Over the last 30 years the BBC has stealthily assumed the mantle of the nation’s cultural and social anthropological arbiter. This has encouraged them to foist on their listeners and viewers certain performers – mostly in the non-talent-related field of presenting – of minority types to which they feel we should become accustomed and appreciate. A recent example of this activity is the adoption and promotion of the untalented, blubber-lipped, dim-witted, mono-toned, unfunny, unattractive fatso, Adrian Chiles.
Slowly, inexorably as the style wizards at the BEEB have let it be seen that Chubby Chiles represents a suitable role model for our young and impressionable, his flabby frame has been increasingly exposed – until they have given him an early prime time slot on the One Show, a kind of Blue Peter for almost-grown-ups, to which a well-groomed orang-utan could not fail to draw knackered and desensitized viewers after a hard day’s work.
But someone up there in White (Ivory Tower) City has at last spotted that Chiles is about as exciting a performer as a plate of blancmange, and they’ve thought it expedient to replace him on the all-important Friday show with the idiotic but immeasurably more watchable Chris Evans (despite the Ginger One not speaking Brummie, Ulster or Geordie.)
Chiles’ blubbery lower lip is reported to have gone all wobbly at the news. He says he doesn’t want to do the other days if Evans does Friday sitting next to the perma-grinning Christine Bleakley. The BBC are said even to have offered him his own Friday night Plug-Whinge-And-Fart Show – what they like to call a Chat Show.
Incredibly, Chubby Chiles is on a £1m a year contract. It is contemptible that the Corporation should chuck our money around to people like this without even asking us. I challenge them to provide any evidence that there is a demand for Chiles, or others like him – e.g: the grim Mogadon that is Stephen Nolan, brought over from Belfast at great expense every week to turn off the listeners of otherwise perky Radio 5 Live for four hours over the weekend.
If Chiles walks from the One Show – which he is mercifully threatening to do – don’t be surprised if they try and slip Nolan in – another dreary fatty with no manners and a bowl of French fries on each shoulder.
And this is not the first time I’ve had to talk about this…

Popularity: 6% [?]

Over the last few months Rupert Murdoch has displayed uncharacteristic shilly-shallying over whether or not to charge for online access to the contents of his mainstream papers. (He already charges for digital access to the specialist Wall Street Journal.) It has finally been announced through Times editor, James Harding that his paper – along with other News Corp titles around the world – will definitely be charging for access to online journalism from Spring 2010.
   Old Rumplechops has many regrettable traits, but being a fool isn’t one of them, and it’s hard to argue with the logic of his response to the reality that any serious commercial news medium must generate enough income to pay for quality news gathering (overlooking for a moment the high costs and penalties incurred by one of News Corp’s more disreputable British titles as a result of the systematic invasion of privacy, subterfuge, incitement to crime and plain old phone-screwing that has passed as news gathering for years under former managing editor, Stuart Kuttner).
   It is inevitable that any reliable and responsibly operated news organisation, in order to survive, will, in the end, have to charge for its product however it is disseminated. And most serious news consumers won’t object. Many already buy fewer hard-copy newspapers each week than they used to, and top up with online editions for free. But those who want to continue to receive quality news, independent analysis and opinion will accept that, in the absence of sufficient advertising revenue to fill the vastly greater space and choices available to advertisers online, it has to be paid for somehow.

Where Harding and (presumably) Murdoch are wrong is in insisting that pay-per-item isn’t the way. He says they’ll offer long term subscriptions, or a daily rate. But this doesn’t reflect the way people now use web news services. They are more promiscuous in their relationship with online news purveyors than they are with the hard copy news they buy. (For example, the Guardian is the online best-seller among British papers, with nearly 33m. worldwide unique online users while it has a hard copy circulation of just 300,000 , compared with the Daily Telegraph’s circulation of c.800,000 with 31m. online users, and the Daily Mail’s huge 2,000,000 circulation and 30m. unique worldwide users.)
As the option to view several different versions or perspectives is there, the users do take advantage of it.
It’s likely that the ultimate means of charging and collecting revenue from online visitors will consist of users signing up to a general news service provider, that will allow then into whichever paper they want to visit, having paid into the single service an advance sum on account of incremental payments of say, 15p per article which the service distributes to the newspapers used.
Multiple subscriptions would be time-consuming and tedious to maintain; most people wouldn’t bother to sign up to everything for that reason. But using a central hub and payment platform, they would be able to access anything from the Tablet, the Spectator or the Telegraph, to the Mail or the News of the World.
Inevitably, some publications – like the Guardian, which already has a very successful online presence – will do better than others, and the competitive incentive for continuing to deliver high-quality, trustworthy news will be as strong as ever.
In practical terms, someone currently spending £15 a week on printed papers and weeklies would be able, for the same money, to access 100 separate articles from the whole range of titles on offer in their newsagent – probably more than most would consume in seven days.
I couldn’t find any logic in Harding’s assertion that “with article-only economics, you will find yourself writing a lot more about Britney Spears and a lot less about Tamils in Northern Sri Lanka.” In case he hadn’t noticed, this is precisely what already separates the Broadsheets from the Tabloids, and has done ever since anyone first noticed the difference.
Regrettably, the single biggest obstacle to the success of online news charging, however achieved, has been widely identified as the BBC’s online news service, which of course doesn’t have to compete for advertising income, because its news gathering operation is funded by the Licence Fee. It can and has been argued that providing free online services is not part of the Corporation’s remit under the terms of their broadcasting charter. After all, they’ve never offered the Radio Times free to all licence holders.
A brave government must address this anomaly by disallowing the BBC to offer this free service, except perhaps in the most basic, headline terms, for if this doesn’t happen, we may well witness within a decade or so in this country the death through lack of resources of the strong, independent news providers we currently have – online and on paper.

Popularity: 2% [?]

If the BBC are going to invite Nick Griffin back on Question Time, to avoid complaints of unfair treatment they’ll have to put him on with a group of similarly ill-informed saloon bar ranters. But I shan’t be watching; the views of men of limited knowledge and tunnel vision tend to pall too rapidly to provide good television.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Sometimes I love the British Broadcasting Corporation; and sometimes I think it’s a bit of an Arse.

 I guess it’s characteristic of the English that their major institutions often mirror each other in the way they operate – like their love of change for its own sake. Frequent change is perceived as essential, not necessarily to improve or in any way alter the exercise of a function, but to give the appearance that things are happening, decisions are being made. It suggests among other things, that the hierarchy are, at least, alive.

          Take, for instance, the Church of England, and the innovations instituted by the current Bishop of Hereford, Anthony Priddis. When he moved into the Bishop’s Palace in 2004 he showed that he was a man with a thorough understanding of the value of change. Perhaps he had in mind the words of a former Anglican churchman, later Catholic Cardinal, John Henry Newman – “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”  

          In any event, to show that he wished to be closer to his new congregation than his predecessors and that in these liberal, classless times it just wasn’t right that a bishop should live in a Palace, he changed the name of his dwelling from the “Bishop’s Palace” to the “Bishop’s House”. Everything else stayed the same, but now he just lived in a house, and no doubt, his congregation felt all the better for it. And he’d made a change.

          Take, also, the BBC’s decision to replace Ed Stourton with Justin Webb in R4’s Today Programme. I suggested last December when the decision was announced that it was perhaps because it was felt by R4 Controller, Mark Damazer that Stourton wasn’t jokey enough and didn’t possess that flippant touch which has, it seems, become so essential to mass broadcasting. It was also possible that he was perceived as too flagrantly posh – still considered a fairly serious sin among the ‘80s intake of Beeb execs. Now, at last, we’ve had a taste of Justin Webb’s efforts on Today, it’s clear that it can’t have been for either of these reasons – for Webb displays no more jokiness (which is something) and rather less humour; he doesn’t have an identifiably regional accent, sounds only marginally less posh than Stourton and certainly lacks the gravitas and politely probing interview techniques of his predecessor.        

It turns out to be no more than a ploy by a BBC executive to show that he’s earning his salary by making a high profile change – nothing more, in other words, than a bit of territory marking; the controller cocking his leg on the bushes to let people know he’s still around.

          “Poshness is not the answer to this question,” Damazer told the Guardian.  ”I don’t think there is anybody I respect or like more in journalism. What I won’t do is a line-by-line, argument by argument anatomy about the strengths and weaknesses of various Radio 4 presenters. What I will say is that the Ed decision only makes sense in the context of Justin. In terms of how it was handled it was a manual in how not to do it: we were rubbish. We just did it wrong.”

          Meanwhile the punters have no say; a lesser man has been foisted upon the programme’s six million listeners, simply because the control wants to show them he’s still got balls.

Popularity: 1% [?]

As Murdoch talks of charging for online access to his British papers, the BBC’s Licence Fee could still annihilate the British Press.

The BBC is paid by the British public to provide public broadcasting services. In principle, despite the currently somewhat muted champions of market forces, most of us still support the concept.

BBC Radio provides a service that is unique in world communications.

BBC TV has for a long time fought the urge to submit entirely to raw populism, and although its grip on that resolve sometimes seems to falter, it still strives, and generally succeeds in delivering a broad and reflective range of programmes and is used by a large proportion of the public who pay for it.

However, it has also inevitably become a major presence among those organisations competing in the dissemination of information through the internet, where its public funding gives it a huge and inherently unfair advantage.

Popularity: 1% [?]