The Times: Behave, Auntie, you vulgar addled old bat

[...] Public service broadcasting means an effective network that produces a range of well-made programmes, particularly in the less popular genres, which are financed according to their intrinsic needs and not the size of the audience. Who can disagree? Chasing ratings is not what Auntie should be doing. Yet the BBC TV schedules are stuffed with cheap, populist rubbish, which can hardly be said to be needed since the commercial producers make them with even greater enthusiasm and vulgarity. “Intoxicated”, as Attenborough put it, with the popularity of such genres, BBC1 and BBC2 have allowed them to run rampant like some nasty kind of pondlife and crowd out other programmes.

“Do we really require so many gardening programmes, makeover programmes or celebrity chefs? Is it not a scandal . . . that there seems to be no place for a continuing series of programmes about science or serious music?” . . . It was “very, very sad” that the science show Tomorrow’s World no longer had a place in the schedule. “If you want an informed society there has to be a basic understanding of science.” Read more
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