In Good Faith

executives were exuding the air of men who had been fasting prior to

drastic surgery.

In the event the Government's green paper on the BBC charter renewal

proved to be a pleasant relief. It raised questions and offered no hard

prescriptions. Surgery will not be required.

Best of all for the BBC, it based the future financing of the

corporation on a licence fee, the form favoured by the BBC itself and

the one upon which its own discussion document, Extending Choice, is

firmly based.

The document was launched on Thursday but had been in preparation for

some months. It was not, nor could ever have been, a response to the

green paper, which the director-general revealed he had seen for the

first time on Tuesday. But imagine the pain and conflict that would have

arisen if the Government had announced a totally different scheme,

leaving the BBC pleading for the retention of licences and looking as

likely to succeed as a local council who advocated sticking to the poll

tax.

So licence fee (index-linked) it will probably be. Personally I do not

think that this will ensure the long-term future of the BBC. For the

past 30 years there has always been an unofficial principle that the BBC

had to retain 40% of the available audience to be able to justify the

licence fee. This it did easily, partly by keeping a big portfolio of

popular programmes like sitcoms, soaps, and game shows. But in the

nineties, all are agreed that the expansion of cable and satellite will

reduce that share.

Extending Choice says that by the turn of the century the BBC will

have a third of the TV audience and a third of radio listeners, and that

every family will tune to BBC output for 24 hours in the week. That

scenario would not make it difficult to justify a licence. But just

suppose the audience share sank lower? Would the public be so willing to

pay at 20%?

The BBC's controller in Scotland, John McCormick, is confident that

there is no evidence of public dissatisfaction with the licence fee and

that the wide reach of services to be offered by the Beeb, together with

the quality of its product, will see it through into the twenty-first

century. I hope it does, but there will be a few hurdles to get over

before then.

Long before the charter renewal will come the introduction next April

of the Producer's Choice scheme, which enables programme producers to

choose where to acquire technical facilities and skilled labour to make

their programmes. Previously this was all in-house, but now they will be

able to use many of the facilities houses and the freelance and

independent sectors that have sprung up in recent years. The impact of

that upon the BBC has yet to be seen as there has never been a genuine

free market in resources throughout the days of the BBC/ITV duopoly.

There is nothing in Extending Choice about Scotland. The thrust of the

proposals are emphatically British, with Glasgow identified as one of

the decentralised regional production centres. Nothing wrong with that,

but I suspect that John McCormick will come under pressure from

devolutionist lobbies to offer Scotland something special and guarantee

existing output.

Already there have been sharp questions about cutbacks in outlying

radio stations. It has not been easy to cut costs to conserve a British

institution and give guarantees to its northern branch office, but that

is the task the controller faces.

I shall be getting his reaction to the reactions to Extending Choice

in next Saturday's Weekender, but I want in this column to raise a more

fundamental point.

It is easy to criticise the BBC, and former insiders like myself can

usually find plenty of ammunition. Paradoxically broadcasters like

Scottish Television escape the same scrutiny because they are not

designated ''public service broadcasting'' or funded by licence, yet

their technical and presentation standards often fall beneath those of

the BBC.

This double standard has meant that impossible feats are expected from

the BBC in these difficult times. It is unlikely to be able to fulfil

them. But before we tear it to pieces in frustration, let us remember

that nearly all institutions in our society are experiencing turmoil.

Universities, schools, hospitals, our system of justice -- are in a

state of crisis. It is convenient (and facile and wrong) to blame it all

on the Government when it is part of a sea change of alarming speed in

Western society. The issues are too important for short-term fixit

solutions. The constraints of available public money and the recession

bring irresistible pressures to modify many cherished ways of doing

things. Let us take the matter as a whole and realise that much thought

is required to rebuild our society for a place in Europe in the

twenty-first century.

What alarms me most is that people are expecting it all to be solved

by public spending when there is less and less to spend. Yet the BBC is

asking per year less than it costs to buy this newspaper daily for the

same period. So who am I to cast the first stone? But when you are

deciding what institutions we can afford to do without, don't forget the

Church. You don't need a licence to receive its transmissions and you

pay what you can afford.