When The BBC was all that

I’m going back to the 1990s.   One can go to the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s,  for the British Broadcasting Corporation was what it claimed to be; “The World’s Radio Station”.

The BBC used to really report the News.   The News was important.  A story could be two minutes or ten minutes or twenty two minutes, it didn’t matter.  The purpose of the BBC was to inform, and if it took two minutes or twenty two minutes, that is what it took.

The standard of the BBC was to inform public of the stories it was about to cover, report on the stories in depth, then do a recap of what had been told.

Many of us sitting exams were instructed by our teachers to adopt the BBC Method;

“Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them.”

Many of us followed the advice to good use.

The BBC used to give complete stories.   If you listen to the BBC about an event in Zanzibar, you would not only be granted the information as to where Zanzibar is, a touch of its history, what happened, who is involved, who they are and what the consequences would be.

You might not have even known Zanzibar was a real place when you began to listen, but at the end of that broadcast, you could sit an exam, for that is how in depth the BBC used to be.

The BBC used to broadcast news almost continually.  It would have historical programs of the highest quality so that you would know, at the end of it as much information as necessary to allow you to speak of the event with some expertise.

It would read a novel on air, a chapter a day,  or have it acted out within a thirty minute period.  It covered sports and business and science, but it was mostly news.  And news was not cut and pasted to fit into the space left between useless blah blah.

Blah blah is when they waste time interviewing no one of any significance about nothing you care about.  Doing some false history program where all the facts and dates are virtually omitted so that if you listen to a program about the Battle of the Somme you wouldn’t know if it happened in 1914, 15, 16 or 17, or who was there and why it was important.

In fact, if you look at the schedule you will see very little news and 90% worthless blah blah which is repeated over and over and over again.  So that if you turned off a blah blah about female boxers at 9:08 you will be turning it off again at 2:33, and again at 8:33.  It will probably pop up again the next day as well.

The decline of the BBC is of such magnitude that one is stunned that it’s broadcasting of Blah Blah has gone on for so many years.   One assumed that a station with the reputation of the BBC would have gone back to its previous high standards within a few months of its decent into Newsbytes.

Nope.

The fact is, even it’s Webpage has very little news and lot of unnecessary rubbish as if they have joined the 1984 production of keeping people ignorant.

The rise of so many alternative news sites, be they right wing, be they whacky, is the result of the fact that you can not expect to hear news on the BBC.

The bits they give you are often hollow or deceptive, and the ‘need to know’ has become dulled in the minds of the public.  One simply goes back to what they were doing; whether cooking, playing a game on line, writing an item, with this shoulder shrug, assuming if it was important the BBC would have told them.

Which is the purpose.