2011-02-22
post/3439993445
quote 05:52:00
“ Mr Cameron said: “Britain has a range of strong defence relationships with countries in the region. “I seem to remember we spent a lot of effort and indeed life in defending and helping to defend Kuwait, so the idea that Britain should not have defence relationships with some of these countries I don’t understand. It is quite right that we do. We have some of the toughest rules on export licences and exports of arms anywhere in the world. Everything has to meet those rules.”The Foreign Office has revoked a series of export licences to Bahrain and Libya covering tear gas and gun components. ”
David Cameron in Kuwait to promote reform message, from BBC News. Sentences reordered for maximum irony.
2010-12-21
post/2407481449
quote 22:18:00
“ During one round of the game, Stephen Fry suggested that ‘countryside’ should mean ‘to kill Piers Morgan’. ”
From the section on the Uxbridge English Dictionary in Wikipedia’s List of games on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue.
2010-10-26
post/1408923463
photo 21:44:54
Didcot Substation: a promotional image for BBC Four’s The Secret Life of the National Grid.
2010-09-05
post/1068603780
quote 09:08:36
“ At that Whitechapel Gallery evening, everyone there over 80 could vividly recall the Battle of Cable Street. Most said they had witnessed it at first-hand, and the scenes of out-of-control street-fighting had clearly burned themselves in on their memory. Some could describe as if it were yesterday the fear they felt, as the event descended into near-anarchy. All the same, I had a sneaking feeling that since they could not have been more than 10 or 12 at the time, perhaps one or two of them were recalling those chaotic events with help from Pathe newsreels or the memories of others. ”
Lisa Jardine Do our memories get better or worse with age?
2010-08-28
post/1024524357
quote 10:22:32
“ Over 90% of UK households already have digital television today, more than 70% already have broadband. In other words, they’re already living in a digital Britain yet their support for the licence fee is higher than it was in analogue households twenty-five years ago. The purists have spent a generation making the free-market case for abolishing the licence fee and the British public agrees with them less now than they did when they started. ”
More from BBC D-G Mark Thompson’s MacTaggart lecture (transcript at The Guardian)
post/1024508080
quote 10:15:00
“ Sky’s marketing budget is larger than the entire programme budget of ITV1. ”
Mark Thompson, BBC Director-General, during the MacTaggart lecture (transcript at The Guardian)
2010-08-26
post/1015028521
quote 18:04:00
“ However, for design guru Stephen Bayley, the passport’s references to our maritime history, dry stone walls and Blenheim Palace are nothing more than cliches, symbolising the “British disease of a soft-focus nostalgia for a past that never was”. ”
BBC News, quoting Stephen Bayley, asking What do new passport images say about modern Britain?
2010-03-04
post/426163795
quote 12:48:04
“ The BBC’s own Public Purposes, stated in its own charter [all] bellow for investment in network internet content, which will increasingly, inevitably, ineluctably do a better job of achieving these purposes than TV, whether broadcast or on-demand. […] Rather “the Internet” is again and again stated to be core to the future of the way the BBC reaches its audiences — but only if the output of the BBC is restricted to linear programming and the internet is a new pipe for this linear programming. ”
Paul Bennun at Somethin’ Else posting a Our Response to the BBC Strategic Review.
post/426161147
quote 12:45:43
“ The [report] is a concession to the whiskery rightwing argument that the BBC should meet only those needs that are not provided for elsewhere. If the BBC has no need to address teens because C4 already does that, why does it bother with sport, given that Sky does that; or news, since there’s always ITN? Follow that logic, and the corporation would end up exactly where its commercial rivals want it to be: as a subscriber service for a handful of tiny audiences whose niche tastes are so unprofitable no one else will cater to them. ”
Jonathan Freedland, in a comment piece for the Guardian: The BBC is caving in to a Tory media policy dictated by Rupert Murdoch.
Some would argue that this is a reductio ad absurdum argument, but I think it gets to the heart of why I’m worried about the report: if the BBC is shrinking, where will it stop?
(My main disagreement with his piece is the blithe acceptance that online content can be scaled back, but I’ve covered that elsewhere.)
