Gold, Silver and Bronze
BBC licence payers must be glad to learn that their 'TV tax' is being spent so wisely these days - bu the 'heid bummers' at Auntie Beeb.
Witness this extract of a report from The Independent newspaper on the fall-out from the Jimmy Savile affair:
"The BBC yesterday released documents relating to the review, conducted late last year by Nick Pollard, the former head of Sky News. Collectively they portrayed a BBC management that was obsessed with procedures and utterly incapable of getting to basic truths. The organisation's executives mistrusted their own journalists who had done the work on the ground and were desperate to cover their backs.
The most scathing descriptions of the BBC's failures were put forward by the Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman who described the episode as a “balls up” and the BBC's repeated failure to run the Savile story as “pathetic”. He was damning of the apparent determination of BBC management to make Mr Rippon the fall guy for the whole affair: “I think the BBC's behaviour now is almost as contemptible as it was then.”
As it tried to manage the crisis, the BBC grandly styled itself in terms of the Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBR) at a moment of national peril. Mr Entwistle appointed himself Gold Commander, with deputies given the rank of silver and bronze. But in reality that management team – described by Lord Patten in evidence released yesterday as having “more senior leaders than China” – was chaotic and “faffing about”, as the BBC Trust chairman put it."
Now I think the problem is that the top bosses at the BBC have been watching too much TV - or maybe taking their trips to the cinema too seriously as well.
Because all this Gold Commander, Silver Commander and Bronze Commander stuff - is like something from 'Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons' - where many of the key characters were colour coded (e.g. Lieutenant Green) just to make life easy for the viewer, presumably.
Or maybe the Gold, Silver and Bronze inspiration came from Resevoir Dogs - the grisly Quentin Tarantino gangster film - where the baddies were are all known as Mr Orange, Mr White and so on - before going on to cut off some poor chap's ear.
So come on BBC - get a grip before I explode with laughter at the sheer stupity of it all.
And for any readers unfamiliar with the delights of Captain Scarlet - here's a YouTube link to show what you've been missing all these years - http://youtu.be/bV8YbLvGrb0
