I’ve been performing a detailed textual analysis of the Government’s BBC Green Paper – using the awesome analytic power of the ‘Find’ command (It’s easy: download the Green Paper and search for important words: if your top word doesn’t come up, write something righteous about its exclusion. You are now a pundit). I’ve read the Green Paper and the most dramatic absence is that of the much-feared post-Hutton hatchet. Most remarkably of all, the BBC’s extraordinary, exotic funding model survives and no significant proportion of the license fee bounty has been set aside for other Public Service Broadcasters.
The pop media have been reduced to discussion of the Green Paper’s fairly flaccid (and probably tokenistic) attack on copycat formats and ratings chasing in general. The proposed legislation is, unarguably, an almost unqualified victory for the Corporation but it’s also a cast iron, unmissable opportunity for forward thinkers at the Beeb (and in Government and in the legislature) to make grown-up use of the next decade-and-a-half to rebuild Auntie for the networked era.
Of course, above all else, what right-thinking people really want to know is, in the upcoming quality food-fight, will Dick & Dom’s brilliant, anarchic and entirely peurile Bungalow (already the target of Parliamentary dissaproval) survive? In our house, we hope so.