Post by Teddy Bear on Oct 8, 2011 17:11:42 GMT
For the few minutes a week that I listen to Radio4, only in the car, and only to news type programmes that I figure will give me material for this website, I just happened to catch a few minutes of one of the programmes described below, before switching over to the Classic station. It was the beginning of Desert Island Discs and the guest was the 'Teletubby' creator. I thought of the post a few days ago where that programme was mentioned, and knew I couldn't care less about who created it, telling us of her 'joy of creating it', much less her choice in music.
So this article below rang a chord. I must admit I don't listen to or watch the BBC enough to be familiar with their everyday garbage, but have no reason to doubt this writer in The Telegraph below.
So this article below rang a chord. I must admit I don't listen to or watch the BBC enough to be familiar with their everyday garbage, but have no reason to doubt this writer in The Telegraph below.
All I get on the BBC these days is ... the BBC
From Desert Island Discs to PM to its own cuts, the Beeb is obsessed with itself.
By Vicki Woods 8:38PM BST 07 Oct 2011
My new kitchen wireless (birthday present) is a glossy black-and-silver little thing affixed to the wall. It came with a remote control, so I no longer have to leap work surfaces in order to switch off The Archers on a Sunday morning – though I do have to keep wiping flour off it.
It costs me dear to silence Ambridge because I am a creature of habit, slow to change and loath to break the pattern of a Sunday morning that was set decades ago. Lie-in, lazy bath, whisk round the bedroom tidying, and get downstairs seconds before the dee-di-diddly-dee from the country folk with the silly accents.
Alas, The Archers has been banned in my kitchen since the producer (Vanessa Whitburn) engineered the stupidly gratuitous death of Nigel Pargetter by sending him out at dead of night (with drink taken) to remove the banner from his battlements at David’s urging. I can’t forgive it, nor can I listen to the other characters sucking their teeth and asking how his widow is as I chop vegetables.
So there is uncosy silence in my kitchen until it’s time to relax into the warm embrace of Desert Island Discs – but what’s happened to that, for heaven’s sake? They haven’t had anybody on lately who doesn’t already have a large presence on the BBC. The woman who invented Teletubbies was on last week, before her, the tedious Martin Clunes from Men Behaving Badly; before him, Danny Baker, Michael McIntyre, Tony Robinson... It is disappointing every Sunday. Is it not also evidence of decadence when an institution set up to provide a public service becomes more interested in itself and its own continuation than in its remit?
Speaking as one who likes to punctuate her day with the hourly pips rather than by looking at her watch, I am becoming irritated from morning till midnight with the BBC’s preoccupation with itself. It’s a mad world when the BBC is a news story on the BBC news or current affairs programmes. Eddie Mair, the BBC man who presents PM on the BBC, devoted 15 minutes to an examination of the BBC’s cuts strategy. He sounded furious, for reasons I had to puzzle out.
It should have been the BBC’s director-general (Mark Thompson) facing the listeners on PM. “But during the day, the Corporation told us he would be in a meeting all day,” Mair said through clenched teeth. Caroline Thomson, the chief operating officer, came on instead (Mair did not ask if she was any relation, though I wouldn’t have been able to resist).
Clearly, he was annoyed by not getting the organ-grinder, and seemed a little testy as he put his questions. He was in a curious position anyway, playing Tough Inquisitor to Wriggly Public Servant, as though he were John Humphrys nagging Andrew Lansley about ward closures.
He nagged Thomson about the proposed strategy of cutting staff instead of cutting “services”. (I think “services” means TV and radio channels.) She said, in a string of sentences that were quite difficult to parse, that they had “looked very carefully” at cutting staff, but had come to the conclusion “particularly talking to audiences” that each of their services “delivered value to a different audience” and therefore it was better to cut staff instead. Maybe it is. Two thousand staff out of 17,000 – one job in nine, if my maths is right (and do write in if not).
It was a meaningless piece of broadcasting. I was left dizzily wondering whether a) Eddie Mair is a BBC union organiser; b) Caroline Thomson has ever worked anywhere else but the BBC; c) why Caroline had to do the BBC-eats-its-own-feet exercise instead of Mark Thompson; and d) why the director-general is such a gloomy-looking cove? Obviously, he has the final “responsibility” for cutting the jobs of BBC employees, and obviously he will have to put a special face and voice on if, or (more likely) when, some of them go on strike. But he is not going to lose his annual performance bonus or anything.
From Desert Island Discs to PM to its own cuts, the Beeb is obsessed with itself.
By Vicki Woods 8:38PM BST 07 Oct 2011
My new kitchen wireless (birthday present) is a glossy black-and-silver little thing affixed to the wall. It came with a remote control, so I no longer have to leap work surfaces in order to switch off The Archers on a Sunday morning – though I do have to keep wiping flour off it.
It costs me dear to silence Ambridge because I am a creature of habit, slow to change and loath to break the pattern of a Sunday morning that was set decades ago. Lie-in, lazy bath, whisk round the bedroom tidying, and get downstairs seconds before the dee-di-diddly-dee from the country folk with the silly accents.
Alas, The Archers has been banned in my kitchen since the producer (Vanessa Whitburn) engineered the stupidly gratuitous death of Nigel Pargetter by sending him out at dead of night (with drink taken) to remove the banner from his battlements at David’s urging. I can’t forgive it, nor can I listen to the other characters sucking their teeth and asking how his widow is as I chop vegetables.
So there is uncosy silence in my kitchen until it’s time to relax into the warm embrace of Desert Island Discs – but what’s happened to that, for heaven’s sake? They haven’t had anybody on lately who doesn’t already have a large presence on the BBC. The woman who invented Teletubbies was on last week, before her, the tedious Martin Clunes from Men Behaving Badly; before him, Danny Baker, Michael McIntyre, Tony Robinson... It is disappointing every Sunday. Is it not also evidence of decadence when an institution set up to provide a public service becomes more interested in itself and its own continuation than in its remit?
Speaking as one who likes to punctuate her day with the hourly pips rather than by looking at her watch, I am becoming irritated from morning till midnight with the BBC’s preoccupation with itself. It’s a mad world when the BBC is a news story on the BBC news or current affairs programmes. Eddie Mair, the BBC man who presents PM on the BBC, devoted 15 minutes to an examination of the BBC’s cuts strategy. He sounded furious, for reasons I had to puzzle out.
It should have been the BBC’s director-general (Mark Thompson) facing the listeners on PM. “But during the day, the Corporation told us he would be in a meeting all day,” Mair said through clenched teeth. Caroline Thomson, the chief operating officer, came on instead (Mair did not ask if she was any relation, though I wouldn’t have been able to resist).
Clearly, he was annoyed by not getting the organ-grinder, and seemed a little testy as he put his questions. He was in a curious position anyway, playing Tough Inquisitor to Wriggly Public Servant, as though he were John Humphrys nagging Andrew Lansley about ward closures.
He nagged Thomson about the proposed strategy of cutting staff instead of cutting “services”. (I think “services” means TV and radio channels.) She said, in a string of sentences that were quite difficult to parse, that they had “looked very carefully” at cutting staff, but had come to the conclusion “particularly talking to audiences” that each of their services “delivered value to a different audience” and therefore it was better to cut staff instead. Maybe it is. Two thousand staff out of 17,000 – one job in nine, if my maths is right (and do write in if not).
It was a meaningless piece of broadcasting. I was left dizzily wondering whether a) Eddie Mair is a BBC union organiser; b) Caroline Thomson has ever worked anywhere else but the BBC; c) why Caroline had to do the BBC-eats-its-own-feet exercise instead of Mark Thompson; and d) why the director-general is such a gloomy-looking cove? Obviously, he has the final “responsibility” for cutting the jobs of BBC employees, and obviously he will have to put a special face and voice on if, or (more likely) when, some of them go on strike. But he is not going to lose his annual performance bonus or anything.