BBC.

This is an account of some parts of Shall I Listen? of 1933. It was the penultimate book by Filson Young (1876-1936). He was a BBC pioneer with instincts about the future of broadcasting which foreshadow the podcast age. He was a snob who disparaged Reithian London-centricity. He was a Londoner who invented a new style of outside broadcasting from a Cornish village. Read more...

In 2007 I wrote "Scrap the BBC!" for the Social Affairs Unit. It was subtitled, "10 years to set broadcasters free". Well, that didn't happen. The next big though interim discussion about the Corporation's future is set for 2022, preparatory for a new charter in 2027. What are the odds of major change within ten years?

I wouldn't bet on it, not with my record. Anyway, a much bigger set of questions arises. How are we to handle the new world of media? Read more...

The BBC is likely to become very small, or even disappear, if not paying the TV Licence fee becomes a civil offence (is decriminalised, in the jargon). What an extraordinary turn-up for those of us who thought the BBC an absurdity but also thought that its dismemberment would probably have to wait a generation. That is roughly where I was when I wrote "Scrap the BBC!" in 2006. Here is how things might turn out.... Read more...

I have a soft spot for the absurd Top Gear and its "star in a cheap car" and its supercar features. But above all I like the Flashmanism of some of the team's heroics. Very galling, then, to watch their absurd treatment of  a visit to Chernobyl. Read more...

All right. My headline may be over-egging things a little. Still, I am pretty sure I helped save the BBC from making a fool of itself over climate change politics. (If I'm wrong, and someone in a position to know lets me know in confidence, I'll cheerfully take this blog down.) The issue is especially interesting to me since I want the BBC to be scrapped but I don't really share the right's horror of its supposed left-wing bias or even the current blogosphere outrage at the BBC's climate coverage. Read more...

There was something quite blissful about David Dimbleby's contribution to today's BBC Today programme (12 November 2012). He said the BBC was over-managed, and that such organisations as the BBC and NHS spawned bureaucracies. The paradox here is that he doesn't grasp that one reason that the NHS and the BBC are alike is that they are both state-sponsored behemoths with monolithic tendencies. Read more...

We should hope all hope that BBC is well-managed. Why not give George Entwistle a nice contract to design an organisational and cultural shake-up, now he's free to concentrate on such a cerebral operation? After all, surely the problems which sank him were of others' making, and Lord Patten says Entwistle was appointed precisely on this ticket? Read more...

BBC Radio 4's iPM show asked me comment on their finding that people might be prepared to pay (an average of) £143 for BBC services. I replied that with a National Trust of the Airwaves they might pay less and get more. Read more...

Do the media set a perverse agenda - or do they faithfully record events with a serious sense of priorities? Read more...

Charles Moore is wise and clever. But he's wrong to suggest there should be a licence fee strike until Jonathan Ross is fired. That's no way to rid ourselves of smut and smugness on the rates. Read more...