Ray Snoddy On Broadcasting

The UK's main broadcasters have treated viewers with contempt for years. They have assembled their expensive schedules and pumped them out at times of their convenience and that, really, has been that. There have been haphazard patterns of repeats, combined with a ludicrous number of outings from the archives for shows such as Open All Hours.

What there has not been are sustained, predictable opportunities to see programmes soon after their first airing. It has been up to the viewers to try to catch up, using whatever devices they have at their disposal. But often, word-of-mouth that a particular series or documentary is good comes too late. The programme has gone.

Apart from being rude to viewers, this approach is counter-productive and wasteful. A programme that has cost more than £500,000 an hour to make often disappears into the ether, as far as most viewers are concerned, after a single showing. Even the small minority with personal video recorders can scarcely keep up. The terrestrial broadcasters are still behaving as if there were four television channels rather than 400.

A small piece of progress can be reported, however. Next month, Channel 4 will become the first British terrestrial broadcaster to offer a time-shifted version of its core channel. Channel 4+1 will be precisely that: an identical version of Channel 4 that starts one hour later than the normal schedule. It offers extra convenience for viewers, and is something that the smaller digital channels have done for years. Five also plans to launch its own "+1" services in the autumn, though only for its two digital channels, Five Live and Five US.

Such services are part of the solution. But if broadcasters are serious about making it easier for viewers to see their wares, then the thorny problem of repeats must be confronted.

Journalists, and politicians who hardly watch any television, believe that repeats are A Bad Thing. Percentages are monitored and any increase deplored. Last week, when the BBC's director general, Mark Thompson, admitted that there would have to be more of them, it sounded like an unfortunate necessity in the face of adversity, almost a defeat.

In fact, what is needed are more repeats, not fewer, to give the audience another chance to catch hundreds of quality programmes that would otherwise be missed entirely.

A more coherent policy is required. BBC One should be the main showcase channel for all but the most challenging new programmes. Zero tolerance for repeats should be the mantra for BBC One and, to a lesser extent, BBC Two. Regular slots on both BBC Three and Four should be set aside for a larger number of repeats from the previous week's output. Indeed, why not go the whole hog and have a digital channel devoted to the previous week's best programming – a BBC seven-days channel?

There is an obvious candidate. The latest BBC figures from its annual report show a new statistic: cost per user-hour. By this measure, Radio 2 cost 0.4p per hour last year, and BBC One cost 7p.

But BBC Parliament cost a whopping 24p per user-hour. This suggests that the audience may be little more than MPs watching each other. It would be cheaper to send them DVDs or stream the service online.

Clearly, for some people PVRs will provide the answer to too much choice. To others, it will be the BBC's planned iPlayer, which will enable viewers to download their choice of programmes free for a week after transmission. But both will remain on the sidelines for a very long time.

The BBC owes it to the rest of the audience to provide more convenient ways of seeing the output they have paid for. Some of the money saved could even be used to provide an ever-more necessary serious TV-news alternative to the increasingly fluffy Breakfast. Because Breakfast is now simulcast on News 24 to save money, anyone who doesn't want a light magazine programme in the morning – though there are plenty who do – has nowhere else to go but Radio 4. So the message is simple. More repeats on entertainment and drama are a good thing in the multi-channel world, and could actually improve the BBC's news offering.

Now that the BBC's Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston has enjoyed his first weekend of freedom, it's time to ask serious questions about how broadcasters cover such issues.

Journalists who risk their lives on behalf of the public's right to know deserve some special attention, a degree of respect. Around the world, 105 journalists have already died this year in the course of performing their work, and 2007 looks like setting a grisly new record for number of deaths.

But how special are they? And how much respect do they deserve? Can it be right day after day to focus almost entirely on the plight of one hostage, to the virtual exclusion of others?It seem neither just nor fair for journalists, whether in print or broadcasting, to elevate the fate of their own to such a disproportionate extent.

The BBC's 10 O'Clock News on Wednesday was a perfect example. More than 12 minutes at the top of the programme were devoted to the splendid news of the release of Alan Johnston, but fewer than 12 seconds on five British hostages still held in Iraq. Some other broadcasters didn't even manage the 12 seconds. No background was given or names attached to the computer expert and four security guards seized in May – although the anonymous nature of these hostages appears to be the result of a Foreign Office news blackout, which doesn't help. One hopes, slightly forlornly, that the Foreign Office knows what it is doing. And broadcasters should try a lot harder to keep the plight of the five in the public eye – perhaps even by questioning whether the Foreign Office's approach has merit.

The truth is that celebrity, sought or unsought, has entered the hierarchy of news values. A Madeleine McCann crowds out news of other missing children. And the fate of a courageous BBC journalist who stayed in Gaza after others had left excludes news of less well-known hostages. It is understandable and explicable. But it is not right.

A spanking for bad broadcasters

Michael Grade, ITV's executive chairman, is right to call for a "zero tolerance" policy on all those in broadcasting who breach the public's trust, whatever the genre. Grade was scathing about one broadcaster's response to reports that actors had been hired to pose as members of the audience in a late-night show. The broadcaster claimed that "viewers understood entertainment shows sometimes contain elements of choreography". Choreography is clearly the latest euphemism for deceit.

Grade also laid into an unnamed senior BBC News executive, who suggested that concern about manipulation in certain formats other than news was no more than dinner-party chatter among "media-literate" groups of people.

"How very patronising! How very revealing!" was Grade's view on such an approach.

In the wake of the scandal over television premium-rate phone-in lines, Grade is right to argue that authenticity, trust and integrity are vital commercial weapons in the battle against endless online content, much of it of dubious provenance.

The Great ITV Leader was more than a little coy about how the issue of trust came to land on the broadcasting agenda.

It was the press that highlighted the transgressions of television, something that the former Daily Mirror journalist happily acknowledged after his Royal Television Society speech. "We were nicked," Grade admitted with a smile. And newspaper reporters will doubtless play a continuing role in making sure that the zero-tolerance policy really comes to pass.

Raymond Snoddy presents 'NewsWatch', the BBC viewer-access programme