How Gordon Ramsay and Gary Lineker insult intelligence of BBC licence fee payers – Yorkshire Post Letters

FORMER BBC director general Tony Hall justified the withdrawal of the over-75s’ TV licence fee exemption by saying it was essential in order to maintain quality programmes.

Since his retirement, repeats have continued apace and, as an example, the Beatles’ (albeit excellent) film A Hard Day’s Night was shown twice on two different BBC channels.

As for investment in quality programmes, what do we now have? The Wall with Danny Dyer and Gordon Ramsay’s Bank Balance are just two further examples of expensive BBC “barrel bottom scraping”.

I think the BBC’s definition of service and quality differs somewhat to that of the senior citizens robbed of their exemption.

Paying the total licence fees of a town the size of say Beverley (population approx. 32,000) purely for some gibbering DJ to waffle over the music being broadcast doesn’t fit too well with senior citizens either, especially when the number of such overpaid characters used by the BBC is taken into account. Gary Lineker’s fee is the licence fees of Beverley and Tadcaster combined by the way.

Then there is the BBC’s own self-indulgent extravagance, especially in news broadcasting. Despite many complaints from viewers, the BBC still believes it right to pay well over the national average salary for someone to sit and read from an autocue to camera.

This is before the daftness of having reporters chatting from outside 10 Downing Street, Westminster, or a dozen other outside broadcast locations when there is clearly no reason for them to be there.

Further BBC profligacy is the “parachuting in” of a national “name” to report on an incident outside the London orbit. A recent pair of live broadcasts from York covering the floods showed this yet again when a “national” BBC reporter – described as “Our North of England Correspondent” – was doing a live piece from York with Ouse Bridge in the background for the main news. A few minutes later one of the local Look North team did an excellent live piece for the regional news programme from exactly the same location. He could have done both broadcasts so why incur the cost of importing the “name”?

Whatever happened to the concept promoted not that long ago to the public that “it’s your BBC”?

It clearly isn’t, it belongs to the BBC ‘mafia’ which believes it knows better than the public which pays for it, and to whom the BBC has a duty to serve.

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