England TV: Smith weighs up market forces (3 Mar 1998)

3 March 1998

Smith weighs up market forces

By Donald Trelford

CHRIS SMITH, the Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, is due to receive a report today from his broadcasting advisory group on the de-listing of sport's "crown jewels", the sharpest of which is live television coverage of England's home cricket Test matches.

Lord MacLaurin, chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, has argued forcefully that de-listing, which would break the BBC's hold and enable cricket to invite bids on the open market, is "vital to the future of the game". Without this, he says, cricket faces "an uncertain and quite possibly bleak future".

Smith will doubtless be impressed by the man from Tesco. He should be careful, however. There are more factors at work here than the laws of the market. Here are some of them.

It is equally "vital" for the BBC to retain domestic cricket, both in terms of their credibility in the world of TV sporting rights and with viewers. The last thing the Government need is a march on London from angry sports fans who have been brought up to believe that their TV licence fee entitles them to watch national sporting teams in action (a belief that embraces football and rugby as well).

The only viable competitor to the BBC is BSkyB, since ITV and Channels 4 and 5 cannot schedule many hours of cricket on a single outlet. The problem with BSkyB is not, as some of my non-Sky readers seem to think, the quality of its cricket coverage, which is excellent (though, much as I hate to say it, I miss Geoffrey Boycott's perceptive technical comments and his general, er, awfulness).

The problem is that it is available to such a tiny audience (an audience, I gather, that may dwindle rather than grow in size as the digital revolution puts up subscription costs). This is a serious matter for the Government, whose obligations to viewers and to the BBC are surely higher than their obligations to cricket.

It is also a problem for the ECB, for how are sponsors to be attracted to a sport watched by relatively few consumers (AXA have already withdrawn from next year's two-division national league) and how are youngsters to acquire a love of cricket if so few of them can see the game's heroes in action?

The image of cricket has also hit its own wicket with the neanderthal vote by MCC members to keep women out of the Long Room.

And yet, having said all that, Lord Tesco has a point: the BBC should not exploit their quasi-monopoly to keep the price down at a time when cricket needs heavy investment. How to square the circle?

One solution, which I have proposed before, is for a price tag to be attached to the "crown jewels", one that takes account of cricket's needs, of what the market might offer, and of what the BBC could reasonably afford to pay if they hadn't spent so much of the licence fee on other things than making programmes.

In other words, there should be independent arbitration to fix the price. I can think of half a dozen qualified people whose judgment both sides could trust. If the BBC could not meet the price, then the rights should be auctioned.

But Mr Smith should ensure that the BBC retain first option, as Parliament required in the Broadcasting Act passed only two years ago.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)