Come on BBC, get you priorities right

I'm pissed off with the BBC. Don’t get me wrong, my support for the licence fee is strong, but it’s been tested twice in the same day (yesterday). First, Richard Bacon (standing in for Victoria Derbyshire) on Radio 5Live yesterday morning did a fawning interview with Peter Andre. It was little more than a puff for the Aussie crooner’s latest musical offering, more suited to Smashey’n’Nicey FM.

Then came the evening telly news, the production of which is clearly a tough assignment without Parliament’s daily feed of easy stories. They’d dug out of the archives footage of the Belfast troubles in 1969*, on the flimsy pretext of their 40th anniversary. News content? Zero. Relevance to today’s society? Some, though without any analysis or linkage to the present day, this was somewhat limited. Hard graft for BBC reporters? Of course not.

Surely a publicly funded broadcaster’s news output ought to contain ‘news’ (i.e. stuff that is new......although one theory about the origin of ‘news’ is that it stands for North, East, West, South, or so I heard once on Mastermind), and information that’s relevant and useful to licence payers. Indeed, this is one of the most compelling justifications for the licence fee. But when you watch or listen to BBC news, how much of it is relevant to making the world (or just the UK) either a better place or at least a better informed and less prejudiced place? And how much is celebrity gossip?

Yours grumpily.

*By the way, I would actually like to see an ‘Irish History for Dummies’ documentary, wherein the troubles in Belfast 40 years ago would have a valid place. But not in today’s news.