Vocal Voices

A few days ago MP John Whittingdale, SoS for Culture etc. set up a committee of eight to look at the upcoming Royal Charter for the BBC. JW is a long-time critic of the licence fee and the BBC Trust and the fear was that 'the committee' would recommend drastic changes to how the BBC works. This was made even more evident when the Times published a leaked Green Paper saying that the Trust should be scraped and its duties handed over to Ofcom, channels and services be reduced, management thinned out and its website reduced in scope and refocused.

So yesterday the BBC reported that its boss, Tony Hall, had come out "fighting" with a speech to his staff saying how wonderful his organisation was. The problem then became the BBC's own Have Your Say section on its website. Auntie was remorselessly slammed by a huge majority of posters. There was little support for the licence fee, none at all for the salaries it pays its "stars" and its output quality ridiculed as 'dumbed down' to CBBC level.

Now, today, a bunch of luvvies, most of them BBC Stars and Starlets, have written an open letter of support for Auntie, the BBC reports, but it has not made the mistake of opening it up to comments.

Other news outlets have, though, and there is not a lot of support. Ossie will be pleased.

Ossie will be pleased.

Indeed, but remember I'm principally gunning for the "politicos" in the organisation.

Inform - Educate - Entertain. It's the slant that these people put on the first two historic aims that I object to. More than happy with SCD ....

I am not totally against the BBC or the licence fee, but I an concerned at the licence cost and the BBC output. Of tonight's programmes on BBC 1&2 only one, Eggheads, gets a five and none of the rest get anywhere near a four out of 10. Quality programmes?

However, most posters want the BBC to go commercial, Pay-per-view or subscription, all of which would remove a lot of the 'political' stuff as most people would not want to pay for it. The thing is, could any of them work? Pay-per-view certainly would not, and I do wonder if there is enough advertising money out there. There certainly is not enough to cover all the BBC's services and TV/Radio channels. That only leaves subscription packages and I, for one, would not be buying.

The BBC is carrying out a public consultation re the Royal Charter.

https://consultations.external.bbc.co.u ... orrows-bbc