Chapter 25
SHOWDOWN ON WHO DECIDES THE TV CHANNELS VIEWERS CAN WATCH
The final hurdle was a new Broadcasting Bill that would allow the ITC to licence interested private broadcasters to transmit digital TV channels. Here came the biggest Whitehall battle.
The top DNH officials envisaged a ‘business as normal’ approach, whereby the ITC would decide what TV channels were good for the country, and licence them one by one. The broadcasters would then jointly procure the transmission capacity. The UK’s high TV programme standards had to be maintained.
Wrong, I said. You could not put into head-to-head competition Rupert Murdoch, doing whatever he liked over satellite TV, against terrestrial TV, where the regulators would decide what was good for viewers to watch. The DNH officials had no idea of how a competitive market would work in a digital age, where consumers would be in sole charge of which digital TV platform to tune into.
The alternative concept I put forward was to imagine each digital radio transmission as a sort of radio cable TV network offering multiple TV channels. It would be run by a commercial entity that I called a Multiplex Provider. They alone would decide the TV channel line-up based on their commercial judgement of what would attract the largest TV audience.
The DNH officials were horrified at my idea. One top official, Paul Bolt, told me that if the choice was left to consumers, UK TV would degenerate into cartoons on every channel. Did I want to be responsible for bringing down the standard of UK TV broadcasting?
My response was that it had nothing to do with what I wanted or didn’t want. It was the consequence of Rupert Murdoch and, for that matter, the cable TV operators having full freedom to put what they liked over their 400-channel delivery mediums. It was not tenable to come along with a weaker 40-TV-channel medium and hobble it with some official committee deciding what TV channels were good for the UK viewer.
They would not budge. I would not budge. They had the policy lead over the Broadcasting Bill. They knew that Peter Brook was too weak to get what they wanted through the Cabinet if Michael Heseltine opposed it. For several months there was a Mexican standoff.
Then a letter dropped onto my desk and an identical letter onto the desk of the senior official in DNH, Sally Booth. It came from Dr John Forrest, the MD of NTL. Why not split the digital capacity in half? Half would be governed by the approach favoured by DNH and half by my approach. I telephoned Sally Booth, and a deal was struck.
Digital terrestrial TV policy for the UK had been settled. It was probably the very best of outcomes as it provided the Multiplex provider with anchor tenants (including the BBC and Channel 4 delivering distinctive, high-quality programming) with enough flexibility to make the overall offering as compelling as possible for a mass audience.
A second dispute arose on the selection criteria the ITC would apply in choosing the Multiplex provider. The Treasury wanted the highest bidder for the spectrum. I wanted the entity willing to sink the most money into the transmitter network and subsidise set-top boxes (to drive high penetration). And DNH wanted TV programme diversity. Sally and I teamed up against the Treasury. The criteria were investment in the transmitter network (coverage), investment in a set-top box subsidy and programme diversity.
A few weeks later, Michael Heseltine and Peter Brooks co-hosted a meeting of the broadcasting industry based on the deal Sally and I had agreed. Carlton, without doubt driven by Nigel Walmsley, led the industry from the Channel 3 camp, and the BBC came up trumps. Digital terrestrial TV was flying in the UK.
After the meeting, I happened to go down in the same lift in 1, Victoria Street with John Birt, the Director-General of the BBC. When he reached the pavement outside, his car had not arrived. He turned and literally collared me for five minutes. This was the first time I had met him, yet he was soon pouring his heart out about the difficulties confronting him at the BBC. All the staff and managers at the BBC hated him, he said, but they couldn’t see that the reforms he was bringing to the BBC were absolutely essential. It was an interesting glimpse into the changes swirling around the BBC and perhaps a sign that I had carved out a role as DTI industry ‘sponsor’. I have always been and remain a big fan of the BBC. They have played a hugely constructive role in Britain’s broadcasting technology history and in helping the BBC to re-invent itself.
A few days later one of my DTI policy colleagues congratulated me on getting the new broadcasting bill off the ground – a feather in the cap for any civil servant, he suggested. But I did not view the achievement in terms of a new bill. My policy ambitious was to bring about digital TV platform diversity to limit Rupert Murdoch’s capacity to dominate the UK digital broadcasting market. I wanted his venture to succeed but adding to our successful TV broadcasting diversity and media plurality rather than crushing it. I knew it would take more than a decade to know if that had been accomplished.