Is the game up for the BBC?

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Jun 18, 2000 | by words James Cusick

At 1.47pm last Wednesday at the doors of lawyers Denton Hall in London's Chancery Lane, a sealed package was delivered and signed for. A similar package had arrived earlier that lunchtime and had also been accepted by the legal firm.

Inside, when the office clock hit 2pm, both of these packages were opened. What followed has been described as judgment day - the arrival of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The BBC had lost the right to screen Premiership football highlights - effectively cutting out the heart of Match Of The Day.

Denton Hall are the legal firm who represent the Premier League, and the package which arrived 13 minutes before the 2pm deadline was from ITV. Its contents would not, as popular myth over the last week has tearfully maintained, actually end 35 years of the BBC's football highlights programme. They merely confirmed that, for the second time in two decades, the BBC had lost one of its treasured institutions to the arrivistes of commercial television.

Denton Hall's arithmetic was simple enough. The BBC's envelope offered #123 million for a three-year deal that would allow the corporation to carry on screening the English Premiership highlights, thus keeping Match Of The Day as its flagship sports programme. The crucial importance of winning must have suddenly struck the BBC's senior executives and the new director general, Greg Dyke, in a meeting that morning in Broadcasting House. Only a hour or so before the BBC's final bid was delivered to Chancery Lane, its bottom-line figure was increased by #30m - only a fraction less than the cost of running the all-but-unwatched digital channel, BBC Choice, for a year.

According to one BBC source, commercial intelligence (often a smart way of describing sought-after industry gossip) had told them their strategy on keeping Match Of The Day could fail. "There was," she said "genuine panic because the implications finally hit home. It was difficult to see how they would be able explain away this one if their worst fears were true."

And the fears were true. ITV's envelope contained a bid some #60m higher. At Corporate Centre - one of the old-era divisions still intact as the BBC's post-Birtian revolution commences - there is now an internal inquiry into how the commercial intelligence Dyke and his executives assumed was correct turned out to be so wrong. Dyke's conspiratorial outburst on Radio Four's Today programme, where he blamed the whole debacle on an unholy alliance between the Premiership and ITV - was said by some insiders to be based on his anger of being sent, to paraphrase Lord Howe, to the wicket without the appropriate bat to score the winning run.

Cricket analogies are somehow inappropriate to describe Dyke's temper tantrum - the BBC has already lost sound and vision in test cricket to Kelvin MacKenzie's TalkSport radio and Channel 4. Away from home, test series are now the property of Sky.

Other sporting analogies are equally difficult, the corporation in recent years having lost Formula One motor racing to ITV, and the Ryder Cup and other golf to Sky Sports - along with England's home rugby union internationals. The Beeb has also lost the rights to England's international football matches, the Cheltenham horse racing festival and the Derby.

When the corporation comes to do its Sports Review Of The Year in 2001, there will be a big brother - or, in the BBC's case, big auntie - edit. Out of legal necessity, this will simply ignore major sporting events or confine them to words read from an autocue. Why? Because the BBC will have no rights to the lifeblood of all television - pictures, moving pictures. A recent BBC film of the Ryder Cup abruptly stopped in 1993. Why? It didn't have any pictures to continue with. And in TV, no pictures means no history.

The BBC did manage to secure the rights to the FA Cup on Thursday - a prize dismissed by many as a runners'-up trophy. But ITV scored again at the end of the week when it won the rights to League and Worthington Cup matches, along with digital channel ONdigital, in a three-year deal worth #315m. ITV's share is thought to be worth #10m a year.

Still, at least there will be some club football on the BBC to join the World Cup, the home internationals, the European Championships and the UEFA Cup final. So keen is auntie to show off her remaining portfolio that her website proudly puffs the achievement of being allowed to show the European Super Cup adding the word "football" in brackets in case anyone was unsure.

With the newly secured rights to the FA Cup rumoured to be costing the BBC #70m a year (in partnership with Sky over three years), ITV insiders believe it may have paid roughly #4m a match. One senior BBC sports producer, aggrieved at Dyke's insistence that the BBC just could not afford to retain the Premiership higlights, said the trophy had a particularly apt name. "It's the FA Cup all right - the f*** all left cup."

Put in perspective, the Premiership loss should not really alter the Reithian philosophy that still pervades the corridors of the BBC. Lord Reith, the first director general, thought the BBC - effectively his creation - had the "responsibility to carry into the greatest number of homes everything that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement." He also arrogantly thought that he, not they, knew best what people wanted.