£8 million luxury building for GBC: WHAT NEXT?

Indeed, BBC and ITV news for the Channel Islands and Isle of Man is often limited, complicated by the fact that Jersey and Guernsey are as politically separate from one another as they are from the UK, while the Isle of Man’s situation is even more awkward, with it being left to news editors in Manchester or Carlisle to decide what stories from the Island are worth covering.

However, it does have a domestic broadcaster of its own, Manx Radio, mostly commercially rather than publicly funded. By contrast, an attempt at setting up a local TV station was soon abandoned, and Manx Telecom’s online video now fills the gap. When I told one Manx official about GBC’s struggles to attract viewers, he replied: ‘We do not want a repeat of the Gibraltar situation’.

GBC, formed in 1963 from a merger of the private Gibraltar Television and the public Radio Gibraltar, has never been an ITV franchise, and it would be impractical to make it one now. Local viewers have become used to ITV direct from the UK, and would complain if GBC replaced Coronation Street with The Powder Room, or even a London regional news bulletin with its own.

SCHEDULING DIFFICULTIES

And it was scheduling difficulties that led GBC to drop BBC Prime, as well as BBC One and Two becoming available locally via satellite. BBC Worldwide, £250 000 a year the poorer, complained but took no action, and despite the Corporation’s best efforts to stop reception outside the UK by switching satellites, its UK channels can still be received as far south as Gibraltar.

As it happens, some GBC programming appeared on the BBC in the UK the day after the Brexit referendum when BBC Parliament carried highlights of its coverage. James Neish, now a freelancer, also appeared on the BBC’s coverage, and in the absence of a full-time BBC reporter, is an antidote to those based in Madrid who talk about ‘Gibraltans’ or ‘mainland Spain’.

Of course, now that GBC’s local programming is available online, it can reach a global audience, and unlike that from broadcasters in other small territories, has the advantage of being in a major world language. By contrast, that of KvF in the Faroe Islands, population 51 000, is all in Faroese, a language only intelligible to Icelandic speakers, and only then with some effort.

Unlike Gibraltar, where the licence fee was so little that it ended up being scrapped, in the Faroe Islands, it is a whopping £207 a year, not per household, but per adult taxpayer between 24 and 66, after which it drops to £69. In spite of this, and a slightly larger population to fund it, KvF still carries advertising, and most TV programmes are imported.

If people want channels from ‘Denmark proper’, the other Nordic countries, or the rest of the world, they have to shell out again, between £337 and £984 a year. I would not advocate charging anything as much in Gibraltar, much as I feel that GBC never had a level playing field when it came to competing with local ‘satellite associations’ charging as little as £60 a year for Sky.

The Way Forward or ‘King Report’ stated that consideration would be given ‘to allowing GBC to also operate as a cable TV service provider... using modern, fibre optic cable/telephone technology’, but nothing happened. In fairness, few public broadcasters expand into pay-TV, as RTÉ’s cable service in Ireland was sold off long ago, and is now owned by Virgin Media.

By contrast, FITV in the Falkland Islands is an offshoot of the local pay-TV service, and its output online is subscription-funded, just like the weekly newspaper Penguin News. Its Falklands In Focus programme is only fortnightly, but if it can do that without subsidy in a territory with a population of only 3300, think what a similar service could do in one ten times the size.

TV NEWS FOR 1,600 PEOPLE

Despite having just 1600 people, thanks to foreign aid, the Pacific island of Niue has a nightly TV news bulletin with a comical mix of the global and local. One I saw on YouTube led with a story about UN membership and free association with New Zealand, followed by one about how the island’s water supply was affected after someone was caught swimming in the water tank!

It made GBC look like CNN. However, even in the age of broadband internet, no local online media outlet has emerged as a competitor, certainly when it comes to TV news. For example, Your Gibraltar TV, despite its name, no longer carries any video content on its site at all, only press releases, so with hindsight, its brand name may have been overambitious.

Granted, it should not remain reliant on the public purse, not least after the expense of its new premises at South Jumpers Bastion, but what would GBC’s critics do with it instead? Slash or freeze its budget? Break it up? Sell it off? Split airtime between different providers? Make GBC TV subscription-funded and online-only? Or close it down? What is their answer?

02-05-19 PANORAMAdailyGIBRALTAR