Entertainment For Lively Minds
NEWSFLASH: Forgotten old people found cowering behind cupboard by broadcasting think tank
You may be interested to read the following recommendations by The Policy Exchange:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8458271.stm
which recommends that the BBC
"should cut the amount it spends on sports rights, popular entertainment and shows for 16 to 35-year-olds"
and that:
"it should put quality before ratings and leave sport and popular entertainment to commercial channels".
Could this be what we're waiting for? Does this mean the end of public broadcasting ageism? Is this the death knell for brain-dead beeb 3 James Corden vehicles? Will the BBC finally acknowledge that interesting things happen to people older than Ferne Cotton and that being over 40 is not the same as having swine flu?
Will they get the message that the British public actually DO prefer age-disfigured people like Michael Palin and Delia Smith to Alan Yentob, despite what er...Alan Yentob says?
Probably not, but you can hope...
- More from Pax Romana.
- Login or register to post comments
-
Know your enemy
Far be it from me to reduce this to ad hominem attacks, and open debate is good and essential, but look at them :
http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/people/Alumni.cgi
Read through the blurbs of these adolescents and tell me how precisely they are especially qualified to take a carving knife to the broadcasting in this country.
Quangos have had a kicking lately, and what is the BBC if not a quango, but I would be glad to see far fewer of these self-appointed think-tanks rolling up with a report and press release every other day.
Blimey
You're right. They have a combined age of about four, and are probably too nerdy to even make the Hot Chip substitute bench.
Any time is see a think tank
I've never heard of before, I bung their name into sourcewatch to get an idea of where their bias might lie. They list Charles Moore, formerly of the Telegraph as the chairman of their board of governers.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Policy_Exchange
I am not a number
In my opinion the main problem is that not everyone aged between x and y will ever want the same programmes as everyone else. My age puts me more or less in the middle of the demographic that the BBC have apparently been spending lots of money trying to woo, and I've not really been all that enthused by much of it at all. I don't need presenters who act like they are my friends who think that I have some kind of short-term memory problem.
Perhaps age isn't the way to look at this but instead have a variety of programming, rather than finding one model and seeing what other variables can be plugged into it. So much of television feels like one of those flipbooks for children with separate pages for head, torso and legs.
As far as sport in particular goes
Not all of us have Sky and not all of us want it. I'd like to see the BBC buying more sport, the big stuff like international football, the Ryder Cup, Test matches. The stuff Murdoch was allowed to bid for in return for his electoral support.
But I don't want any of those
So I'd be forced onto Sky to avoid them.
Fair point
but the red button is your friend - they can shovel great chunks of the sport onto there, a la Glastonbury, without heavily disrupting the normal schedules.
Tory Boys...
.. the lot of them
Bring back the Earl Grey Whistle Test
The presenters must surely be pensioners by now...
Right Wing Think Tank...
... Wants Potentially Profitable Bits Of The BBC Off Air and Left To Private Sector?
Hmmmm... Rupert Murdoch will be delighted with these findings. Prepare for more of this if the tories are elected folks.
Dear oh dear
doods link really is scary. Not just the pics, although the pic of Head of Education seems to have been replaced by a schoolboy's, what a jolly jape. Actually I have it in for think tanks generally. This one is fairly typical: a bunch of oxbridge boys (note only two women) noodle off into business and politics then due to noblesse oblige (and the fact that all their life they have become used to people listening to their fatuous opinions) they feel the need to give us the benefits of the brilliance. I mean why do we HAVE to listen to these self appointed influential people?
I am sure with all the expertise herein, we could form The Word Policy Forum and issue such edicts. What do you reckon?
"Power to the people" as my colleague in the Tooting Liberation Front was fond of shouting. God, anyone got any Socialist Workers to sell?
To be fair...
and non-partisan for a moment, I think that most thinktank staff look like that, left or right. They're nerd magnets.
Like many of their ilk,
this lot appear to have one key differentiator; they have learned that the glib maxim, "Those who can, do, while those who can't, teach.", can be twisted and taken a step further, turning it into a career path: "Those who are bright and well connected can pontificate".
Their role models were the well heeled perpetual students of old, but these guys have gone one better and become management consultants. Their special skill is to find funding from somewhere which allows them to comment upon things that affect the rest of us, without their having to enjoy the consequences of their own advice.
The Labour Party has been accused of using too much 'spin'. Ye Gods.
Absolutely agree VV
I had some peripheral experience of a think tank and a very clever guy made the exact same observations you make in your second para on that group.
This Policy Exchange document...
... is basically yet another of these things conjured up by a centre-right / free market group whose interests lie in the erosion of the BBC. Thus, I think, they are probably best ignored.
but...
The BBC seems to have been perpetually under attack from the current government. I am not sure if this is a party political thing. Maybe the BBC really is a bit of a dinosaur?