 John Hurt takes on the incorrigible Alan Clark MP in a BBC Four series |
As Oscar Wilde famously put it: "There's only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that's not being talked about." So I suspect the BBC is not entirely unhappy about the row over its digital TV channels.
For till recently no one had been talking about them much, outside the rarefied atmosphere of the business and media pages.
There'd been pot shots at BBC Three, the young adults' channel, over its comparatively high budget and low audience.
There'd been claims that BBC Four was a ghetto for arts programmes and documentaries that ought to have been on BBC Two.
 |  To show programmes first on the digital channels is a form of bribery  |
And there'd been more optimistic pieces recording the rapid sales of Freeview boxes, helping bring the new BBC channels to over half the homes in the country. Is anyone watching?
But this week's story was about the so-called "zero ratings" attracted by some of the BBC's digital channels - "55 days with no one watching" as the Guardian and other papers put it - has coincided with heavy publicity for the first episode of the BBC Four drama, The Alan Clark Diaries, starring John Hurt.
Suddenly there's a programme the chattering classes want to watch which can be seen only on digital television.
BBC spending criticised
The Daily Express attacked the BBC for spending so much of "your money" on making and promoting "a show you can't watch". Its remarks come as it's still in full cry over the dropping of Kilroy.
Only at the end did it state: "The BBC have said they will screen The Alan Clark Diaries later in the year on BBC Two."
It quoted the Labour MP Chris Bryant as saying: "To show programmes first on the digital channels is a form of bribery.
"Thousands of homes have no means of getting something they have already paid for through their licence fee."
His constituents in Wales are among those who cannot receive a Freeview signal.
The BBC's director of television Jana Bennett responded in a Guardian article by saying that digital TV was "coming of age".
She rightly stated that programmes conceived and initiated by the digital channels had now begun to attract the acclaim and excitement once reserved for analogue channels.
Programmes such as Little Britain on BBC Three, Balamory on CBeebies and on BBC Four, The National Trust and The Alan Clark Diaries.
She acknowledged that getting the right level of promotion for such programmes was "a complicated balancing act and we may get it wrong sometimes".
Controversy revisited
But she pointed out that controversy over the introduction of BBC channels was not something new.
In the late 1940s, there was similar criticism of the embryonic Third Programme, now Radio 3, because it was available in only 50% of homes.
In the early years of BBC Two, which rolled out across the UK quite slowly, its audience could not be measured at all.
It's often forgotten that The Forsyte Saga and Civilisation were on BBC Two. The BBC's digital channels have, however, achieved 50% penetration quite quickly.
Ms Bennett said the claim about zero ratings was a red herring, because many digital channels got viewing levels unmeasurable by the ratings system, particularly in the small hours.
What she didn't point out was that almost a third of the apparent "zero viewing" came from BBC News 24, much of it overnight.
At that time, the channel is also broadcast on BBC One, where it gets hundreds of thousands of viewers!
Indeed, the best digital programmes are already being seen on BBC One or BBC Two.
BBC Four's documentary series about The National Trust started a rerun on BBC Two this week and the Clark Diaries will be shown there later in the spring.
BBC Three's Little Britain is also running on BBC Two, as are programmes from the children's channels.
In the increasingly competitive TV marketplace, all digital channels find it hard to attract attention to their new programmes.
That's one problem the BBC's not had to face with The Alan Clark Diaries.
One-Minute World News 
News services
E-mail this to a friend 
Printable version 
