According to a protest letter signed by 37 producers of shows such as Desert Island Discs and Midweek, a quarter of all Radio 4 producers are due to be axed in the upcoming BBC cutbacks.
I’m sorry, but this makes me want to weep.
Not because I’m a member of the English middle-class conspiracy to support R4 and preserve intellectual and class supremacy. (For one thing, I’m not English.)
It’s because the BBC is possibly the best thing about this country. And Radio 4 is possibly the best thing about the best thing about this country.
Every time I turn on Today or Start the Week or Open Book or In Our Time, I think, Thank god someone is still thinking about the things that really matter, about history and how we live and who we are. Thank god someone is talking to me as if I were a sentient being rather than a celebrity-worshipping racist moron.
(Rupert Murdoch, by the way, made a worldwide profit of just over £3 billion last year. And pays a whopping 6% tax on his British income. Explain that to my cleaner, who pays 20% tax on the money she makes working 80 hours a week as a hospital cleaner.)
It’s a simple equation — BBC cutbacks make us all poorer and stupider.
By the time everyone comes round to realising that fact, it’ll be too late.
I love you Meg
And I, you, Mik.
I do not have Sky. I rarely get a freeview signal. I can not live without my radio which is almost perpetually tuned to Radio 4. If there is an English middle-class conspiracy to support R4 and preserve intellectual and class supremacy and it means I get to keep Fags, Mags and Bags, I want to join it.
Well said Meg! I usually feel that I pay my license fee for Radio 3 and 4, not the TV.
I used to work for Radio 4 (and WS) so I mind this a lot. Since I stopped working for the BBC, R4 is what reminds me that I have a brain; it acts as an antidote to housework and brings me into contact with the huge world outside the small village where I live. I wash up to Woman’s Hour; I fold laundry to FOOC; I listened this week to 30 minutes of Cerys Mathews talking about fishing (Hook Line and Singer)! Somewhere this will all filter through my consciousness, either emerging in a story or simply to remind me how interesting life can be. I’m off to contribute my bit to the consultation about DQF (Delivering Quality First!) which is on the BBC Trust website …
I am a devotee of Radio Four. It broadcasts the best comedy in the UK and I have not heard a station like it anywhere in the world. In fact I have an Afternoon Play on now via iPlayer. (iPlayer therefore I am).
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Couldn’t agree more!