Tony Klinger

As those of you who follow my various articles and blogs might know I usually craft my pieces with the care and attention of an old world artesan. Every word is carefully measured, weighed and evaluated before it is used or discarded. However there are days when there isn’t that much time, or I am so angry that I just write directly on to the site. Today is such a day.

So bear with me if there are errors in syntax or spelling, but I have to vent my considerable spleen. My reason for anger is, as in many past instances, the BBC.

For those of you from the unfortunate parts of the world that are not England, this is an acronym for the British Broadcasting Corporation. It is our very British public broadcasting service. I use the possessive  pronoun because we stupid British taxpayers are actually compelled by law to pay for this service in addition to the several hundred other entertainment channels we can choose to use, either from free to air, advertising supported broadcasters, or subscription based satellite or cable providers.

It is not the quality of the BBC I am questioning here, actually the quality is generally satisfactory most of the time. But we are made to pay a great deal of money, all of us, for this service, and are entitled to demand  that it will not be just like any other broadcasters.

We relish the fact that the license fee we pay gives us the privilege of watching or listening to its myriad offerings which include 4 network and digital television stations, a multitude of national and international radio stations and a vast local broadcasting network, complimented by a brilliantly conceived and serviced web offering which is second to no one on the planet ALL OF THIS WITHOUT ANY ADVERTISING .

That’s the deal we all accept when we pay our bloody license fee and this costs us a few billion pounds per year, and none of us minds too much, it’s great stuff. So why the bloody hell has the BBC broken the sacred taboo and taken to advertising itself all over the place?

I don’t understand the need the BBC has developed to advertise all its services in so many places, particularly between its own programming and worse still at the cinema.

Why worse still I hear you say, quite? The answer is simple, we, the British license payer, is, in the end, going to have to pay extra for this advertising which is designed to encourage us, the viewers and listeners of the BBC, to watch and listen to that which we are already paying these maniacs to make.

It doesn’t come free this advertising, oh no, the BBC, on our behalf, have to pay to place this advertising on our giant screens before us. Worse still it costs money to produce these glossy trailers advertising the wares that we already own because we paid for them. Before some clever dick tries to tell me that they make their own advertising trailers and so it costs zero cash let me respond that I have been in film and media production all my life and it does cost you a great deal of my money, and that of all the rest of my fellow Brits. Just because you use your own production facilities and don’t make a cash charge for their use does not mean it didn’t cost you anything. It just means you have some clever accountants!

I shall not be unreasonable about this; We need some trailers informing us what programs are scheduled for our future; But we don’t need the people running this service trumpeting it as if it were the most commercial organization on the planet.

The truth must be that the BBC is trying to get the public onside for the next time the BBC needs to win a political argument about raising the level of the license fee? I understand that, even if I don’t sympathize. I just don’t want to be one of the mugs paying for it. In the meantime these cheeky monkeys are picking the pocket of our nation.