BBC PAYING OUT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS TO RELOCATE STAFF

Underlining the old corporate aphorism that it’s often expensive to save money, the BBC is paying its London staff some £24 million ($37 million) to move to Salford, some 200 miles away. On Tuesday Britain’s National Audit Office criticized the amount of money it was shelling out for relocation packages as overly generous and said […]

DR. WHO COMING TO THEATERS IN 3D

Dr. Who, the British science-fiction show that debuted in 1963, making it the longest-running sci-fi show in history — which has also successfully transitioned into books, DVDs, and iTunes downloads –is about to transition to movie theaters as part of a 3D 50th anniversary celebration. 3D, said BBC’s controller of drama commissioning Ben Stephenson, will […]

U.K. ADVERTISERS YANKED TV ADS DURING OLYMPICS

With Olympics coverage available without advertising on the BBC during the summer — and with the coverage capturing a sizable chunk of the U.K.’s television audience — advertisers appeared to yank their ads from the country’s commercial television outlets, a report by Britain’s Advertising Association and researcher WARC (World Advertising Research Center) would seem to […]

FORMER BBC ANCHOR “ASHAMED” OF ITS CURRENT NEWS COVERAGE

One of the BBC’s most respected and renowned journalists has unleashed a torrent of criticism at the publicly supported broadcaster. Writing in The Mail on Sunday, former anchor and foreign correspondent Michael Buerk said that while he watched its coverage of the Queen’s Jubilee, “I was so ashamed of the BBC I would have wept […]

DID BBC OVERSPEND TO GET RID OF “REDUNDANT” EXECS?

Britain’s BBC is paying a lot of money to save money. That fact appeared evident from a report by the London Daily Telegraph detailing pay-outs to personnel who have volunteered to step down and those who have been made “redundant” by cost-saving measures that combined their work with others’. According to documents obtained by the […]

DANCE FINALE ATTRACTS 49 PERCENT OF UK TV AUDIENCE

Strictly Come Dancing, the long-running British TV series that spawned America’s Dancing with the Stars, averaged 12.4 million viewers for its season finale Saturday night — peaking at 14 million. The figure represented 49 percent of the British TV audience in a country whose population is 20 percent the size of the U.S. (60 million […]

BBC SCORED FOR GIVING HEFTY GOLDEN PARACHUTE TO EX CHIEF

The BBC has come in for additional censure for its decision to pay former director-general George Entwistle £450,000 (about $700,000) after he stepped down after less than two months on the job following the scandal over the decision to cancel a Newsnight report that would have revealed that the late Jimmy Savile, a popular BBC […]

BBC SLAMMED FOR HANDLING OF SAVILE SEX-ABUSE STORY

The BBC has come in for withering criticism in a 185-page report by Nick Pollard, the former head of Sky News, about the decision to axe an investigation by its flagship newsmagazine Newsnight that would have revealed that the late Jimmy Savile, once one of the public broadcaster’s most celebrated hosts, had sexually abused children. […]

U.K. MEDIA REGULATOR CENSURES BBC FOR USING KID IN VIOLENT DRAMA

The BBC has been censured by British media regulator OFCOM for not doing enough to protect a child actor who appeared in two violent scenes of the drama Line of Duty and in other scenes that “included sexually explicit language.” The regulator acted on the complaint of a single viewer, noting that its rules call […]

STUDY CALLS FOR MORE GAY HOSTS, CHARACTERS ON CHILDREN’S TV

BBC children’s programs should include more gay hosts and characters, according to a report commissioned by the publicly supported broadcaster and released today (Friday). Clare Luke of Solitaire Consulting, which produced the report for the BBC, said that it was important the children be “familiarized” with different sexual orientations “from an early age” and that […]

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