Paxo - BBC obsessed with the copper wire and not about the electricity

The Daily Telegraph have very sensibly printed in full the James McTaggart memorial lecture by Jeremy Paxman.."Never mind the scandals: what’s it all for" at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival

"...We have become obsessed with how the copper wire is organised, and forgotten about the electricity"

"Now this is new. For most of the media, most of the time, the motivation has always been pretty simple: you grab as much of the potential audience as possible, in order that you can screw the maximum amount of money out of them. Television was different because those who made it had a different sense of intention. In those more innocent days – and it applied to both the BBC and the commercial sector, producers made programmes because they were passionately engaged with the world and wanted to communicate what they’d found out. Too much of the time now they simply pick things from the world which look as if they might make good television, regardless of whether they do anything other than meet the demands of a format. To put it simply, people at the top are less concerned with content and a lot more concerned with bottom lines. There are too many people in this industry whose answer to the question what is television for? is to say ‘to make money.’


"Of course, the BBC’s got problems of its own, and they also come down to money. It was comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the Treasury in the last licence fee settlement, so that it is now committed to spending nearly one and a half billion on things – whether they be the cost of digital switchover, on-demand, building office blocks in Salford – which have nothing much to do with sole purpose of its existence, which is to produce worthwhile programmes. Even so, quite how these obligations produce a budget crisis in an organisation with an assured income of three and a half billion pounds is still something of a mystery to me.

"But the bigger question is whether the BBC itself has a future. Working for it has always been a bit like living in Stalin’s Russia, with one five-year-plan, one resoundingly empty slogan after another. One BBC, Making it Happen, Creative Futures, they all blur into one great vacuous blur. I can’t even recall what the current one is. Rather like Stalin’s Russia, they express a belief that the system will go on forever."

No great admirers of Paxo or his cast of late night entertainers but at least one of the cast has finally found a voice to expose (some of) the failures of the Televisual media ... You Tube, Blinkx, finally opening a few people's eyes ?

A must read for anyone interested in understanding how the public view Television...although he failed tomention the squillions spent by the BBC on "idents", those irritating Chanel identities that save making programmes but fill air time.

See also Independent Guradian and The Rest / Pic is of Newsnight's . Emily Maitlis who outshines Paxo in every department. We had a toss up between her and Mark Urban for which pic to use.