Gay licence fee payers don’t get value for money from BBC

Posted by Caitlin Pike on 28 February 2006 at 15:31
Tags: BBC, Ethics, Issues, Journalism, Television

Coverage of gay people on the BBC’s flagship channels is almost non existant, according to new research commissioned by gay and lesbain charity Stonewall, in spite of contributing £190 million a year to the BBC in TV licence fees.

A monitoring exercise carried out for Stonewall of 168 hours of prime-time BBC One and BBC Two found lesbian and gay lives realistically portrayed for just six minutes, or 0.06 per cent of airtime. A further 32 minutes of programming featured derogatory or offensive references to gay people. These came from a range of programmes including the Weakest Link, hosted by Anne Robinson, and The Lenny Henry Show.

The stark conclusion of this major exercise is that gay licence-payers receive astonishingly poor value from the BBC, said Stonewall chief executive Ben Summerskill.

At a time when the BBC is seeking renewal of its Charter, it’s difficult to argue that 1.5 million households should be expected to continue making such a substantial contribution to channels on which their real lives are hardly reflected, and which are often punctuated with derisive and demeaning depictions of them.

A BBC spokesperson said:

Stonewall’s report is a contribution towards our goal of serving all licence payers. But we feel that Stonewall has chosen to analyse a very narrow timeslot, which excludes nearly all of the BBC’s news and current affairs output. We believe the researchers would have found a great deal of richness and diversity in our output across television, radio and online throughout the eight weeks they examined. We are committed to finding ways of reflecting the audience’s daily lives in our programmes, but we feel the notion that gay men and lesbians only receive value for money from the licence fee through seeing direct representation of gay life is misconceived.

Focus groups of both gay and heterosexual people told Stonewall researchers they wanted to see better representation of gay people on screen. The BBC was singled out as the least successful broadcaster at capturing the realities of gay lives. “If you put the BBC against Channel 4, it’s just like the caveman,” said one interviewee from London.

Stonewall found that Gay innuendo was broadcast across a wide range of programmes in spite of BBC editorial guidelines which explicitly require staff to avoid “offensive or stereotypical assumptions”.

The BBC has made strenuous efforts in the last five years to serve minority ethnic viewers more effectively, added Summerskill.

Gay people are forced to pay the BBC £126.50 a year on pain of imprisonment if they fail. We hope that the BBC will now develop for the first time a similar sense of obligation to lesbian and gay licence-payers.

The report suggests eight key recommendations to the BBC. These include provision of urgently-needed “balanced and unsensational” coverage in its news and current affairs programmes, developing authentic gay characters throughout drama and soap outputs and including six per cent of gay contestants in game shows, reflecting the wider British population.