being very well advised and he s ignoring the advice. but whichever it is, he s ending up trying to, as i say, sort of tick, tick box populist policies to allow some of his potential critics on the backbenches to feel that their hobbyhorse issue is being advanced. at the same time as the british public and the activists, the tory activists can see that he looks a broken man, and those optics, i think, have a much more profound impact than any policy that he might try to put forward to in a sort of kneejerk reaction. and helen lewis from the atlantic, i mean, in the sunday papers, various newspapers, the telegraph and sunday times, they were reporting it as a blizzard of crowd pleasing policies. you know, laura s touched on it, but you know, one of them was the announcement about the bbc licence fee, within a few hours, lo and behold, the culture secretary, nadine dorries, was tweeting on sunday about that bbc deal. so does that mean that we should see
to government and to ofcom that the bbc funding model, which is essentially public money it s a tax in one form or another needs to make sure that, then, the bbc adheres to the highest standards in terms of the content contract they have with ofcom. i think ofcom have been actually less forceful than the old bbc governors were, and i think that s a mistake and we do try and press ofcom harder on that. but it s radio one and radio two that people worry about as being too commercial and, you know, getting into territory that they shouldn t be in? y. to a degree, although i think you have to acknowledge if you re going to allow the bbc to be in the radio business, it s going to have to be in most bits of the radio business and therefore it will be in the popular music end. but we expect, if they re being funded the way they are, that that they do more than just play the hits that they have a breadth of music and a breadth of subject matter which, you know, should be
when a lot of people who use bbc services particularly older people don t have reliable broadband. yeah, i mean, i d like to bring in phil riley here, chief executive of boom radio. you know, you ve built up radio stations, you know commercial radio really well. let s take nadine dorries at face value. you know, if this is the last licence fee to be announced, as she s suggesting, how could the bbc be funded? helen was touching on a couple of options, but what are the options, do you think? i think helen hit the nail on the head, really. i don t think there is really anotherfunding model that works for anything like the scale of bbc that we have today. subscription is an interesting idea, but it falls very badly when you consider that 18 million households in the uk access their television via freeview. freeview it s impossible to put subscription on freeview, it hasn t got conditional access, so there s 18 million people if you take the bbc off them, the freeview model falls o
and also, young people aren t consuming bbc content in the way that older people do. but that that s something that needs to be considered. the argument that the government appears to want to be having is the wrong argument. ok, well, radio four is taking a deep dive into all these issues about how to fund the bbc if the licence fee goes. the briefing room with david aaronovitch is on thursday evening at 8pm on radio four and available via bbc sounds afterwards for listeners now who want even more on the licence fee. but for us today, let s zoom out of these discussions for a moment because within all these newspaper scoops about operation red meat and parties at downing street, there are some pretty difficult questions for the media to answer. for example, one of these parties was held the night before prince philip s funeral. it was a leaving party held forjames slack, a former daily mailjournalist who was working as borisjohnson s director of communications, and he s now back on fle
sustainable given their audience level and the costs involved. nobody would touch them in a privatised world and try and make money out of them. they re simply not commercially sustainable. so this isn t about making a kind of kneejerk defend the bbc case. this is about thinking about the rest of the radio industry. the commercial world would be affected. not only would all those bbc local and nation services closed down the bbc networks collectively, one, two, three, four and five could just about survive if they were prepared to cut their cost base by about their content costs by about 60%. well, good luck saving the good bits of the bbc that people know and love if you have to take 60% off the cost and then the third leg of this is that the commercial sector, if the bbc, if the networks were taking commercials, the commercial sector would suddenly find its own revenue base cut back by ten, 15, 20%. therefore, the commercial