Brian McNair: TV licence fee is worthy of BBC's public service

HBO in the US, Sky and Virgin here, are cited as examples of the way ahead, though one wonders if the UK's existing pay TV outfits, like commercial media in the 1980s when advertising was mooted for the BBC, would welcome another competitor.

Mr Graham's report, premised on the truism that the way we watch TV is changing because of the internet, ranges from the patronising to the disingenuous and naive in its efforts to convince us that the 145.50 per year we pay for the licence fee is unsustainable, and even damaging to British culture.

But for those who love the BBC, or at least value its content enough to want it to survive, it can't be ignored.

Mr Graham suggests the licence fee "criminalises the poor", and single mothers in particular. They are the ones who can't afford the 2.80 a week and end up in court. The BBC are stealing the food out of poor babies mouths, in short, to line the pockets of overpaid execs and Jonathan Ross.

Well, spare us the violins: millions of low income households currently pay for premium TV services supplied by Sky and Virgin at costs of 500 per year including sports and movies. It was largely working-class football fans who put Sky where it is today, and economically deprived housing estates across the land where the BSkyB satellite dishes first proliferated in large numbers.

Mr Graham's touching concern for the criminalisation of single mothers reads like an appeal to the Coalition and its favoured approach to the financial crisis - improve the lot of the poor by cutting or abolishing the publicly funded things that make them a little bit richer in the quality of their lives.

Mr Graham's second argument is disingenuous - that the BBC is, to refer to the title of his report, a "subsidy junkie", or more precisely - "a subsidised entertainment firm with some non-commercial obligations".

His argument is that because the survival of the licence fee depends on popular support for the BBC, it must compete in content terms with ITV and other commercial media.

It is ratings-driven, just like the rest of them, and all this guff about "public service values" in broadcasting is self-serving BBC rhetoric, "platitudes", he calls them.

Yes, the BBC has to be popular to be able to lay claim to the licence fee, and so produces soap operas, game shows, reality TV formats, costume dramas. And sometimes these programmes are pretty indistinguishable from those found on ITV. Sometimes ITV does them better. But it's the unique cultural eco-system formed by the mix of BBC with its commercial free-to-air rivals that keeps the general standard of British broadcasting so high.

From its launch in the 1950s, ITV made the BBC more accessible and less elitist. That was good for the BBC. The BBC has kept the big commercial channels on their toes by encouraging relatively high audience expectations. The BBC, insulated from share-holder pressure and market volatility which has wreaked havoc for commercial media these last three years, defines the standards beneath which no TV operator wishing to succeed in the UK broadcast market can sink. Sky News isn't Fox News. The reason for that is BBC news and journalism.

Without a strong, publicly funded BBC, active across the range of broadcasting genres and formats, we would have TV like the Americans, or the Italians. Good in parts - Mad Men, we bow down before your brilliance - but close to unwatchable by excessive advertising and a hundred channels of low-budget true crime crap.

Mr Graham argues that by funding the BBC to produce what all agree is generally high quality content, the licence fee lets Sky off the hook of having to produce quality domestic programmes of its own. The licence fee is to blame for Sky's reliance on foreign imports. Some may think it a little naive, given the history of the British press since Rupert Murdoch took over the Sun, to believe that if the BBC was a commercial competitor Sky would respond with a rich diet of expensive, innovative, home grown programming.

I'm not bashing Sky or News Corp here. They are what they are, and I spend a lot of money on their products. But it's because they are what they are - and Virgin, and Channel 5 under Richard Desmond - that we continue to need a well-funded BBC, politically independent, focused on the national interest, committed to creativity and quality, insulated to some degree from shareholders' and proprietors' whims.

And the licence fee remains the best funding mechanism for public service broadcasting, notwithstanding the digital revolution. Why? Because it costs so little, to pay and to collect. It's simple, and we're used to it, like road tax. There's no public demand to abolish it, as Mr Graham grudgingly concedes, and satisfaction with BBC programming remains high.

Maybe in these times when the symbolism of sacrifice is so important, it could be frozen for a while, or even cut, though I don't support that approach.

Better to increase it and use the extra revenue to provide exemptions for those on benefits and in poverty. But abolition of the licence fee would be the first step towards the disappearance of public service broadcasting in the UK, and the final victory of its enemies in the commercial media.

Yes there are anomalies. I'm upping sticks for Australia in a few weeks, and won't be able to watch BBC iPlayer, although I'll continue to pay my licence fee in the UK. That's not fair, and there are five million fee payers in that position. People are watching less and less TV on the box in the corner, more and more on mobile devices and computers. The licence fee doesn't apply to them, because it is effectively a tax on television sets. That's not fair either.

We shouldn't abolish the fee. Instead, let's redesignate it as a fee for the right to access public service content by UK citizens on TVs or mobile devices; extend access to iPlayer to fee-paying UK citizens resident overseas; and exempt those demonstrably on low income and unable to afford it. •Brian McNair is Professor of Journalism & Communication at the University of Strathclyde