BBC set to announce budget cuts

[Win2Win Racing]

The BBC is to announce how it proposes to make budget cuts of 20% as a result of the freeze to the licence fee.

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[Win2Win]

About time, they've wasted sooooo much money over the years as like the governments, they get so used to the income increasing year on year

[barneymather]

They might have got rid of Hollywood celeb ego-massager and all-round crawler Jonathan Ross and his £6m a year, but there's still lots of Beeb employees on megabucks.

DG Mark Thompson gets £834,000 a year and 'Director of Vision' (WTF?) Jana Bennett is on £534,000 per annum. And there's always the £18m+ annual taxi bill to keep the accounts dept. busy.

It's a measure of how far from reality the Beeb's management are when they see nothing wrong with spending 50 grand a day on taxis. Of our money of course, not theirs, although they see it as their own big pot of gold to dip into whenever they feel like it.

[vegyjones]

They must spend an awful lot transporting sports correspondents and commentators around the globe, when to save money they could actiulally comentate from a studio in the UK wwhile watching events on a monitor like the rest of us.

I'm sure they claim there is a good reason for sending tv and radio people to all these events but you wouldn't get it past the boss at a private sector business.

[barneymather]

Apparently the taxi costs have spiked as the BBC needs a constant stream of 'talking heads' to fill slots on their rolling news programmes...which hardly anyone watches.

Most guests won't turn up unless they get a taxi there and back, to which I would say fine, we won't bother and will just run a film or stay with the presenter.

But of course the Beeb being the Beeb, they agree to anything as the money isn't theirs to squander. Times journalist Rod Liddle worked at the BBC and he says there are lots of well-paid staff there who do very little but the BBC can't afford to get rid of them thanks to their gold standard terms and conditions, paid for by mugs like us.

The BBC has just announced job cuts, albeit that they're being phased out over 6 years, something I've never heard of in my life. Which commercial organisation could afford to stagger pay-offs over that length of time?

At its best the BBC is a first-class broadcaster, however apart from its lack of impartiality at times, it wants the best of both worlds: the feather-bedding of the licence fee to fufil its public service remit but also the freedom to chase lowest common denominator ratings by copying ITV's brain-dead output.

I don't like to see anyone losing their job, but if the job doesn't amount to much and is being funded by OAPs and the low-paid who are threatened with prison if they don't cough up, I'm afraid it's a luxury we can't afford. Don't bank on Beeb bosses 'earning' 200 grand a year upwards getting their P45s though.

[Win2Win]

More repeats announced ...... and that'll be different policy from the last 20 years how???

And what's with keeping BBC3 & 4? ..... They could easily combine the two of them.

It won't be long before horse racing on the Beeb just shows the last furlong live ..... and get rid of the fashion poofs at Ascot

[scoobydoo]

I like the Beeb...I just dont get people being so down on it. I pay my license, there is some crap on there I dont like but that is my opinion, I understand that they have to have something for everyone. & I believe they are a lot more impartial than people say...Paxman and Andrew Neill for example give all sides a tough time thankfully. I reckon most people who dont like the BBC are Conservatives...most of the cuts are political imo. By the looks of it, Tories had a deal before the election with Murdoch to make Sky stronger but unfortunately....that slighly backfired somewhat.

[barneymather]

I've missed the fashion pooves at Ascot, I'm glad to say. Ouch.

BBC4 is an example of what can be really good about the BBC, (e.g., if you're into any kind of music from the 60s and 70s, they show some great stuff) and to me it offers better programmes than BBC1 or BBC2.

BBC3 however has been a complete and monstrously expensive disaster - £500m and climbing for what, one hit show, Gavin and Stacey, which although a sitcom of merit, suffers the fatal flaw of having lard@rse bighead James Corden starring in it, when he should've stuck to writing the scripts.

Rather than put his hand up and admit he got it wrong though, there's been no contrition from the architect of BBC3, who has simply blustered that the channel has produced some good programmes and continues to improve, this in the face of all evidence.

If you spend 500 million quid of public money and the results are demonstrably poor, you really ought to have the grace and humility to say you were in the wrong, rather than brazen it out and pretend everything's just fine.

Being disilluisoned with football nowadays, I don't have Sky (the main reason most people seem to have it is the footy), just cable, and it wouldn't bother me greatly if I had to do without that. Most of my telly watching is with DVDs of old Brit shows, of which there are many, and a curious fact is they were all produced when we only had 3 channels.

I remember as a kid talking with my mates about the Yanks having loads of channels when we only had three, but even then we knew the American cable stations were full of cack, all game shows and other cheap rubbish.

Going back to the Beeb, if it stuck to its remit and stopped trying to outdo the dozy lot at ITV, it wouldn't attract so much criticism, but as I said previously, it's morally indefensible to threaten to put anyone in jail (and particularly people whose income doesn't stretch very far) if they don't have a licence fee when the BBC are paying scores of staff six-figure salaries.

This kind of scenario is akin to something which the Beeb's own Panorama would run a special on, bosses on £250,000 a year swanning about doing not a great deal and setting their lawyers on low-income households because they won't pay up to fund their megabucks salaries.

It's a wholly untenable situation when you think about it and reminds you of the arrogant attitudes of bank bosses before they hit the skids, although you can always change your bank and no one forces you to run up credit card bills.

I reckon most Beeb critics are Conservatives, although that's not surprising because a liberal left culture permeates old Auntie, something which BBC bosses and former employees such as Peter Sissons (not noted as a Tory cheerleader) have now admitted themselves, albeit a decade or two too late.

I can't see this culture changing either as the Notting Hill media elite have a very strong (and misplaced) sense of superiority, and eventually it'll lead to the Beeb being broken up one way or another. That's a classic British mistake - go down with the ship rather than change.