I didn’t watch game shows, I wanted to party with Joe Strummer and a unicorn. But the BBC losing the jewel in their crown because of money? Well, that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth
Beeb have lost one of the most-watched programmes they have ever had to Channel 4 felt so shocking.
How could the nation’s publicly owned channel lose the jewel in its crown? Well, money, of course.
The BBC, along with the NHS, are one of the last nationalised industries in Britain.
So of course the Tories have been slowly waging a war against it. Not the kind of blitzkrieg war they’ve been waging against the NHS, granted, but a kind of slow war of attrition none the less.
Back in 2015, long before he blew himself into political pieces with his pal David Cameron, Tory chancellor George Osborne was saying (threatening) that the BBC, along with everyone else, had to “make savings and get their house in order”.
The BBC duly announced measures and cuts that will cost them over a billion pounds over the next five years.
Enough money to pay for many Bake Offs. Many local radio stations.
The BBC – again like the NHS – are something that Americans marvel at when they visit our country. “There’s, like, no commercials? Wow.”
Channel 4 will, of course, be able to recoup some of the £25million a year it is costing them to buy Bake Off (at least £10million more than the BBC offered) from advertising revenues, a route that would never have been open to the BBC.
Whenever I return from a long trip abroad, one of the nicest things is tuning in to Radio Four on the way home from the airport – the gentle babble of voices, the lack of different, harsher voices trying to sell me something every five minutes. It is a reminder that you are home and that we have something unique here.
You have to wonder, if the BBC are able to lose their most successful shows on a regular basis, how much longer will we have it?