Letters From A Tory

Dear Sir Michael Lyons,

I doubt you are a very popular man in and around the BBC at the moment.  2,800 jobs are to be chopped and you are the one who has instigated it.  You’re probably in for quite a lot of flack over this, but I find it astonishing that even an incident such as this is not acting as a catalyst for a wider debate about the BBC.

As far as I understand it, we pay our license fee to the BBC because they provide a ‘public service’.  To my mind, this means that they will produce a range of programmes that would not otherwise be produced in a free market for television companies.  Educational programmes for children, the Open University, awareness campaigns, charity events - these are the kind of programmes that would be probably become few and far between in a completely open market where broadcasters produce what they want to.  The BBC should therefore focus on the programmes that provide a public service.  It is baffling to note the crap quality of programmes that the BBC produces.  Jeremy Paxman did a wonderful job of highlighting shows such as ‘Help me Anthea, I’m infested’, which are obviously a disgraceful use of taxpayers money.  Not only should those programmes all be cut, but there are several other pertinent questions that need to be asked alongside this: Why do BBC3 and BBC4 exist, when BBC1 and BBC2 contain so much rubbish that there is plenty of room for better shows?  Why do the BBC provide services such as GCSE Bitesize when this service would clearly be provided by private companies (and already is, but they cannot compete with the BBC)?  Why are Radio 1 and Radio 2 not commercial radio stations, when they are clearly able to survive on their own and do not provide a ‘public service’?

The BBC should not produce programmes and should not offer additional services that would be provided by private companies in their absence, including other television networks.  The BBC is almost granted monopoly status in some areas of broadcasting, which is NOT what the BBC is supposed to be doing.  Most of the BBC should be sold off, the license fee should be slashed, and the focus should be turned back to public service broadcasting which was the original attention.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory