Take Back The Airwaves

Knowing that I am not without my trash TV side, a friend advised me to watch this week’s Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach, promising that it would give me something to blog about. Well, it certainly did. It was an extended ridicule of those who have the temerity to speak up for the Christian seventy-two per cent of this country’s population.

Specifically, it depicted a meeting which could not possibly take place, between Christian leaders and the writing and production staff of a soap opera. The latter would not give the former the time of day even at the allegedly public BBC or Channel Four, never mind at (as we were expected to believe) a privately owned commercial network.

A Christian lady was depicted wearing a wig, raising the question of whether or not Jews would ever have been subjected to this. No, of course they would not have been. Never mind Muslims.

Needless to say, we were treated to the usual schoolboy howlers about this and this, though mercifully not also about this.

Oh well, it at least it was ITV, which we do not own and which makes no claim that we do (but whose advertisers we can boycott, using the Net to encourage others to do so), rather than the BBC. Anyone doubting the uselessness of the Bush Administration, and the contempt in which the Republican Party holds those of whose votes it depends, need look no further than the failure to declare persona non grata the staff of the Corporation that made Popetown and actually broadcast Jerry Springer: The Opera. The BBC has been banned from other countries for a lot less than that. Yet Bush himself even grants the Beeb interviews!

I have written here and elsewhere about having the BBC Trust elected by the license-payers. There is also a very strong case for making the license fee itself voluntary, with payment constituting enrolment in the Trust, and thus effecting the right to vote and stand in such elections. Neither the National Trust nor the Royal National Lifeboat Institution is visibly on the brink of collapse. Yet far more people would join the BBC Trust than have joined either of those.

So Radio Three, Radio Four, BBC News 24, BBC Parliament, whoever takes on the mantle of Sir David Attenborough, and many others besides, would be more than safe. Popetown and Jerry Springer: The Opera, among very much else, would not be.

Nor could they hope for much of a hearing at ITV if it were re-regionalised under a combination of municipal and mutual ownership. Central government (with very tight parliamentary scrutiny) should replace local government in the application of this model to Channel Four.