I stumbled across this article in The Guardian recently...BBC Looks for Commercial Deals as it Faces Potential End of the Licence Fee.
My initial reaction was 'thank God'... with the licence fee abut to go up to almost £170 a year that means I pay about double compared to my Netflix connection, and there's something VERY wrong about this when I watch about 5 times as much Flix as I do BBC.
But that is discounting several hours of Radio 4 every week, of which I can do 3 hours in one go on a lazy morning or long drive...
But then again the production costs of radio are massively lower than television, and actually much higher quality of experience if you ask me.
Even so on balance I don't think the license fee is a fair way of charging people, especially when the fee is going up and the number of consumers of BBC content is going down.
Commercial Backers...?
I had realised this is a thing already, I get advertised to on the BBC weather app, and some Podcasts are set to have adverts, and apparently the Beeb recently struck a deal with Disney over producing Doctor Who, I can't see how that can improve the show, I don't watch it anyway these days.
It was great when I was a kid in the Tom Baker era, I was lucky to get the heyday of it, but now it's too PC, and there's no hope for that changing with Disney on board.
And that's probably their highest valued asset, so after that there's less potential for commercial deals.
In defence of shared cultural values...
The Director General defends the Beeb using this line - that if we lose the Beeb, we lose our shared media culture, the capacity to have shared sit-down moments - but I dunno, this all sounds a bit 1950s, and something of a myth anyway.
And if all we're losing is a thin, mythical sense of national identity based around an imagined sense of belonging, then so what.
Solution: let's just keep Radio 4 public!
I mean we'd be lost without Amblebridge, right?
Maybe strip everything else out, palm it off to commercial interests for profit, maybe just maintain a BBC shell to broadcast some content, or maybe not, maybe just give everything else over to the global media market. I mean no one NEEDS The Apprentice or Question Time, after all.
Then we just keep R4 public service funded by the license fee, Yes, I think everyone should be required to pay £0.50 a year to fund JUST RADIO 4, that'd probably be about what it would cost, complete guess, probably cheaper than that.
It's all we need for a shared sense of National Identity IMO!
And what kind of wronguns don't listen to several hours of Radio 4 a week, anyway?