Big Brother versus baseball from Botswana

by Nicola Shepherd

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THE�Tories have finally explained how they are going to maintain Labour spending plans while including tax cuts in their election manifesto. Something had to go, and the Tory government axe will fall on Channel Four.

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Yes, the channel that was born of Mrs Thatcher and designed to cater for minorities is to be consumed by privatisation. The money raised from this will go towards funding museums and art galleries so that they need no longer come knocking on the doors of the Treasury begging bowl in hand.

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Brilliant! ....well, maybe not.

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While, on the one hand, the idea of not using taxpayers money to subsidise the arts is very attractive. After all, the argument goes, it is not the majority of working class taxpayers, the Treasury's greatest beneficiary, who reap the artistic rewards, but a minority, middle class, cultural elite.

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And it is those very taxpayers who contribute to the National Lottery Fund, and so the same argument applies to grants from that particular source, too. And, anyway, Channel Four is funded by advertising now, so what's the difference

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The biggest argument against Channel Four's privatisation is one which hinges on the integrity of programming.

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True, Channel Four is funded by advertising and after huge early losses, now turns in a healthy profit. But, crucially, it has a public service remit.

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Public service programming of limited minority interest, for which Channel Four is justly proud and rightly famous, would be eroded as shareholders demanded more Big Brother and less�baseball from Botswana, because Big Brother gets�more big advertising bucks.

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David Scott, managing director of Channel Four, wrote to Shadow Culture Secretary Peter Ainsworth, saying as much: "We believe it (privatisation) would seriously damage the very bais on which the channel's success rests - that we have a public service remit while being funded commercially, " he says.

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Legislation to preserve the uniqueness of the Channel wouldn't work, he insists, because you can legislate for time allocated to certain types of programming, but you can't legislate for quality.

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The Tories desperately want the arts to be more independent of government because it is a big financial drain for�not much vote-catching reward.

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This looks like a neat way to raise a cool two billion pounds for the arts.

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But there is the small matter of what they have to do before they can implement such a radical policy.

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Get elected.