The Gaucho Club                     The over paid moguls rarely venture outside of London (or even the Gaucho Club) commission programs from each other and are insulated from real life.   It is still hard to understand why opposition parties and civil society did not more vigorously oppose the use of taxpayers' money to subsidise a self-perpetuating class of ideologues promoting such one-sided views.
Clearly these people  are out of touch with the real world. 

BBC banked £106,000 of Children in Need phone-in cash

The BBC has admitted that it banked £106,000 that should have gone to causes such as Children in Need and Comic Relief in the latest phone-in scandal to affect the corporation.
Viewers who contacted fundraising phone-ins but whose calls were received just after the lines had closed were still charged for the call and a BBC subsidiary kept the money.
Sir Michael Lyons, Chairman of the BBC Trust, which uncovered the practice, expressed regret for what he described as “a failure in terms of the behaviour of staff and of the BBC’s own systems”. He added: “This did not help the BBC or the people we serve.”

John Simpson hits out at BBC's 'bikini' values

The BBC's most senior reporter has criticised the corporation for dumbing down its current affairs programmes, predicting the news would soon by read by "someone in a bikini" or "from Strictly Come Dancing".
John Simpson, who has hit out at plans by BBC director general Mark Thompson to make significant cuts to BBC news services, told the audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival that values at the broadcaster were changing.
"It wouldn't surprise me to see people doing the job of newsreader wearing bikinis or from Strictly Come Dancing," he said. The public is changing.
"The hold the BBC has on young people is not the same. They don't mind adverts. Sometimes they like adverts better than the programmes."
The BBC's world affairs editor also joked that he feared his career would end in the Blue Peter garden, the final resting place of some of the programme's pets.
"I expect sooner or later I'll be taken out into the Blue Peter garden, given a lethal injection and buried."
Mr Simpson's made his remarks in defiance of a recent warning to presenters from BBC chairman Sir Michael Lyons against criticising the corporation, and its planned budget cuts, in public.

He blamed the weakness of its management for failing to stand up to attacks from the Government that were destroying the BBC's role as "the world's most powerful, free-standing, independent broadcaster".
Under a licence fee settlement, the BBC must make cuts of £2 billion over the next six years.
It is estimated as many as 2,800 jobs could go as a result, with flagship programmes such as Planet Earth and BBC News bearing the brunt.
Mr Thompson has called 100 of the corporation's biggest names to a meeting this Wednesday, when the package of cuts will be signed off by the BBC Trust.
Mr Simpson has worked for the BBC for more than 40 years. He joined the corporation in 1966 as a trainee sub-editor in Radio News.
His comments may contain a veiled reference to Natasha Kaplinsky's recent defection to Channel Five.
The presenter of the BBC's Six O'Clock News, whose profile soared after she won Strictly Come Dancing in 2004, quit the BBC to become the face of Five news.

THE BBC CAUGHT RED HANDED DOCTORING GLOBAL WARMING STORY                                  If you weren’t skeptical about the media before, you might be after this, especially the story about the BBC. After pressure by enviro-freaks, the BBC actually gave in and changed the facts to suit them!
Jeremy Paxman has accused the BBC of hypocrisy over climate change, saying it takes a "high moral tone" in its reporting of the issue while at the same time pursuing environmentally irresponsible policies.
 

                  An everyday tale of Rip Off merchants, using your job at the BBC and cashing in on the character you play to make you a bit  on the side.

Senior figures from the Radio 4 soap, including the shows editor, accepted an offer of free trips around the Mediterranean, North Africa and Norway in exchange for       entertaining passengers on Archers themed cruises. It cost Fans more than £1400 each to meet the cast members. In the BBC editorial guidelines it forbids employees from accepting free-bees as well as exploiting the BBC and its characters for commercial gain.

The BBC's own editorial guidelines state: "We [the BBC] must not endorse or appear to endorse any other organisation, its products, activities or services." They add: "We will not normally allow the BBC name, logos, titles, channel names, programme titles, formats or characters to be used by commercial advertisers."

But the highlight of the voyage is undoubtedly No Place Like Gnome, a specially-written episode of the show which will be performed by members of the cast and passengers.
The cast and crew also co-host an onboard cocktail party with the ship's captain and sign autographs.

A BBC spokes woman said the cruises were licensed by BBC Worldwide and therefore in keeping with BBC rules.

BBC chief spends £40,000 on flights and hotels
 

Figures, released by the BBC under the Freedom of Information Act reveal Mr Thompson has been abroad 26 times since taking over at the helm of the corporation in 2004.
 Mark Thompson, the director-general of the BBC, has spent more than £40,000 on flights and hotel bills since taking up his post include a visit to the Cannes Film Festival, stopping off at the Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, and visiting the Athens Olympics. 

In 2006, director general Mark   Thompson saw his pay packet increase by £160,000 from £459,000 to £619,000.

BBC staff are currently fighting Mr Thompson's own proposals to slash more than 1,800 jobs The BBC was unable to provide a full breakdown of the costs of all Mr Thompson's overseas trips, but it has been able to disclose details of flights worth just over £37,000 and hotel rooms costing just over £6,000. In April it spent just over £3,350 on two flights to Augusta and New York so Mr Thompson could attend the Masters golf tournament and a series of staff meetings.

BBC 'Fat Cats' in row over bonuses A row has erupted over executive pay at the BBC after details of the Executive Board’s remuneration were revealed in the Corporation’s annual report, published today.
BBC bosses received annual bonuses of nearly 25 per cent of their salaries last year, despite thousands of workers facing the prospect of redundancy as the Corporation attempts to trim its £3.8 billion budget.
The report revealed that 13 members of the executive board, including Mark Byford, (pictured here) the deputy director general, received payments in addition to their salaries totalling £546,000 in the last financial year. The average salary among the BBC’s 27,000 staff is £38,000.
News of the bonuses - up more than 2 per cent on the previous year - prompted outrage among union leaders and led to calls for executives to return the money.
 

 How the BBC Spends Your Money

I'm sure you have seen the news that the BBC is facing a record fine of up to £250,000 after repeatedly ripping off licence fee payers on a string of shows. It's expected to receive its biggest ever sanction when Ofcom rules on its faking of competition winners on a number of programmes. Viewers on shows including Children in Need, Comic Relief and Sport Relief were all duped.         Production staff were found to have made up names of winners and even posed as contestants. The regulator, which will rule on 12 cases, will not give the BBC any special favours. An Ofcom spokesman said: "Whether publicly funded or not the same rigorous high standards apply to all." The fine will almost certainly be a record and the maximum £250,000 censure is thought to be under serious consideration. Now I do understand that other TV broadcasters were at the same sordid scam but then again no other broadcaster forces us to fund their activities.

Given the years of BBC crowing   about how much good work it does for charity, this recognition of a lack of control over how production staff operates rather blinds Pudsey in the other eye. How can we trust them when they have shown they cannot regulate their own standards?

  Former BBC producer Rod Liddle's column in today's Sunday Times is a cracking read from end to end, echoing so much of what we have said and discussed here for so long. Particular highlights of his article, BBC in need, sub-headed "Poor old Auntie Beeb is unwell. She’s confused and no longer knows right from wrong, truth from fakery", include:
Management surprise at management ignorance:
Much to the apparent surprise of Bennett and Abramsky, two experienced and highly respected corporation bureaucrats, a procession of contrite and nervous producers came forward to ’fess up. The public, it seemed, had been deceived with unnerving consistency, particularly over programmes with phone-in polls and competitions. And on the corporation’s most noble flagship enterprises, too. Comic Relief and Children in Need, for example.
“We just sat there absolutely stunned,” one executive board member told me, “shocked beyond belief. Nobody had any idea that this was going on on such a scale.”
Not even Bennett and Abramsky, when they asked for producers to come forward?
“Nobody. Nobody at all. And we had the very powerful sense that there was a lot more to come. And we thought this time no excuses, something really has to be done.”
 

The week the BBC revealed that it had misled viewers in a wildlife documentary called Incredible Animal Journeys broadcast in May. The programme claimed to show Steve Leonard, the presenter, tracking the migration of a pregnant caribou via a GPS receiver from a hotel room in the Yukon. In fact, the scenes were “reconstructed” several weeks later in the UK.
The broadcaster was only rumbled after an eagle-eyed viewer spotted a British electrical socket in the background

The awful waste of an awful lot of cash on the awful Jonathan Woss:
“The BBC was burbling with happiness because it had got Jonathan Ross for ‘only’ £18m when he had asked for £24m,” the senior BBC journalist remarked with some derision. “He draws only about 3m viewers every week – for which he is paid almost eight times the entire yearly budget for a programme like The World Tonight. How can that possibly be justified?”
Privately quite a few BBC executives admit that the Ross contract was a misjudgment, politically, morally and practically. One told me it had cost the BBC “a couple of hundred million quid” when it came to charter renewal because the politicians were ill-disposed towards an organisation that could be so cavalier with licence-payers’ money.