peterbirks

The exhaustion caught up with me last night and I was dog-tired by 8.30 in the evening. I crashed at about 9.15 and woke up at about 2am. However, rather than get up and play an hour or so on Stars (which I nearly did), I decided to just wallow in the free relaxing time. I got back to sleep until 5am. Excellent.

Curiously, my performance in the gym today was abysmal compared with yesterday, when I was functioning on about two hours' sleep. I hit 23.15 for 5km on the rowing machine on Wednesday, which is better than I can remember doing, er, ever (and I haven't been rowing 5K that much this year, anyway -- sticking to 4km as a rule). This, mark, was after the weight training and 25 minutes on the cross-trainer.

Anyhoo, I wake up at 5am and turn on the morning news on Radio Five. Now, forgive me if I'm wrong, but does what happened last night on The Apprentice qualify as news? I'm not precious about this; perhaps it does (if enough people are curious about what happened). But surely, if it does, then the happenings on Big Brother qualify as well? But one of them is covered because it is a BBC programme, while the other is ignored because it is not.

One expects this kind of thing in Sports Personality of the Year, but I happen to think that news values should focus on a bit more than whether the programme was made by the BBC.

+++++

I've had a tough journalistic week, having to put on two very different and unusual hats from my normal world of financial reporting. On Monday I came into work, only to find that a senior insurance executive had been arrested and sectioned after his two-year old daughter was found seriously injured (she later died). Then, on Tuesday, I had a court case where an ex-insurance CEO was up at Southwark Crown Court for conspiracy to defraud.

Writing about these things is a minefield, with all sorts of conventions needing to be followed if you don't want the courts to throw you into jail for contempt.

+++++

Recent music has included Voxtrot, which is growing on me (think in the mode of Arcade Fire) and is recommended, and Biffy Clyro, whose latest escapade (Puzzle) had me wondering if they had transplanted from Scotland (although not, I suspect, West Lothian) to Austin, Texas, and had hired Avril Lavigne's producer for the record. This was genuine US bubblegum pop for the 2000s. You know the type. Heavy pop chords, shouty anthems. I've only heard it a couple of times, but there seems to be little edge to the music, designed specifically to be shown on one of the Video pop channels, as far as I can see.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You were just lucky - Big Brother is frequently seen as a legitimate news story, even lead, on 5Live's morning news. It's irrelevant that it's on a different channel.

I believe the BBC license fee will be scrapped in my lifetime (hopefully another 40-50 years) so it's just a question of waiting it out. Come the glorious day ...

matt

I don't think the license fee will last much more than 5-6 years. The difficulty of distinguishing between watching on a TV and watching streamed programming will make the thing untenable. Thy should just remove the license and all its anomalies and replace it with a government grant. At the moment it's a little like Road Tax, there's no hypothecation between collecting the tax and doling it out. So why not collect the money from society as a whole and then pay out the agreed amount to the BBC?

Erk?

Yes, obviously.

It isn't anything like Road Tax, any more than it is like "sin tax" (although sloth and wrath are going to be particularly hard to target. The first because, well, collection is going to be a pain; and the second because, in a different way, collection is going to be a pain).

I'm at sea when I read things in various papers about how current media outlets will cope with the Web in the next few years. Geoff is entirely right: there is no point in continuing the license fee at all, from a commercial perspective. (Although I note that BBC Radio has been free of licensing for quite some time, and is much the better for it.)

The future of broadcast is obviously "on the Web." Except that it isn't. This is a very lazy way of describing the underlying medium, which let's face it is just the Ethernet, with the horrid, cacked-up, technological failures above that medium.

Sadly, the only current viable model for making money is via advertising. This might work for the good. Given the example of politics, which for obvious reasons tends to be ahead of other mass-marketing games, I suspect that it is going to come down to Focus Groups.

... and this is even worse, when you consider the drastic collapse in production prices. Sooner or later, everybody is going to be able to produce their own version of "On the buses" in their own living room. Rather like "Readers' Wives," except with even less humour.

In the mean time, I'll stick to BBC7. It's free, it's on the 'net, and I'll be able to record the best bits of the last forty years before Geoff's time limit comes up.

Similar procedures guv. Once upon a time, people with vehicles paid £10 for a license to drive on the roads. Initially that money was used to pay for road maintenance. The government (in the form of the Post Office) took the £100 million and then paid out that money to road-builders.

Then things got out of balance. They collected £200 million but paid out £300 million and things have been going to hell in a handcart ever since. It's a mess because the government try and use a taxation system as a means of social engineering almost completely unrelated to financing roads and maintenance.

With TV Licenses you pay your money to a government agency. The agency collects £1 billion, pays for it's own running costs and hands on £950 million to the government who then pay a pre-agreed sum of £900 million to the BBC. Or whatever the numbers are. So why can't we lose the license, collect £1 billion from taxes in some other unavoidable way and the government still give £900 million to the BBC? That's effectively what happens with radio now.

No need for detector operations, no stupid forms to complete when you buy a set-top box, no anomalies about who needs what. Instead of a advert-free broadcasting operation funded by the government from money raised from the population, we'll have an advert-free operation funded by the government from money raised from the population.

"But it means people who don't have a TV will be subsidising those who've got them." A bit like the childless paying for education, the healthy paying for medical treatment and pacifists paying for the army.

The BBC licence was something that Lord Reith fought very hard for, I believe. The great fear at the time was that mass communication, then at the stage of being possible, but very expensive, would just become the mouthpiece of the government of the day, and would therefore never be trusted. How, therefore, could a broadasting company gain trust that its "news" was unbiased?

The licence fee was the fudge, with the theory being that the money never actually touched the government and there was nothing that the government could do directly to that money without passing an Act of Parliament. This is quite important. There's a big difference between the Chancellor deciding how much to give the BBC this year and the Government needing to go to Parliament to say "The BBC should not get any money this year", partly, of course, because parliament would likely ask why.

Today, the separation is a bit of a fiction, but the BBC wants to maintain that fiction in case of future developments. The problem is, the BBC still thinks in terms of the days of mass communication pre-war (possible, but expensive) whereas today, the "push" concept of broadcast TV is in itself outmoded. Information is easy to get and, crucially, easy to disseminate. So the fear that the BBC will not be unbiased is no longer that relevant, because there are so many other news sources out there.

PJ

Note also that the BBC World Service is funded directly by the Government, and the level of funding is set by the Foreign Office and Treasury every few years. I once spent an interesting few days doing some (unpaid) consultancy work for them analysing their organisation as part of a masters in Public Sector Management. The way in which their funding source differed from the rest of the BBC certainly had an effect on how they perceived themselves and it affected their reaction to external pressures. Whether this had a greater effect than being based in Bush House which at that time was a warren of narrow corridors and small offices - half of which seemed to be empty - was a moot point.

Matt Harrison

"So why not collect the money from society as a whole and then pay out the agreed amount to the BBC?"

Because the BBC is shite. I don't watch it, so why the fuck should I pay for it ?

Sorry, you started me off. Don't start me off about the licence fee.

I think Geoff's point is not that the system would be fair, but that it's no less unfair than the myriad of taxes that you pay (presumably without complaint) that support other things which are shite and which you don't use, such as, for example, the schooling system or the National Health Service. As we both know, life isn't fair, and the sooner we get accustomed to that, the more equipped we are to survive.

Then again, since you don't pay income tax Andy, surely you would want the licence fee to be abolished and for it to be absorbed into government expenditure?

PJ

On the contrary Pete, I did go to school (duh) and as it happens I've had two operations on the NHS, although of course it would still be there for me even if I had never used it to date.

It's just the BBC ... must not go on foul-mouthed rant ... well IMO they're a bunch of useless smug wankers who would be out on the street in no time if they had to pay their own way like everyone else.

Andy.

PS And of course this is a point of principle, my tax status (or lack of) is irrelevant :-)

Fit

no subject

That long?

Re: That long?

Re: That long?

Re: That long?

Re: That long?

Re: That long?

Re: That long?

Re: That long?