Defying Gravity Lost in Space?

It’s said that, despite twin obsessions with central planning and the economies of scale, the Soviet Union would always build at least two facilities to produce any given product. Otherwise they had no benchmark for efficiency. With two plants they could at least tell which set of factory managers was diverting more goods to the black market.

The UK would have been well advised to have followed a similar approach when it set up its national broadcaster. Because, with the guy in charge of the stationery cupboard earning more than the country’s Prime Minister, the BBC just might possibly be hideously inefficient.

What I want to know today is what’s happened to Defying Gravity?

I watched last week’s episode on video last night, so could swear it was on after The Restaurant, which incidentally is racing The Apprentice downhill as the BBC seemingly chooses candidates not on the basis of any aptitude, but because they fill its criteria for diversity and supposed entertainment value. Not only would I rather see the best candidates who applied to be on these programmes, I would also have thought the BBC’s funding method was intended to ensure chasing ratings took second place to preserving objectivity. I guess they’ll be applying the same policy to Mastermind soon.

Anyway, I would have thought it would be simple and obvious for the BBC to put a web page for each programme so that when I type for instance “Defyi” into Google I am at most two clicks away from a clearly expressed summary of when the series is screened. Instead, I find this mess of a page, which tells me only that episode 7, Fear is coming up on Saturday at 22:50 on BBC 2. Nothing to warn me that I might not yet have seen episode 6. I could easily have failed to discover on a poor data-driven rather than hand-crafted web-page that I have 4 days left to watch the 6th episode, Bacon on iPlayer or could catch it at 01:25 on 24th November, whatever day of the week that is.

The Beeb has obviously spent a fortune of our money on Defying Gravity. You’d think the overpaid wallies would at least make sure we can quickly and easily find out when we can watch it.

Trawling the rest of the web, I find a suggestion that the series has been quietly moved from its sensible midweek slot.

Wikipedia tells us that the series was halted after 8 (of 13) episodes on ABC before it even began on the BBC. But the fact that ratings declined doesn’t mean it’s rubbish. The history of TV shows that series like Defying Gravity can have a small but dedicated audience, and sometimes a growing cult following years later. And, if the BBC knew the series was going to lose its appeal to a mass audience, why didn’t they put it on at an obscure time from the start? Then at least those of us who are interested might have had the benefit of a regular slot.

Is Defying Gravity going to drift aimlessly in space? Or will it keep my interest? I’d like the opportunity to find out. Better fire up that iPlayer…

FFS, BBC!

I ordered a number 36 from the local Indian takeaway the other night. When I went to collect the meal it was a king prawn vindaloo. “But I ordered a chicken korma”, I complained. “Sorry sir, we decided to change the menu”. Never mind. I made it to the cinema anyway. I’d booked a ticket for the controversial alien prawn apartheid Nigerian gangster gore-fest District 9. But instead I found myself watching the beautifully filmed, but spoilt by saccharine narration and intrusive over-dramatic score Disney flamingo gore-fest The Crimson Wing instead. The cinema said they’d got a good deal and decided to go with the big birds at the last minute.

OK, there was no curry surprise, nor one at the cinema. But these examples are no different to what the BBC did on Saturday. They announced at the end of the Radio 5 commentary on Ukraine v. England – controversially to be shown only live only over the internet, from £4.99, or at selected cinemas, from, I heard, £12 – that the highlights WOULD after all be shown on regular TV later that evening.

Call me old-fashioned, but if I’m going to watch highlights I prefer not to know the score. If I’m not going to watch highlights, and I can’t watch live, then the next best option is to listen to a live commentary. So I decided to find an excuse to be near a radio for 2 hours on Saturday. I volunteered to do some cooking. Had I known in advance that I’d be able to watch highlights, then I would not have cooked my goulash just so that I could listen to the football commentary. Most likely I would not have cooked my goulash at all. In fact, it’s fair to say I planned a large part of the day around the football.

For decades we have become accustomed to a television medium where transmissions – by and large – follow a “schedule”. Exceptions are rare. I’m still annoyed, for example, that the BBC suspended coverage of the enthralling 1980 world snooker final to show coverage of the SAS operation to end the Iranian embassy siege on both channels. Pointless. After 10 seconds, I’d got the point and decided to read all about it in the next morning’s paper.

I’m therefore astonished at the insipid media response to the BBC’s decision not to inform us a little earlier about the Ukraine-England highlights programme. There was some kind of media programme on the radio this afternoon (OK, I can be arsed to check the schedule in this morning’s paper which is 2 feet away – it was The Media Show, 1:30pm, Radio 4 – see how this scheduling lark works Mr BBC? Convenient, isn’t it?). At the start they mentioned the footie scheduling decision as if that was to be the main topic on the programme. But “But first…” turned into around 28 minutes of waiting (BTW, audiences hate this sort of trickery to keep you listening or watching), before some lame muttering to the effect that if the Beeb hadn’t accepted an embargo on announcing the highlights programme then we wouldn’t have seen it at all. Personally (as a license-payer) the highlights were worth not very much at all – £x, say – having listened to the entire game on the radio, and would have been worth quite a bit – say £10x – had I known about them in advance. If, as I read somewhere, the BBC paid £900k (+ broadcasting costs + annoyance to viewers who wanted to watch the News or the Football League programme which were displaced at short notice), then maybe the highlights weren’t such good value after all. Reportedly some 4 million of us tuned into the highlights. Maybe a lot of these switched on, as I did, just to see if the England game really was on. Maybe a lot simply put the telly on and watch whatever the BBC chooses to show, since this episode indicates that is obviously how Auntie believes we will consume moving pictures in the future.

I wasn’t a fly on the wall during the negotiations between the BBC and the company that bought the rights to the qualifier, but I would imagine there was a price the internet-streaming rights owner would accept to allow highlights without pre-announcement, and a (higher) price with an announcement. I bet the higher price wasn’t £9 million. Why didn’t the BBC simply say “Actually [I imagine that's the sort of word they would use], we can’t jerk our viewers around like that”?

There exists in the UK a list of sports events that must be made available “free to air” – the so-called “crown jewels”. This list is currently up for review. The problem is – a point taught in class 1, Economics 101: profit maximisation principles – you can make more profit by not satisfying demand, assuming all purchasers have to pay the same price and you can’t “segment” the market. E.g. 10m people paying £1 to watch a football game earns you £10m, but if you can get 2m to pay £10 you’ll rake in £20m. Maybe you’d be best off finding 50 billionnaires willing to pay £1m each…

The point is, we live in a very unequal society. Government (as usual) is trying to address the effects rather than the causes by mandating that some events must be free to air. The trouble is, it leaves the sports affected financially worse off. Kind of a poor reward for creating a popular product – and often helping promote a sense of national identity.

Maybe there’s a better solution.

Let’s bear in mind that “free to air” is an incoherent concept and really a synonym for “in the good old days”. BBC channels, strictly speaking, are not free to air, since you need a licence. OK, the BBC is in the ludicrously privileged position that if you have a TV the law assumes you watch the BBC and need a licence. In other words, the BBC licence fee is an unfair, regressive tax.

Maybe the BBC licence fee could be reduced. Maybe people should only pay for TV content they actually want. And whilst I like to watch sport, I am aware that many people watch none. In a few years we’ll all be digital with many more channels – BBC Sports 1 and 2, for example. Why not charge a basic BBC licence-fee and a supplement for sport? (The same may apply to other content, of course, e.g. access to the BBC’s archive via iPlayer).

So if free to air is a woolly concept, why doesn’t the Government simply relax the rule so that instead of “free to air” it simply stipulates that sports events must be available to multiple broadcasters?

Remember the mobile-phone spectrum auction that raised £22m? I’m not advocating such grasping behaviour, but we could use a little bit of the smarts that were behind that operation to devise a way for multiple broadcasters to show sports events, whilst maintaining the total income to the sports.

Here’s one way you could do it. You’d have an auction as now for the rights. Let’s say the winner – Sky, perhaps – bids £10m for a particular sports event. This has established the value of the event to a monopoly broadcaster, since Sky would have to assume they’ll be paying the full £10m. But now we’ll allow another broadcaster – the BBC, say – to share the rights for 50% of the price offered by Sky, which both would then pay. If ITV also wants to show the game, then all would pay 33.33%. If ESPN wants it as well, then 25% each. If someone wants to stream it over the internet for Brits abroad (if global rights are on offer), or to fans watching on mobile phones, then 20% each.

It might be even better for 2 bidders to pay 110% of the original price – 55% each or £5.5m in this example – 3 to pay 120%, 40% each or £4m – and so on.

Now, I reckon this would create a win-win-win situation:
- sports would maximise their income , whilst also reaching the maximum number of viewers (in fact, the market is being segmented, since the cost per viewer varies);
- viewers would have more access to sporting events and could choose the commentary and form of coverage they wanted – broadcasters would have an incentive to improve or at least differentiate their products;
- broadcasters could follow their various business models. E.g. Sky and ESPN could show a lot of sport to people who pay a premium, the BBC and ITV could show a selection of popular events, and so on;
- the Government gets out of making tricky decisions about the “crown jewels” every few years.

Certain events – the World Cup Final, for example – are already shown simultaneously on multiple channels. Viewers are able to choose their commentary and punditry teams. I remember how, when I was a boy, we used to argue over which channel to watch the FA Cup Final on – on our neighbours’ colour TV! Let’s bring those days back. Jumpers for goalposts…

OK, there are a few problems to sort out. E.g. side-deals may be needed to avoid too many cameras at sports events. But surely it must be possible to improve on the current situation where either sports lose out financially or many viewers have no access to key sporting events, like the Ashes – not good for the long-term future of the sport.

Whatever the rules, perhaps the BBC could spend our money a little more wisely in future than it did by agreeing to keep secret its purchase of Ukraine v. England highlights. FFS, BBC, For Footie’s Sake!

Bring Back BBC Bias!

With so much sport to choose from, it takes something special to grab my attention – genuine rivalry, perhaps, like the Ashes. Or a special individual. I happen to think Lewis Hamilton is a driver of exceptional talent. My interest in F1, like that of millions of others, was rekindled when he burst on the scene.

I was therefore fuming when Hamilton’s McLaren suffered a puncture on the first corner of yesterday’s German GP, leaving him in last place for the rest of the race. Like millions of others I was interested to know exactly what had happened.

I was rather puzzled that Hamilton appeared to lose it at the first corner and not only ran wide but, at first sight, must have collided with another car (Raikonnen’s Ferrari was the candidate) on rejoining the race. OK, there’s a bit of “My boy can do no wrong”, about it, but such errors would be very uncharacteristic for Hamilton, who, as I said, is pure raw talent.

Sure enough, the plot soon began to thicken. It was announced that the Australian Red Bull driver Mark Webber, who ended up winning the race, was under investigation for an incident at the start. The BBC’s “expert pundit”, former under-achieving Scottish driver David Coulthard (if you’ve followed that Wikipedia link, then, like me, you’ll have been reminded that Coulthard’s last racing team was – you’ve guessed it – Red Bull) immediately announced that Webber had done nothing wrong. His comments suggested that his basis for this was that he “hadn’t seen a collision”.

At this stage we hadn’t seen any clear replays, so Coulthard clearly believes that he has the ability to monitor exactly what is happening over a few seconds to 20 cars speeding away from the start of a GP. No-one else can do this, especially whilst simultaneously commentating, so Coulthard is clearly superhuman and deserves every penny of the millions he earnt not winning many races.

Replays soon confirmed that Webber had in fact side-swiped Barrichello’s Brawn going into the first corner. Webber admitted in the post-race interview that he thought Barrichello was on the other side of him! Lucky he wasn’t on a public road, or he’d be facing a dangerous driving charge. Miraculously, the collision had little effect on Barrichello or Webber’s cars. On another day, though, Webber’s mistake would have taken out half the field.

David “Superman” Coulthard’s opinion was, of course, unchanged by the visual facts of what had happened.

Webber received a drive-through penalty, which was insufficiently severe to prevent him winning the race. What sort of sport is this becoming? When I used to watch, the penalty was a 10 second stop, as well as a drive-through.

What the stewards didn’t investigate, though, was what happened next. Webber bounced off Barrichello, and – no doubt shocked to have found a car already there as he headed to the apex of the first corner – also steered left where Hamilton happened to be going round his outside. It turns out Webber clipped the McLaren forcing him off the track and giving him the puncture that cost him the race.

But the Beeb’s narrative was what a “brilliant performance” by Webber. Sorry, I expect sports coverage to reflect at least some of what I feel about the event, not construct some dumbed-down narrative. Webber was lucky his car wasn’t wrecked after playing dodgems at the start; lucky F1’s punishment regime is a joke; lucky not to find himself behind Hamilton and Barrichello at the start (and vulnerable for a lap or two to Kers-powered overtaking moves by the Ferraris and Kovalainen’s McLaren); and lucky too, as it happened, that Brawn screwed up a Barrichello pit-stop, relegating the closest rival to the Red Bulls to 6th. Maybe there’s a reason the “brilliant” Webber had not won any of his previous 129 GPs.

Not only is the Beeb happy to give Webber more credit that he deserves, they are also apparently happy to do down the British talent:

“Hamilton had fancied his chances of scoring a podium finish after qualifying fifth – and a fuel-corrected third fastest.

But after benefiting from his Kers power-boost system to contest the lead with Webber and Barrichello going into the first corner, Hamilton missed his braking point and ran wide.

He got a puncture and rejoined last where for some reason the McLaren, which has a major aerodynamic upgrade this weekend, did not show the pace it had on Saturday.”

What’s this “fancied his chances”? Subtext: “but got egg on his face”, eh? And “benefiting from Kers”? – with the implication that he doesn’t deserve it. But he should benefit. The car has to carry the Kers gear around the track! And McLaren have made design compromises to put it in the car. And probably budget compromises too – working on Kers rather than other aspects of the car (only McLaren and Ferrari have effective Kers systems). I expect they thought F1 was serious about including this “green” technology, and that it wouldn’t be quietly dropped as is being done next season. And Hamilton was so far behind (he had to limp to the pits with his puncture) that there was no point flogging it. There may also have been other damage to his car.

Yes, much of posterity will believe this latest poor result was purely Hamilton’s fault. Anyone using the Guardian’s archive will get the same impression as at the BBC:

“Lewis Hamilton had a bad day after being forced into the pits shortly after the start with a puncture. He made a strong start from fifth but ran wide after turn one. He returned to the track but was bumped from behind almost immediately.”

Independent readers will see Kimi Raikonnen slurred by name:

“As for Lewis Hamilton, on a day when he and McLaren felt their year of woe would potentially end with a podium, he could not have anticipated it would end so disastrously and in such swift fashion.

From fifth on the grid, and aided by a push of the KERS button, the world champion made a storming start.

As Webber and Barrichello played dodgems, Hamilton appeared poised to take full advantage, only to overcook it and run wide into the sharp first-corner hairpin.

Returning to the track in fifth place, Hamilton’s right-rear tyre was punctured by the front wing of Kimi Raikkonen’s Ferrari, which was not to be the only incident of the day involving the Finn.”

Raikonnen has been wrecking a lot of other drivers’ races lately, but not Hamilton’s on this occasion.

Whilst the Independent is happy to report what a BBC commentator guessed had happened, the Times actually bothers to get it right:

“Defending world champion Lewis Hamilton finished 18th and last after an attack on the opening lap saw him involved in a collision with Webber that cost him a puncture.

Webber bashed into Barrichello’s car on the run from the start to the first corner, a collision for which he was punished with his drive-through penalty, but he overcame that with a dazzling drive to victory.”

After this, I woke up this morning expecting to hear the BBC revelling on England’s remarkable escape in the First Ashes Test – listening to the last overs of this had rather raised my spirits. But no, Auntie had decided “the angle” was supposed England delaying tactics. It did seem England had overstepped the mark (though part of Strauss’s explanation – trying to ensure the players out there knew how long they had to last – is very plausible), but this had no effect on the match – the Aussies lost no overs. The rule was 15 overs or an hour’s play whichever is the longer. Can anyone imagine the Aussies (or any other Test side) allowing the bowlers to achieve more than 15 overs in the last hour in similar circumstances?

Look, BBC, I pay my licence fee because – oh, sorry, you’re a monopoly – anyway, I expect what British viewers and readers would consider balance. Winning a GP after playing dodgems at the start is not “brilliant”, and to deserve to win a Test you actually have to look like being able to take the last wicket. If I want the Aussie angle, I’ll find out how to get their coverage over the internet!

Fewer Says Who

Maybe my ears deceived me, but I could have sworn that yesterday morning on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme I heard a statement of the form:

“They are conspiring against Gordon Brown, whom is in a precarious position.”

It’s not just media hyperventilation at continuing personality politics (anyone out there seen a policy? Hello? Hello?), there appears to have been a recent surge of enthusiasm for the word “whom”.

Only a year or two ago the BBC – as if this institution is not otherwise suffocating public debate enough in this country they seem to be unofficial custodians of our language as well – suggested “who” could safely be used most of the time. In 2006, University Challenge even claimed “whom” was virtually obsolete”. Now, in what could be a clip from a 1960s class comedy (wherein the cheeky chappy looks lovably foolish in his mistaken attempts to speak proper), Alan Johnson seemed on the same BBC Radio 4 a few weeks ago to take a deep breath before producing the word “whom” as proudly as a baby pooing.

I suspect the “whom” epidemic is caused by an oversimplification of grammatical rules. The majority school claims that “who” should be used as the subject and “whom” otherwise. This rather ignores the subtleties of direct and indirect objects of verbs, let alone the accusatives, genitives and so on so important in Latin. My initial position was that “whom” correctly replaces indirect but not direct objects. E.g. “That’s the player who was kicked by Fabregas”. “That’s the referee of whom Drogba spoke”. The trouble is, it’s not quite so simple, if we’re to clarify whether we should refer to “the player who Fabregas spat on” (allegedly) or “the player whom Fabregas spat on” (allegedly) – the former seems correct to me. Maybe we do need to go back to those Latin cases, but a more practical minority position is occasionally referred to in online forums. This is that “whom” is the form to be used after prepositions.  So use the word in constructs such as “of whom”, “to whom” etc, but not elsewhere.  This is what appeared to be the consensus until the recent outbreak of grammatical correctness.

The affectation of “whom” is nothing compared to the change in pronunciation of “says” and “said” over the last couple of years.  for decades we’ve all been content to rhyme “say” with “hay”, but “said” with “Fred”.  “Says” is pronounced “sez”, alright?

While the English police direct their resources at supposedly mistaken “who”s and supposedly mispronounced “said”s, “fewer” falls ever more into disuse.  The Guardian’s otherwise brilliant columnist Lucy Mangan even wrote recently that she couldn’t:

“think of an example where abolition of the distinction [between "less" and "fewer"] would cause confusion, but my heart mourns its loss.”

What?

Consider the ambiguities arising from the lack of a moreish equivalent to “fewer”.  Here’s one: “There are more dangerous snakes over there”.  Are there more snakes thither or are the ones there more dangerous?  If we were there rather than here we could be clear: “There are fewer dangerous snakes over there” or “There are less dangerous snakes over there.”  Trouble is, now that the language has eroded, to make yourself understood you’d have to say something like: “The snakes over there are less dangerous.”

So we’re making people concentrate on supposed, but dubious, correctness when it makes no difference to understanding, but paying no attention to language rules that are necessary to avoid confusion.  As usual we’d rather play little social games than actually solve any problems.

Logan’s Run, Peston & Goodwin, James Baker’s loony ramblings and Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs

I was treated last week to a screening of the 1976 dystopian saga, Logan’s Run. The event was organised by CRASSH, so we discussed the themes of the movie afterwards (and the 1970s haircuts!). There’s the idea of what the world would be like if we disappeared – a longstanding human preoccupation recently discussed, for example, in Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us. The film treats us to an the sight of an overgrown Washington. Perhaps the familiar trope – remember Survivors, Twelve Monkeys? – arises from a collective experience of living among the ruins of past great civilisations – Egypt, Rome, Greece, Inca, those of the builders of Stonehenge and the giant Easter Island statues, the fascination with mysterious, powerful Ancients reinforced in a thousand Hollywood movies and supplanted to imagined worlds in numerous SF works (check out Iain M Banks’ Against a Dark Background, Feersum Endjinn and Matter) and a dozen Star Trek episodes – coupled with the perceived Cold War threat of the rapid destruction of our own civilisation (as most memorably explored in the classic novel, A Canticle for Liebowitz). The scientific question of “what would happen without us” is an interesting one, though, so perhaps more on that another time.

Logan’s Run also presents a future of overwhelming state power. This was a common theme in portrayals of future (or historically contingent “parallel world” alternative) societies in the media of the middle part of the 20th century – think of 1984, It Happened Here, and, less high-brow, Blake’s Seven and Star Wars. The examples are endless, but less common today, when the narrative is more likely to revolve around external (or internal) threats to society – think 24 or even Battlestar Galactica.

We forget how the state became so dominant in people’s lives during the mid 20th century, and the battles to throw off the yoke – remember 1968 and 1989. It wasn’t just the Nazi and Soviet phenomena. The World Wars were among the factors leading to powerful states everywhere determining the course of their citizen’s lives. But even after 1945, conscription sent the youth of many countries to fight in pointless wars, food was rationed in the UK until the 1950s, and it was only after the Thatcher Revolution that the state’s role in housing provision started to decline. Globally, the post-war Affluent Society rippled out from the US, where it asserted itself in the 1960s, reaching the Soviet Empire in the 1980s, and China – where Tiananmen has postponed political change – only in the 1990s.

Perhaps it is my interpretation of recent history as a battle for individual freedom that causes me to react so viscerally against the scape-goating of Fred Goodwin, led by the dangerously influential, over-excitable Robert Peston. I consider it nothing short of scandalous that the BBC – the only UK website in the world’s top 10, they seemed to be saying on the radio today (though I don’t recollect what metric this was based on and Mr Google can’t verify this factoid) – presents a single dominant opinion on financial issues to the world, in the form of Peston’s blog. It is, in fact, the only blog in the hundreds of links on my customised version of the BBC homepage, appearing prominently at the top of the Business & Money section. I checked all the boxes and, looking at the selection menu again, “Robert Peston” appears on the same level as category headings, such as “Economy”, “Companies” and “Top stories”! It reminds me of how, in 2007, many UK newspapers contained News, Sport and Madeleine McCann sections.

It’s not just me who sees the hounding of Robert Peston as the thin end of the totalitarian wedge. There’s Daniel Finkelstein in The Times, for example, and – flaming hockey-sticks! – I even find myself agreeing with Boris in the Torygraph. Unfortunately, it’s not just Peston. Vince Cable is another who is profiting immensely by talking down the financial system. Here’s what he has to say on the Lib Dem website:

“In the case of Sir Fred Goodwin, it seems to me the Government would be on strong ground to tell him he is entitled to pension payments available to employees of bankrupt companies under the Pension Protection Fund, which have a maximum of £27,000 a year. If he feels that’s inadequate he can sue.”

Unbelievable. Let’s make it up as we go along, shall we?

But it’s not just executives such as Goodwin who must be punished, apparently. Look at this paragraph from a prescription by James Baker writing in the FT:

“To prevent a bank run, all depositors of recapitalised banks should be fully guaranteed, even if their deposit exceeds the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation maximum of $250,000 (€197,000, £175,000). But bank boards of directors and senior management should be replaced and, unfortunately, shareholders will lose their investment. Optimally, bondholders would be wiped out, too. But the risk of a crash in the bond market means that bondholders may receive only a haircut. All of this is harsh, but required if we are ultimately to return market discipline to our financial sector.”

Everyone must be protected from their actions, it seems, except shareholders! Forget the law. Forget fairness. Forget even the economists’ cherished but flawed principle of moral hazard. Apparently there are consequences if depositors lose confidence in the system, consequences if bondholders lose confidence. But… hang about. What about those crashing stockmarkets? Aren’t they one of the feedbacks in the system, ratcheting down business confidence and people’s willingness and ability to spend? Don’t massively devalued share prices make it more difficult for companies to raise money? If there’s a danger of bank-runs by depositors and bond-holder panic, then maybe, just maybe, there’s a danger of stock-market crashes if shareholders are wiped out, or if confiscation of their assets is threatened.

Value judgements and confiscations by government don’t help us solve this crisis – they make it harder – but they sure reinforce the power of the political classes and their media rabble-rousers.

I was minded of this on Sunday evening when I was trying to make a complex point in a discussion. Someone had earlier pointed out to general amusement that the UK’s Middle England tabloid, the Daily Mail, had, in the same week, railed against the ban on traditional incandescent lightbulbs and pointed out the money that could be saved by installing them! I rhetorically suggested that maybe the ban on incandescent bulbs had been counter-productive. Meaning, a better way to phase out the old type of bulbs would be to convince everyone that the new ones are a better product. Anyone stocking up on incandescents now in advance of the ban could use them for decades, whereas someone switching to compact fluorescents (CFLs) to save on their electricity bill would do so immediately. And are we going to abandon CFLs in favour of advanced LEDs in a few years’ time? Probably not, but those conscious of the electricity cost may well make another switch voluntarily. But apparently my comment about banning bulbs was beyond the pale and I was interrupted mid-flow.

Do we really want to solve our problems by state diktat? Or should we respect fairness, reason and individual freedoms? The latter is the only possible path that can succeed. If we imagine that we can only achieve our goals by capture of the state apparatus the result will be endless conflict. And we might not like the end result.

The Great Depression of the 1930s was a factor in greatly increasing the power of the state over the individual. Let’s not repeat the experiment.

Clawing back a response to Peston

Rob Peston has revisited the topic of Goodwin’s pension yet again.  Yet for some reason my response on his blog at 09:30 (it’s now 10:30, WordPress shows it to be an hour later for reasons I haven’t got round to investigating) has been “referred to the moderators” – twice.  I suspect what’s happened is that someone disagreeing with me has simply complained about my comment [oops, maybe not - see PS].  By the time it is reinstated it will no longer be one of the most recent posts so will be much less likely to be read.  Here’s what I wanted to say:

Rob, A little bit more measured than your previous posts on Goodwin’s pension, though you get entirely carried away at the end. It seems RBS has always been run competently, but, in a sense, management have been too much in control – hubris was the problem. Losses on loans depend on what happens in the future, so I hardly think RBS shareholders could successfully argue that they were misled by the bank because it failed to predict events resulting in massive losses, such as the insanity of allowing Lehman’s to fail in a disorderly fashion – termed the “second-worst decision of the Bush years” by a City insider I happened to be talking to on Saturday evening.

You presuppose that it is desirable to “claw-back” Fred’s pension. This whole issue is a distraction not only from the debate about the real causes of the financial crisis (regulatory and government somnambulism) – as numerous contributors here have pointed out – but also from the issue of the disgraceful levels of income and other inequality currently prevailing in the UK and elsewhere. We need to solve our systemic problems, not scapegoat individuals.

I’d also like to see a little humility from yourself, since you haven’t retracted your misleading claim that RBS was “not obliged” to top-up Goodwin’s pension. This is not the case and was sloppy journalism, as discussed here.

The whole point is that Myners et al could only have stopped Fred receiving his pension if they’d fired rather than early retired him. But clearly everyone involved knows that Fred was only the most prominent member of a group of people who steered RBS onto the rocks (or something rhyming with “Northerns”, if we want to go all Cockney!) – in fact the main reason Fred had to go was to draw a line under the past so that RBS could move on and start to rebuild.

RBS isn’t the first company to destroy itself with a takeover at the top of the market and it won’t be the last. It seems to me that those who should take a large part of the blame, though, are the pension fund managers who would have seen it all before and should have had the detachment and historical perspective to recognise the mistake, yet nevertheless voted in favour of the disastrous ABN deal.

PS (14:00): I discovered the link to Peston’s previous post was broken (my mistake), so have fixed it above and resubmitted the comment on the BBC site (twice, since nothing happened the first time). Of course, none of this would have happened if they’d simply accepted my original comment as was, or actually done something with it rather than leave it “referred to moderator” until the rest of the world has moved on to other pressing matters (nearly 5 hours and counting).

Mainstream media organisations using their pre-existing dominant market position to capture traffic that would otherwise go to other parts of the blogosphere is legitimate, I suppose, but they shouldn’t be surprised if restrictions on participation induce resentment. Organisations like the BBC which have a state-sponsored monopoly like some 17th century slave-running trading company have, in my view, a strong obligation to operate their blogs democratically, and, if they insist on moderating comments, to resource this activity properly – or get out of the way and leave the job to those prepared to do it properly.

(14:30): No comments even “awaiting moderation” have appeared on Peston’s blog post since 14:00. This is starting to piss me off. Off to do something more productive…

(16:20): At last! My original posts on Peston’s blog have appeared with “[Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]” inserted. Thanks BBC, and sorry to cause hassle, though I still think the moderation system could be improved. No trace of my corrected posts around 14:00, though.

Goodwin and getting away with it

Kids, remember what you learn in the school playground, because the grown-up world is… just the same.

Last week, I mentioned the absurdity of the attempts to bully Fred Goodwin, sorry, prevent him from receiving his entirely undeserved pension.

Never mind that we have numerous laws to protect minorities from arbitrary discrimination.  Clearly none of these apply to overpaid, failed bank chief executives.

But before break, the kids in the playground may have learnt that in 1215 the Magna Carta limited the powers of the state. Nevertheless, according to Harriet Harman, Fred Goodwin is so evil that the law should be suspended in his case.

I find it almost beyond belief that an issue as peripheral as Fred’s payoff is still in the news. The House of Commons Treasury Select Committee is to grill the Chairman and Chief Executive of the UKFI (charged with no less a role than managing the UK’s now vast state-owned banking assets) later this morning – I may try to get away with watching a bit of the meeting, as they have their own little TV channel on the internet.  (09:45 – the actual broadcast is here, but it is either not working or late – BBC Parliament, for reasons that are unclear, prefers to run repeats than broadcast Select Committee meetings; 09:52 – finally starting late – pathetically – though it’s also on BBC News 24).

I listen to the BBC, which is to a large degree setting the agenda.  Once again I am stunned that the organisation has scaled new heights of arrogance.  Remember, we’re talking about an institution that can’t even run a quiz in a sensible fashion.  As Bamber Gascoigne (I gather Paul was available but would have gone too far in taking the piss, and Bamber had the edge as a former University Challenge compere) pointed out on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, it’s completely nuts for a university quiz programme to be filmed over two academic years!

Today also admitted this morning that Goodwin’s pension may not have been discretionary in the first place.  Now, as I pointed out last week, I have an inkling that the misunderstanding was all the fault of the school sneak, Robert Peston.  Everyone’s covering for him, and he’s not admitting on his blog that he’s misled everyone.

Then there’s Lord Myners, who’s incompetence in being unsure whether Goodwin’s top-up was discretionary or not is truly breath-taking.  Has he simply trusted Peston?  I fear so, because that’s the sort of thing that happens in the real world.  Nobody’s going to snitch on the Pest because doing so would also expose their own idiocy.

This entire storm in a teacup is of course part of the Government’s smokescreen, which the credulous media are simply lapping up.

Now we have revolting sight of the odious Alistair Darling trying to seize the moral high-ground.  His idea of humility is to say, in effect: “it was someone else’s fault and we should have done more to stop them”.  No Alistair, you created an environment – principally by allowing a property asset bubble to continue unchecked – in which financial disasters were bound to occur.

The real world, kids, is like this: very few are distinguished by being more or less incompetent than anyone else.  Those who “succeed” are simply those who manage to escape the blame for their mistakes.  Those who “fail” were, by and large, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

PS (09:56): The Treasury Select Committee is hilarious.  The UKFI doesn’t have specific information on bank pay-offs.  Headmaster John McFall is giving them a good ticking off.  Bring back the cane, that’s what I say!

(09:57): Now we’re onto the Fred Goodwin issue: it’s quite clear – Goodwin could have been fired (12 months notice/gardening leave – which would itself have likely led to a scandal, of course) rather than early retired.  But the media coverage is a fudge – the pension top-up simply wasn’t discretionary as Peston claimed – the situation would have had to have been handled entirely differently.

(10:08): Still discussing it!  The screw-up, if there was one, was that Goodwin was allowed to retire early, not fired.  These guys are completely mad: the mood was entirely different on October 11th – Fred’s compensation was not a big issue, the important thing was to get him to go quietly.  Myners is not looking very good…  But I’m getting bored.  I expect everyone else is too, so likely Myners will survive.

(11:23): It seems they’ve returned to the Goodwin pension issue many times as each Treasury Select Committee member has to have his ha’porth.  Unbelievable.

I Want Colin’s Sandwich!

It’s “have a go at the Beeb” week here in the UK, after Sachsgate (I always feel I should provide a bit of background for my Martian readership).  Why the leader of the Old Etonian party (who are, perhaps, starting to look like an Eton mess, methinks, if I may permit myself a jolly jibe at the expense of Messrs Osborne et al) decided to argue that BBC executive pay levels have anything to do with it is completely beyond me.  Let’s remind the voters that some are more equal than others, shall we?  That’s bound to play well for the Tories, that one.  Novices.

I did, though, find Eton Dave somewhat less vomit-inducing than Paul Gambaccini trying to somehow exonerate the one executive, Lesley Douglas, who did the decent thing and resigned.  “Lesley Douglas was brought low by Russell Brand”, opined the ageing DJ.  I would have thought she was “brought low” (I expect she’ll work again, the media look after their own, don’t they, Andrew Gilligan?), by the mistake of hiring a comedian edgier – to modify a Fred Truemanism that comes to mind – than a broken piss-pot and then not implementing common-sense management controls in case he went too far.  Even if the humour of Brand’s must-read column in the Saturday Guardian is as perfectly judged as that George Best chip, it’s not as if every past attempt at humour by the hirsute, but slightly effeminate and studious, though paradoxically studdish, truly enigmatic comedian has been perfectly appropriate for the politically-correct inhabitants of Beebworld. It’s not about executive pay, Cameron Minor: the problem is the deep-rooted arrogant culture that’s developed at the BBC over many years.  Unfortunately, the Corporation is of course a public-sector organisation which makes it very difficult to fix, because you can’t just appoint a new management team to carry out a change programme – which generally involves “letting go” a lot of those who don’t feel like changing – because you can’t fire anyone without a public inquiry.

Actually, I wasn’t planning to write any of the above when I sat down at the keyboard.  It does bring me to my point, though.  The BBC is a public sector organisation but in recent years it has started trying to behave like a private company, to the detriment of the licence payer.  Prompted by an FT piece, Corporation Rampant, I was going to develop an argument in forensic detail showing how the goals of BBC Worldwide are contradictory to those of providing value to the BBC’s customers in the UK.

The trouble is, I thought I’d do a little research on the 1988 and 1990 sitcom, Colin’s Sandwich, just to confirm that Mel Smith’s little gem is not available on DVD, before using it as an exemplar.  You’ve probably guessed what happened next… yeap, it’s not quite the real thing, but some Sandwich clips are available on YouTube, so I had a look at Best Man Speech.  Then I noticed links to real best man speeches.  After a bit I realised that it’s probably possible to spend your entire life watching best man speeches on YouTube, since they’re likely being put on there faster than you can play them…

Anyway, the FT reports that the BBC currently receives £3.4 billion p.a. in licence-fee revenue (a £139.50 regressive tax on each TV-owning household) and that this is supplemented by a further “£200-250 million” from BBC Worldwide, which gets to exploit the BBC’s content overseas and in the UK, for example, by selling DVDs, licensing programmes abroad and even operating channels such as BBC World (not apparently available in the UK for reasons that are totally beyond me).  Now, £250 million is 250/3400 = less than 1/13th of the licence fee, that is, around a tenner per licence-fee payer.

My point is that restricting access to BBC content costs licence-fee payers more than £10 a year in lost value.

It’s perfectly valid to ask why the licence-fee payer who misses a series on TV should have to pay a premium price for it on DVD.  The BBC recently broadcast a 6 part series about the Amazon.  I downloaded a few episodes via iPlayer, but didn’t get round to watching them before all that bandwidth was wasted and they expired and were deleted after 30 days.  Before the sectors on my hard-drive had even cooled down, I saw the BBC advertising the Amazon series on DVD for the princely sum of £19.95.  Rather than, say, broadcasting them end-to-end in the middle of the night on BBC channel 73 so that the interested viewer – who’s already paid for them – can make a recording.  Or simply not letting them expire on iPlayer, which must be less effort, IT-wise, than deliberately making them unwatchable after a certain period.

It’s also easy to argue that there is a loss of value of at least £10 loss per licence-fee payer if we just consider access, or lack of it, to the “long tail” of BBC content. Colin’s Sandwich would definitely be worth more than £10 to me.  Per series.  Another example – attentive readers will recall – was the Gerry Robinson NHS programme.  This is also not being marketed to the public, as far as I know.  There must be thousands of programmes we are denied access to, but for which there is no business case for the BBC to produce on DVD (all that box design) and distribute.

I would find the BBC’s current-affairs and documentary content (news, Panorama, Horizon, etc.) an invaluable research resource, but it’s simply not available, though the technology is now there to make it so.  In fact – and sorry to harp on about it – programmes that you’ve actually gone to the trouble of downloading are deliberately made unavailable in iPlayer after 30 days.

There must be a better business model.  The funds BBC Worldwide generates for the BBC licence-fee payer are not worth the cost in terms of the lost opportunities to provide more generous access to content for the BBC’s viewers in the UK.  Personally, if I had access to the BBC’s entire archive I could manage without the 1/13th more programming supposedly enabled by the profit from BBC Worldwide.

Could Gerry Robinson save the BBC?

What a bunch of jokers they are at the BBC!

I’ve been using their new iPlayer to try to catch the odd programme I’ve missed. Such as “Can Gerry Robinson Save the NHS? – One Year On”, originally broadcast on 12th December 2007. I downloaded it on 13th December and it stayed in my iPlayer library until I realised it was about to timeout (why? – yes, exactly, why?) on 11th January. So I dropped what I was doing and tried to watch it…

Guess what? The wallies had only let everyone download just the first 24 minutes and 7 seconds of a 60 minute programme. They’d known this for some weeks before I tried to watch it of course. Did they do anything about the people who’d downloaded the defective file? Did they heck!

To cut a long story short, I tried to log the problem and got error codes on their problem-reporting “webform” (they don’t just provide an email address, that would be too simple). I eventually rang them, and found out that yes, they had put a short file up for download, and, no, it didn’t occur to them to actually do anything to put the problem right. The period when the download was available was allowed to expire after 7 days, as usual, and the DRM would prevent anyone watching it after 30 days. They didn’t try to contact those who had downloaded the duff file. No special arrangements were made to extend the programme’s availability. To cap it all, I was cut-off when I tried to log a complaint.

What concerns me most, though, is not the BBC’s typical public-service attitude to customer-service, but their whole strategy, of which this is a symptom. They are a public-service broadcaster with a monopoly bolted on the side.

What do I mean by that? Well, if they were a pure public-service provider, they would surely:

1. Maximise the availability of content to licence-payers.

2. Produce as much content as they can afford from the licence-fee, and not try to boost their income by selling DVDs, using 0870 numbers for tech support, etc.

But their mission is totally compromised by trying to make a bit of extra money on the side. By doing this, they reduce the value of their content to the licence-payer by a vast amount, in order to make a relatively small amount in extra sales. For example, any fool can see that in future we will consume most content on-demand. If the BBC is to maintain the licence-fee model – and compete with other providers – it has to remove all restrictions on when viewers can watch this content. Trying to keep it free (to licence-payers) AND restricted (so further sales are possible) is incoherent.

And then, like all monopolies, Auntie treats its product as a cash-cow. Monopolies tend to shrink, because, due to one of the irresistible laws of the grey science, you maximise your profit (especially when people have very unequal ability as well as willingness to pay) by selling fewer items at a higher cost. Ideally, you’d just sell one copy of Doctor Who, for about £10 million – to Bill Gates, say. This is why BBC DVDs are so expensive, when they have already been paid for by the licence-payer. And the BBC’s public-service mission is undermined, because, to ensure a market for the DVDs for popular programmes they have to limit the number of times they are shown (despite the availability of BBC3, 4… to show them on). As we move to on-demand viewing, there is a complete contradiction between DVD sales and public-service broadcasting.

OK, I know there are 3rd parties involved – production companies – but the BBC is not there to create a market for DVDs. They should buy programmes outright. This would maximise value for the licence-payer. And if people didn’t need to buy DVDs, we might find they were prepared to pay a bit more on the licence fees.

Even worse, when it comes to programmes like “Gerry”, there is a limited after-market, so it is madness to restrict access to 7 days to download, 30 days to watch.

The BBC needs to decide whether it is a public-service broadcaster or a business. It can’t be both.