If the BBC has to court popularity with the public to ensure it continues to be funded, is it any wonder that it is being totally dumbed down? It’s not just the news imho.

It’s kind of hard for me to defend the Six seeing as I haven’t watched it for years - what with being overseas and all. What I would say is that it’s very important that the BBC is protected and given a long term future, because to use a terrible cliche, people won’t know what they had until it’s gone.

The BBC is far from a perfect organisation, and there are areas that need work, but I do worry that this drip, drip, drip stream of complaint and criticism will undermine its long-term future. That’s not to say it should be exempt from criticism.

What people like Bell should be doing instead is offering constructive suggestions of how to make things better, how to improve the quality of output while still trying to hold onto a mass audience in times when people don’t want highbrow news. The BBC faces uniquely difficult challenges to protect its long term survival in a way that commercial organisations don’t. The BBC is also open to criticism in a way that many other media outlets are not.

Fundamentally though, I still belive the BBC is an enormous force for good and if you have a look at the quality of television, radio and internet services around the world, you can’t fail to think that the Brits really are rather lucky. Public broadcasting is an easy target, but its value cannot be overstated.

TV in Australia - for example - is mind crushingly bad and a lot of that can be explained by the lack of a strong public broadcaster. It has the ABC and SBS, but they are funded directly by the government (SBS takes ads to top up its revenue) and they have been rendered largely impotent by a fairly hard right government. There is a terrible vacuum here for quality programming, not just quality news. Imagine having three terestrial (F-to-A) channels that make ITV look postively excellent and you start to get at the heart of the problem.

Neil, I think your response is quite fair. If things have truly slipped that much then hand wringing, wailing and the gnashing of teeth is most certainly in order.

My selfish concern, as an ex-BBCer and misty eyed expat, is that there is a BBC for me to come home to one day.

While I do worry that there is any number of misguided cretins out there who would like to see the end of the Beeb, it sounds as though the BBC could be threatening itself quite adequately at the moment by pumping out crappy material.

I wonder what explanations there are for the fall in standards? For what it’s worth, I do wonder if the way we’re training our journalists in this day and age is starting to have an impact? It’s just that I can’t see management sitting round a table and taking a knowing decision to dumb down, so it strikes me there must be other drivers and those drivers need not necessarily be obvious to those of us on the outside.

Perhaps Neil there is an opportunity for you and I to go to the Beeb as extortionately expensive consultants and offer them some meaningless graphs and buzzwords to ensure we have a comfortable retirement on the Costa del Clyde?

I haven’t been able to watch Breakfast TV for five years. I decided to give it a whirl following this post. I’ll try again in 2011.

I wonder why Andy Marr’s Sunday programme (which I consistently miss because it is, after all, on very early on a Sunday) is drying up. The first few episodes I thought were brilliant - exciting, intelligent, informative.

Can’t someone get an interview with him and ask him?

Kieren