The media is changing at an incredible pace, and a piece of missing television shows us just how much, says Mark Smith

It’s the year 4000 and in an office of the future, two people are arguing over what to watch on the telly. Roald wants to see the Mars versus Venus game but Lizan wants to watch a speech by the leader of the solar system, a deluded, megalomaniacal president who only cares about himself (this is the far future so any resemblance to the present day is purely coincidental). In the end, they settle for a news programme on Channel 403 – that way, they can see both the president and the sport. They gather round to watch.

At the time this particular vision of the year 4000 was written and performed – in the mid-1960s – a future in which there would be a president of the solar system and Mars might play Venus at football and, most amazing of all, there might be hundreds of television channels would have seemed pretty radical. Not so radical were the other scenes of astronauts exploring strange distant planets: this was the 60s when manned missions in space were awakening all kinds of possibilities. Maybe in 2026, Armetis II is doing the same all over again. I hope so.

But what really strikes you about those scenes of the office workers in an old episode of the Doctor Who story The Daleks’ Masterplan – recently uploaded to iPlayer after being missing for 50 years – is the assumption that television (or offices for that matter) would still be around in 2,000 years from now. The episode was recorded in the 60s just as TV was beginning its long domination of our lives and it was probably inconceivable that there might be a future without it. It was taken for granted that in 4000, if we wanted to get the news, we would gather round the TV.

But here we are in 2026 and that vision of the days to come is looking dead already. You’ll remember BBC Scotland launched a Scottish channel seven years ago and the lynchpin was a big shiny news programme from a big shiny studio, but the viewing figures were extraordinarily low; some of the channel’s programmes were registering zero viewers. BBC1’s news programme Reporting Scotland also now looks and feels very old-fashioned and foosty indeed, with the poor sodden reporters standing out in the rain doing vox-pops and slow ponderous reports of stories people picked up ages ago on their phones in seconds. There’s the smell of the past about it.

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The behaviour of everyone under 30 also tells you what’s happening now: they do not watch broadcast TV unless a particular programme goes viral or they’re round at their granny’s house. I was speaking to a large class of journalism students the other day, all in their early 20s, and asked them where they got their news from. A news programme on the TV? Zero. Their phones? Everyone. It probably means that a more realistic portrayal of the office workers in 4000 would have been Roald watching Mars versus Venus on his hand-held device and Lizan watching the president on hers, although it may change all over again soon who knows.

The most recent figures on what people are watching are revealing on the subject. In January for instance, the data from the ratings body Barb showed that more people had watched YouTube than the BBC for the first time ever. After measuring the numbers who watched a service for at least three consecutive minutes, Barb found YouTube had a reach of 51.9million viewers in December 2025, more than a million ahead of the BBC. And it was the same for the two months before as well: YouTube bigger than the Beeb.

The traditional channels know they’re going to have to adapt to the situation and are trying to in some ways. Channel 4 has said they’re planning to produce new videos for social media in an attempt to get their shows noticed, by which they mean noticed by the under-30s who only watch TV if they discover it through TikTok or some other platform. The BBC is also planning to produce content for YouTube after the regulator Ofcom warned them they’ll need to make content for the platform or risk losing relevance. The BBC doesn’t really have a choice to be fair, although it will inevitably turn the screw more on the licence fee: why should people who pay the fee be subsidising programmes on YouTube for people who don’t?

Which leads me to my own prediction of the future, let’s say for 2036 rather than 4000. The first part of it would be that in ten years’ time, we’ll have many more highly specialised, subscription channels catering to particular demographics. You can see it happening already, and although there’s not heaps of money to be made from the channels, the costs of running them are relatively low: no studios and continuity announcers or any of that malarkey. The ever-developing tech means the standards of production are high as well; just as high as traditional TV and in some cases higher.

The other part of my prediction concerns the BBC specifically. Figures just revealed to parliament show that 46 million licence fee warning letters were sent to UK households between 2024 and 2025 (the cost of collecting the fee in that period was £165.6million). The reason the BBC is so keen on sending out the warning letters is that in 2024-25, licence fee evasion and cancellation cost them more than £1bn. The problem is, as more and more people cancel their licence fee, the BBC send out more and more letters, and more and more people cancel their licence fee. It’s the BBC trying to keep up with a speeding train on a doddery old bike.

William Hartnell as the Doctor in The Daleks' Masterplan with, from left, Nicholas Courtney, Adrienne Hill and Peter Purves

Will the process be finished by 2036? Hard to say. Although its influence and presence are fading fast, for older people the BBC still feels like an important part of public life, and their daily lives. However, the changing demographics mean we’re essentially dealing with a process of managed decline: the sustainability of the licence fee will continue to decline as viewing figures decline and at some point, a government will decide enough is enough and the fee will be replaced by a subscription model. It will certainly have happened by the year 4000 – whether it’ll happen by 2036 I’m not certain.

Part of me is sad about it all to be sure. One of the reasons I was a bit excited when the lost episodes of Doctor Who were put up on iPlayer this week was that I've been obsessed with it since I was four years old and saw Tom Baker driving Bessie towards a giant robot and decided nothing else mattered. The show has been a big part of my imaginative life and the country’s cultural life and that is partly because the BBC was such a huge presence for all of us in a world of three channels.

And as I watched the episodes this week, I celebrated its glorious past a little and mourned it a little too. The sort of television you can see in The Daleks’ Masterplan – filmed theatre, effectively – is gone forever and that’s fine, things change. But any programme that presents a vision of the future also reveals how little some things change as well. As I say, the episode is set in 4000 and we’re told that a non-aggression pact between the planets was signed in the year 3975. But then we’re taken to a darkened room where a small group of men is planning to break the pact and start a new war in an attempt to seize power for themselves. Hopes of peace, the reality of war: 4000, 2026, it’s all the same.

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