Dont be knocking the BBC Mr Gudgeon . It offers a much more unbiased viewpoint rather than Murdochs relentless pro tory propaganda crap we are fed with via News Corp and News International. Dont think hardly anyone north of Birmingham watches Sky News anymore !

I am sure the BBC will make a fine job of the Derby today just like they do with the Grand National …. fabulous coverage and certainly makes me proud to be British ! ~clap ~clap

Who on earth is interested in tennis ffs ! ~naughty ~naughty

The BBC will never have any credibility while people are threatened with jail if they don’t pay for it.

No coincidence that all their vacancies are advertised in the Guardian.

It’s just the broadcasting arm of the labour party.

As for the Grand National coverage:

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/news/multi-platform/news/bbc-outsources-grand-national-coverage/300744.article

It’s not even them.

Cut out the middle-men, abolish the licence tax, save some money and give viewers freedom of choice.

If people really want to watch eastenders and dancing slebs and the BBC is as good as claimed it won’t have any trouble standing independently.

Couldn’t agree more Rob. Many still cling to the BBC through a form of rose tinted loyalty. The original BBC of yester year died many moons ago.

Abolish it and move on oh and SKY are appauling too, turns my stomach!

One final point – Tennis is one of the finest sports on the planet! If you can’t appreciate the skill of Federer or the past masters; Sampras, McEnroe, Becker & Bjorg then I give up!

Obviously none of you have the red button feature as full coverage uninterupted of the tennis was on the red button by the bbc (red button normally channel 301 but can vary)

did you know, if you crouch down and take 60 deep breaths then stand up real quick and blow on your thumb as hard as you can,, you pass out !!!! smashin stuff !!!!

BBC coverage of Formula 1 is EXCELLENT

Funny this as I was just thinking last night how the latest season on BBC has been really good TV: Shadowline, the drama about the Munich air disaster, Case Histories, Dr Who, Damned United (broadcast by and made by BBC) etc, etc.
Also very nice to watch tv without interruptions for adverts for products I don’t want.

I travel a lot and don’t think I’ve come across a better news programme anywhere in the world than Today on R4.

I’d rather put up with the interruptions than be criminalised for not paying a tax to finance programmes and left-wing dogma that I don’t want.

Rob, it is not a tax – it is entirely optional. If you do not have a TV, you do not have to pay for a TV licence. You can still watch programmes on iPlayer and listen to the radio, if you so desire.

At less than £3 a week, I personally think that the TV licence is still pretty good value for money and I watch very little TV.

Gary:

It’s not very optional if you only want to watch DVDs on your TV is it?

@caster rob wrote:

Gary:

It’s not very optional if you only want to watch DVDs on your TV is it?

You can always buy a decent laptop and watch them on that.

@spadger wrote:

@caster rob wrote:

Gary:

It’s not very optional if you only want to watch DVDs on your TV is it?

You can always buy a decent laptop and watch them on that.

Not with a 40″ LED display and 5.1 surround sound I can’t.

Fair point.
I get where your’e coming from. There should deffo be a way they can block the signal in this day and age if you don’t want the Beeb.
Especially now we’ve gone digital.

The fairest way would be to make it all PPV except for a skeletal public information/news broadcast, which is more or less what the BBC was set up to be.

The market would eventually determine the value of individual programmes and quite a lot of “stars” would suddenly discover that they’re not worth quite as much as they thought they were.

Some people may actually get up and go for a walk, or even read a book!

I gasp at the situational irony of Rob accusing someone else of dogma!

And everything’s going to look left wing if your benchmarks are the Mail and Telegraph.

@pr@ngler wrote:

I gasp at the situational irony of Rob accusing someone else of dogma!

Don’t gasp too hard, my dogma’s entirely self-financed.

Anyway, my accusation is hardly groundless, they admit it themselves. Their only error is claiming it was all in the past, as though they all changed their mind-set overnight.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23873043-bbc-chief-mark-thompson-admits-left-wing-bias.do

And everything’s going to look left wing if your benchmarks are the Mail and Telegraph.

Sneering at the independently-run Mail or Telegraph is derigueur for public-sector employees.

Let it all out Rob. We’re here to help.

Not with glib condescending remarks that avoid the issues, you aren’t.

I haven’t been on here for ages, but I see the keyboard warriors are still hard at it! You should get out more fellas.

About time too:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/10/bbc-news-world-service-jobs?commentpage=last#end-of-comments

There’s no need to have the news presenter at the scene of the latest, earthquake, tsunami, volcanic eruption, plane-crash, etc, when there’s already an army of reporters on the ground.

Only a proposal at the moment but it hasn’t stopped the guardian panicking over the loss of job advertising revenue.