A Vega/OU programme causes Christopher Dunkley to rethink his views on the corporation`s plans to stream its TV programmes.

The most enthralling programme I saw on television last week - in fact I have seen nothing so fascinating for months - was called The Next Big Thing: Nanotechnology. It began by explaining how, a few years ago, scientists discovered something they called "Buckminsterfullerene" or "Bucky Balls" for short. The programme was very late at night and I may have been dreaming, but I think this remarkable substance was named after the American architect and guru, Buckminster Fuller, because its atomic structure so uncannily resembles that of his famous geodesic domes. I hesitate because I do not remember the words "geodesic" or dome" being mentioned, yet the story sounds pointless without them. Anyway, it seems that this substance - for reasons I could not follow - provided scientists with the key to using individual atoms as building blocks. And that, essentially, is nanotechnology.

The implications, assuming I was not dreaming and did get the gist of the programme, are stupefying. I do not recall anyone offering a straightforward definition of nanotechnology, but since a nanosecond is a thousand millionth of a second I imagine it means technology on a very very small scale. We marvel at the amount of information you can get on today`s silicon chips but, according to this programme, using nanotechnology, the next generation of computers will be built without wires and will make our present kit look like heaps of Meccano. Given the significance of what is already happening in biotechnology (and the fact that, according to The Next Big Thing, it has also been recently established that living organisms, including man, run on countless molecular electric motors) it seems that we are standing at the edge of a technological revolution which is going to make microelectronics look piddling.

However, I have not changed hats. The point I want to make is that this programme was made by the Open University and shown on BBC2 at 12.30 at night. It will have been seen by a tiny handful of viewers. Perhaps BBC2 has already done a series on nanotechnology aimed at the lay viewer and put out at a more accessible time. Perhaps Horizon has done a really good edition on it. Perhaps BBC1 has plans to follow the repeat of its children`s drama series Walking With Dinosaurs, full of fairy stories about the distant past, with a series on nanotechnology, biotechnology, and the non-fiction implications for the future of the human race aimed at big audiences. Perhaps. But if so, all of it has passed me by; the Open University is, so far, my only source.

This, among other things, has caused me to change my mind about the plans for a radical reform of BBC television with two digital networks, BBC3 and BBC4, being added to the existing pair and the four channels "streaming" their content to appeal to particular audiences. We have been told repeatedly over the past few months that these plans will be announced by BBC director-general Greg Dyke in Edinburgh on August 25. However, it is hard to imagine what is left for him to reveal since Mark Thompson, director of BBC television, gave most of the game away in a speech in June, and subsequent press leaks have filled in a lot of detail, even including the budgets.

If these figures are correct - Pounds 92m for BBC3, the "alternative" channel designed to woo young viewers away from satellite, cable and Channel 4; and Pounds 50m for BBC4, a "highbrow" channel devoted to the arts, politics and science - they may fail almost before they have begun. Last year BBC1 cost Pounds 823m and BBC2 Pounds 421m. Even Radio 3 cost Pounds 63m, so a TV network trying to survive on Pounds 50m will be a shoestring operation. Yet if it is the only way that we are to be offered that 10 per cent or so of programmes designed for the more demanding viewer, that small proportion which makes television something more than virtual chewing-gum, perhaps we should not be too quick to oppose it.

There is not much mystery about why the BBC wants to change. Public-service broadcasting financed by a poll tax makes good sense in a period of spectrum scarcity, and a lot less sense in a period of abundance. With the new technologies now providing room for almost infinite numbers of networks, the BBC could put on a brave smile, accept the old urging to "Do what you do best, old boy", reduce its activities to Dickens, politics and religion, watch the licence fee decline, and settle into a marginal role like that of the Public Broadcasting Service in America. Instead it is using a sophisticated argument which has proved persuasive with politicians in the past. This says: the BBC can ensure that Britain has the best television in the world, but only if it is allowed to maintain a critical mass of talent and serve all of the audience at least some of the time - in other words, to continue as a major contender for ratings.

Moving on to the argument for switching the emphasis from mixed genre to streamed channels, they tell us that this merely follows what happened long ago in radio. But that is disingenuous because BBC network radio runs two channels of popular music, one of unpopular music, one of news and sport and another for all other speech content. If you want a radio model for what is now being proposed in television you have to go back to the old Light, Home and Third Programme arrangement which depended upon the Reithian belief that different intellectual levels need to be served within the audience, and that, with skill and luck, you can pull people up from one level to another.

Unremarkable half-a-century ago, that idea is anathema in the politically correct 21st century, so sleight of hand has to be used to disguise the fact that what the BBC is now proposing is Reithian television. But who cares? The BBC`s existing channels are devoted increasingly to commercial drivel such as The National Lottery - On The Spot, embarrassing PR flannel such as You Only Live Once with Nick Hancock smarming all over Mohammed Fayed of all people, and even BBC2 is reduced to The Fitz in which we are supposed to find the characters funny simply because they are Irish (sorry, Oirish). If opting for a Reithian four-network scheme is the only way to get back to a television service with serious current affairs, proper arts coverage, and programmes at reasonable times about such matters as nanotechnology, then so be it.

Copyright © The Financial Times Limited, Aug 16, 2000.