Chris Bertram is talking about the BBC on his weblog, after he recieved a link from the Biased BBC weblog. He notes some things I’m annoyed with as well:
So what do I think about the BBC? I’m not particularly keen on the way it is financed (by a regressive poll tax) and I’m sure that will change given the multiplication of channels. The BBC’s current position strikes me as untenable given the way it uses the licence fee to subsidise its aggressive competition with the private sector via ventures such as BBC Choice, BBC4, BBC Style, BBC Everything Else and in the magazine market with its range of music, gardening, history etc etc offerings. I think I’m right in saying that they’ve now been barred from surreptitiously advertising some of these products on their main TV channels, but, all the same, magazines like History Today have to compete in a market against a product bearing the imprimatur of the prestigious public service broadcaster and containing numerous TV tie- ins, listings and so on. That strikes me as unfair.
I don’t really agree on the licence fee, as it does make the BBC more independent from the government than if they had to depend on funding from general taxes. I was against the similar arrangment we had here, true, but that was because we had the worst of both worlds: a licence fee *and* lots of commercials.
As for Chris’ other points, I quite agree. I get very annoyed with the amount of advertising the BBC does themselves for channels I’ll never see and I do think the BBC has gone too commercial in the last five years or so: BBC World e.g. is nothing but a rebranded CNN with british accents. I also think the quality of the two main channels has drastically gone down: too much socalled reality programmes showing some rich upper class twits getting their life laundried or their gardens the size of Devon redone or buying a second home, a small little castle near Windsor. The less said about [fx: annoying Scottish accent]Fame Academy[/fx] the better. And spare me Pauline “can’t act, can annoy” Quirk, please. However, Chris has a point when he says:
At the same time, I thing a great deal of what the BBC produces (like the Robert Hughes programme on Gaudi and the documentary on Algeria I mentioned recently) is really great stuff. And a lot of the best drama of recent years has been on the BBC (would Denis Potter ever have gone so far without it?). Channel 4 used to provide an alternative arena for good programming, but in recent years it has become dominated by reality TV, crap gameshows, chat programmes from hell and other dross (yes, even more than the BBC).
The strength of the BBC at the moment seems to me to lie in its non-fiction programmes. Series like “What did the Victorians do for us?”, “The Blue Planet” or “Life of Mammals” are just plain brilliant and it’s hard to see any other tv channel doing them.
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