The broadcaster’s ‘savings’, which include making CBBC online only, are a wrong turn. It isn’t Netflix and shouldn’t try to be
During the pandemic, when schools were shut and children stuck at home, the BBC was a lifeline. Not only educational – unlike most things they were consuming on YouTube or TikTok – but often entertaining. My own history-loving teenager credits her knowledge of British monarchs to the chorus of a Horrible Histories song: “William, William, Henry, Stephen, Henry, Richard, John, oi!”.
She is not alone. A report by Ofcom last November showed a huge appreciation for the BBC among parents and teenagers in particular during the crisis when CBBC, which showed BBC Bitesize every weekday morning during the pandemic, became audiovisual daycare with shows such as Newsround and Operation Ouch. Which makes it all the depressing that just a few months later, the BBC has announced that the terrestrial channel is to move online as part of a package of cost cuts to fill the £285m funding gap created by the two-year licence fee freeze imposed by the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries.
