Mary Riddell points out that the BBC really isn\’t living up to its public broadcasting role. This is a rejection letter sent tosomeone making a film about Vaughan Williams:
Dear Mr Palmer, Thank you for your enquiry about the composer Mr V Williams. Having looked at our own activity via the lens of find, play & share, we came to the conclusion that a film about Mr Williams would not be appropriate at this time. This is essentially because we are… reconstructing the architecture of bbc.co.uk, and to do that, we need to maximise the routes to content.\’We must establish the tools that allow shared behaviours, and so harness the power of the audience and our network to make our content more findable. We have decided to take a radically new approach… and therefore free resources for projects of real ambition… So, given that this is the new vision for Vision, you will understand why a film about Mr V Williams such as you have proposed does not fit our remit. But good luck with the project, and do let me know if Mr V Williams has an important premiere in the future as this findability might allow us to reconsider.
OK, fine, the BBC is not fit for purpose. Let\’s sell it then, shall we?
I don’t understand the letter. Is it just me?
Nope.
Didn’t Vaughan Williams die in the late 50’s bout 1958?
What a bunch of idiots in the BBC.
Maybe someone had changed Wikipedia to report that he’d been involved in writing Don’t Stop Movin’.
This is Birt Speak like you see in Private Eye.
This is all a wind up, right?
Please tell me it is a wind up – my apoplexy level will go off the scale if I’m actually paying for some BBC F**kwit to actally have written that meaningless drivel.
The BBC say they doubt the letter was ever written and can find no trace of it their end. Mr Palmer has not yet produced it for public scrutiny.
Ho hum diddley dum.
Plantman,
I doubt it’s a wind up, but I also doubt that someone at the BBC actually wrote THAT letter.
What someone at the BBC DID do is write a form with code to allow text to be inserted automatically, in this case “V Williams”.
It’s a mail merge.
Translate the letter into Italian or German and it could then be an opera libretto. Or is it an avant-garde tone poem in which only the sound of the words is important?