If a Mafia don forced you and your neighbours to pay him protection and he later had the brass neck to claim that you were getting great value for money instead of the services offered by free marketeers, I think you would, humble reader, suspect a bit of a flaw in the logic. Well, that flaw appears to be lost on the author of a piece that carries the headline, “Why Jonathan Ross is worth the money”. For people who have been blessed with ignorance as to whom Ross is, he is a foul-mouthed, extremely well paid late-night chatshow host and movie pundit who, among other recent glittering performances, told the US actress Gwyneth Paltrow and mother of two children that he’d like to f**k her. Classy.
Excerpt:
The most important thing is that in everything the BBC does, the trust is looking for it to demonstrate as often as possible an understanding that it must justify the licence fee by striving constantly to deliver the highest standards and programmes that stand out from the crowd.
The public values talented performers – but expects, rightly, that it will get the best possible value when paying for them.
The author of this piece forgets that value is in the eye of the beholder. If I think that I get value for money for shopping in Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s or Walmart, that is my judgement, made on the basis of my choice, for specific goods that I happen to buy. If one of those supermarket chains demanded that I pay them a flat fee every year regardless of whether I shopped there or not, and claimed that its services/goods were “great value for money”, and employed loutish staff, I think I might be a tad unimpressed by that logic.
The only way to know if the BBC offers value for money is to let customers pay for it out of their own free will. Everything else is special pleading.
I wouldn’t let people pay for it, I wouldn’t privatise it, I wouldn’t look at advertising or alternative funding arrangements. I’d close it down, sell off its assets and copyrights. Maybe its archive could go in some kind of Peeples’ Trust or something, but the organisation deserves only destruction. Besides it being a nest of statists with all sorts of nasty connections in the political class, simple free market principles tell us that privatising this behemoth that was created by the state to blunder about would be a disaster for the broadcasting market. I’d just order its staff not to turn up for work, ring it with troops to stop the bastards commandeering it in some kind of wanky protest, and flog the whole thing off as fast as it could be got through Parliament.
I don’t care if it offers value for money, or if it could offer value for money. It’s the worst kind of creature of the state, and we need to be free of it.
The only way to know if the BBC offers value for money is to let customers pay for it out of their own free will.
I agree wholeheartedly with you in principle. In practice I accept that the BBC produces high quality content e.g. it’s hard to imagine that Radio 3 or 4 would remain the island of intelligent radio in an ocean of semi-literate babble if it were privatized.
I have the same problem with the BBC as most people around here – it is thoughtlessly prejudiced and yet smugly convinced of its own impartiality. BBC staff genuinely believe they are impartial but they haven’t examined their own antipathy to commerce. They haven’t questioned their assumption that charities are more worthwhile than companies or their policy of allowing branding when it happens to be a political organization e.g. “research by the UN…” but far less generously when it’s a company “research by an insurance company…”. Theirs is perhaps the correct view on the world, albeit one with which I wholeheartedly disagree. So they may be right but they do not deserve a platform for which I pick up the bill in order to make their case.
I’ll quit rehearsing all the familiar arguments against the BBC and get on with my point: For all the problems I have with its politics, I don’t think we should be so bigoted that we can’t recognize what’s good about the BBC.
Then privatise it
The BBC has in it’s favour a number of excellent titles and a host of technically brilliant staff. Sell the whole thing to Sky or ITV and let them worry about it.
Sell the archives as well. Separately or together with the operating company. The good stuff will get repeated or remade or re-imagined, the bad stuff will fade away.
Anyone who has ever contracted for the BBC, as I have, knows exactly where the licence fee goes. It goes into endless pointless meetings with people called Jules, Seb and Tim who have no idea what’s going on but need to be invited to meetings or else someone might notice that they do fuck all else. Plenty of fat to trim there.
Admittedly that was 12 years ago but I am reliably assured that its still the same today.
It’s too broke to fix, and privatising would produce the worst of all worlds, with a bloated behemoth distorting the marketplace. It needs to go.
There’s nothing to stop other companies buying the rights to all the quality programmes I keep hearing it makes. I’m sure somebody would want to buy the rights to Doctor Who.
Well, I’d also quite like to fuck Gwyneth Paltrow but I’d be thinking of Cate Blanchett.
Actually no, just Cate. No way am I putting up with Chris Martin’s sloppy seconds. It would be all yellow. Or something.
The question is, are radio 3 and 4 worth paying £3.2bn a year for in forced extractions of money? The televisual output of the BBC is mostly execrable rubbish.
If these two radio stations are worth keeping, pay for them seperately with state money (no more than £50m, I’d imagine) and let the rest be paid for commercially – it is commercial programming after all.
Finally someone got back on topic:-)
While I would like to see the BBC totally dismembered as much as the next guy, anything that got rid of the licence fee would be a huge step forwards. As far as bloated behemoths distorting the marketplace, we have had that for the last century, which is why all Britain’s privately owned electronic media companies are such weird and feeble beasts.
Rob is right. It is commercial programming. The BBC act like it’s commercial, they chase ratings and sell merchandise yet they also claim a special exemption. I can’t remember what it was called but we had a start-up subscription arts channel on Sky and CATV which the BBC strangled at birth by setting-up BBC 4 which provided a similar service “free”.
The point at which I realized quite how insane it all was was when I looked at a website with a list of bizarre laws. You know the sort of thing. There’s a town in Montana where you can be fined for having an ugly horse. Somewhere in New England it’s illegal to “educate a dog” etc. In this list someone had included, “And in England you need a license to own a TV!”
OK, I now have Sky but for many years I managed on the usual five channels (I have Sky now because we can’t get decent reception here – they also do our internet and phone) but I paid, through the license fee, for the likes of BBC3 and BBC4 which I couldn’t even watch. How is that fair? About 30% of the populace are still on analogue and they’re still paying for it. They’re probably also paying for DAB they can’t receive. Some of them might not have a computer and can’t access the BBC’s online services.
There’s going to be some really pissed-off people when they start shutting down analogue. I once worked trying to sell ITV Digital. Freeview is only marginally better and just as hit and miss. The BBC adverts about getting a freeview box for a few quid are utterly disingenuous. You might need to spend over a hundred notes on a new aerial. It might not work even then. You might not be cabled and you might not be allowed to have a sat dish (in national parks and such). There will be hell to pay.
In any case technology is going to call time on the Beeb. When Grid (the CERN developed ubernet) comes online as a consumer product and enables you to download “Return of The King (extended version)” in 2s then the broadcast model is buggered.
I don’t see why Radio 3 and 4 can’t be run on the (American) Public Radio model.
That is to say, no advertising, but if you like it you send them money. The incentive being, pay for it or lose it.
If not enough people are willing to pay, then it’s end of story.
Spot on. What a loathsome, arrogant bigot.
I have sympathy for the view that the BBC produces some good quality but this is far outweighed by the damage done by their distortions. I call them Minitrue.
I’m not convinced moving the BBC to a subscription basis is as politically difficult as some imagine it to be. If, for instance, the Conservatives announced that they were to get rid of the license fee – most emphatically not to privatise the Beeb or to shut it down, but simply to scrap the license fee – they would have gained my vote and the votes of many others.
More importantly, however, any criticism levelled at their policies by Humphrys, Naughtie, Robinson, et al., could easily be dismissed with a “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you? After all, we’re cutting off your gravy train.”
Well, I suppose that Jonathan has overlooked the success of Costco, Sam’s Club and BJ and other membership retailers, in the U S.
Of course this differs from being required to join (via tax), so subscription set top boxes will probably be the ultimate answer as consumer dissatisfaction sets in. Then the boxes will be built in to sets, and capable of being set to the subscribed services.
You will always pay for what you get; not necessarily get what you pay for.
Andrew, American public radio and TV are partially financed by the taxpayers, through the NEA.
The majority of what you see and hear on the BBC is privately produced. The problems with this arrangement are caused by the incestuous relationship between the Beeb and many of these private production companies and the army of Media Studies graduates the Beeb employs to micromanage these productions.
There is, therefore, no real bar to the Beeb, or any other broadcasting company, continuing to produce high quality, or innovative, programming under a subscription or advertising model, provided they can attract people to pay for them.
The Beebs main, (public), defense against the privatisation argument is the “you’ll lose all the high quality or innovative programmes” which argument usually boils down to David Attenborough and “The Office”. If the licence paying public can be convinced that this “baby with the bath water” argument is specious, then all that would remain to be done would be to break the incestuous relationship between the Beeb and the politicians.
Oh well, no-one said it would be easy.
I fear that Radio 3 is not looking as good as in the past. Parts of it are getting distinctly shoddy, “Breakfast” does no one any favours. The Chopin weekend was good but for every one of those there is a lot of inane chat and advertising of the worst sort. I also noticed that the Festival of English Music the weekend before last never got a mention, perhaps it was the “England” word that spoilt it.
I don’t see why Radio 3 and 4 can’t be run on the (American) Public Radio model.
Much as I like NPR there really isn’t any comparison between any of the local (Seattle) NPR stations and Radio 4. The production standards are a joke, the programming has some high spots but there really isn’t any comparison between, say, “… don’t tell me…” and “The News Quiz”.
There are no flagship news programmes for peak time that resemble PM or Today which, bias aside, still provide me with a better overview of world news that anything I can find here.
To a certain extent, Nick M is quite right, once the Internet is up to the task, broadcast TV as we grew up with it will be a thing of the past. The core problem is there is a risk there with the production model that might not be easily resolved.
Making good TV is always going to be pretty expensive and without subscriptions/advertising/taxes I think I’ve seen what the result is and Miro/YouTube et al are not a substitute.
The Beeb would never survive in the real world. A secret BBC survey found that 58% of people would never watch BBC if given a choice – and that is exactly why the TV tax is wrong!
In my house, I pay a TV tax to watch Top Gear which has around 10 episodes a year and MotoGP which is 14 hours or so a year – both are on BBC2,
That is some damned expensive TV!
Would J Ross be any more or less foul-mouthed (or “talented”) on say, a wage of £5,000 a week?
Or does the need to fawn over attractive female actresses require extra pay to make sure he does it properly?
And if J Ross went because he wasn’t rewarded enough, would there be any chance the Beeb could get another presenter for this show?
The “quality” argument is a canard anyway. There’s no way to define quality objectively, so what it comes down to is state subsidy of stuff the nobs think is good for us, or which they like. If opera, ballet and string quartets have limited appeal, then those industries have to shrink to match the demand. The argument usually stumped up at this point is that a nation is defined by its level of high quality (nob) culture or something like that, but again there’s no justification for that. So you end up with “I want everybody forced to pay for string quartets on radio 3 under threat of imprisonment, because I like string quartets”.
Well, the free market will still have string quartets, if less of them, than the subsidised statist (s)nob market we currently have, but they might have to play in smaller, more appropriate halls. Likewise opera might have to learn how to produce Parsifal on a moderate budget rather than in an vast opera house on extravagant sets. You can sing or scratch a fiddle anywhere.
Of course the BBC tax should be abolished (the telephone number wages of Mr “Woss”, a man who can not pronounce his own name, just adds to the inate wrongness of the whole principle) – but the horrible thing about Britain is that the private broadcasters have the same leftist political opinions.
It is not just the television stations (the wall to wall leftism of ITV and C4) – it is the radio stations also.
On Sunday I heard a film music programme on “Classic F.M.” and it was messed up (as such shows always are) by the presenter giving endless lazy leftist opinions – films judged by the politics, although he did not even have the honesty to say that is what he was doing. It was just “True Lies” bad film, “Syrania” good film (etc).
And today I heard on a local radio station more leftist stuff – not presented as a leftist opinion to be balanced by another view, but simply as museings about “profound” films (films that were not only leftist – but so boring that hardly anyone paid to see them).
Every station has leftist voices – even on Fox News there are endless examples of leftist nonsense (for example one of the regulars on “Redeye” claimed that the reason a few people in Hollywood were supporting John McCain was because they were rich and “rich people support Republicans” – ignoring both the general point that most billionaries are on the left in the United States, and the specific fact that the Hollywood rich are overwhelmingly on the left) but, in the United States, there are also other voices – both on Fox News and on talk radio.
Here it is knee jerk “liberal” leftism on almost all stations almost all the time.
It is the basic structure of the industry, the regulations, that create this.
I don’t see the connection to Costco. I have a Costco membership, because it’s worth it to me. If they cease to be worthwhile, I can simply stop using them and stop paying for it, and join Sam’s Club instead. Or do nothing and keep my money entirely. That’s probably not viable with the BBC.
Also, I could give a damn whether the BBC produces high-quality programming. They could produce a sequel to Brokeback Mountain directed by Howard Stern and starring Kate Beckinsale, Cate Blanchett, Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Jessica Simpson, and Halle Berry, and my complaint would still be not about the content (definitely not about the content!) but about the coercion.
Paul,
They don’t know they’re doing it. Remember a few years back they celebrated “50 years of the NHS” on the 50p coin? Do you think anyone involved thought that might be controversial at all? That the creation of the stonking Stalinist heffalump was in fact a party-political issue and therefore inappropriate for the coin of the Realm? Like death and taxes (and it involves a lot of both) it is now thoroughly institutionalised within the general meta-context.
You can call for the abolition of the monarchy or disestablishment of the Church of England and lots of people will agree with you. Call for the scrapping of the NHS (or the BBC or the UN) and you will be regarded as totally batshit mental.
OK. I bet you don’t know what electron beam tomography is? I only heard of it a few years back. There was one such scanner in the entire UK. They were in half the ERs of the USA by then. Some Americans get crap healthcare because that’s all they can afford. Everyone here does. Why do you think Madonna, married to an Englishman and living in London flew to LA to give birth? Same reason I pay Sky and the BBC.
Sunfish,
You seem to like your “Jessicas”. Good taste about Ms Berry and Ms Blanchett though. If you’re suggesting a movie about shock-jock group lesbian cowgirl sex then can I be casting director? I would conduct some very thorough auditions. 😉
Nick M.
I agree on most points – but I think there is quite a lot of support for stopping taxpayers money going to the vile B.B.C. and to the U.N.
Partly this is because they do not support the principle of having money taken from them by the threat of violence to finance the folk at the B.B.C. (whereas they, sadly, do support the principle of tax money going for health care – although they admit the N.H.S. is not very good in practice), but it is also (contra Sunfish) a matter of content. The unthinking knee jerk “liberal” bias of the B.B.C. irritates many ordinary people.
However, sadly “enlightened” people make these choices – and these people have been “educated”.
Someone can be very clever (good at X, Y, Z) but just come out with the (crack brained) political principles they have been taught – Warren Buffet is an example.
Although, I admit, the super rich (the billionaries) live in a different world (a world in which tax levels and regulations are no longer important to them – as they have already made as much money as they want) and it is common among them to come out with crack brained political opinions.
Nick M.
I agree on most points – but I think there is quite a lot of support for stopping taxpayers money going to the vile B.B.C. and to the U.N.
Partly this is because they do not support the principle of having money taken from them by the threat of violence to finance the folk at the B.B.C. (whereas they, sadly, do support the principle of tax money going for health care – although they admit the N.H.S. is not very good in practice), but it is also (contra Sunfish) a matter of content. The unthinking knee jerk “liberal” bias of the B.B.C. irritates many ordinary people.
However, sadly “enlightened” people make these choices – and these people have been “educated”.
Someone can be very clever (good at X, Y, Z) but just come out with the (crack brained) political principles they have been taught – Warren Buffet is an example.
Although, I admit, the super rich (the billionaries) live in a different world (a world in which tax levels and regulations are no longer important to them – as they have already made as much money as they want) and it is common among them to come out with crack brained political opinions.
Here’s how screwed up that is:
In the emergency medical services in the US, a common protocol is that, in any event where there’s a mechanism that could cause spinal injury, and the patient lost consciousness at all, he’s automatically going to be transported taped to a spine board and stabilized. He won’t be taken off until his spine is actually imaged by the tomography that you mention.
Which is really tricky when the hospital doesn’t have a scanner.
You’re hired. However, I have to tell you, the budget is what I got on me right now, which probably wouldn’t take an average family through the drive-through lane at Dairy Queen. Seventeen bucks won’t buy a whole lot of lesbian cowgirl group sex.