I WAS reading an old issue of Doctor Who Magazine from April 1982 the other day when I came across a letter from a Mr Robert Drysdale from Edinburgh. A few questions occurred to me as I read the letter. First, are you still out there Robert? Second: should we trust older people’s views on TV? And third: why is a grown man sitting at home on his own reading old issues of Doctor Who Magazine?

But let me tell you more about the letter anyway. Some of it was about geeky things that would interest only the likes of Robert and me (such as which button operates the Tardis doors) but the main thrust of the letter was about how bad television in general, and Doctor Who in particular, was in the 1980s compared to the 1960s. “Each year,” wrote Robert, “I hope for a return to some of the drama and tension [of the 1960s] but the opportunities for this are still being missed.”

I have to say: I get what Robert is saying because I feel the same way. I gave up on the current Doctor Who a long time ago because “it’s not as good as it used to be” and most current TV drama – the stories, the tropes, the casting, the direction – isn’t to my taste. The former TV critic Gareth McLean said the other day that he has “viewer’s block” with modern telly and has been unable to watch more than 10 minutes of any of the new TV dramas. I know what he means.

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But to answer the question I posed earlier about whether we should trust the opinions of older people about TV, the answer is: no, we shouldn’t. Memories are unreliable. The other problem is that the connection you make with TV in your early years (especially with something like Doctor Who) is particularly intense and real and it’s hard to recapture that kind of feeling when you’re an adult. And besides: stuff changes, times move on, deal with it.

What I’m saying here is that I understand why lots of older people have become detached from the BBC and think it’s not as good as it used to be. And I understand why they might grumble about the increase in the licence fee that’s just been announced, even though the increase is only £1.50 a year, or 12p a week, or less than 2p a day. If you don’t feel that the BBC is doing much for you, you’re going to feel a little bit aggrieved about being forced to pay for it (and it’ll be even worse if you think the BBC is biased against independence or Brexit).

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But the real problem isn’t older people, it’s young people, and the BBC knows it. Before they launched their new Scotland channel, the staff at Pacific Quay did some audience research and the results from the young people they spoke to were grim. They pretty much do not watch terrestrial TV, they watch social media or platforms like Netflix, and they don't get their news from programmes broadcast at 9pm or 10pm or whenever.

The question this raises, obviously, is: why should young people pay for the BBC when it’s a service they use infrequently or not at all? Anyone under 25 or so has been raised on Netflix and Youtube, which they get for free or choose to pay for. Netflix and Youtube can also be tailored right down to their particular interests and, no matter how diverse the BBC tries to be, that kind of identity-television is hard to beat.

The BBC knows the inevitability of all of this. They know the licence fee is achingly out of date, they know the demographics will defeat them and they know young people will say ‘why am I paying for this?’ and that eventually a government will agree with them. So what I’m saying is: scrap the licence fee not because of people like me (old farts who dream of how telly used to be), scrap it because of everyone else. Scrap it because of all those young people – the people who’ve already started start to use TV in the way that, one day, we all will.

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