The BBC is the world’s oldest national broadcaster and one of the largest. It is publicly funded, editorially independent of government, and — uniquely — paid for not by taxation or advertising but by a compulsory licence fee on households that watch live television.
The licence fee
Around £170 a year per household. The crucial and much-misunderstood point is that it is required to watch any live broadcast television, or to use BBC iPlayer at all — not merely to watch the BBC. Watching a live ITV or Sky broadcast without a licence is a criminal offence.
In exchange, BBC output carries no advertising whatsoever. This is why British viewers watching American commercial television are startled by the number of breaks, and why BBC dramas run to odd lengths — they are built without ad breaks in mind.
What it actually runs
Far more than the two main channels. The BBC operates BBC One and Two, BBC News, CBBC and CBeebies, ten national radio stations including Radios 1 to 6 Music, around forty local radio stations, iPlayer and Sounds, an enormous news website, and the World Service, which broadcasts in more than forty languages and reaches hundreds of millions of people.
Reith and the mission
Its first director-general, John Reith, defined the purpose in three words that are still in the Royal Charter: to inform, educate and entertain. Reith’s vision was paternalistic — he believed broadcasting should give people what they ought to want rather than what they said they wanted — and the tension between that and popular programming has run through the BBC ever since.
Independence and the rows
The BBC is funded by a fee set by government but is editorially independent, which puts it in a permanently awkward position. It is accused of left-wing bias by the right and of establishment deference by the left, frequently over the same broadcast, and its own defenders treat this as evidence it is getting the balance roughly right.
Serious crises have included the Hutton Inquiry in 2004, which led to the resignation of both the chairman and the director-general, and the Savile scandal. Governments of both parties have used charter renewal and fee settlements as leverage, and the BBC has grown noticeably more cautious as a result.
Auntie
The affectionate nickname, dating from an era when the BBC was regarded as prim, respectable and slightly disapproving. It survives, usually deployed with irony.
The pressure it is under
Streaming has undermined the model. Younger audiences watch little live television and increasingly resent paying for a service they use through other means, and the number of licences in force is falling. The fee has been frozen or below inflation for years, and the corporation has made deep cuts.
What keeps the argument alive is that the BBC is genuinely popular in practice even where it is unpopular in principle — reach across all its services remains close to universal, and every proposal to abolish it runs into the question of what would replace it.