The BBC is a dying dinosaur collapsing under the sheer weight of its own corruption and incompetence. Enough is enough. It really is time to scrap the licence fee and tell old ‘Aunty’ to jog on or compete on a level playing field.
In this austere age of perpetual recession where an army of millionaire MPs have made more cuts and slashes, it leaves somewhat of a sour taste in the mouth that each UK household when forced by law to pay £145.50 a year to finance the legion of crooked fat cats, tired old hacks, vacuous celebrities, aspiring politicians, two-bit shysters, talking heads and perfumed ponces that all flock together like one big hugely dysfunctional family under the banner of the BBC.
To put it bluntly, the stale perfume of rotten fruit and vile odour of institutional decay has surrounded the British Broadcasting Corporation, or to put it more aptly, the 'Beeb', for an awfully long time now.
As a collective audience of brass-plated mugs we could just about stomach the fact that endless repeats of Dad's Army, live episodes of Eastenders, sporting pundits in love with their own voice, groundbreaking movies from the 1980s, Cash in the Attic and of course, the One Show, didn't really represent value for money.
Even the huge fees commanded by celebrity sycophants such as Jonathan Ross, who defended his £6million a year salary whilst at the BBC with a blithe rationale that, "I'm in show business and I was at the top of my game," weren't enough for us to take to the streets in a merry carnival of licence burning and aunty bashing.
Yet, along came a spider in the form of the Jimmy Savile revelations. The perverted DJ's web seemed to infiltrate the very fabric of the BBC and forever taint it with the foul implication that our beloved 'Aunty' allowed this predatory paedophile carte blanche to carry on 'grooming a nation' just as long as the white-haired, shell-suit wearing, cigar eating freak stayed on top of the ratings.
And then like a particularly nauseating slug in Savile's toxic trail, along came Stuart Hall. Another BBC stalwart, and another vile pervert. Like Savile, the 'It's A Knockout' presenter stood accused of abusing his victims on BBC premises, and like Savile there are an abundance of accusations that the corporation knew about it. A source told the Mirror, “Everyone at the BBC was talking about him (Hall) and the young girls but nobody did anything about it." As more than one critic shrewdly noticed, "Public money funded these monsters to abuse kids while the BBC turned a blind eye."
That same public money, in other words your licence fee, was also used to pay Lord McAlpine a total of £310,000 for libel damages and the accountants at the Beeb dug into the very same purse to pay Savile's victims an amount equalling almost £4million.
Regardless of the arguments centered around who should be paying compensation in such cases, the final straw which is breaking the licence payers' back is the fact that the total paid to Savile's victims is actually lower than the £4.1m 'golden handshake' paid to senior managers who were forced out in the wake of the scandal. On what deranged planet could that ever be right?
But wait there's more! Much more. Seven of the top brass at the BBC were grilled a few years back by a committee led by MP Margaret Hodge to determine who was responsible for the scandal of using licence payers' money as 'sweeteners' to pay off executives within the corporation.
During the three hour hearing it transpired that BBC HR Director Lucy Adams was accused of describing licence payers money as 'sweeteners'and a leaked email reveals Miss Adams asking a colleague in HR, "What would the typical redundancy payment be so I can get a sense of the scale of this sweetener"
Oh dear! What a crooked web they weave. Like a crusading knight on a white horse, which is rather rich considering her former incompetence and apathetic behavior during the Islington care home scandal, MP Margaret Hodge, righteously declared that the corporation's personnel chief Lucy Adams was a liar.
The venomous broadside was apparently met with cheers in the BBC newsroom which reveals a lot about the culture of the 'Beeb' and backs up the recent report which found harassment and bullying has created a "climate of anxiety and fear" within the corporation.
So ask yourself this? Do we really need to pay BBC employees to visit Afghanistan and make a special programme about how Prince Harry is saving the world. And could we possibly sacrifice the need to finance the likes of Gary Barlow to travel the globe and record a special song for the Queen just so he can secure himself a chance of bagging a future knighthood?
And Is the opportunity to 'exclusively' enjoy Raiders of the Lost Ark on Saturday evening or watch a pensioner with a wig and speech impediment gamely shuffle his feet and tell terrible jokes, while hot young, scantily clad young things gyrate crazily all around him worth paying £145.50 a year for. It's definitely worth it for the likes of Bruce Forsyth because he received a cool £500,000 for each series of Strictly Come Dancing, but it's doubtful if he ever has to worry about meeting the mortgage repayments, paying the car tax, or keeping on top of the household bills in an endless bid to keep the wolf from the doors.
So chew on that next time you're watching a gang of overpaid singers, whose pockets are lined with your hard-earned money, squabble furiously about what slice of fresh meat has got 'the voice' to ensure them at least five minutes in the limelight as the Karaoke saviour of their generation.
Fans, and they're usually employees of the BBC will wax lyrically about what a great institution the BBC is. It's not and never has been. It certainly no longer complies with its original charter to educate, inform, and entertain. It's a pompous and out of touch bloated organisation, riddled from top to bottom with greed, elitism, and the very worst traits of institutionalised corruption and cultural fascism. In effect the Beeb can be likened to a secret society that regards itself vastly superior to the common plebs.
Isn't it about time 'Aunty' dearest competed on the level playing field that is the free market. In a digital age where freedom of choice is king, isn't a media outlet demanding money with menaces from every household in the land no matter if your interested in subscribing to their services or not, the actions of a crazed tyrant? A yearly subscription to both Lovefilm and Netflix costs a lot less than the BBC's licence fee and I know which service I prefer and offers more bang for my buck.
It really is time for the Government to wake up, tune into another channel and scrap this outdated, unwanted, unnecessary and extortionate licence fee.
I've got to go now, a man in a white van with a strange device on top has just pulled up outside my house requesting a 'quiet word'.
