of huge national, nay, international significance – yes, “The BBC keeps the licence fee for another ten years, but the Board of Governors will be scrapped. The Government’s plans for the BBC also include a sharper focus on public service programming and less emphasis on audience ratings”. Strangely enough, Sky News led, rightly, with the story of Shabina Begum, a story of much greater significance than the government’s disappointingly modest tinkering with the running of the BBC (if they’d brought in voluntary subscription to the BBC, that would have been a lead story).
The BBC’s generous coverage of itself included a filmed package by Gavin Hewitt, including this introduction:
But some programme makers doubt whether it will be that easy to define quality, engaging, programming.
to a clip of one Peter Bazalgette of Endemol Productions:
The BBC has Eastenders and Holby City, ITV has Coronation Street and Emmerdale. These are popular dramas, soaps, er, they are the genres of which television is made up of. It’s quite impossible for the BBC to pretend it’s not going to make any of those programmes, and they are going to be, in a sense, related to programmes on other channels because they’re in the same genre.
Well Peter, perhaps the fearless, incisive, Tessa Jowell has some other programmes in mind* – drivel like, say, Fame Academy (which has to be the all time number one example of the BBC copying a nihilistic ratings grabber from its non feather-bedded commercial rivals) or Changing Rooms or Ground Force or Ready Steady Cook. And who makes tosh like that? Why, Endemol Productions of course, not that The Ten O’Clock News saw fit to mention Endemol’s substantial relationship with the BBC.
* not that Eastenders is worthy of preservation in its current form – it and its ilk have a lot to answer for, teaching generations of young Britons that all social interaction takes the form of violent slanging matches in dreadful Estuary English.
I believe that henceforth, the BBC be referred to as The State Broadcaster,for that is properly what it is.
I disagree actually, the future of The State Broadcaster is far more important than some tedious human rights flap. The opinion pages of the Daily Mail and Guardian are the best places for that sort of fiasco to be played out.
Full-frontal glimpse of the new, improved fearless approach to quality: The bright pink letter N story, rebranding Nottingham, is Natasha’s Big Story du jour, complete with a Real Balloon and — Be still my leaping heart! — a man in tights fumbling with his quiver.
A purple dinosaur will replace the Dermott-Bill object any second, with a texting opportunity to vote on Our New Look.
BBC1, Where Morons Muster
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,174-1510372,00.html
so thats where my licence fee went….
BBC – Beeb Buys Celebrities (And minor ones at that)