The BBC – another damning report!

And that of course is the question which will have to be considered. With the increasing ability to source a huge range of visual entertainment via the internet is there a place for such a huge public broadcaster in the next 10/20 years. Something more akin to the PBS in the USA might be more appropriate with the taxpayer making a small contribution.

What I don’t understand about the BBC is why some hold it in such high regard, above all the others?
They produce top quality TV – on occasion – but so do all the other channels.
It’s just another channel that I choose to watch or not. Let them fight it out with the rest.
The fact I have to pay £12 for the privilege of watching that one (or two) channels makes no sense at all when £20 gets me 120 channels on cable.
True a lot of that 120 is tat but there are some good programs and I have a choice.
I can’t choose the bbc. I have to subscribe.
That’s not fair.

Yes thank you for adding them.

You missed out – politicisation and entitlement – that’s the bit that sticks in my craw.

We wil have to disagree about what we perceive as well written well acted and well produced drama.
The answer to your simple question. The BBC has become a vast unaccountable self-indulgent, arrogant, self serving edifice which I pay for. Like most taxpayer funded organisations it is management heavy with the emphasis on structure, organisation, strategy, rather than on the production of the highest quality radio and television programmes – its raison d’être.

Charlie ,why are you so anti BBC?
They are not perfect by a long chalk but nothing is and to be honest it would be a sad place if they weren’t here.
Programmes like Downton are just olde worlde soap operas,the plots are the same as all the others just in a different time period.
I actually feel more aggrieved having to sit through crap adverts trying to tell me borrowing money to drink and gamble is the way to perfect hair/teeth /diet etc.To be honest for the odd good programme the independants put out they do put out alot of rubbish as well.
I think the BBC are now under more scrutiny so hopefully what is perceived as being wrong can be righted.

All they are targeting is the biggest audience they can get and the BBC follow like sheep to appease the great god of television – ratings.

I vaguely listened to Julian Fellowes commenting on the success of Downton Abbey as something he wasn’t expecting because it was expected to be of interest to a small section of the viewing public.
Targeting is something practised in all walks of life but it can be seen quite easily in television programming – look at what happened when ITV felt there was no profit to be made by having a section for kids in the afternoon and see what section of society benefited, or the dueling between BBC1 and ITV on Saturday evenings as they both try to attract an audience of trendy and hip viewers eager not to miss the hype.

Targeted drama? Well that’s a new idea which will come as a surprise to all the TV companies I would guess. I suppose you can read anything you like into whatever you like if you try hard enough. What is true of course is that audiences for serious drama are relatively small.

I have no worries with the BBC so to speak but i too also wonder why they felt they had to move.

Wasn’t it something involving the movement of stuff out of London, demanded by the government?
The old BBC Centre was unsuitable for the newfangled gubbin’s that is used these days so I think they were having to move anyway, and I suppose the land up there was much cheaper than the equivalent around London so they just knocked down an old whippet factory and employed a bunch of Poles to build them a new headquarters. Obviously the newly imported staff relocated from the South is going to cause a short term dilution of the Mancunian accent, but eventually they will be assimilated and one day the evening news will be read by a man wearing t’traditional flat cap…;o)

Snafu – I was not recommending those dramas, merely pointing out that ITV has made and still makes high quality programmes. If you don’t like period drama, however you define it, then there will be as much not to watch on the BBC.

Not much at all, other than cookery shows, game shows, fly on the wall documentary’s, programme’s that show us how to do up our houses if we have lots of money and the like.
I end up listening to the radio, reading, walking the wife and kids, that sort of thing. But I feel there is something in that list you provided: much of the content was of a targeted sort, lets say upper middle class and the aspiring lower orders. The rest of us – if we weren’t listening to the radio, reading, etc – are forced to look elsewhere for our televised entertainment. The (for want of a better term) nostalgia channels are fine if you enjoy old editions of QI, etc, and the documentary channels will entertain you if you want to view sharks or Nazis. I am assured that there are even sports channels for those who enjoy that sort of thing.
Some might end up down the pub, but I shall end up losing at Monopoly to the kids. Again.

Firstly I would I would suggest that “they would say that, wouldn’t they?” and secondly read no further than Paul F just above #49. There’s your answer, in a nutshell!

Just think if all of that money had been put into proper programmes…..or rather not as it would have been spent on ratings chasing with even glitzier entertainment, and even crasser “lifestyle” tripe.

One of the points made in the interview yesterday is that it was better to retain highly skilled qualified staff they already had than to try and refill the positions with all the training needed and the delays and cancellations that would of caused.
I have no worries with the BBC so to speak but i too also wonder why they felt they had to move.

The main substance of your post hits the nail fairly and squarely in the middle!
And of course they cocked it up by overestimating the staff who were prepared to move so “sweeteners” were included. And from some I know around Salford there was/is ill-feeling that more were not recruited locally.
And I don’t think we have seen the redundancy payments for those who declined to move, sweeteners or not.

If the expenses paid are legitimate “relocation” expenses (i.e. to cover removal expenses, legals costs of selling/buying your main residence, temporary accomodation, etc) and the BBC felt that relocating staff was better than replacing them with local new recruits, then I would suggest that there is little to argue against in terms of the principles followed. As a number of posts above have said, private sector companies often offer to cover costs of relocation if they move the “job” you are doing to another site that is beyond a reasonable commute.

However, I have more of an issue as to why the BBC felt it had to move the set-up north in the first place?

I suspect it felt it was purely to silence the accusations that it was “London-centric” in operation deu to it being based in London – and I believe that pandering to the “politically correct” lobby just to shut them up cannot be considered a sensible way to spend my licence fee.

Does it matter whether a decision/spend is made in London, rather than Manchester, Salford, (or Stow-on-the-Wold, Belfast, Largs, John O’Groats etc….. )? Surely, so long as the decision is made on basis of “best value”/”best outcome” for the stake holders then the location of the decision maker is irrelevant. Why are decisions made in Salford any better per se than those made by the very same people if thy were still based in London?

Sorry, the whole relocation strikes me as a politicaly driven/justified exercise rather than financially driven/justified exercise – and that does make me angry.

Why couldn’t they stay where they were and just refurbish TV Centre (as was), and have a glitzy new outstation in the grim ‘oop North, plus one in the East, one in the West, one in NI, one in Scotland, one in Wales…. and one down South too, don’t forget, some of us live further south than London, and feel our local concerns and issues are not properly reflect either :highly_amused:

Nope, payment of relocation expenses is probably justified once the decision to move was made, but the decsion to relocate, that caused the need for expenses, probably cannot be justifed in the first place – IMHO.

Paul F (living in the softie Saarrf since 1968, but born and bred in the grim Norff 😉 )

Maybe those of us that live in the south should now complain that BBC is too “Salford-centric” :dev2:

Snafu – I was not recommending those dramas, merely pointing out that ITV has made and still makes high quality programmes. If you don’t like period drama, however you define it, then there will be as much not to watch on the BBC.

And it’s worth bearing in mind when the BBC lauds the viewing figures of 10 million for some tripe on dancing or cooking or EastEnders screeching at each other, that another 40 or 50 million are not watching it.

Hitting that ‘like’ button!

Whitechapel, Downton Abbey, The Leaving, Broadchurch, Bletchley Circle, The Guilty, The Making of a Lady etc etc…..just a few recent ITV dramas.

And that’s fine, but I am not a fan of period dramas – way too much focus on well known names and posing for the camera – so if you watch it, well done.
I used to watch comedy, Father Ted, Black Books, etc. My mother watches the endless repeats of Last of the Summer Wine, Porridge, Dad’s Army, Open All Hours or Only Fools and Horses, not my sort of comedy but she loves them, watches very little of the new stuff in fact; ok, they are not everyone’s mug of Earl Grey but they were indisputably popular – a gentle humour and usually unoffensive – what is being made now that will take their place in the future?

Nor can I, I take it your talking about TOP GEAR, and not their “Ding a lings?”……..:D
Jim.
Lincoln .7

They secretly can’t get enough of it!!;)