BBC has to save £125million your suggestions please

[billysboy]

So the Beeb has to save a bit of cash any suggestions

mine are as follows

Stop sending out news reporters and their crew everywhere to report from ie the coast when there is a gale or outside a hospital when someone important is being treated

Sack Steve Wright who earns £500k a year and his sycophants

Dont broadcast all night stop at 1 am and restart at 530 am

I cannot stand Stacey Dooley and it has cheered me up no end to see a number of pp share my low opinion of her and her product. Usually if you say anything against her you get a right telling off.

I must speak out in support of keeping EastEnders on. I have had to endure watching it for years as dd pronounced herself a fan, and the only thing that's kept me going this past month is looking forward to the entirety of Albert Square gets wiped out by covid. Like fuck am I missing that payoff after half a decade of misery.

Brilliant

Get rid of the children’s channels. That market is served perfectly adequately in the private sector.

Which commercial children’s channels are making significant amounts of British content?

Allow me to pay for iPlayer (I’m outside U.K.) which I would be delighted to do.

And block people who HAVEN'T paid for their licence from accessing iplayer.

The farce of just clicking "I have a licence" without any proof is ridiculous!

Make the licence number (easily found) a password for access

Frankly I suspect the same could be applied to most modern TVs too. Stop non payers watching the illegally.

And yes charge non licence holders for access. Crazy this still hasn't been sorted

And yes cut the crazy salaries, not just linekar and derek Thompson but all over 6 figures. Crazy money!

Maybe then we'd see new actors & presenters getting a chance rather than the same old faces/voices repeatedly & boringly

Cut all male salaries to match their female colleagues. yes!

And yes trim the fat of too many managers not enough grafters

Get each DJ on the radio stations to report the news and weather - don't need additional people to do a 5 minute segment yep agree with that

Stop all the stupid cooking and dancing shite - we don't need that think you'll find this is actually an area where they MAKE money

So while not to your (or mine especially) taste it makes sense to keep these. BUT I've never understood why TWO presenters for this - unnecessary

I wish they'd buy bake off back though it's turned to shit since the move to C4 bring back Nadiya to judge with Mary and ditch Paul.

Stop trying to compete with commercial broadcasters totally agree, go back to bbc basics - education, culture (not pop culture) & real investigative journalism

Commission work from up and coming writers LOVE this (can I please be one?)

I love eat/shop well for less but it's not necessary to have high paid presenters on them, there was a dietician on "eat" that was lovely, can't remember her name, Asian lady who'd be perfect for doing it herself.

BUT I don't agree with:

abolishing licensing for advertising - that way lies channel 5 shite!

Close the bbc news channel. We don’t need news 24/7. We really don’t. I'd say we need it more now than ever

Does anyone listen to the local stations?

Yes, 7.5 million people.

Guess what? The BBC, in providing a universal service, will spend money on things you don’t like.

I don’t like Mrs Brown’s Boys, Top Gear, Strictly or Radio 2. All of them are excellent uses of my licence fee.

I’m overseas and can listen to the iPlayer radio app here for free. I’d be happy to pay for it. I really enjoy listening to BBC radio stations, especially my old local station.

The TV iPlayer doesn’t work here because it recognizes my IP address is a US one. There are ways around this with VPNs and stuff but I’d be happy to pay for the TV iPlayer overseas also if they would open it up to us here.

Celebs going on a free holiday to India aka yet another stupid Marigold hotel! as much as we hope, we know they are never going to retire to India its just another holiday courtesy of the BBC and us!

Why do we need the BBC?

Paid subscription access to iplayer outside the UK. I'd absolutely pay for this.

All the local radio stations plus Five Live now merge overnight.

I reckon they could save money by not sending a dozen reporters, commentators and pundits to every international tournament- football especially.

@AgeLikeWine where else are there good quality educational children’s programmes?

Stop hiring "household names" to voice children's tv shows
Halve the hiring of "household names" generally. I'm sure you have in-house talent (good examples include Steph McGovern, who came up through the ranks).
Merge BBC 2 & 4 - similar content, same audience
Buy syndicated content from global disasters - nobody needs Johnny from London turning up in Haiti or the sight of NZealand's latest earthquake to film the devastation
Stop buying ratings-grabbing shit like RuPaul's Drag Race. If you are going to compete in the marketplace then become commercial, otherwise use another metric
Sack half your middle management and see if you miss any of them (blanket rule in all big businesses and all quangos)

@Selfsettling3 a lot of the Canadian content that goes out on Itv3 is very good. You could do the same CBeebies content without celeb voices and not a single 4 year old in the land would notice.

Lose the cooking shite, expensive dull thrillers shite and Steve Shite.

They should add a charge for certain things on I player perhaps. Want a whole series at once? pay a couple of quid. Maybe fill it with old programs and films you can buy for a few p/£

I’d rather watch a blank screen than the One Show.

How would you tell the difference?

I’ve no real idea why people want less high quality children’s programming.

Fair enough point on the cost cutting potential within it though.

I need to tell DH his oneshow tribe are all here 🤣 he absolutely despises it to the point if he accidently hears the opening wah waaaahhh he gets totally triggered.

I'd turn eastenders into a single locked room with Phil Mitchell delivering a Samuel Beckett monologue that goes on forever. Thats all BBC1 will be from then on. Might be a bit too upbeat for eastenders viewers though.

Get rid of the children’s channels. That market is served perfectly adequately in the private sector.

I have to strongly disagree there. The lack of advertising is a massive benefit. Adverts are often an irritant for an adult but they can really confuse very young children, when they hear an adult shouting at them that they can/should enjoy a toy, but then find out that they can't because their parents disagree with the shouty person extolling its supposed essential virtues, don't want to buy it and/or can't afford it. Tiny kids have a very small world already and then something enters it (by being advertised) and then, in their consciousness, is instantly taken away again.

Yes, the BBC has toys and merchandise relating to their own programmes, but it's out there for parents to find if they look for it; it isn't pushed frantically every 10-15 minutes. Call me cynical, but I reckon a lot of shows on the commercial channels are specifically designed around merchandising, with the makers first deciding what they want to sell and then constructing programmes mainly for that purpose. That, therefore, would mean that the entire programme is actually one continual advert with the official adverts nothing more than reminder breaks.

Also, as for those suggesting that the BBC doesn't need to 'duplicate' with two different kids' channels, do you genuinely believe that a 2yo and a 12yo are going to want to watch the same programmes (and for them to be appropriate for both)? Even if they were both aimed at the same age group, what would be wrong with kids having a bit of choice? How would adults like to be told that they can have one of Match of The Day, Songs of Praise or Mrs Brown's Boys, but no choice - they get what they're given? I know some elements of MN are fond of blaming children for being children and saying "Pay for itself if you want it", but children can't pay for their own food or clothing, can they - doesn't mean they shouldn't have it.

Isn't Death In Paradise filmed in Guadaloupe for like 6 months or something? I'm sure I read thats why one of the old cast members left as he was missing his family. I think it's sold to other networks so it could be profitable but a 6 months living expenses paid on a Carribean Island plus salaries for actors and crew members must be quite costly. Surely with all the computer graphics they could just film it at Blackpool or something lol. Actually joking aside why can't a 'British' Brodcasting company come up with a similar drama based in the UK at a lower cost??

do you genuinely believe that a 2yo and a 12yo are going to want to watch the same programmes (and for them to be appropriate for both)? Even if they were both aimed at the same age group, what would be wrong with kids having a bit of choice? How would adults like to be told that they can have one of Match of The Day, Songs of Praise or Mrs Brown's Boys, but no choice - they get what they're given?

That's exactly how both adults and children managed for years before digital TV came along - and without the back-up options of streaming, YouTube etc. If you didn't want MOTD, SOP or MBB on the three available channels - guess what? You switched off the television set and did something else. As a child, if it wasn't the 15:30 - 17:00 children's TV slot you either watched adult TV - or did something else.

It's ridiculously indulgent to expect wall-to-wall TV aimed at a precise audience. One BBC children's channel is more than enough - especially now that, in the 21st Century, there are other children's channels, streamed/on demand TV and DVDs are readily available - if modern children really are incapable of amusing themselves unless they're stuck in front of a screen (which I doubt).

I don't see how cutting individual programmes would necessarily help, as they'd just have to fund something else to replace it.

Waste within programmes is certainly one to address, including paying presenters way over the odds (whilst not opening up opportunities to a wide pool of talented people who would work for a fair wage), trebling up (or more) on people doing overlapping jobs and having totally superfluous people like Evan Davies on Dragons' Den. Nothing against him personally, and I'm sure he has his place in appropriate programmes, but whoever thought it necessary to have him saying "And now, it's a husband and wife team hoping for a dragon to help them turn over a new leaf!!!" five seconds before a married couple come on, introduce themselves and then talk about their expanding publishing company?! Even if he isn't paid any extra wage for it as a BBC employee, there will be travel, sustenance and organisational costs and facilities for an extra person who is as vital there as a blobfish's toothbrush.

Also, with the news question raised earlier: aren't there a handful of news agencies that pretty much feed the info to most global news and media outlets anyway? Even if the BBC prefers to use its own people, you'll find that they'll have a dedicated South Africa correspondent who lives and works there - but when a big story breaks in SA, they'll fly Hugh Edwards or Laura Kuenssberg (and probably associated assistants) straight over to Jo'burg to report on it instead of the person they already have in place and employed to do that very job - presumably just because they think the viewers want somebody they can instantly put a name to instead of waiting two seconds for a less familiar name to come up on the screen.

Well I dunno but I'm guessing their focus groups (yeah sack all of them as well) told them that Death Slightly Outside The Northampton Interchange probably wouldn't be such a draw.

Damn you, fast moving discussion. Why aren't you people getting your pots out for the clap? Anyway, my last response was re the Death In Paradise question.