The BBC

I have two, superficially contradictory, points to make about funding of the arts. Please bear with me.

The BBC has announced that they are introducing repeats of Top of the Pops, beginning in 1976. Good, you might say, accessible proletraian culture, paid for by the taxpayer.

But this is not in reaction to a popular yearning for eurovision song contest type music, flared trousers and self satisfied woolley-haired DJs. It is because the BBC has too many stations and cannot fill them. This awful nonsense will go out on the BBC's fourth TV channel (they have nine TV channels and of course many radio stations) and will provide a cheap source of material to justify the bandwidth.

At the same time the BBC is making cuts to its news service and, worst of all, cuts to the World Service, Britain's window on the world and one of the truly great things about British, or any other, broadcasting. The Hindi service is to be cancelled, denying basic impartial news to millions of people who unlike the London based Litterati, do not have the internet. So we can have Jimmy Saville repeated.

The BBC could provide a cheap, high quality service with one TV channel (two if we are to continue with the costume dramas which sell to the US at a profit) and Radios 3 and 4. All the rest could be flogged off to independent companies who allowed advertising, which would scarcely be noticed, and might even improve Radio 1. The World Service could continue in its originl form, supplying high quality news to people who did not otherwise have it.

But the controllers of the BBC can't see this: they must have more and more channels purveying more and more crap, earning them more and more money on the basis of audience figures, while the rest of us shell out more and more for something unnecessary.

Time to make a saving there, too.