I caught the first part of Cristo Foufas' 5am TalkRadio show last Saturday morning, I soon switched over to music as I was off on a long drive but caught that he was talking about how the BBC works, so I just listened back to it. Turns out he was propmpted by Tim Davie saying he believes most people are "happy" to pay the £159 TV licence fee.
Cristo said he likes the BBC, he hopes they can change to save themselves and, although he can find them biased at times, some of their journalism is very good. But he thinks the licence fee is the most bizarre way of paying for it. He thinks a basic BBC service (eg BBC 1, 2, radio, a basic news website) should be provided from general taxation, with any extras to be paid for by subscription
He said a BBC subscription model would give the people who worked there "a more commercial mindset2. When Cristo was at ITV he worked with ex BBC folk who couldn't handle a commercial pace. He gave an example of an assistant producer at the Beeb who'd been in the same role for 30 years with an attitidue of "I'm in now, I'm staff, I'll never get fired". Cristo was frustrated trying to get anything done when he worked at the BBC, saying it takes 30 people to make a decision. He recalled during the London bombings a BBC local station was talking about odd socks. And, as there's no need to chase an audience, you get lazy features, eg a local radio afternoon show asking "What's out your window?" (I'm guessing Jo Good's show BITD
![Rolling on the floor laughing :rofl: 🤣](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/joypixels/emoji-assets@5.0/png/64/1f923.png)
).
Some of you might remember that Cristo was on BBC RL overnights quite a few years ago. A while back I heard him say that he'd always felt unwelcome there, he was never given a security pass and when he arrived every night, security staff acted as if they didn't know who he was, then he was eventually let go by a text from the editor.