Tuesday 28 October 2008

Ban The Brand

What public service does Russell Brand fulfil, that he should be paid out of license-payers' money?

Let the license fee be made voluntary, with those who chose to pay it enrolled as members of the BBC Trust. The Trustees would then be elected by and from among the members in each of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the nine English regions (with their boundaries adjusted to reflect those of the historic counties).

Members would vote for one candidate by means of an X, and the top two would be declared elected at the end. A Chairman would be appointed by the relevant Secretary of State with the approval of the relevant Select Committee.

All would hold office for a fixed term of four years, and would have to be sufficiently independent that they could, in principle, serve on local authority remuneration committees.

The National Trust and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution not only survive, but thrive. So would the BBC.

Without Russell Brand.

18 comments:

  1. Your last sentence doesn't follow.

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  2. It certainly does. No BCC accountable to license-payers, themselves by no means just everyone who wanted to watch the telly, would tolerate this person for one moment.

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  3. He's very popular

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  4. Not with the sort of people who join thingls like the National Trust or the RNLI, and who would bother to pay a voluntary license fee (never mind bother to vote in, and even stand for, the election of the Trustees), he isn't.

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  5. Under this new system, what would the first B in BBC stand for?

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  6. Well, not "Brand", I can assure you.

    It would correspond to the "National" in "National Trust", and to both the R and the N in RNLI.

    As now, in fact.

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  7. One of the really nice things about the RNLI is that they will rescue anybody who needs it, not just people who fund them.

    By contrast, a BBC designed to appeal only to a narrow section of the population cannot claim to be acting as any kind of national broadcaster - as its rapidly shrinking audience would demonstrate.

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  8. It could probably not just still claim to be the highest quality broadcaster in the world, but actually be once more the highest quality broadcaster in the world. The people paying for it would make sure of that.

    Brand, practically all of Radio One or BBC Three, and so on: how much of that is listened to or watched by people who pay the license fee, anyway?

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  9. Shrinking audience? So what? The BBC isn't there to chase ratings.

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  10. I'm caught in two minds about this. On the one hand, I absolutely despise Brand (and Ross), and have an instinctive, deep-rooted loyalty to Reithian values.

    On the other - and here I diverge from, I suspect, the author of this blog and from my own other side - I *do* like and respect some of what Radio 1 and 1Xtra do, and would rather see that represented in the public sector than leave the whole of pop culture to the private sector, in which eventuality it would be reduced to the Top 20 and an ever narrower set of familiars.

    Hard to work out which side of me is stronger: the Hoggartist or the trendy-leftie.

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  11. "I *do* like and respect some of what Radio 1 and 1Xtra do"

    And *that* would still exist under this scheme.

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  12. No, the BBC isn't there to chase ratings. It is, however, there to broadcast to the whole nation, not just some self-selecting group. This means that it will occasionally put on programs you don't like. Representation is cruel that way.

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  13. Brand, practically all of Radio One or BBC Three, and so on: how much of that is listened to or watched by people who pay the license fee, anyway?


    "I *do* like and respect some of what Radio 1 and 1Xtra do"

    And *that* would still exist under this scheme.


    Funny - I took your first comment to meant that Radio 1, like Brand, wouldn't still exist under this scheme.

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  14. Then you can't read English. (And Don can't write British English, it seems.)

    Don, if the BBC were there to represent the paying members of its Trust - "self-selecting", if you will -, then your problem would not arise.

    Those members would, it is true, be prepared to pay for some programming for their teenage and university-age offspring. Just not for this.

    Nice to see the "we're still the coolest people in the Sixth Form, even though we're in our Thirties or upwards" crowd turning out to defend their current spiritual leader, Russell Brand. Grow up.

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  15. Who's defending Brand?

    "Brand and Ross behaved like juvenile morons"

    and

    "Your proposal to reform the BBC is ill thought out and inimical to the corporation's stated aims"

    are not, in fact, mutually exclusive points of view.

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  16. "the corporation's stated aims"

    So change the aims.

    Brand and Ross are now toast.

    The BBC has an awful lot to burn with them.

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  17. If I were on 1Xtra, or the less Top 40-based side of Radio 1, I would be very worried right now.

    The sort of people David thinks ought to have complete control over the BBC - and to whom it has just capitulated - have been longing for decades to have their revenge on all that "ghastly nigger music".

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  18. Have you ever met any Afro-Carribbeans? I mean outside the wholly atypical music industry?

    Old Labour family-centred churchgoers and ardent monarchists with tough views on crime. Like the white working class is or (increasingly, alas) used to be, except more observant even beyond the Catholic Church.

    Indeed, even many of them inside the music industry could also be so described.

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