and…keep your hands off my stack.
The B.B.C. announced cuts the other day and so with predictable reliability the calls of “All Out!!” went up from the unions. The Beeb really is the last bastion of a nationalised industry, puffed up and pampered.
The job cut announcements amount to about 2,500 positions going an 1,800 redundancies, well that accounts for the load of people you see milling around in the background of News 24.
As I mentioned yesterday when posting about the channel having two production companies covering the Scotland game, one for either side of the border there is an amazing amount of duplication and ten people doing a job for one. As pointed out by Jeff Randall’s excellent column in today’s Telegraph
Once a big story hits the wires, desk-bound BBC news-gatherers simply hit the phones… calls from the BBC’s business unit, several shows at Five Live and Radio Four, regional radio outlets, BBC Scotland (lots from there), BBC Online, Breakfast TV, the One O’clock News, the Six O’clock News and the Ten O’Clock News. Oh yes, and News 24.
On another occasion, I was in Calais to cover a Eurotunnel shareholders’ meeting for the Ten O’Clock News. I arrived to find swarms of BBC reporters, producers and film crews falling over each other; the corporation had sent more people than the rest of the British media put together. In the evening, we filled three tables in a local restaurant.
The unions will huff and puff, but the vast majority of BBC News staff know that the way they cover many stories is madness (12 turned up at the launch of Chris Huhne’s tilt for the Lib Dem leadership). On the day of Alistair Darling’s Pre-Budget Report, I was asked by six different BBC outlets to be a pundit. Jeff Randall
All could be done by one central unit for radio and one for TV, News 24, what’s the point of having a dedicated news channel if they aren’t the ones doing the news gathering. Oh they really need a 24 hour rolling news service, sat there watching nothing happening because in most 24 hour periods there’s bugger all that happens that is truly news worthy. I mean how many people do they need in Paris at this moment to tell us about the atmosphere before the World Cup final?
He’s also right about the crap they put on on B.B.C. 3, dear god it is utter tripe, they could focus not “on fewer, high-quality shows” but on more high quality shows by getting rid of the expense of that one channel alone.
It’s cutting along with the thinning out of those doing duplicate jobs in the news section , both gathering and reading it out loud to the viewer, the wasteful salaries they stupidly hand out to “stars” – by definition if someone is in a soap they’re not a star, they can hardly be classed as an actor and how much do they pay people to watching some builder cut MDF on all those makeover shows – and getting rid of most of the middle management would free up enough cash from the adequate TV license to contin… well actual start again making quality shows for the viewers.
Someone I as talking to yesterday said he heard them say on the radio about how most people only watch four different programmes on each channel and when thinking about it on the five terrestrial channels and their digital offshoots the pair of us could hardly come up with four.
On the Beeb, well if you count sport as one entity and they hardly have any decent sport on these days, that’s one then there’s “Have I Got News For You”, “QI” (surely that could be on for more than 30 minutes), “Family Guy” (when they decide to show it) and “Top Gear” from all the Beebs channels it’s not much is it.
Saying that it’s more than ITV and all their output, where if it wasn’t for the rugby WC I wouldn’t have watched ITV1 for months, ITV2 nope, ITV3 if I want to watch old repeats of BBC I’d watch the Beeb so I didn’t have the bother with ads, ITV4 well now “Homicide: Death On The Streets” has disappeared I believe the only thing I’ve watched on there was “Minder”, yes a ten year old repeat was replaced by a 30 year old one, and it was still one of the best things I watched all week.
Channel4, all there decent stuff is on More4 and that amounts to “The Sopranos” otherwise it’s crap like “Wife Swap”, “Big Brother”, “Hollyoaks” and other assorted rubbish aimed at the mentally challenged on the main station and E4.
Five, take away the baseball and NFL and the button on the remote control wouldn’t wear out any time soon.
Hell I ended up watching “Dave” the other night, well if there’s only repeats on I might as well watch the ones I liked from years gone by – “QI”, “Top Gear”, “Red Dwarf”, “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” & “Bottom”.