BBC Switch

» see bbc.co.uk/switch as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The BBC has always been good at the two ends of a life. CBBC for the children, Radio 1 and BBC Three for whatever counts as young adult. What sat between those, roughly twelve to sixteen, had no address of its own, and Switch was the corporation's attempt to build one. It went out for the first time on Saturday 20 October 2007.

It was not a channel. It was a brand stretched across three places at once, a block of programmes on BBC Two on Saturday afternoons and a strand on Radio 1 on Sunday evenings between seven and midnight, held together by a portal at bbc.co.uk/switch that was supposed to be where the audience actually lived. The launch lineup mixed a music and chat show called Sound, presented by Annie Mac and Nick Grimshaw, with imported drama like Falcon Beach and an advice programme called The Surgery. Later on it picked up Kyle XY and Greek, which tells you which market it was borrowing its shape from.

This was built for British fifteen year olds and I was twenty three in Ankara when it started, which puts me outside it twice over. Even if the age had matched, the online half was on a domain that geoblocked, and the television half was a Saturday afternoon on BBC Two. There was no way to be in the audience for this from here, and that is a fair description of most BBC youth output in that decade.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

The thing Switch got right was the live events. Switch Live ran in 2008 and 2009 as a concert aimed squarely at the audience, with the kind of lineup a fourteen year old could not otherwise get a ticket to see. It worked well enough that when the brand was closed the events did not die with it, they carried on inside Radio 1 as the Teen Awards, which are still running.

Everything else was harder. A brand that exists on television on Saturday and on radio on Sunday is asking a teenager to remember appointments, at exactly the point in history when that audience was moving onto YouTube and Facebook and no longer needed anyone's schedule. The BBC was fighting for attention it used to receive automatically.

~ the postmortem ~

Mark Thompson's strategy review put BBC Online up for a 25 percent cut, thirty four million pounds off the budget, and Switch was one of the things named in it. The BBC Trust confirmed the plan in July 2010, which gave the brand five months of knowing it was finished. The last broadcast went out on 18 December 2010, and in January 2011 the possibility of any return was closed off for good.

The radio connection to Radio 1 survived the closure, so the part that had an existing home kept going and the part that had been built fresh did not. That is usually how these reviews land. A brand assembled out of three departments is easy to take apart again, because every piece of it already belongs to someone with their own budget line.

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