Does the BBC really make 28,000 hours of arts programming a year?
Last week, the BBC showcased its commitment to arts broadcasting at a launch in which Tim Davie, the director-general, said: “We did 28,000 hours of arts, classical music and culture content in a year and no one else comes close. And I know there’s a lot of noise around sometimes, but we make more TV arts content than all the other PSBs [public service broadcasters] and streamers combined. Just saying.”
Certainly I can believe that the BBC makes more arts programming than anyone else. That is a depressingly low bar. But 28,000 hours? To be clear, that is the equivalent of 1,167 days or 3.2 years. To make 28,000 hours of culture content a year, the BBC would have to produce almost 77 hours of it a day. Now, I am no mathematician, but it is obvious, even to me, that something is awry.
So how did the director-general come up with the maths? Was he counting all of Radio 1, 2, 3 and 1xtra as culture? Certainly Radio 3 is wall-to-wall culture and, to boot, is a 24-hour channel with predominantly new programming. Given that there are 8,760 hours in a year, I would shave off 15 per cent of this to allow for repeats, and that gives us 7,446 hours. So where does that leave the remaining 20,554 hours?
Not much is coming from original scheduled television, from BBC One or BBC Two – or BBC Three, for that matter, which doesn’t start until 7pm each day. You need to add Alan Yentob into the equation, but his Imagine series has had its number of episodes reduced, and only four were produced last year. We could once have relied on BBC Four, but that is now, more or less, an archive channel and so barely dents the BBC’s original press release linked to the event which claimed that it created 28,000 hours of arts and culture content.
Admittedly the summer always feels like a cultural bonanza, with both the Proms and Glastonbury, but even they barely make a dent in the BBC’s claims. Take the Proms. There were 90 concerts this year, which were each between 70 minutes and three hours long. Even if we were being generous and said each concert lasted three hours, that only adds up to about 270 hours of content for the entire season. Obviously some Proms are shown on TV, while all are on Radio 3 and BBC Sounds. If all the concerts appeared in all three formats, it would come to 660 hours – about 2.35 per cent of 28,000.
At this point, I should clarify that a colleague asked the BBC press office what, exactly, made up those 28,000 hours. Surely, if the director-general is making such a bold claim, there would be some sort of itemised list to back it up? Without admitting any fault, they nevertheless subtly changed their tune. An amended press release about its content made an important distinction which stated that the 28,000 hours were what the BBC made available every year, which sounds to me like they are counting every archive piece and the Zoe Ball Breakfast Show.
This, of course, is frustrating. Was the BBC being dishonest, or is the director-general’s maths actually worse than mine?