Three Is The Magic Number

Melvyn Bragg has just given only too interesting an interview to Radio Four’s The Media Show. Why has it fallen to Sky, rather than to the BBC or to Channel Four, to buy up the rights to The South Bank Show Awards and thus to the spin-off programmes about each of the winners which Bragg is mercifully still going to be making each year? And what are we going to do about ITV?

ITV is commercial, yet somehow not quite part of the private sector, exactly. It has a unique position in the nation’s life and hearts, hence that 3 button on every remote control in the land. To which it has no divine right. Which is to say, no divine right to exist at all.

Exactly how many people watch television on the Internet compared to the number of people who watch television on the television? Just which digital channel has anything remotely approaching ITV’s viewing figures? And has no one noticed how massively dependent on terrestrial television is digital television for its content? Yet this immensely privileged commercial network expects public money to provide such basics as regional news, and children's programmes.

It is very high time to re-regionalise ITV under a combination of municipal and mutual ownership, and to apply that same model to Channel Four, but with central government replacing local government, subject to very strict parliamentary scrutiny. I say again, there is no divine right to that 3 button. Nor, come to that, to the 4 button or the 5 button, the latter apparently about to pass into the hands of Richard Desmond. Something Must Be Done.