Time to bid the BBC 'bye,bye'?

If old Auntie Beeb was a horse, they would shoot it.

 

It is an anachronism, maintaining the absurdity of a broadcasting system financed by a compulsory licence fee whether watched or not (increasingly ‘not’). It is facing its ‘Kodak’ moment when it becomes an irrelevance also. It is the terminally-ill ‘Guardian’ in pictures and is going the same way.

 

It seems to be unable to do anything right. Never mind the scandals of the annus horribilis. It now transpires that its business management is totally inept. In a survey of Britain’s most and least admired businesses, the BBC comes last in the management of corporate assets. It comes second from last for quality of management, although the number of top brass earning 6-figure salaries has increased when we were promised that the fat cats would be culled.

 

It manages to stay 1 place overall above the worst 10 duds against some pretty stiff competition in the race to the bottom – Irish Banks, First Group (the operator of appalling railway companies), with Ladbrokes coming in last.

 

The reward for this miserable showing  has been a rash of pay-offs above and beyond the Beeb’s contractual obligations.

 

There was a time when its moral standing was unimpeachable. That has been irretrievably lost by the Savile scandal and the accompanying denials, prevarication, and general duck-shoving, when it is abundantly obvious that BBC bosses must have known all along what was happening.

 

BBC News used to set the standard for objective and unbiased reporting. Its dedicated partiality towards the EU and Palestine, its determinedly leftish stance on politics, its anti-Israel bias have now resulted in viewers leaving in droves to Al Jazeera.

 

Until very recently  some of the former quality could be seen on BBC World. It carried excellent documentaries, business programmes for the Middle East and South East Asia, the outstanding ‘Dohar Debate’ and other top quality material. Now peak viewing time in SE Asia comprises mostly of rolling news; much of the quality stuff is still produced, but it is transmitted at GMT, which means that ‘Asia Business’ hits Singapore or Bangkok at about 4 a.m.

 

On the entertainment side, a minute scrutiny of the programme schedules is need to find anything worth watching, except where tastes run to potty-mouthed ’comedians’ and irrelevant sex scenes.

 

BBC programme warnings never say ‘adult or pornographic content’,  ‘foul language’, or ‘gratuitous nudity’. But they do say ‘may contain flash photography’.

 

Perhaps they should also say ‘contains nuts’.