If this is public-sector broadcasting, I'm a Buddha

Once you start developing programmes from the focus group, public-service values become irrelevant

The one thing that you cannot accuse Greg Dyke's BBC of doing is failing to build on success. If success has a thousand fathers, in the BBC's world, as in Hollywood, it also begets a thousand children. Just look at the BBC1 and BBC2 winter seasons announced this week.

There's another poll, this time on your favourite book; the life of Buddha, no less, reconstructed on computer images; yet more documentaries on Hitler and Stalin ("of making programmes on the great dictators there is no end") and, to cap it all, Five Things I Hate About You, a series which, according to BBC announcement, "sees couples competing against each other in a bid to expose their partner's most irritating habits and foibles". What next? Daughters against mothers-in-law? Mistresses versus wives? And that, I might say, is just the BBC2 schedule. The poetry series is on BBC1.

Now it's easy to make fun of old Auntie. She does get in such a fuss when criticised. And it's certainly wrong to re-arouse the old dumbing-down debate. It's boring and, let's face it, also futile by now. There's no point in staring back. If history is the new rock'n'roll for the BBC, it's own history has been confined to the memory of a few octogenarian archivists. What the Corporation is now up to is a quite different game. It's not populism for its own sake, as some critics would argue, and it's not dumbing down exactly. It is, in the words of Lorraine Heggessey, Controller of BBC1, this week, striving to "open the door on a range of subjects for a mass, mainstream audience."

Which is fine, and well inside the traditions of a public-sector broadcasting service that, uniquely among its global equivalents, aimed for and appealed to the middle market. The BBC of Bill Cotton was a service that delighted and constantly refreshed that market with comedy, entertainment and drama. It was John Birt who deserted those broad meadows for the sparser pastures of the corporate uplands, and it is Greg Dyke who has restored the Cotton inheritance, with considerable élan.

So far so good. Get BBC1 up the viewing charts and then the Corporation can turn its attention to the margins of serious broadcasting, "better in tune with its audiences but still very much underpinned by public-service values," as Ms Heggessy would have it.

That's the bit that sticks in the craw. For the name of the game of the BBC's management and governors is not primarily to bring public-service broadcasting to the middle masses. It is to survive and grow as an institution funded by the licence fee. John Birt tried to do it by making the BBC a value-for-money state-funded corporation, lean in costs and modern in management. Greg Dyke together with the chairman of the BBC, Gavyn Davies, have seen that the best way of beating back demands for an abolition of the licence fee is to win the ratings war. So long as the public, and the press, are excited by polls for your favourite book, picture or public latrine, no one will worry too much about the price.

And so far, it has to be said, the strategy has been remarkably successful. The latest efforts to push a campaign against the fee and to use the Communications Bill to bludgeon the BBC seem to have got nowhere. As Tessa Jowell virtually said recently, renewal of the licence fee when it comes up in 2005 is really not an issue.

It should be. Of course there is an issue about charging viewers £112 a year, whether they like it or not, to see programmes that could just as easily be made by commercial television. Bringing in public-service values is a red herring. Those values have to (and did) come out of the heart of an organisation. They are not bolt-on qualities: "Tell him to take out a few swear words, put in a mention of Winston Churchill and wrap it."

Once you start down the slippery slope of developing programmes from the focus group – a slide started under Birt – public-service values become irrelevant. If you want to say something about Buddhism and the historic figure of Siddartha Gautama, you go to his teachings and find out what they meant then and mean today. If you wish to make a programme of what you believe viewers want from previous successes, you use, as the announcement puts it, "recent archaeological discoveries, aided by computer-generated images and dramatised episodes, to recreate the man who became known as 'the Buddha's path to Enlightenment and beyond'."

"After the life of the carpenter's son, we bring you the life of ... well, maybe not Mohammed on second thoughts."

This is not educative, it's not even serious. It's just patronising. It assumes that entertainment is titivation, not understanding. Public broadcasting takes its energy, and its ambition, from a belief that serious conversation, balanced and broad-ranging news and promotion of the arts are part of the civilisation of a country and must be developed as such. Commercial broadcasting takes it cue from finding out what the public wants and giving it to them.

After this week's announcement of its new schedules, there can be no doubt in which category the BBC now belongs.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk