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The BBC is an anomaly. It is funded by a completely arbitrary tax - the licence fee. Only 41 per cent of the population still think this is an appropriate funding mechanism. Yet, for now, the licence fee is rigorously imposed nonetheless, as I found when I decided it was pointless to pay it since I didn't switch the TV on from one month to the next, except to watch DVDs.
You get endless threatening letters. Then you get surprise visits by "enforcement officers". Several million such raids are made each year. Paying for the BBC is not optional, I soon learned.
Yet despite this thuggery, the corporation likes to think of itself as one of the great institutions of the land. To show itself worthy of this status and thus the licence fee, it tries to curry favour with the Government not so much through the excellence of its programming as by keenly conforming to daft precepts about how such a public body should be run.
In charge of "overall creative and leadership responsibility" for all BBC television is "Director of Vision" Jana Bennett, OBE. She has just made a terrible speech called "Beyond the M25: a BBC for all of the UK". In it she proposed sending lots of established programmes off to be made in the provinces in order to be seen to be enforcing "diversity" and diminishing the importance of London.
In her numbing BBC jargon, Bennett put it like this: "Talent clusters will be supported and reinforced by moving a number of programme strands from their current locations to the nations and regions by 2012."
Newsnight Review, Question Time and The Weakest Link will be dispatched to Scotland. Fatuously, the Chelsea Flower Show will in future be covered from Birmingham. All for political reasons, against all sense.
Everybody who works in London knows that it's called the capital because it's the centre. It's hard to state this obvious truth brutally enough. It's because it's the centre of national life that most of us are here. We know that with special force because most of us weren't born here. We strove to make it. Bennett's obsequiousness to the regions is completely phoney and everybody knows it. It's cant.
In her address to the Royal Television Society, Bennett actually spoke aloud the corporation's holy slogan: "I embrace diversity". That's not the entirety of the BBC's most sacred mantra, though.
In its entirety, the text runs "I embrace diversity", and then, sotto voce but never to be omitted, "and I love the licence fee". In Jana Bennett's own case, she's probably quite fervent about it, I'd guess. Last year, we paid her £536,000 in salary and bonus. At £139.50 a go, that was 3,842 licence fees all for her. Maybe, if I'm lucky, mine among them.
Madge does nothing for men
For a quarter of a century now it's been a bafflement to me that lots of otherwise apparently intelligent women have been so excited by Madonna, indeed taken her as a role model. Over the years she's been responsible for encouraging all sorts of rubbish fingerless gloves, footless tights, corsets, leotards, crucifixes. Now Madonna is divorcing Guy Ritchie. It's all very sad. For the most important fact about Madonna is that no man has ever been in the least interested in her, let alone sexually attracted to her, at any stage of her career.
Perhaps I move among the over-discerning? I think not. Even Martin Amis, never too picky, memorably complained when called upon to assess her Sex book, "she hasn't done a damned thing for me physically since she went blonde and hardbody circa 1986".
Madonna is best understood perhaps as a one-woman installation, powerfully expressing the depth of the misunderstandings that exist between the sexes.
Arboricultural oversight
Walking around super-lavish Kings Place, near King's Cross, is a disconcerting experience. Here private money has created a huge cultural centre underneath an office block. It seems an incredible last fling. Kings Place boasts London's first new concert hall since the Barbican and lots of art exhibitions. That's not all. Dotted all around are yet more sculptures. They occupy the space very oddly, especially given that many of them resemble giant turds dropped by the very biggest of dinosaurs.
What there is not, among all this art, is any trees.
Correction: there is one, a beautiful Robinia pseudoacacia "Frisia", visible right through the building. But it's on the other side of Battlebridge Basin, not part of Kings Place at all. Too much sculpture, not enough trees.
Reader views (4)
Dear Sir,
The London Evening Standard dated 17/10/08 had an editorial regarding the BBC. Apparently the BBC payed it's "Director of Vision" Jana Bennett last year £536,000. A Director of Vision does what exactly to earn £536,000. I have a vision too, it is of an old age pensioner who can not afford to both eat and heat their home at the same time. Do away with the license fee and let their be heat.
Last night on the BBC 6 o'clock news they had a segment about a shipping container filled with scotch whiskey that the BBC is shipping around the world. What can shipping whiskey around the world have anything to do with quality broadcasting? This is surreal, do they have meetings in the Director of Vision's Office at the end of the year and start panicking because God forbid they might end up with a surplus.
Jana Bennett yells to her staff (read relatives), "Quick increase Jonathan Ross's salary another million and ship whiskey around the world, our employees can drink it when it arrives back in London".
It is time for a national referendum regarding the BBC's license fee and their total disregard for the value of money. Let the BBC go commercial and pay taxes like any other corporation. Then it would be interesting to see how much Ms. Bennett's visions were worth!
Yours sincerely,
Graeme Martin
- Graeme Martin, London, 23/10/2008 08:09
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Luring them away?? Who would hire these talentless mediocrities?
In the States PBS is as good as the BBC and that is with a little help from their friends. The BBC has few friends and quite a few enemies.
No wonder they are scared.
- Minnie, London, UK, 22/10/2008 15:15
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Maybe in return for these ludicrous salaries, paid out of our taxes and which the BBC claim are necessary in order to prevent the private sector luring away their top staff, employees like Jana Bennett should have to show documentary evidence that anyone else is willing to offer them a better deal.
- R. Goodacre, London SW15, 17/10/2008 14:51
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Shifting Casualty from Bristol to Cardiff means that BBC employees will be able to boost their income with inflated expenses as they travel back to Bristol to do the filming. Imagine the cost of BBC Sports covering 2012 by staff based in Salford!
- Dave, London, 17/10/2008 14:24
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