Gillian Reynolds presents a false dilemma in Daily Telegraph for Tuesday 6 May 2008. Now hear this: there are more ways than one to thin a fat cat. The choice is NOT twixt bad and even worse. Ever heard of free and fair?
07h31-BST Friday 09 May 2008-CE
Gillian Reynolds, same Telegraph, covering Othello on BBC Radio 3, fatuously burbles: “All those fools who want to take Shakespeare off the national curriculum [myself included] had their rebuttal here. Even those idiots who wonder what Radio 3 is for had their answer. So don’t write to say this is minority stuff, or you don’t see the value of the licence fee…”
Here is a third view. The spear-shaking scribe can be available on the net for any kid advanced enough to dig the dude, as far as I care. But public money ought not to finance any stuff OTHER THAN the Third Programme which would be renamed ‘BBC Radio’ (the ONE-AND-ONLY programme) with Arts and Current Affairs including News. Roger Day (Trafalgar Square 1969, for RFP) said: “The BBC are good at news; let them stick to it.”
The legal extortion racket run by the Beeb ought to be ended, like all such screw-you mechanisms. For people who like Luxy, AFN, Caroline, Big-L and latter-day ILRs, the commercial mechanism produces the goods. The Beeb ought never to have been allowed to try and get with it. It is not their proper job to do Light entertainment. Normandy and such stations ought to have been brought on-shore, not imitated.
FIN 09h39
