The Future of the BBC As a boy growing up in the 1930s in the Midlands, Norman Painting, the son of a railway-man, listened to a new radio service from the British Broadcasting Corporation. His mother hoped he would get a job as a manager at the mine, but listening to the voices from London talking about world affairs, culture and music gave him other ideas. 'The radio opened a door to the world,' says Mr. Painting, who went on to Oxford University on a scholarship and became an academic before later working for the BBC's Radio 4 in its long-running soap, 'The Archers'. Mr. Painting's story helps to explain Britain's devotion to what it calls 'public-service broadcasting', and why the state has been standing by the BBC in the financing issue. The debate had raged for years over whether the BBC should still be publicly financed, especially by a license fee paid by all those with TV sets. The BBC hates the idea of losing its license fee. Rather than go commercial, its bosses plan to keep fighting for public financing for decades. In 2006, after a heated debate, the government renewed its financing for the next ten years through a compulsory 'TV license' on all households with TV sets. But when the current charter runs out in 2016, will the government take away its public subsides and leave the BBC to fend for itself? According to recent reports, the BBC will have to make do with annual increases below retail-price inflation, less than it asked for. Even so, it is fortunate to be handed a guaranteed income over several years. Among developed countries, only Germany's government spends more than Britain's on broadcasting as a share of GDP. America's dispenses next to nothing, preferring to leave it to the market. For the next ten years, the BBC's position looks secure. Yet it's getting increasingly harder to argue that the government should make the public pay for it. The BBC's purpose, according to its first director-general, John Reith, was to 'inform, educate and entertain'. But now the BBC can't have anything like the educative role it used to play. Though it remains Britain's dominant source of in-depth news and most reliable provider of high-quality programming, changes in technology and media habits are splitting its audience and making it harder to tag improving shows on to entertaining ones. Serving What Public? It was easy to get the teenaged Mr. Painting interested in the BBC programs because there was nothing else on. That is no longer true. First the other terrestrials sprang up: ITV, followed by Channel 4 and then Channel 5, from the 1990s, hundreds of new channels were launched on satellite and cable platforms, creating a new 'multi-channel' world. The rapid rise of the Internet has also taken a toll of the old generalist channels. People are increasingly turning away from both the BBC and its terrestrial competitors. Two decades ago, the BBC commanded 47% of all television viewing and its rivals, ITV and Channel 4, shared the rest. According to Ofcom, the communications regulator, today, BBC1 and BBC2, its terrestrial channels, account for just 33% of all viewing, multi-channel services (which include BBC3 and BBC4, both digital channels) win 30%. In homes with satellite or cable television, the corporation's share has fallen further: BBC1 and BBC2 together have just 23% of the former and 22% of the latter. Young people especially are abandoning public-service programmers. According to Ofcom, in 2001, people between 16 and 24 spent 74% of their viewing time watching channels such as the BBC and Channel 4, but in 2005 only 58% of their time. Poorer, less educated viewers seem to be turning away, too. Serious material suffers most when people move to multi-channel television. The result, says a BBC executive, is that 'we are over-serving' middle-class 55-year-olds. The BBC is trying to