A quick look at BBC television programmes for tonight shows Eastenders, Holby City, Life on Mars (I don't know what that is), One Life (on "Sugar Mummies"), The Apprentice, The Underdog Show etc etc.

Very posh

Nah, mate, it ain't posh enough.




x Jan x

I thought the point of a licence fee was that the BBC didn't have to chase ratings. And they are already trying to bring digital TV to the masses by turning BBC3 into the Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps channel.

It's a shame M Hanson didn't mention Radio 3 but I wonder whether the censorship of so much on the MB there while they are happy to accept all sorts of drivel on the Radio 1 MB (and elsewhere) is an anti-intellectual thing. I think they would be happy if the R3 MB were simply a request forum.

It's all a bit depressing. If they think it is too posh now, goodness knows what awaits us. Assuming that by "posh" they mean anything remotely challenging. Fairly recent tv innovations such as the Culture Show and BBC4 scuttled swiftly downmarket at a bewildering rate. With BBC4, I think it is maybe more a question of finance than policy but I don't see where the Avengers, Life on Mars or the League of Gentlemen ( to mention three current regulars on the schedule there ) fit into the original remit of the station. The Culture Show seems a more definite decision to go for the student market. Horizon now bears as much resemblance to what the show was originally about as Top Gear does. BBC News24 can still manage some gravitas when there is a major ongoing story such as a conflict or natural disaster but on any normal slow news day the content is banal with celeb-centric soundbites and "text us what you think".

What has this to do with a Radio 3 board ? Well, as the new schedule settles in, it has successes and failures but the general impression is much more lightweight and ties in with the general direction of the Corporation.  IMHO !!

Radio 3 is ok, the rest of the bbc is for chavs

It's not really odd, Mary, at least not to someone like me who's old enough to have glimpsed a time when what you describe was not normal but also young enough to have seen the direction in which things were headed (not that I ever imagined they'd arrive so quickly at that point).

I had the extremely good fortune of growing up in a part of the country where I was able to go to a traditional and, I realise looking back, really rather special grammar school at a relatively small cost to my parents - it wasn't free, but it was a former 'grant-maintained' school, and the fees were within reach of a fairly average middle-class family, which as far as I can gather is no longer the case, the gulf between rich and poor having (re-)opened in that respect as in so many others in the short time since then. (I should explain that I'm 27, which I think makes me rather younger than most other posters to this board. I was at the school in question between 1991 and 1998.) At a time when secondary teaching was moving increasingly towards the model you describe, a model aimed at training students to pass exams (exams themselves designed precisely to be 'teachable' in this way) rather than to know their subject, I had several wonderful, inspiring teachers - particularly in my A-level subjects, German, philosophy and music - as well as being in an environment where I could talk to teachers about all sorts of other things I was interested in, some of them really rather obscure.

Without those experiences, I think I wouldn't have felt 'permitted' to be interested in the sorts of things that have shaped me intellectually as an adult; and, valuable as my subsequent university education at Cambridge was, it would have 'come too late' if I hadn't already been set up to deal with the kind of inputs that were most useful to me there (quite apart from which, I'm neither a posh boy nor a social butterfly, whereas most students at Cambridge were one or the other of those, and I think if I didn't have the inner confidence in my own intellectual worth that school had given me I would have hidden in their shadow and gained nothing from my three years there).

Sorry. That's a lot about 'me'. But it's about my school really, and the tail end of an educational system that I witnessed by sheer good luck - the fact that my parents cared enough and weren't frightened to send me to a school that even then was conspicuous for not following the crowd, and, even more crucially, the fact that there was still such a school around for them to choose. Ten or even five years later, I don't think I'd have had anything like the same experience.

Several years ago Alan Moore said (paraphrasing), "if you dumb-down your television to cater to a specific audience, you will create the audience you are trying to cater to".

Well, the dumbed-down audience undoubtedly exists today.

Chickens/eggs, anybody?