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January 31st, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
By
Quentin Letts
Last updated at 8:25 AM on 31st January 2012
The first and the greatest: Lord Reith, who pioneered the BBC’s tradition of independent public service broadcasting
When the young John Reith applied to become the general manager of the British Broadcasting Company in 1922, there was a refreshing amateurishness to his candidacy.
Reith admitted he did not know much about broadcasting. Only after completing his application form and posting it in the letterbox at his club did he consult Who’s Who to learn more about the man in charge of the selection panel.
Discovering that Sir William Noble hailed from Aberdeen, Reith badgered the club porter to retrieve his letter from the locked mailbox so he could add some gallant prose about his own Aberdonian credentials.
It worked. Reith landed the job (which paid £1,750 a year) and went on to become the first — and greatest — director-general of the BBC.
With the imminent departure of Mark Thompson, the BBC’s ‘DG-ship’ is again about to fall vacant. I hope readers of the Mail will not mind, but I am putting in for the job.
Victory
This is no comment on the pleasure with which I serve as your Parliamentary sketchwriter, theatre critic and occasional powder monkey, helping the gundeck let rip at the political and arts Establishment.
Anyway, I very much doubt my campaign will end in victory, so our acquaintance may continue. But I intend to have a bash at the DG-ship. Here is why.
The BBC needs to do less and it needs to aim upmarket. It needs to drop the tone of perpetual political correctness, disown coarseness, cease its tiresome and offensive bias against religion and stop acting as an unremitting champion of the public sector (and assailant of the Coalition Government for trying to reduce the deficit).
The sole justification for its licence fee is that the BBC will do things not otherwise done by independent, commercial broadcasters. Much though I admire many BBC programmes — Sherlock, The Proms, Strictly and many more are brilliant — I am not convinced this can be said of all of its output.
BBC 3, consistently defended by the broadcast professionals, is a particular weakness. Its listings include shows such as Sun, Sex And Suspicious Parents, and Snog, Marry, Avoid.
How do these fit with the ideal, inherited from Reith, that the BBC should nurture high-minded aspiration, enlightening and educating the British public?
One of my first wishes as director-general would be to see the white dot appear on BBC 3. That station’s demise could save the licence fee payer £85 million a year. Every little helps.
Slimmed-down: Why not replace the BBC’s daytime shows with the old-style test card?
I can see sparse justification for much of the BBC’s daytime programmes, plenty of which seem to be derivative efforts about property and cooking.
Indeed, does BBC television really need to broadcast during the day? Can the commercial sector not be given a free run between the hours of, say, 9.30am and 4pm?
Would it be so heinous for the old testcard to be brought back during those times?
Broadcasting through the night also seems fairly wasteful. Few licence fee payers would be inconvenienced by the disappearance of Filthy Cities and Celebrity Antiques Road Trip, which went out on BBC 1 last night well after midnight.
Were I DG, it would also be goodbye to such daytime BBC TV fare as Britain’s Empty Homes, Cash In The Attic, Flog It! and other such non-gems.
What would I favour in their place? Well, much less telly, for a start, because I would also close the (actually rather good) BBC 4 and fold its best output into BBC 2.
Creative
That would save £50 million and would improve BBC 2, which has made strides in the right direction of late.
What sort of shows would I want to see instead? I am not a TV producer. They would no doubt have far more creative ideas than me. But how about a return of Play For Today, which was last seen in 1984?
As a drama critic, I come across plenty of new plays on the stage, some terrific, some so-so. Why are so few seen on television?
How about a weekly, prime slot for a show about fine art? And why, in Olympics year, is there no development of the It’s A Knockout idea, pitting the towns of Britain against one another in sporting heats? Could it not get our youngsters athletically involved and engender civic pride?
Viewers would like the licence fee to be lower and that can happen only if the BBC reins in its corporate empire building. It has too many executives who fret too much about fulfilling some outdated, multicultural remit.
The Corporation’s new chairman, Lord Patten, has grasped the crisis of confidence facing the BBC. He argued only last week that programmes must become more intellectual.
‘Crisis of confidence’: The BBC’s new chairman Lord Patten has said the Corporation must become more intellectual
Where is today’s Kenneth ‘Civilisation’ Clark? Where is the new Jacob ‘The Ascent Of Man’ Bronowski? The new John Freeman, of one-on-one interviews fame?
I am not a nostalgia freak, but I did recently look at a schedule for a night’s BBC 1 programmes from 1964 and was struck by the presence of a late-night show called Gallery, a high-brow discussion programme introduced by Ian Trethowan.
Last night’s BBC 1 schedule offered The Graham Norton Show. Norton is a talented comedian and makes me chuckle on a Saturday morning on Radio 2, but he is no Ian Trethowan.
Lord Patten needs a DG who will work with his grain rather than trying to undermine him.
The first step is to worry less about audience numbers. It may be an unfortunate thing to echo Captain Bligh of the bad ship Bounty, but the director-general must take the attitude: ‘A pox on the ratings!’
I believe, as it happens, that ratings would soon rise, with viewers responding to quality. A nightly television version of BBC Radio’s From Our Own Correspondent would educate and interest viewers more, surely, than Kirsty Wark’s A Question Of Taste cooking quiz on BBC last night.
It might also redress the BBC’s mainstream failings in foreign news reporting. The Corporation has an amazing network of correspondents whose work rarely appears on prime-time TV.
Funded mainly by our annual £145.50 licence fees, the BBC spends £4 billion a year. An astonishing sum, no?
In addition to the savings on BBC 3 and BBC 4, I would get rid of Radios 1 and Five Live, which fall into the category of ‘already done by the commercial sector’.
Also expendable is the opinion-tinged BBC News Channel (£41 million), which fulfills the role of padding during the small hours.
The imperatives of rolling news do not sit easily with the mainly high standards of BBC journalism.
Furthermore, those cliches of 24-hour news are becoming intolerable and, in the age of the internet, redundant.
The Left-wing Guardian newspaper, effective in-house journal of BBC executives, last week ran a list of ‘runners and riders’ for the director-generalship. To a soul they were TV professionals, some of them BBC ‘lifers’.
Insiders
The favourites were broadcasting insiders, a dismayingly narrow range of urban, fashion-conscious folk, denizens of the London telly schmoozebelt.
Their politics? Pink-tinged or (at best) Centrist, so far as one could discern. Here were creatures of the status quo.
When I saw that list, I was so irritated I thought: ‘What the heck — let’s have a tilt at the windmill.’ Should there not be at least one Right-wing, non-broadcast executive in the pot of applications? Hence my candidacy.
If Boris Johnson can become Mayor of London and John Prescott can talk of standing as a police commissioner, why can I not stick up my paw for the DG-ship?
The Left will laugh. Some of them already are. As Ali G might say: ‘Is it cos I is Right?’
The status quo is a non-starter, and not just in terms of the DG’s £650,000 salary (who does he think he is? Stephen Hester?).
I would do the job for the salary of a backbench MP, around £65,000. I would do without a limousine.
I would charge almost no expenses and would expect the BBC’s executives to accept similarly modest packages.
If our legislators must make do on such money, so can a broadcaster. But you will not hear that from any of my other so-called rivals for this nationally important position.
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It’s an elementary step in any job application to find out about the organisation you’re joining. I think therefore that you are doomed to fail, because you have demonstrated your ignorance of the BBC by that comment about bias against religion. This is the channel which broadcasts a church service every Sunday, Songs of Praise, a regular religious news programme, Carols at Kings, Urbi et Orbi, the Nativity, major religious pieces of music like The Messiah, the St Matthew Passion, St John Passion, Mozart’s and Faure’s Requiems, and much, much more. What other national radio channel in the UK does the same? How does that constitute an anti-religious bias?
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Irene. you think french TV is bad, try spanish, fine if you like cookery programmes ,silly game shows. and endless adverts.. while I’m at it, I hate it when weather reporting bimbo’s say ” hello there”, whats wrong with good morning / evening, hello is ok but not ” hello there”
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Does anybody listen or watch BBC anymore. isn’t it just for oldies and lefties?
– Bill Smith, West Mids, 31/1/2012 8:49
Around 65 million people watching per year, and a similar number listening, at the last independent count.
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Magrew, The old firestation 20;40……. If it wasn’t for the BBC you wouldn’t exist!
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But Quentin, if you were DG how would you possibly find time to write your brilliant, ascerbic colums for the Mail? Hmm… come to think of it, that must take you all of 10 minutes a day between expenses paid lunches and trips to the theatre! I reckon you already have a cushy enough job without climbing aboard the BBC gravy train.
– Dolly Diamond, Brighton, 31/1/2012 19:33……….. Aww bless, the left wing ‘we hate the mail’ trolls keep trying don’t they? A little warning for you all though – perhaps you need to relax the daily vitriolic onslaught at the mail and its readers, otherwise one of you, possibly the retired know it all teacher or the smug trainspotter, are likely to bust a blood vessel, or worse! For your own health you might find that a relaxation in the monitoring of the mail is needed. Just some friendly advice 😉
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Well Done Quentin, hope you make DG.
And if you do, promise one more thing – to send the weather girls and one of the sports reporters on Breakfast News, to have elocution lessons… we have shahs (showers), whyles (Wales), royn (rain), and for football apparently they score gowls (goals)… .. oh and “sat” there (sitting) …..perhaps Bob Crowe could help out……
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Quentin Letts – DG of No-Riff-Raff-TV – The man is an unspeakable snob
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James18;32 You are so right. Religion gets a free ride every day. This morning some royal correspondent said , with the radio equivalent of a straight face, that “God guided the Queen.” Not that she took inspiration from the Bible or or that she was helped by the teachings of her particular religion. No, God was intervening and telling her what to do! Now religious folk won’t even notice it, but to a non-religious person it sounds positively bizzare and even creepy. I don’t believe the Queen hears voices but the BBC correspondent obviously thinks she does.
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But Quentin, if you were DG how would you possibly find time to write your brilliant, ascerbic colums for the Mail? Hmm… come to think of it, that must take you all of 10 minutes a day between expenses paid lunches and trips to the theatre! I reckon you already have a cushy enough job without climbing aboard the BBC gravy train.
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O.M.G If you were selected I would think I had died and gone to Heaven! The B.B.C needs someone like you at the helm, I am getting so excited when is the decision made? And why should the pinkos get ALL the jobs, and if it would mean all the rubbish programmes disappeared you get my vote, Do I as a viewer actually get a vote? Just keep on being positive and I will keep my fingers crossed for you! Good Luck!
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