30 kilos of plutonium went missing from the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in 2003/4 according to the BBC News this morning. That’s enough to make 7 atom bombs! So where did it go?
Continue reading 30 kg plutonium missing from Sellafield nuclear plantTag Archives: Television
Honesty and fair dealing
“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
Groucho Marx
BBC2 documentaries are puerile
I was thinking of going to Homebase this week – thought I might give BBC2 a call, see if they wanted to make a documentary about it.
Sam Wollaston, The Guardian, Mar 2004
TV shows are terribly mean-spirited
TV shows now are terribly mean-spirited. You’re rooting for people to be eliminated, rooting for judges to find new ways of being nasty.
I wouldn’t want to see electrocutions on TV. But I’ve no doubt some day we will.
Chuck Barris, The Guardian, 3 Mar 2003
How middle-class consensus makes TV news less attractive to viewers
Britain’s largely middle-class consensus on what constitutes impartiality helps to explain why TV news is so predictable and unadventurous – and why TV news is growing less and less attractive to large cross-sections of the viewing audience.
Peter Preston, The Observer, 8 Dec 2002
BBC copied ‘That’s Life’ format and gave it to a BBC senior executive’s girlfriend!
Bernard Braden died 9 years ago having never fully recovered from the injustice that overshadowed his career, when the BBC dropped his programme, Braden’s Week, and replaced it with a copy: That’s Life.
The fact that it was presented by the then unknown Esther Rantzen, who had been Braden’s junior researcher, and was later discovered to be the girlfriend of a BBC production executive, Desmond Wilcox, added insult to injury.
Barbara Kelly, Daily Mail Supplement, 25 May 2002
Diversity at the BBC means acting and thinking like them
Two of my colleagues at the BBC have regional accents and are very experienced, yet they are constantly asked: ‘Which university did you go to?’ There is this unspoken reality that, although I look different from you, I must act, think and speak the same as you, which is then promoted as diversity.
Unnamed BBC Journalist, The Guardian, 13 May 2002
BBC is Oxbridge dominated and hideously white
Greg Dyke revealed the “hideously white” nature of the BBC last year. Expecting to then rapidly recruit ethnic minority staff into a white, male, Oxbridge-dominated culture is, at best, naive.
Joy Francis, The Guardian, 13 May 2002
Television companies steal ideas
It’s an open secret that if you’re an independent producer and you go to see the BBC or C4 with an idea there’s as much chance of you making that idea as somebody else.
It’s a lunch cartel. You go in and pitch an idea to someone, then they go out for lunch with some mate and say, ‘You know what. This guy came in with this rather good idea, what do you think about it?’ and their mate will say ‘Yeah, that’s good,’ and they’ll go away and add a couple of bells and whistles.
Charlie Parsons, Co-Founder Planet 24, The Guardian, 14 May 2001
At the BBC someone is always trying to stop someone more talented from doing something
“Every hour of every day at the BBC, someone is trying to stop someone more talented from doing something. My job as director-general was to go round, find as many of those cases as possible and reverse them.”
Alasdair Milne, BBC Director-General 1982-87
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