Skip to content

Oh Dear. How Sad

BBC warns Nadine Dorries will plunge it into a ‘spiral of decline’ by declaring end to licence fee

Diddums even.

45 thoughts on “Oh Dear. How Sad”

  1. “BBC warns of ‘serious implications'”

    Yes.. the chairs their woke arses are sitting on are on the line… 😛

  2. Cue ranks of serried luvvies wailing and rending their garments. If they know what’s good for them.

  3. I’ve argued elsewhere that the BBC is not political, but part of the Establishment… so it tends to monster people (Boris, Jeremy Corbyn) who are not the right kind of people. Those who might upset the serene apple cart of the Great and Good.

    But the Establishment are looking to be more and more out of step with modern life. If the BBC were sensible it would already be working on Plan B, but I suspect they *cannot* conceive of a world that doesn’t need them.

  4. Good.
    The BBC is an embarrassment.
    If it was a racehorse, we would have given it a carrot before taking it out back and shipping it to the glue factory.

  5. It should be incorporated fully into the NHS, it is already their propaganda arm. The extra cost wiuld barely be a farthing on the NHS’s balance sheet.

  6. It does confirm that

    1) The Tories knew that abolishing the BBC was the right thing to do
    2) That they had not done it because they pander to the left
    3) Only when Boris is on the ropes do we see the Tories actually doing things that their base want

    Let’s hope that Boris can cling on long enough that some more proper conservative policies are pushed forward before he and Princess nut-nut are consigned to the dustbin of history

  7. It’s all lies and bollocks; a “red meat” policy desperation aimed at digging Boris out of his immediate hole. If he survives the coming days and weeks this will be shoved aside and forgotten. The only previous hint of pressure on the BBC was slapped down by Boris himself, who loves the organisation. If they really wanted it ended they’d have ended it by now.

    These twats won’t even be in power in 2027. Sadly, the BBC is safe.

  8. Cue ranks of serried luvvies wailing and rending their garments. If they know what’s good for them.

    And gnashing of teeth. If necessary, teeth will be provided.

  9. JuliaM,

    +1

    I was watching one of Tom Scott’s videos on YouTube. About a hydroelectric plant that is using those robot dogs. No mention of brown people, gays, women, colonialism. Just someone talking sensibly about a bit of technology. Remember when the BBC did that? Tomorrow’s world, Think of a Number, Adam Hart-Davis? It’s a couple of Christmas lectures now.

    It cracks me up when people come out in defence of the BBC as a national treasure, as if it was still putting on Morecambe and Wise, Fawlty Towers, Jonathon Meades and The Ascent of Man rather than endless cookery, antique and reality crap.

  10. It’s only been (checks watch) 11 and a half years of “conservative” government lads. They need more time to do conservative things!

  11. Bloke in North Dorset

    “It’s a couple of Christmas lectures now.”

    Did you watch the last one? Its not even that now. Kids masked up, having been tested beforehand. The audience not representative of the wider country, just representative of London. Patronising presenters.

  12. I was on s discussion on Instagram over this very subject. Someone had a BBC2 closedown from 1986. It was the end of a film by Andrej Wajda and then the schedule for the next evening ( Sunday ). There was David Vine doing Ski Sunday ( when they actually showed races), a wildlife programme, philosophers discussing the Cold War, The Money Programme ( remember how excellent Val was on that ?),a programme discussing architecture and a rather obscure film starring Gielgud.

    Even BBC4, the so called intellectual channel struggles with that line up.

    I’ve never been in favour of the licence fee but for a long time, no one had cone up with a better model. It is also much cheaper than in Austria, for example. But its rationale eroded throughout the 90s and 00s and since the advent of proper terrestrial digital and Internet TV, it has become indefensible.

  13. Close it down. If they need a Chairman to organise that I’m available for £500k per annum. Not expensive since the crucial actions could all be taken in six months. Mainly I’d WFH but occasionally might take a helicopter to visit London and kick some arses. Boy, it’s well provided with arses.

  14. The problem will always be the BBC lobby. You have anything to do with the broadcast media in the UK, you soon realise all the people you meet have either worked for the BBC, are working for the BBC & or have ambitions to work for the BBC. And that stretches out into the wider arts & into journalism. Worth noting the number of journalists the BBC claims to employ against the total membership of the NUJ.
    The BBC is a black hole a whole section of society orbits around. And some of those orbital tracks aren’t even in the UK. There’s one helluvalot of vested interests there.

  15. BiND,

    ““It’s a couple of Christmas lectures now.”

    Did you watch the last one? Its not even that now. Kids masked up, having been tested beforehand. The audience not representative of the wider country, just representative of London. Patronising presenters.”

    I didn’t. I did hear about it, but I’m so massively tuned out of the BBC now, I missed it. Like at one time, I’d have seen some ads or seen it on the programme guide, but my default behaviour is turning on the TV and hitting the Smart button and there’s Netflix, Amazon and YouTube.

  16. “And gnashing of teeth. If necessary, teeth will be provided”

    Ah, the legendary Dave Allen – I see I’m not the only one old enough to remember that sketch!

  17. Worth noting the number of journalists the BBC claims to employ against the total membership of the NUJ.

    The NUJ claims 38000 members, the BBC claims 2000 journalists.
    WTF do the 38000 do all day, and also WTF do the 2000 do all day at the BBC?

  18. You only have to look at the butcher job they did on Dr Who to see where the BBC are heading.

    From a great and loved sci-fi series to a preachy, sermonising, woke lecture on why women and diversity are great and white men and capitalism are bad. They even tried to destroy the canon of the series. Turns out Dr Who was originally a black woman, or something.

    Ratings plummet, fans hate it but according to the show’s makers and actors, that’s only because fans are “-ists” of one form or another.

    The BBC have stopped making programmes and just provide platforms for ‘the message’.

  19. “The spiral of decline started 40 years ago”

    40? My dad used to talk of a visit by a Cabinet minister to his local Tory association during which he was asked about BBC bias. The Minister answered that they were certainly aware of it, but wanted to wait until the next election to be sure that it wasn’t simply a reflection of popular frustration with a long-standing government.

    That was sixty years ago.

    “I was watching one of Tom Scott’s videos on YouTube. About a hydroelectric plant that is using those robot dogs. No mention of brown people, gays, women, colonialism. Just someone talking sensibly about a bit of technology. Remember when the BBC did that?”

    Tom’s stuff’s excellent. And the thing is, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was totally on-board with the BBC/Guardian agenda. He seems like your fairly typical media type. But I don’t know. And that’s how it should be.

  20. Why wait until 2027?
    That’s a clear signal this will never happen, it’s just political tinsel.
    Stop the licence fee NOW. Then burn it down and salt the ashes.

  21. The licence fee will be abolished and the funding for the BBC will come from general taxation.

    Now: Don’t like funding the BBC? Don’t buy a licence.
    Then: Don’t like funding the BBC? Tough.

  22. Even if the Tories are still in power when the next agreement ends, it won’t be the same cabinet. Nadine had no authority to say this will be the last one as she can’t bind her successor – who knows what will happen when the time rolls around again. There’s a couple of reasons I expect them to chicken out from scrapping the licence fee and making the BBC a subscription service, let alone scrapping or privatising the thing. Fear of ticking off older voters for whom the BBC is a popular institution. Fear of losing a modicum of control over the giant of the media landscape – sure they may be biased now, even if it’s usually more about a metropolitan liberal establishment mindset rather than something more explicitly partisan, but at least their special political vulnerability forces them to do some self-reflection on it.

    I think a lot of politicians also buy into the idea of the BBC as a commercial success story and its World Service as a useful tool in foreign policy. Now you could hive off the World Service and the truth about commercial success of exports is tricky to judge in the absence of a counter-factual – would the UK media environment have been more commercially astute without this behemoth looming over it, or would we just have been swamped by cheap imported TV?

    There’s also the pure technical issue of how you convert free-to-air BBC content to a subscription service and whether you bung them a separate funding for local radio or scrap that altogether. Obviously there are solutions to the technical side but as a politician you probably don’t want the BBC to go Internet only (remember the Old People) and you don’t want to have people faff about getting access codes entered into their telly box (Old People again). Even the requirement of pretty minor technical changes can put decision makers off agreeing to go forward with something – inherent conservatism or just the fact it gives a convenient excuse to stop things they don’t want to happen for other reasons – so 95% certain they’ll back out when it actually matters.

  23. What PJF said.

    I find it hard to be worried about the BBC being a bunch of leftist arseholes when the fucking Tory party seems to be much the same.

  24. Adverts then. The more popular you are the higher the rate. The better audience you raise the higher the rate. Or disband the whole thing and see if I care.

  25. Anon,

    “I think a lot of politicians also buy into the idea of the BBC as a commercial success story and its World Service as a useful tool in foreign policy. Now you could hive off the World Service and the truth about commercial success of exports is tricky to judge in the absence of a counter-factual – would the UK media environment have been more commercially astute without this behemoth looming over it, or would we just have been swamped by cheap imported TV?”

    If it’s so commercially successful, why am I having to pay for it? The BBC makes some export money, but it isn’t that big. Some game show formats, Dr Who and some costume dramas.

    And why should I care about “cheap imported TV”? Do we mind about cheap Chinese USB leads and cheap Bangladeshi underpants? If someone in Indonesia can make a TV series that’s better than something we can make here for the same money, why should someone here be employed?

  26. Rhoda, in the old days, we watched the BBC without ads ‘cos of the licence fee (subscription) or watched ITV with ads.

    Now, I pay a licence fee to the BBC and suffer ads for THEIR output, and a subscription to Sky AND still have to watch the fucking adverts….. If I stopped the whole fucking lot tomorrow, they will find a way to make me pay. See, my comment above on general taxation.

    Trust me, at every turn, whatever is decided, we will be worse off.

  27. @bom4

    Does the BBC export game show formats? Thought they were mostly bought in from the likes of Endemol. My point isn’t that the BBC is a massive commercial success with its exports etc. As you say they’re actually thin gruel in the grand scheme of things. But they like to portray themselves as such and my point is that I think a lot of MPs buy into that.

    In fairness the UK as a whole does do well at media and cultural exports. Another argument often deployed in favour of the BBC is that even if their direct exports are pretty small, the BBC forms an important part of our media ecosystem – very large training scheme, its commissions help get UK writers and production teams started before they go on to bigger things, etc. This is where the “would our screens just get filled with cheap imports” – probably US rather than Indonesian, more’s the pity – issue comes into play. But the flip side of that is whether without the overwhelming presence of the BBC, UK media creators would have got more cost-conscious or export-oriented and generally more globally competitive. We do have a big advantage from the English language and a lot of cultural history to draw on.

    Fwiw there are pretty strong culturally conservative arguments about whether we really want to import a lot of cheap media content from across the world. The influence of culture on our idea of who we are as a society/nation, and the extent to which it would be preferable for the majority of our shared cultural experiences, the stories we tell and see told about ourselves, to be “home grown”. It’s not unreasonable to be quite happy to import your saucepan from Turkey because they’ve got good at making cheap kitchenware but not want the your young’uns to grow up hooked to cheap Turkish TV. (Turkish TV exports being on the rise across a lot of the world at the moment, and unsurprisingly showcasing some cultural values that we might not all be so keen on.)

    I appreciate these arguments seem to go down much better in France where they form part of a reaction against the cultural hegemony of the perfidious Anglosphere, as well as a handy protectionist racket for local media creators, but I wouldn’t want to absolutely rip the mickey out of a group of of people who’ve answered the question “Are we committed to a path of cultural self-destruction in the name of economic expediency?” with a “Non”… In the long term that may turn out to have been the most sensible answer, at least from their point of view. Nor would it be surprising, if we do get another term of Tory government, to see the BBC start playing up the “British” aspect of their name and history to suit the political mood music. They’d be idiots not to.

  28. @Cherny,

    Going along with the horse analogy, I’ve always liked the ‘The next time that horse crosses the finishing line, it will be in a greyhound’.

  29. Anon: Fear of ticking off older voters for whom the BBC is a popular institution
    I doubt very much if that is true. The BBC may be a habit for some but older voters don’t readily accept being preached at or the liberal agenda.

    I think a lot of politicians also buy into the idea of the BBC as a commercial success story
    I can’t think why they should. They may occasionally pay lip-service to the BBC as they do incessantly to our NHS but that doesn’t mean they believe it.
    …and its World Service as a useful tool in foreign policy
    There was a time when the World Service was excellent and was funded by a precept from the Foreign Office. The whole point then was that it was not a tool for foreign policy but a reliable source of world news. Gorbachev is famously supposed to have relied on the World Service when he was captured. Now that the World Service is funded by the licence fee, its output is as biased as the rest of the BBC’s broadcasting.
    There are pretty strong culturally conservative arguments about whether we really want to import a lot of cheap media content from across the world.
    We?
    The influence of culture on our idea of who we are as a society/nation, and the extent to which it would be preferable for the majority of our shared cultural experiences, the stories we tell and see told about ourselves, to be “home grown”
    It’s a legitimate point of view but the BBC simply does not provide this, so this argument fails.

  30. The influence of culture on our idea of who we are as a society/nation, and the extent to which it would be preferable for the majority of our shared cultural experiences, the stories we tell and see told about ourselves, to be “home grown”

    I’d say the argument against that is the US. Most US media is produced on the coasts. Predominantly the west. It disseminates almost exclusively coastal culture with coastal biases. Yet flyover country between the coasts manages to have a totally different culture.

  31. @Bloke on M4
    And why should I care about “cheap imported TV”?

    I have to admit that these days I’m not as certain as I used to be – ref the way the BBC has gone all woke-ist with Doctor Who as referenced above.
    But really, have you taken a good look at “cheap imported TV” ?

    People complain about the amount of naff competition and cookery programs these days, but that I have to say is largely a case of “be careful what you ask for”. Now we have all these extra TV channels, viewer eyeballs are spread a lot more thinly, and that means money is spread a lot more thinly – and the natural response to that is you get more cheap to make programming like competitions (who’s prizes are generally nothing like what they used to be) and cooking. But we do still get some darn good stuff – and having an income that isn’t dependent on advertising income, and hence “how many eyeballs can you get” as the metric against programming decisions are made, does allow the BBC to do some stuff that isn’t done much by others.
    Even if you never watch anything the BBC does, the fact that it’s there sets a benchmark against which other programming does get compared – and so having the BBC funded as it is does somewhat slow the race to the bottom of a sludge filled pond.

    So on the one hand I am definitely against scrapping the licence fee.
    But I also see that standards have been dropping for some time. Simple things like ensuring that the costume department has an understanding of PAL colour gamuts and doesn’t put out costumes that display as featureless blobs of red because it’s well outside of what the system can handle (yes, I admit it, I watch Strictly). Other things like making sure that when people takl, “normal” people can actually hear what they are saying.
    And as mentioned, well and truly on the eco and woke bandwagons.
    So on the other hand, I’m now less certain.

    But I do think that if the licence fee (in something vaguely similar to its current form) goes, then things will go downhill even faster.

  32. Anon,

    “Does the BBC export game show formats? Thought they were mostly bought in from the likes of Endemol. My point isn’t that the BBC is a massive commercial success with its exports etc. As you say they’re actually thin gruel in the grand scheme of things. But they like to portray themselves as such and my point is that I think a lot of MPs buy into that.”

    OK, fair point.

    “In fairness the UK as a whole does do well at media and cultural exports. Another argument often deployed in favour of the BBC is that even if their direct exports are pretty small, the BBC forms an important part of our media ecosystem – very large training scheme, its commissions help get UK writers and production teams started before they go on to bigger things, etc. This is where the “would our screens just get filled with cheap imports” – probably US rather than Indonesian, more’s the pity – issue comes into play. But the flip side of that is whether without the overwhelming presence of the BBC, UK media creators would have got more cost-conscious or export-oriented and generally more globally competitive. We do have a big advantage from the English language and a lot of cultural history to draw on.”

    If the BBC has such great writing programmes, why are they outclassed by Netflix and Amazon? The BBC produces formulaic work. I could write a BBC drama. You could get people who write pornography and fan fiction to write it. Fleabag is the only thing they’ve made in the last decade that’s exceptional.

    “Fwiw there are pretty strong culturally conservative arguments about whether we really want to import a lot of cheap media content from across the world. The influence of culture on our idea of who we are as a society/nation”

    But we no longer have this, if we ever did. The BBC Christmas Day viewing figures show something like 5 million people watching the top shows. That’s less than 1 in 10 viewers. We no longer have any cohesion of values around television. Lots of under 30s never watch regular TV.

    And in general, I believe that culture is evolutionary and not a top-down thing.

  33. Simon makes a fundamental error about modern broadcasting. It no longer matters how many viewers a programme has. There is still some premium in advertising around a popular show, but the reality now is that that is gravy to the broadcaster and in any case only applies to “live” TV.

    Streaming Income is guaranteed through subscriptions. Channels that I watch show movies and big series without adverts. On Demand telly has fundamentally altered the patterns and economics of broadcasting.
    Even a channel on Sky can guarantee an income with 0% of viewers just by a share of the subscriptions. Also advertising is now spread across hundreds of channels as are the viewers so both have become diluted.

  34. Simon,

    “People complain about the amount of naff competition and cookery programs these days, but that I have to say is largely a case of “be careful what you ask for”. Now we have all these extra TV channels, viewer eyeballs are spread a lot more thinly, and that means money is spread a lot more thinly – and the natural response to that is you get more cheap to make programming like competitions (who’s prizes are generally nothing like what they used to be) and cooking. But we do still get some darn good stuff – and having an income that isn’t dependent on advertising income, and hence “how many eyeballs can you get” as the metric against programming decisions are made, does allow the BBC to do some stuff that isn’t done much by others.
    Even if you never watch anything the BBC does, the fact that it’s there sets a benchmark against which other programming does get compared – and so having the BBC funded as it is does somewhat slow the race to the bottom of a sludge filled pond.”

    I don’t buy this. The BBC gets £3.7bn/year, mostly from a TV license that comes with threats if you don’t cough up. Even if you watch The Cookery Channel or Babestation, instead, the BBC still gets paid.

    And where is this “damn great stuff” you talk about? There was a time when the BBC put things on that, in all sorts of ways, I would describe as mind expanding or culturally significant, but I struggle to see it in the schedule. Where’s the equivalent of Sister Wendy talking about Caravaggio, or James Burke doing Connections, or Jonathon Meades talking about architecture?

    My take is that men stopped watching the BBC. First they went and watched Sky for the football, then they did more gaming, then porn, and then more and more science and tech went onto YouTube. Lots of smarter women also followed. And the more this happened, the more the BBC made trash for women who wanted trash, and paid themselves bloated salaries to deliver it.

  35. The BBC has never been accountable to the people who paid for it.
    Yet there are people who think that the American Revolution was justified, and hence the killing of British soldiers for the greater good of the cause of freedom and an accountable but limited government. Although they don’t admit this, it’s the logical consequence of their view.
    But some of these also think that the no representation for your taxation structure of the BBC is for the greater good. Have the Board of Trustees elected by the licence payer and them deciding on the scope and the price, no chance.
    And unable to comprehend these are incompatible claims regarding moral purpose.

  36. @bis

    I’d say the argument against that is the US. Most US media is produced on the coasts. Predominantly the west. It disseminates almost exclusively coastal culture with coastal biases. Yet flyover country between the coasts manages to have a totally different culture.

    Yeah, culture war fundies can definitely overexaggerate the effect cultural domination can have on underlying social structure and values. The reverse is true too of course, with a liberal/radical counterculture having been able to grow and thrive during an era when conservative attitudes dominated the media. Apparently Bollywood film and music was all the rage in Afghanistan after the Taliban were kicked out of power, but now the Taliban are back in charge, how much change did Bollywood really make to their social fabric?

    A few counterpoints – even in Flyover Country, young Americans tend to have more liberal values than their parents and you have to wonder whether airwave domination was a factor. And you can find places where cultural effects have occurred following media domination. Maybe a question of the degree of hegemony, not just media and cultural but also economic, and how assimilable it is into local society. I’m sure the current wave of Korean cultural exports will lead to a few more people studying East Asian languages at university, but I hardly think we’ll see kids chatting to each other in Korean in the playground. Whereas in Sweden or Lebanon, teens chatting in English is a very real phenomenon. English language films, TV, youtube, websites are all parts of that. In France it’s much rarer and it doesn’t seem outlandish to think French politicians’ determination to avert anglophone domination has been a factor in that.

    @TMB

    Bear in mind the subtext of what I wrote is that “PJF and MC are right, a gambling man would be wise to bet against this happening: there are a couple of reasons/perceptions likely to affect Tory MPs’ thinking as well as some useful publicly voiceable excuses about the BBC being a British success story, technical challenges of changing model etc so they’ll be able to cop out with a straight face” and we are mostly in agreement, I think. I didn’t say that chickening out was the correct course. Just my evaluation of which arguments, however flimsy, are likely to hold sway over the key actors at the relevant time, and even if those can’t be publicly voiced (“As a Tory MP who knows which demographics are more likely to vote, I am especially paranoid about doing anything that ticks off Old People”), whether there are any more convenient get-outs for them.

    However amazing you find it though, there is clear evidence that older people are generally supportive of the BBC. Whether that will survive 5 more years of the BBC wokifying itself I’m not sure, but that’s the present state of play. The BBC’s current audience is well-known to skew older, as you can verify easily against audience data. Younger people abandoning conventional TV/radio is a factor in this of course, and part of the reason the BBC has gone down the cultural path it has is fear that being “stuffy” and “old-fashioned” will ultimately lose them touch with a whole generation of younger people. It hurts when substantial numbers of twenty-somethings and even thirty-somethings have stopped watching broadcast TV and so no longer pay the TV licence, hence reform of some kind is surely inevitable, even if it ends up being a subsidy from general taxation or switching to a broadband tax. Ignoring the 16-24 age bracket, who are small, anomalous and not so politically influential, YouGov polls show that the proportion of Brits who are “proud” of the BBC does increase with age. However, and I think this reflects the group you identify as getting fed up with the wokery or perhaps the dumbing down of TV, there’s also a proportion who say they are “not proud” of the BBC which also climbs with age – the don’t knows fall dramatically, so basically the BBC is more polarising among older people than younger people, and it looks like this is related to the Leave-Remain split. However, the “prouds” substantially outnumber the “not prouds”. If the government did announce it was going to privatise, shut down or render the BBC subscription-only, have no doubt that MPs’ mail-bags would be brimming with protest.

    Interestingly, YouGov’s survey on public trust shows that there’s a similar age polarisation for trust in BBC journalists – people tend to trust the BBC more than not, but the margin is narrower than on “pride” and this time in the older age groups, “don’t trust” seems to outnumber “trust” (around margin of error though). I think this shows you’re correct that older, more conservative people have reasons to distrust BBC journalistic output and call out its biases, but you may be wrong to think people will see the BBC through this prism alone. It seems substantial numbers of people, particularly among the old, actually like the BBC, despite distrusting it. Maybe that’s to do with the BBC’s historic legacy, or they still appreciate the non-journalistic content like entertainment shows despite creeping wokery there?

    Re exports, I think “British success stories” play to Tory MPs’ prejudices. I’m fervently pro-Brexit & think the UK made the best strategic choice to disengage from EU structures, and the balance of our trade will be far less EU-oriented in 20 years’ time. Didn’t Andrew Lillico reckon it would fall to about a third of our trade? I reckon something similar. However, even I’m ticked off by the way, within hours of any trade deal being announced, Tory MPs pop up proclaiming how this will help exports of some utterly economically and strategically inconsequential product or service. I mean listen to them – they get a trade deal that might be worth billions, and they’ll bang on about something worth a couple of million. Sometimes sub £1 million. Brexit is their baby and it’s just forced them into a set of political narratives. Media exports, even inconsequential ones, play well to that narrative: rather like “green and pleasant land” niche agricultural products, they project the idea there’s something inherently good about Britain for being able to export them (we’re a “creative”, “culturally influential” country) and the fact sales are largely made to the Anglosphere, or redubbings are broadcast all over the world, is in tune with “Global Britain” and “we’re not reliant on Europe anymore”. Unfortunately for the BBC, two of their biggest export successes were Top Gear and Doctor Who, so the timing of this narrative may not be great for them. No doubt they’ll point at some big-name trans-Atlantic co-productions if needs be. I’m inclined to think there’ll be Tory MPs prepared to swallow that bait.

    Re the final point: yeah, it may be an awful argument, but if the Tories do win the next election (not guaranteed!) I’m near certain the BBC has enough political operators near its top end to spot the direction of the prevailing wind and play up their “Britishness”. Particularly as a contrast to the content on Netflix and Youtube. Like I said, without the BBC playing such a dominant role, who really knows where we’d be? There’s no good international comparator, since we’re the only English-speaking country with a media market around our size. Places like Australia notoriously import a lot of content because their market is too small and there’s plenty of international content in English, but ours – while far smaller than America’s – is large enough to support a substantial industry. Without the BBC crowding others out, perhaps it would have been more commercially oriented and more successful overseas. It might be difficult to find people to voice that opinion, particularly since so many industry figures still want to sell to the BBC! Or perhaps the BBC has played a linchpin role in cultivating new talent and maintaining quality standards. A story far more luvvies will vocally support! Moreover, even a Tory MP fed up with wokified Beeb productions may fear the alternatives. Cut the BBC loose, privatise the whole thing, and you’ve still got the risk of full-on wokeness (look at US media) with less of a leash over them. I think @Simon’s post above is interesting as I reckon a lot of Tories have a similar mindset: an element of cultural snobbery about trashy/”Americanized” TV, which is another likely consequence of freeing the BBC from public service obligations or scrapping it altogether. And sorry @Simon, I don’t mean that pejoratively as there are reasonable arguments for snobbery – as I said, there’s something to say in favour of the rather chauvinistic French approach.

    I hardly need to ask @TMB what your views are on what should happen to the BBC – very, very sound man. But it would be interesting to know what spread of probabilities you’d apply to the different outcomes, perhaps based on the premise that the Tories win the next GE. What do you think the Tories would actually do? I’m with @MC and @PJF: even if Nadine really means this, and she does seem to have genuine anti-Beeb animus, she can’t make it happen and her successor is very unlikely to either. I can see @Simon is quite torn on what should happen. I reckon if he mulled it over, and took into account (which his post hinted at but stopped short of tackling) the difficulties the BBC funding model is going to face in terms of fewer younger people watching conventional TV (and some alternatives being vaunted eg the “licence fee” switching from people who watch live TV to people with broadband connections), that would probably be a decent proxy for what a typical Tory MP would, on consideration, prefer too.

  37. Data tables for the YouGov surveys cited above can be accessed from the bottom of these pages to get the age breakdowns:

    https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2018/07/04/nhs-british-institution-brits-are-second-most-prou
    https://yougov.co.uk/topics/media/articles-reports/2020/04/29/no-trust-media-has-not-collapsed-because-coronavir

    @bom4

    And in general, I believe that culture is evolutionary and not a top-down thing

    Yep, fully agree there’s a lot in this, see response to @bis. We certainly had national culture, customs, traditions etc before the era of big broadcast media. But otoh are there Tory MPs with a touch, or more, of nostalgia, who’d fully sign up to the “Make Cultural Cohesion By Shared Media Experiences Great Again” agenda if they could, and would be willing to vote in favour of some rotting carcass of a proxy for it if given the chance? I fear so.

  38. “James Burke doing Connections” I shudder to think what the current woke/eco set at the BBC would do with such a show, some things are bet left alone

  39. Anon,

    “However, even I’m ticked off by the way, within hours of any trade deal being announced, Tory MPs pop up proclaiming how this will help exports of some utterly economically and strategically inconsequential product or service. I mean listen to them – they get a trade deal that might be worth billions, and they’ll bang on about something worth a couple of million.”

    I believe a lot of this is about the general opinion of what the public think matters. The main thing in these stories is always about food exports, like the UK will now export £2m of beef to the USA. And we had the same thing during the Brexit vote of how cheese exports to the EU would be hit.

    Lots of people out there think farming matters. The understand it. They sympathise with farmers who always claim poverty (and don’t mention all the subsidies they get in their claims). Many of them have no concept of how little £2m is in the grand scheme of exports.

    We export a lot more copies of Grand Theft Auto per year than that, or ARM technology, or pharma, or the CG work that Framestore in London do on Marvel movies.

  40. We have been in New Zealand for 6 years now and so do not watch the BBC.We do not miss it either. There is no licence fee here and TV is funded by advertising and Government handouts.(I think) As a result adverts are long ,repetitive and almost without exception CRAP. As a result we rarely watch broadcast TV as there are very few programmes for which we are prepared to suffer the adverts. The occasional BBC programme that is broadcast here tends to be an Attenborough Climate crisis horror show or something similar .As far as the old ones not being able to cope with smart tvs , watch your mouth youngster. At the age of 84, I quite happily surf through Youtube, Netflix, Acorn and others to find quality shows.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *