The BBC was once at the helm of queer TV representation - what happened?

The BBC has announced that BBC Three will stop broadcasting as a TV channel by next spring, with existing shows moving to iPlayer and YouTube. Earlier this year, the BBC axed I Kissed a Boy and I Kissed a Girl, the UK’s first LGBTQIA+ dating shows.

Last month, it confirmed that Drag Race UK will be leaving the service, moving to the paywalled platform WOW Presents Plus.  The BBC blames “significant financial pressures.” But when public broadcasters face commercial pressures, queer TV is often the first to go. 

Free from advertisers, the BBC has been at the forefront of diverse broadcasting delivering many firsts, including gay and lesbian kisses shown on British TV for the first time. It has even gone as far as standing steadfast by this, like in 1989, when the BBC aired the first gay kiss on a British soap in EastEnders, MPs called for the show to be taken off air, but it stood by its call, despite tabloid and parliamentary hostility.

More recently, BBC Three has been home to many of the BBC’s riskier and more adventurous shows, making space for programmes that other broadcasters would not.

I Kissed a Boy and I Kissed a Girl were exactly this kind of risk. When they first came out, I can’t think of a single queer friend who didn’t watch along. After years of Love Island and an onslaught of straight dating shows, BBC Three finally gave us ours. 

Since 2019, Drag Race UK has shown audiences stories told by LGBTQIA+ people rather than about them. But now, as last year’s runner-up Elle Vosque put it: viewers will now have to already know about the show, rather than “flicking through the BBC” and stumbling upon it. 

The BBC has been here before. When BBC Three first moved online in 2016, its weekly audience fell by 69% among 16-to-34-year-olds, and a peer-reviewed study concluded that at least three-quarters of that loss came from the move online. It also noted that the savings came from cutting the programming costs, not switching off the channel. 

The BBC knows this. When the BBC made its case in 2021 for bringing BBC Three back to TV, it admitted that younger audiences “are not necessarily discovering BBC Three content,” and that a TV channel would be “a key route to discovering” it. 

Ofcom expects the BBC to report on how BBC Three represents underserved young people, but the groups it tracks are defined by age, class, ethnicity and region. Sexual orientation and gender identity are not listed. The government’s Green Paper on the BBC’s future says that “where audiences feel underrepresented, the BBC should be expected to close the gap, yet again LGBTQIA+ communities aren’t listed.”

New Director General Matt Brittin, a former Google executive, has been tasked with finding £500 million in savings, on top of an already set target of £1.5 billion. His answer is a BBC ‘purpose-built for the internet’.

He has championed plans for the iPlayer to incorporate an AI assistant called Iggy and algorithm-led recommendations on iPlayer. But algorithms recommend more of the same, and the young person who would never search for a drag show in the first place is often the one who might benefit most.

The queer community's confidence in the BBC is already wearing thin, especially over its treatment of trans issues, from censoring Bethany Antonia’s T-shirt to ILGA-Europe’s allegations of causing “serious damage” with their anti-trans rhetoric, the BBC has seriously fallen short of its claim to represent the whole of the British public. Although, The Sun claims the BBC has begun work on a “gender fluid” dating show, open to “all genders and sexualities”.

The BBC’s financial pressures are real, but cutting queer programming first sends a clear message about whose stories are optional. Much of the case for the licence fee is that the BBC goes where commercial broadcasters won’t. Without that, what sets it apart? 

The government’s White Paper on the BBC will be released by Christmas. The next charter could give the BBC a funding model that still allows it to make the shows that make it distinctive.

And it could put its commitment to the queer community in writing, so queer TV is no longer a luxury that only survives when there’s cash to spare. TV has been a place where queer kids find themselves organically, and the BBC can still keep that door open.

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