Sale of BBC Television Centre confirmed by BBC Trust

So what would you suggest then? What mechanism should be in place that protcts the BBC from the Goverment and makes sure the management keep in check.



It carries both.

How can being effectively a Director of an organisation employing thousands of people with a budget of billions not be a responsibility? Look what happened a few years back with their predessesors and The Hutton Report.

You've caught me in the middle of changing my last post- and aren't you mistaking power for responsibility ?

Hutton ? It was the DG who went and the Deputy DG, not the Board, as it was.

It's a bit different being a Trust, but not much.

A Trust is liable if the organisation gets in to financial difficulty, but with a guaranteed £3.5 billion income per year and the checks by media (and government, ultimately), it's not going to happen.

Indeed, so there will be investment in HD and downloads etc, but that's no good if the content is a repeat of Open All Hours

They also say there will be more repeats on BBC3. I didn't think that was possible!

Quite right, it makes no sense at all. I suppose you could say the same about the other broadcasters, but thus far due to being commercial I haven't seen programming declining directly because of online expansion.

I notice that BBC Buses will be axed and Open Centres downgraded. I'm not sure why these services were provided at all anyway, surely it's up to your council's library services to provide this type of thing

No it wasn't. The Chairman of the Board of Governors - Gavyn Davies resigned over Hutton, alongside Greg Dyke who was forced out by the rest of the Governors

The Deputy DG, Mark Byford (who made the grovelling apology once he took over from Dyke) is still at the BBC

As for power and responsibilty.... one comes with the other surely. A manager has power over what he is responsible for. Coming back to the original point, power and responsibilty are what people earn their money for.

Hutton is ultimately responsible for what it happening now. Had Blair and Campbell not wanted to crucify the BBC over what for them was "an inconvenient truth", Greg Dyke might still be there, possibly Gavyn Davies.

Through his approach, Mark Thompson could easily be seen as a New Labour plant (though I don't think he is) - he had already made moves towards more outsourcing and slimming down the corporation before today's announcement so Blair must be delighted at having inflicted the damage Thatcher tried but failed to inflict on the BBC with her "plants" such as Duke Hussey and Stuart Young.

You can bleat all you like about the BBC needing to streamline to compete effectively but the fact is, with reduced budgets you simply cannot produce the same calibre of programmes.

Well if they change the repeat policy it could actually improve the channel...

At the moment BBC Three repeat a few BBC Three shows to death. If they repeated more BBC One shows then it could actually make the schedule a bit more varied. (ITV2-4 repeat more ITV1 shows and it works for them)

If I could ask, what has been the justification for a) the heaviest cuts in news and factual specifically as opposed to other areas, and b) the increase in repeats while the already quite repetitive BBC3 and BBC4 remain on-air with what could well be repeat rates increasing to the ridiculous? I know of the decisions made, but not of the reasons.

There is a slight irony in Mark Thompson's vision for a BBC with less content but better done, to avoid 'spreading the butter too thinly', when I'd argue keeping BBC 3 & 4 contradicts such a vision, trying to spread programming across four channels total when the two digital ones are simply not necessary in the current situation - their content could be 'plugging the gap' elsewhere and yet this seems to have clearly been ignored - again, why?

As I said above - allowing BBC Three and BBC Four to repeat BBC One and Two shows rather than endlessly repeat their own shows may actually mean the schedule is less repetitive rather than more (widening the number of shows they can repeat on the channels?)

It is also important to remember that the BBC cutting jobs in its own Factual department isn't the same as cutting the number of factual programmes, or investment in that area.

What the BBC has done is announce that it will change the staffing policy in its factual department to reflect the change in commissioning policy.

Until the late 1980s the BBC made most of the programmes it showed that it didn't buy in from overseas. Then in the late 80s and 90s it started commissioning 25% of its shows from independent producers (which sprang up to provide shows for Channel Four, which made almost nothing apart from Right to Reply of its own) The BBC therefore only produced 75% of its shows in-house.

Recently the BBC introduced WOCC (Window of Creative Commissioning?) which now means that only 50% of BBC shows are guaranteed to be produced in-house, 25% guaranteed to be produced by independents, and 25% up for grabs between BBC and indys.

The BBC have announced that they will now only staff the Factual department with core staff to produce the 50%, not the 75% previously. If they do achieve a proportion of the WOCC commissions, then they will use freelance staff, or contract staff just for the duration of the project, not recruit them as staff...



BBC Three and BBC Four exist as outlets designed to appeal to a particular demographic - by re-using content from BBC One and Two but mixing it with content commissioned for BBC Three and Four you can still achieve these goals. After all the costs of running the actual channel are trivial in comparison to commissioning the content.

You're right about Gavyn Davies- bad slip by me there, for which I apologise.

But as for responsiblity going with power- they don't necessarily follow. (See my comments on page 6 about the BBC Trust.)

With a privileged collective, there's often the impression of responsibility and the figurehead may go (to equally well paid employment) if there's been a major problem, but the rest of the collective will stay in place, at least, in the case of the BBC Board/Trust, until their term of office ends (when those people get new, equally well paid employment). They are replaced by other privileged people.

People being paid according to the amount of responsibility they have is nonsense- that's a lie perpetuated by managers. People get paid in accordance with factors such as market forces, the hierarchical system and privilege. 'Earning' doesn't come into it. It's about getting what you can and being paid more than those 'below' you.

(I believe Gavyn Davies is doing very well these days.)

I have a question. If the BBC is supposed to operate as a non-profit organization, how is there to be any long-term savings in outsourcing production activities to profit-motivated private contractors?

I'm no expert...but if you are a nonprofit, and you can do something for $100, then I, as a private company, will want to have my margin added on top of the actual $100 cost of the activity if I do it for you. (Or do some of these independent producers try to function as non-profits? I don't know...does anyone?)

Alternatively, if you have a unionised workforce and I don't...well....wages are usually one of the largest cost-components of any activity...

... is that really the point? Is all this outsourcing just designed to change the balance of power between the organizations and labour in the media industry in general (and the public service part of it in particular)? Or is it just that the structure of the BBC right now is getting in the way of evolving the corporation into whatever it is intended to evolve into? Part of some long-term plan to turn the BBC into something more like the American PBS or the Canadian CBC?

How many of the people who lose their positions at the BBC will end up joining the production concerns that the BBC will outsource to? What sort of positions, exactly are intended to be eliminated?

TVC is, when you get down to it, just famous real estate. But changing the way that content is produced is changing the way the BBC does its job. What sort of institution will it be after these changes are made?