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Should the BBC allow swearing on air?
******In reaction to an independent BBC review on taste and standards commissioned after offensive comments about actor Andrew Sachs created a public outcry, the BBC Trust has said that the most offensive language should only be used in “exceptional circumstances” on BBC One between 9 and 10 p.m.******Editorial guidelines should clarify that BBC should not make programmes that “celebrate or condone gratuitous, aggressive, intrusive and humiliating behaviour,” the Trust ruled, recognizing that “licence fee payers can distinguish between comedy and satire, which they appreciate, and unjustified humiliation, of which they disapprove.” ******The study, which polled 2,700 participants, finds that viewers don’t want more censorship or regulation.******”Most people value the creativity of the BBC and accept it may sometimes result in people being offended.”******What do you think? Should BBC allow swearing on air?
Should BBC salaries be secret?
As the annual chore of filling in tax returns looms on the horizon again, many taxpayers might be reflecting longer than usual this year about just where the money is going.
Since the last time he ripped open the blue cellophane HMRC envelope with a sigh and started hunting around for his P60, Joe Public has seen billions of pounds going to the banks, thousands if not millions being used to bankroll the expensive tastes of MPs — and now he sees the BBC clamming up about how much it spends on stars from that other effective tax, the licence fee.
Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, to which the National Audit Office spending watchdog reports, is fuming because the BBC will not reveal how much it pays its big-name radio presenters.
The BBC Trust says it keeps salary details confidential because it has legal obligations to staff and that disclosure would raise questions over data protection and privacy laws.
The generosity of BBC salaries has been a long-running theme, especially since it was reported last year that Jonathan Ross receives some six million pounds a year. Newsreader Carrie Gracie raised eyebrows more recently when she revealed she gets 92,000 pounds a year.
The Corporation says it merely pays the going rate and in some cases less. It has launched a comprehensive redundancy programme and has confirmed that its stars’ salaries will be cut when contracts come up for renewal.
BBC Director-General Mark Thompson has staunchly defended the licence fee, calling it a “critical part of this country’s investment in the creative industries”.
As an ex BBC employee, may I make the following comments.
1. Artistes Fees. I think it would be proper for the BBC to publish long term contracts for people like presenters, who are virtually just higher paid staff, and who are not competitively seeking employment in the outside world. As far as performing artistes are concerned, it would not be suitable, as their agents are routinely negotiating with film companies, theatres and other television companies, and disclosure of current contracts could seriously effect current negotiations.
2. Top Management. As far as the top management are concerned, who earn more than a prime minister, there are two problems with their own defence. A lot of them say they come from programme making, but if you take out journalistic programmes in which each person only contributes a small part of the whole, then I doubt if you will find any who have actually sat down with a blank sheet of paper, commissioned a script, raised the funding, cast the artistes, designed the set, and produced/directed the show.
The second problem with their defence that of “only paying the going rate” does not hold water. Outside public service, in the commercial world, managers have to be “makers of money” for their shareholders, whereas in the BBC they are just “spenders of money”. It is very difficult to make money, and very easy to spend money, and salaries should be and salaries should reflect this.
Has “Auntie” got it right?
After a week of media frenzy, the BBC hopes it has taken action to end the crisis caused by the crude prank call made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand on the latter’s Radio 2 show.
Brand has quit and Jonathan Ross has been suspended after the presenters left lewd comments on the answerphone of 78-year-old “Fawlty Towers” actor Andrew Sachs. The head of Radio 2 Lesley Douglas has also resigned.
The outcome it would appear has left no one happy. Most commentators feel the BBC took far too long to act on an issue that had clearly angered the public with more than 30,000 people making a complaint.
Many newspapers feel Douglas was unjustly sacrificed, taking the rap for mistakes made by production staff she had little or nothing to do with. The Daily Mirror said she was a “big loss to weak BBC”.
What it means for the BBC is unclear. Its governing body, the BBC Trust, says lessons must be learned and editorial guidelines tightened without jeopardising creativity and “edgy” programmes.
Those like the Daily Mail, a regular critic of the broadcaster, want the corporation to go further, citing other “highly offensive” jokes, including one about the Queen, that have appeared on the BBC since the row erupted.
Others worry that fear of causing offence will make the BBC safe and irrelevant.
“who will watch him now” asked Offended of Tunbridge Wells.
Well I will, for one. And so will the millions of people who used to enjoy watching him before the mindless hordes of vacuous Daily Mail readers got onto their blue-rinse bandwagon. Those professionally-offended minority will not dictate to the quiet and sensible majority what we watch or listen to.
Hard as it may be for them to believe, but they speak for nobody but themselves, and I find their presumption that they in some way speak for the country simultaneously insulting and worrying.
Thatcher’s dead, get over it. (You mean she’s not? Ah well, another week or so…)
BBC row highlights “bad-mannered Britain”
The furore over offensive phone calls made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand to actor Andrew Sachs shows how society has forgotten how to behave itself, the Independent said in an editorial.
“Exactly what has happened to good manners and basic courtesy,” it asked on its leader page. “And isn’t it time they made a return?
The episode casts Britain in a “very shabby light” and raised the question: should a public service broadcaster employ such individuals, the paper added.
The incident was “ugly, cheap and nasty” and highlights a wider issue of falling standards in modern broadcasting, wrote John Harris in a column for the Guardian.
“Perhaps the spectral presence of Mary Whitehouse has hung around our discourse on broadcasting for too long,” he wrote. “Agreeing that too much TV is getting ever more coarse and idiotic doesn’t strike me as a sop to the authoritarian right.”
The Times used its august leader columns to discuss the incident under the headline “A Sorry Affair”, the same headline used by its sister paper The Sun in its “Sun Says” column.
Jonathan Ross should now do the decent thing and resign as well. At least Russell Brand has had the decency to apologise and back this up with a resignation. This has gone some way in the eyes of many to restore his standing.
Neither are my personal taste in entertainment but they obviously entertain some and will, no doubt, find some way of making enough to live on!
Are the BBC’s stars worth their millions?
When it was disclosed two years ago that TV and radio presenter Jonathan Ross was on an 18 million pound three-year contract, many both inside and outside the BBC reacted with dismay.
After all, wasn’t the BBC pleading for more money from the government and higher licence fees from the viewer at the time?
Comments were made in the House of Commons. But the BBC chiefs defended the salaries, without confirming the amounts.
Now a report commissioned by the BBC Trust, the independent body that sets the standards and benchmarks for the corporation, has backed the salaries, saying they are in line with the going rate.
“Some might find this surprising,” the trust’s chairman writes in the Daily Telegraph.
While acknowledging the BBC’s special funding status, he said it was working hard to keep its pay costs down.
Can the BBC afford to pay its stars up to six million pounds a year? Should it allow its pay salary to follow commercial rates, or should it concentrate on finding new talent?
No. They are NOT worth all that precious money.
Spend it on drama, new plays and start nurturing real talent like it used to do, BBC!
I think Jonathan Ross, for example, is woefully over-egged. I find him to be much less than the hype, and so I do not even bother to watch him 
!
I rest my case!
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The Wall
Some of the views expressed in these comments about others in society (“the great unwashed”, “common people”) are far more offensive than the use of swearing, and should give more cause for concern about the state and future of our society. I’d worry less about children growing up using the f-word, and more about them growing learning from the example of Messrs Schwartz and Davis up to look down upon others.The same rules and standards should apply to all broadcasters, publicly-funded or otherwise. The 9pm watershed should be respected, but I think the most severe swearing should probably be held for after 10pm, maybe later.To Mr/Ms Franklin – the reason you should change the channels is because you have the freedom to do so, and avoid the swearing by only affecting yourself. For you to have it your way affects and restricts the freedom of all the other people, who are not offended by swearing, who want to be able to view programmes, and cannot because of you. That’s why censorship should always be reserved for the most severe, and legitimately dangerous, material.