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Skyline_UK

Listed below are comments made by Skyline_UK between Thursday, 30th October 2008 and Thursday, 30th October 2008.

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Auntie's dilemma 2:03pm on 30 Oct 2008 Ok, here's the nub of this whole sorry farago. And it's very simple.

The BBC has been labouring for some years now under an utterly false premise - the one that drives them at an insane pitch to appeal to the 'yoof'.

The phrase you use above "If the Beeb cannot keep enough young people on board, it is sunk" is utter bunkum and you shouldn't recite this wrong-headed mantra, even though I'm sure all BBC employees have been on expensive country hotel training courses to have it ingrained in their psyche!

Why wrongheaded? The trendy (young) marketing folk in the BBC have made the enormous mistake of seeing the BBC as being the same as a large retail brand, and have sold this nonsense some years ago to their superiors. It is not a burger, a trainer, a car. It is unique in its field - a public service broadcaster. The UK population do not choose it as a life-style statement or some such guff. It's just THERE, for people to tune in and out of whenever they wish during their lives. They don't watch CBeebies (or whatever it's called) and then decide "Right, I'm sticking with the BBC for the rest of my life." The BBC is there on people's radio and TV dials for them to discover whenever they wish. And they change these preferences as they grow older - nomatter what you do. The listeners and viewers reach out TO YOU, you don't have to slobber and pander to the point of lunacy to get them to do this. People in the UK are born with brand loyalty to the BBC. They will dip and dip out whenever they wish whether the BBC fawns over them or not.

The recent brouhaha grew directly out of the BBC's own mania engendered by this utterly false premise.

The remedy? Calm down, do what you do best, let the listeners and viewers discover, undiscover and rediscover the BBC and its wondrous services, and climb back out of the gutter (not all the UK's yoof are down there anyway, sorry) and get back to basics.

Odd, I detect a close parallel between the lunatic young bankers who just couldn't put up with the boredom of the profession they'd chosen and so took to outright gambling to get their thrills and loot, and the young turks in the bowels of the BBC who don't want to settle for the staid life of being part of a revered public broadcaster, opting instead for the buzz of creating and addressing fictional 'threat' of get-um-young or they'll never come to you.

The solution is easy and entirely in the BBC's hands. I fear that the recent fracas will not change the mission statement-type obsession, however. Too many people's jobs depend on it, for one thing.
John

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