a matter of real concern was moot – BBC research also showed that this age group had always consumed much less television than the general population; and in fact in 2014 eighteen-year-olds were consuming a shade more TV (again, on an actual set – data-gathering was lagging behind new modes of viewing) than those aged twenty-three or twenty-eight. Radio 1, directly out to serve a youth audience, had seen its listenership rise over the past decade, its controller Ben Cooper told me – from under 9.5 million in 2003 to 10.5 million. But, he added, listeners spent significantly less time with the material: 6 hours 34 minutes a week, rather than 10 hours a week in 2006.

The habits of these digital natives raised questions for the BBC, as they did for all broadcasters. Were those young people harbingers of a future in which linear television eventually, in some unmapped future, might wither away? How important would curatorship, scheduling and the brand identity of individual channels continue to be? Would younger audiences in fact migrate back to more traditional modes of consumption as they got older, or was the game up for all that? Should the BBC follow its audiences out into the big wide world of the web, or try to
usher them back into what Cooper called ‘the walled garden' of the BBC?

Cooper, when we met in the summer of 2014 in his station's loft-like offices on the top floor of Broadcasting House, told me he believed Radio 1 should scatter its offerings in the places where people will find them. And so Radio 1 had established its own YouTube channel with 1.3 million subscribers, a third of them between thirteen and seventeen. On the channel you could find videos of performances and interviews: a paradoxical idea, perhaps, for a radio station, but a recognition of the visual, video-rich world that teenagers were inhabiting. (All the studios in Radio 1 had been fitted with cameras.) He had hired YouTube stars Dan and Phil as DJs – each had built up vast followings on their own YouTube channels – to tempt younger people to the BBC network. The strategy at Radio 1, Cooper said, in conscious echo of the tricolon ‘inform, educate and entertain', was ‘listen, watch, share'. It was, perhaps, a small way of acknowledging that the BBC, once the great distributor of material (you pressed the first button on the television and out poured BBC1, as if through a well-plumbed pipe), was now part of a world in which material circulates in much more unpredictable and uncontrollable ways, dragged hither and thither by the riptides, eddies and flows of the Internet. Cooper said he would like to add the word ‘create' to that trio – and develop more ways of acting as a platform for his audience's talent and ingeniousness.

Once the BBC was a giant. In 2014 it still was, if you looked at it in terms of its institutional size and its reach
among British audiences in all its forms. But, seen from another angle, it was shrinking, fast. The online world is boundary-less and global, one in which the BBC was beginning to look rather small by comparison with the titans that were increasingly dominating it. According to James Purnell, the BBC's director of strategy and digital, ‘At the time of the last charter review we were the same size as Apple. Apple's now twenty times bigger than the BBC. We were roughly the same size as Sky, they're now twice the size of us. BT wasn't in this market, but it is now, and BT is five times the size of BBC. We were 40 per cent of the broadcasting market in the UK. We're now down to 25 per cent.' ‘The monoliths will shake,' Birt had warned in his outgoing speech as director general in 1999.

What does Reith's thinking look like in this context? Online, our lives, and our routes to BBC material, increasingly pass through the great ecosystems built by American conglomerates. Instead of pouring its programmes, as in the past, through pipes that it had either invented or whose development it had aided, it is obliged ‘to play out its digital innovations in spaces that are essentially defined by Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple', in the words of Matt Locke, a former head of innovation at BBC new media. For some, this is an inevitability, and the BBC has inherent qualities that will protect it and its audience. According to Rivera, ‘Fragmentation is our friend, because we are the signal in the noise. The more that's out there, the more there is a need to go to places you trust that have high quality. And I believe when you have more
choice there'll be more flight to quality because you don't have to accept mediocre or poor things.'

But maybe it does matter. If my life with the BBC has hitherto been about privacy – no one able to track my habits and predilections, no one able to sell me anything based on my desires – then perhaps it does make a difference if my path to BBC material online is both forged and tracked by these US corporate giants, and increasingly the BBC has to operate in ecosystems designed by those with profit-making motives far removed from their own founding civic principles. And if the BBC was not set up to be, precisely, radio or television or online, but, rather, at a more essential level, a great public space through whose generous and lofty halls we could all walk together as equals, outside the world of commerce, then maybe the BBC does have some kind of responsibility – ‘big, even colossal', in the words of Reith. Some within the BBC believe that the future has already slipped out of the corporation's grasp: that it should have been at the forefront of guaranteeing access to public-service material online; it should have been inventing ways to protect security and privacy of personal data; it should have made its own browser, and its own Cloud-style storage. That there were more abstract, more searching questions to be asked – both by the corporation and the government – about how the BBC could fulfil a public-service destiny in the digital age. Hall's slant on such questions was to stress the importance of something that is ‘owned here; is for Britain, and respects and reflects British values and the excitement of being British'.

The history of the BBC is, of course, not just the history of the institution and its output; it is the history of how its audience has received it. Matt Locke spoke to me of what he called ‘patterns of attention'. Talking to him made me think about how our attentiveness – our ways of paying attention – to the BBC has changed over the past 92 years. In the 1930 BBC Handbook, advice was given on how best to appreciate the wireless: ‘Listen as carefully at home as you do in a theatre or concert hall. You can't get the best out of a programme if your mind is wandering, or if you are playing bridge or reading. Give it your full attention. Try turning out the lights so that your eye is not caught by familiar objects in the room. Your imagination will be twice as vivid.' Sir David Attenborough told me of his early years in television in the 1950s, when the evening ‘programme' (then meaning not an individual show, but, as it were, the whole evening's playbill) was organised in the expectation that you would sit down and watch ‘the lot. And so consequently the schedule was like making a meal, starting with something little, a little frippery, an hors d'oeuvre and maybe an indication of what might be coming in the evening; and then you had the main course, which was a play or something serious, and then, to end it all, you had a religious blessing – certainly on a Sunday.' In the very early days viewers were perfectly prepared to telephone the programme-makers while a show was still going out to demand, if they thought it was dragging, that they ‘get on with it'.

All of this has changed, of course: radio has become something we might listen to while driving or cooking or
working. We do not automatically gather before the television from 7.30 to 10.30 p.m., fearful that if we don't watch the whole lot we aren't getting our money's worth. If we do sit down in front of it at an appointed moment, and most of us still do, we might be tweeting about it at the same time, or following a liveblog, involved in a discussion about it that goes far beyond our own living room. Television now seems at its most powerful, in fact, when we sit down to watch live events whose outcome we will observe in real time, such as a football match – looping back, in a sense, to the qualities early identified as the form's most exciting characteristics. As early as 1923, in the
Radio Times
of 19 October, an article talked about the coming technology of television. ‘The transmission of sound by wireless, only a few years ago a scientist's dream, is now an everyday fact,' proclaimed the article. ‘An even more marvellous thing will soon by possible … Mr Jones will be able to sit comfortably in his own parlour on Derby Day and watch his favourite romping home – last! … No more special trains for the Cup Tie need be run! The match will be watched by the various supporters in the television apparatus.'

How will we pay attention in the future? What part will the BBC play in our lives? Will the tread of the new giants – BT and Netflix and Amazon – crush the BBC underfoot? Will the government support or punish the BBC, simultaneously over-mighty and shrinking as it is? Will the BBC itself successfully remake its public-service mission for an Internet age? Like the early pioneers of the BBC we stand at a great junction in the ages of communication. Hilda
Matheson talked about the generation beneath her much as those of us above a certain age describe, with a certain wonderment, ‘digital natives'. ‘The child born at the same time as broadcasting takes it so much for granted that he can scarcely think of a pre-broadcasting age,' she wrote. ‘He is apt to think of it as having always existed, as much “always” in his world as motor cars, gramophones and aeroplanes.'

Matheson and the other early pioneers saw no end to the possibilities of broadcasting. They were utopian in their fantasies. It is their optimism and fearlessness that our BBC needs now. It is clear-sighted and subtle political wisdom that is needed now, too, not grandstanding and playing to the gallery. Ninety years ago, Arthur Burrows asked, ‘What surprises may be in store on the other side of silence? How far will our present knowledge of music prepare us for an appreciation of nature's eternal harmonies – the seasonal cadences of the rising and falling sap, the music of the growing grass and the love songs of butterflies?' Lambert summed up the hopes of that eager post-war generation: ‘All kinds of petty discomforts – overcrowded rooms, long hours, arbitrary or tactless treatment – were overlooked in the general sense of adventure, progress, and public service. You felt it a privilege to be “in” at the birth of such a mighty experiment – an experiment not merely in the use of a new invention, broadcasting, but in its use for communal ends, rather than for private profit. Who could tell how far the new service would go?'