April 16

 An alright day today, well, alright for me, which in the objective scale of things is pretty shit, but, in my world, I'll take it.

Went out for a walk. Got a burger with Hazel. Did some shopping. Sunny day. Wasn't bad.

Of course I slept 12 hours, felt very shit until mid afternoon and had to drag myself out. But. Eh. That's par for the course.

I managed to setup my new fire tv stick and doodads today. In the before times, this would have been an easy task that I would blast through. These days I have to build up to it, have a good day and the wind behind me, and I can fiddle with shit. It's not the mental bit. It's the physical bit. I just blow out so quickly. Sometimes halfway through a task, and then.. just... leave it. To literally gather dust.

Anywho, I did it. Packed up the old gear. Put a new fire stick in. Part of my cutting the cord and ditching of the TV licence.

New tech is lovely. It just works. It figured out my tv, figured out I had an amplifier in the way, stuck it all together, and managed to ace power on and off in one button for three devices. Pretty clever. And I can watch stuff off my local network too. It's just about like a condensed old school home theatre PC but now in something the size of your finger. Amazing how tech has come on. AND that this stuff has finally hit mainstream. I've had various HTPC's kicking around at home for 20 years or more. They are finally, almost, just about redundant. If I could get them to throw up a browser via a vpn, then that would pretty much be it for my couple of HTPCs left in service. That's the last bit of the puzzle for watching Stuff That You Cant Otherwise Access, nudge nudge, wink wink. Which to be honest is pretty rare for me. The streaming services et al do a very good job of covering most of it. But. Sometimes its crap. Or exclusive. And then. Pflah. Ahoy matey.

Of TV licences. The news today is all about the BBC sending out redundancy notices to its top News people. Such as Huw Edwards. 61. Who presents two news sittings. And earns an eye watering £450k a year. For a couple of hours a day. On hap hazard days. The news was all about the clutching at handbags about how awful it was letting these senior people go. How shocking. Teary eyed. Oh no.

This is what annoys me about the BBC. It whines about how it's an asset. An independent news broadcaster. Important. And then absolutely spaffs money on an army of shockingly overpaid staff.

The people in these gilded pools have lost touch with reality. If it's not politicians or CEOs then apparently it's people at the beeb. All swanning around on outrageous sums of money, whilst many people in Joe Public scrape by on a 20th or less of their wage. This is not just about someone earning a bit more money. This is about people earning so much more money, that regular people at the bottom of the scale cannot even being to imagine what that's like to have so much money. Houses. Cars. Boats. Vacations.

According to my back of cigarette packet calculation, if someone like Huw was on minimum wage, like a lot of people, he would be earning something like £5k a year. Not £450k. A mere 90 times higher.

You can see why the French guillotined their elite. Let them eat cake indeed. There is a disconnect. These people see nothing wrong with earning such grossly overinflated pay cheques. No shame. No recognition. Smugly chuckling all the way to the offshore tax haven bank account.

If the Beeb is indeed a tax funded institution meant for the general population of the UK, then, let a whole bunch of people learn how the industry works. Give jobs to young people, people who are learning, get them experience, pay them a decent wage, then when they know their stuff, they can either stick with the job at a sane wage - like everyone else in the UK - or move on and seek employment elsewhere. You'd save a huge amount of licence fee money AND you'd be doing a good thing by allowing people a great way into the industry, a great learning and teaching place. Effectively a hands on center for education in media, whilst also being an independent outfit. Let schools have a yearly intake of students into the beeb. Let the work their way up. Explore different careers. Teach your youngers skills. Perfect.

I am pretty sure it would not be a hard sell to offer a 21 year old a 50k a year job presenting the news. And have a huge cohort of them. Let them experiment. Learn. Train. Find their groove. Then get out of the way for another set coming up behind them. Or stay on and learn to run operations. Or go into the behind scenes tech. 

But no.

As it is, it's full of stuffed suits, oxbridge types, stuffing their pockets full of money, whilst chasing pensioners for licence fees and threatening court action. Behind the carefully coiffed hair of Huw Edwards lies a brutal and bullying collection arm that bends the truth about what you need to pay. Spin. That's the ugly bit they skate over. The protection racket that props up the whole rotten decadent whale.

Also.

Whilst the Beeb are quick to hide behind their plausible scapegoat excuse of Independent News Broadcaster, We Are The Truth, here they are cutting the news service - they are cutting two channels and merging them into one, yet stuff like garbage swilling Eastenders they leave alone. Because you know. Eastenders is very important. For. Uhh. A. Functioning democracy ? Without knowing who is currently running the Queen Vic, chaos would ensue in the streets of the UK.

My. Arse.

Eastenders gobbles up £30 million a year to make. To serve up a slice of miserable stereotype bullshit Eastend that has never existed.

Who can deny how important that is.

Channel 4 has shit like Hollyoaks. Which the few times I have unfortunately stumbled into it is in my opinion one of the most dire bits of drivel even shown on a screen. But the thing I do enjoy about Hollyoaks is that I don't have to pay for it. I don't like it. I don't watch it. I certainly don't pay for the thing I am not liking or not watching. FAIR. Unlike Eastenders. Which I also don't like and don't watch, but apparently, have to pay for, if I dare to watch something like, say, the BBC news summary.

Ah ha ha ha ha ha.

No. 

Channel 4 is a good comparison. It is also a state owned TV corporation, publicly owned, but, it receives no funding from the government. Nothing of the licence fee. And costs nothing to Joe Public. It funds itself via advertising. All in all it rakes in just about £1 billion. The BBC on the other hand raked in £5 billion, 70% of which was licence fee protection racket money. ITV earned 2 billion. Also through advertising. No bullshit licence fee funding.

Of inflated salaries. The Beeb Director general earns north of £500k a year. In 2021 the director helped himself to a 16% payrise boosting his wages above the £500k mark for the first time. A very delightful raise of £75k a year.

I mean why not.

The raise alone is hugely more than most people in the UK earn. Many professionals in the UK don't earn £75k a year. Let alone anyone else. And that's just his goddamn raise.

Absolutely disgusting all round. From its over the top salaries and utter waste of money. To drivel content. To exploitative and bullying money collection services. I can find little to nothing of merit in the BBC. It being an independent news service is neither here nor there. Plenty of them kicking around these days. But even if you subscribe to that. It should cost a fraction of what it does. The BBC is fat and bloated on cash, high on its own bullshit and importance, thinks its like some successful uber corporation, with elite tier workers and CEO types.

Fuck em.

If their content is so good. If they are so awesome. Flip to a subscription model. See how many people sign up for their shite at £13 a month. They don't dare do that of course. And they won't. Because they know they would lose all their money. If they thought they could make money like that, they absolutely would. They run away from any thought of that whatsoever because they know they are not worth the money. They want to suckle to the teet of money without consequence forever. Who wouldn't ? Assuming you have no ethics. GIVE US YOUR MONEY OR ELSE... and you get no say in what we do with it. Thank you for your hard earned money fuckers. Now. About that £75k rise for myself... 

Fucking assholes. Like many things wrong in the modern world, self serving, hypocritical, greedy fucking shitbaggery. It's like a disease. A competition between all the sociopathic greedy assholes to see who can be the biggest asshole of them all.

Why on earth we put up with this shit I don't know.

Learn from the French. Heads should be rolling all round. You'd see some fucking savings then, wouldn't you. Less price rises. Less piss being taken.

The BBC should be better than that. They are not. Same pigs. Same trough. Oink fucking oink.

Yes.

I have a bee in my bonnet about the fuckery that is the BBC.

Very glad I don't pay a licence anymore.

They need to die, imho, or seriously, majorly, reform.

Things like Channel 4, and their award winning news service make a mockery of the BBC. And if you're not just being parochial, things like the Associated Press and Reuters seem to do a pretty good job of being global quality news outfits. None of them demand money with menaces.

Fuck the anachronistic BBC. May it sink beneath the waves and be buried in the past.

Trouble is. Those with power and money very very rarely give it up without a hell of a fight. No matter how much of an asshole you show them to be. They don't care. Snouts in the trough is addictive. And they never want to stop snuffling.

Power almost never goes without an ugly fight. It will cajole and lie and manipulate and intimidate to try to retain what it has. Expand what it has. It is the nature of things. And the BBC are for sure doing all they can to retain their protection racket and keep shit the same. But they cannot quite get the gall up, the influence to extend their protection racket to the internet. And, slowly, but surely, all the old media is dying, and the internet is gobbling everything up. And the need to pay the Beeb their blood money dwindles.

Still. You can bet dollars to donuts the BBC will end up trying to tax the internet in the UK. That will be their final gambit. I guarantee it.