BBC in Interviews/News BBC4 website A version of this article is also appearing in The Tablet, the weekly journal of Catholic thought.

BBC4 (leitmotif: “Everybody needs a place to think”) was launched on the 2nd March, broadcasting six hours of programmes nightly.

The BBC claims that its new service will be “British television’s boldest new investment in cultural programming for a generation”. Veteran producers at Television Centre, who remember the early hopes for BBC2, are struck by how similar is the rhetoric being used about BBC4. Like BBC2 in its early days, the new service will be available only to a minority of viewers: on the Corporation’s estimates, some 40 per cent of the population. To see it, viewers will need to have a satellite dish, cable, or a set-top box for digital terrestrial reception.

At least the new channel has had a smooth birth. BBC2’s launch in April 1964 was a disaster. A major power failure at Battersea power station plunged Television Centre into darkness just as the new service was about to open. The next evening the BBC tried again. BBC2 came on air in a dimmed studio with a flickering candle in a gesture to the events of the previous evening. The channel could then only be seen in London and the Midlands, and to receive it viewers had to buy new specially adapted television sets. Hopes for it were high. It would seek a specialist audience, the BBC promised, and there would be many more arts programmes.

In the intervening years, however, the centrifugal forces of broadcasting have spun the arts, which BBC2’s controller famously described as the channel’s “culture snacks”, to the periphery. BBC2 has increasingly mirrored the other mainstream channels, with a heavy commitment to leisure programmes. Can BBC4 avoid going the same way?

The BBC is vulnerable to the charge that, in its pursuit of audience ratings, it has ignored the arts. Peter Maniura, the Corporation’s head of music and arts, told me that the environment for such programmes had become tougher. It was part of a worldwide trend, he said: “We have to fight harder for our place in the sun.” But arts and music programmes were “central to our distinctiveness”, he stressed, “which is the key to the BBC’s long-term survival”.

BBC4’s founding controller, Roly Keating, is a former editor of the Late Show, the late-night arts programme that was a crucible for many of the leading figures in British television. BBC4 will, in some respects, be the Late Show writ large. Its canvas includes the arts, sciences, philosophy and current affairs, areas that have been increasingly left to one side by BBC1 and 2. If it is to be successful, BBC4 should reach that constituency who listen devotedly to Radios 3 and 4. Such people find no equivalent home on television.

Roly Keating - BBC4's founding controller
Photograph courtesy BBC4

In its opening month BBC4 will feature a three-part series on “Britart”, a documentary on the “Black Diaries” of Roger Casement, hanged for treason for his part in the Irish rising of 1916, and Peter Brook’s Hamlet, filmed for the new network by Brook himself. A nightly news programme, presented by George Alagiah, will aim to break with the overly domestic agenda of the programmes on the other networks. There will be regular orchestral concerts and a steady diet of arts documentaries. BBC4’s flagship arts show The Gist will, its producers claim, “probe deep into the cultural psyche of the nation, deconstructing and often demolishing the world of the arts”.

The new channel opens up interesting horizons for dance. Roly Keating is actively sympathetic; he sees dance as part of the heartland of BBC4. The channel’s first major dance commission features a triple bill by Birmingham Royal Ballet including Tombeaux, David Bintley’s homage to classical ballet; Lila York’s Sanctum, inspired by the silent movies of Charlie Chaplin; and Frederick Ashton’s Façade, a choreographic satire based on Edith Sitwell’s poetry. It will be filmed at the Birmingham Hippodome in the week before its transmission on Sunday 17th March. During the intervals, viewers will see interviews with David Bintley, Lila York, the choreographer of Sanctum, and members of the company. The programme, presented by Deborah Bull, will be shown twice on the 17th, at 8.05 pm and then again at midnight.

BBC4 will also film a double bill at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre featuring dancers from the Royal Ballet in works by Cathy Marston and Tom Sapsford. Marston is collaborating with the composer Philip Chambon on a ballet based on LP Hartley’s novel The Go-Between. Sapsford’s ballet, so far untitled, is a choreographic exploration of dreams and the unconscious mind.

Plans are also afoot for a film documentary about Wayne MacGregor’s forthcoming visit to St Petersburg to work with the Kirov Ballet. Discussions are continuing with the Royal Opera House about televising more of the work of the Linbury and the Clore Studios. The BBC, which has already placed permanent automatic cameras at the Barbican Centre, is evaluating that experience and may do something similar at Covent Garden.

The opportunities offered by BBC4 interestingly echo the early days of BBC2. Peter Wright, then a producer with the BBC, persuaded John Cranko to make a forty-minute version of Onegin for the infant channel, while Kenneth MacMillan adapted his ballet Las Hermanas for television. Wright himself made a complete ballet for television, Corporal Jan. It was a particular challenge to interest Cranko in the creative possibilities of television. Once his attention was engaged, he became completely engrossed.

Most choreographers are unenthused by the medium, preferring instead to focus on the stage and on their direct relationships with dancers. It seems to require a direct experience of television to trigger their interest. Ross MacGibbon, the BBC’s new executive producer in charge of dance programmes, will be hoping to engage the energies of a new generation of British choreographers, in the way that Peter Wright did in the early years of BBC2.

With the arrival of BBC4, the scheduling of dance on British television will change subtly. BBC4 should become something of a creative laboratory for new programme genres, while BBC2 will continue to show major productions from the Royal Opera House. It is in discussions about two ballets in particular, Onegin and Manon. The Royal Swedish Ballet’s performance of Peter Wright’s Swan Lake will be shown at Christmas, while Dance for the Camera will continue in its late-night slot. Deborah Bull’s three part series, The Dancer’s Body, a co-production between BBC Music and Arts and BBC Science, will be shown on BBC2 later this year. While there is no dance at present on BBC1, Lorraine Heggessey, BBC1’s Controller, is considering formats that might be suitable for her channel.

The danger, of course, is that the existence of BBC4 could further relegate arts programming to a ghetto. Melvyn Bragg, LWT’s controller of arts and features and editor of the South Bank Show, flies an increasingly isolated flag for the arts on the major networks. While he sees no weakening of ITV’s commitment towards him, he concedes that the climate could become more difficult for programmes attracting audiences of less than 5 million viewers. “The best way out is for BBC4 to be a great success”, he told me. He looks forward to BBC4 helping to create a new audience for the arts, and hopes that their tastes will, over time, have an effect on the major networks. Bragg, interestingly, worked on the television version of Onegin. As a young production trainee at the BBC, he researched translations from the original for Peter Wright.

Last year Bragg accused BBC1 of “dereliction of duty” for its abandonment of the arts. While the Corporation has made an explicit commitment to 230 hours of arts programming on BBC1 and 2, with a minimum of 19 hours on BBC1, its director general, Greg Dyke, admitted to a House of Commons committee in January that 2001 had “not been a great year” for such coverage on BBC TV’s two main channels. But he dismissed charges that the Rolf Harris series, Rolf on Art, trivialised its subject. “Six million people sat and watched a proper exposition and discussion about serious painters. It was probably the highest-rated arts programme of all time. Our role is not only to provide for the artistic elite; it is to provide arts programming which tries to bring people to the arts.”

BBC4 is one of a suite of digital channels announced by Dyke in his MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2000. Two children’s channels, CBBC and Cbeebies, went on air in early February. But the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, has rejected the final part of the jigsaw; a proposed BBC3 intended to appeal to a young audience. BBC3’s intended budget, £97 million, dwarfs the £35 million allotted to BBC4 in its first year. The BBC has revised its plans for BBC3, and has asked the Culture Secretary to reconsider her decision. This is a crucial issue for the Corporation, which believes it has failed to connect with 18- to 35-year-olds.

On the face of it, BBC4’s mission is classic BBC. The mystery is why it did not happen sooner. There are both internal and external reasons. Externally, there is pressure on the BBC to justify the licence fee by pointing to large audiences. Surprisingly, in an age when society is fracturing and there is a diminishing sense of a national shared consciousness, all the main television services are increasingly coming to mirror each other. Like BBC2, Channel 4 was originally intended to give a platform to new and different voices, but has in fact been subverted in a race for ratings.

Internally, executives in any firm tend to run it, not in the greater interests of stakeholders and shareholders, but in their own interests. With the increasing traffic of executives between the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and the independent stations, it is arguable that there is at the top of British television a conventional wisdom that is more market-oriented than public service minded.

The basic case for the continuance of public service broadcasting is that it steps in when the market cannot, and offers programmes that other broadcasters believe too risky to make commercially. The prospectus for BBC4 certainly meets that criterion. The question is this: will BBC4 prove to be the right place for risk-taking, or will it become a “digital dustbin” into which the BBC can slough off its heartland responsibilities?