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[Bassfinger]

1 hour ago, owen said:

I cannot imagine a world without R4

See, I used to love R4, but since the referendum on a certain topic a few years ago I got fed up with politcal bias, the whining right-on left wing comedy, and the increasing wokeness.  I want to hear it straight, not spun so fast they could use it as a gyroscope - I don't give a sheet about their opinion, or speculation, and I like to hear comedy pith taking about all political viewpoints and not just the ones that the Beeb doesn't like.  Hell, they make the Guardian look right wing.  It's  so bad now I actually subscribe to the New York Times as the least politically biased news source I can find, and steer clear of speech radio altogether.  

F&$%@#g politics, it ruins everything it touches.

[Leonard Smalls]

9 hours ago, Bassfinger said:

I want to hear it straight,

This normally means wanting to hear what you want to hear. Anything different is political bias (or as Herr Trump would say, "Fake News").

The way I see it, the beeb is accused of political bias by both left and right wing folks; this probably means they're doing something right! Perhaps if every news story was followed by a bit of comment in the style of the Telegraph (or The Sun if it's TV news 😄) that would give it more of an air of "telling it like it is". Though every time I've heard someone being congratulated for "telling it like it is" it's following something deeply offensive said by the likes of Our Honourable M.E.P For Not Turning Up To Fisheries Meetings...

As for whining right-on left wing comedy, would you prefer a bit of Jim Davidson, or Big Bernard Manning? Not sure if it's down to political bias by media organisations, but you don't seem to hear much right wing comedy, or right wing music? Could it be that Right-On Whining types are that little bit more creative? 😁

[Paul S]

My blues band played for the BBC for nothing but 'lunch and exposure' and it actually did us the world of good  

At the start of 2019 we were a brand new band, had our first rehearsal in January.  Our first gig in March, I think.  Our guitarist sent one of our rehearsal recordings to a guy from BBC Radio Suffolk, Stephen Foster, and invited him to come along to our second gig.  To my amazement he did.  To my further amazement, he really liked us and invited us to play at the Ipswich Maritime Festival that summer.  No money but food, big BBC stage right on the quayside.  What that gave us was a chance to perform on a big stage with a huge sound system in front of lots of people.  The guitarist's son recorded some of it on his iPad and that ended up giving us the best live demo that a new band could have asked for.  And it opened the door onto the blues festival scene in Suffolk this year, which is pretty lively (but of course everything was cancelled).  Nevertheless we got many gigs on the back of the recordings nd will no doubt get many more once it gets going again.

     

 

[Dan Dare]

10 hours ago, Bassfinger said:

Hell, they make the Guardian look right wing

 

10 hours ago, Bassfinger said:

I got fed up with politcal bias, the whining right-on left wing comedy, and the increasing wokeness

 

10 hours ago, Bassfinger said:

F&$%@#g politics, it ruins everything it touches.

You are unhappy that your political viewpoint is not represented by the Beeb and then complain about "F&$%@#g politics" ruining everything it touches. A fine irony. I haven't heard any "whining right-on left wing comedy" on the Beeb recently (I say "heard" because I haven't had a telly for 20+ years and only listen to the radio). It's all insufferably cosy, smug and politically middle of the road.

[Chris2112]

I find the BBC as a whole to be a national disgrace, though I am an ardent R4 listener and have been for years, even though I disagree with a lot of the stuff they broadcast there, I find it to be like reading the newspaper you least agree with - good for perspective! They're always in trouble over the licence fee and questions around value for money, which is particularly pertinent given the absolutely ludicrous salaries paid to idiots like Lineker. The argument for the licence fee to be abolished is stronger than ever but if they did turn to commercial funding the sparse quantity of decent programming that they do would nosedive. One only has to look at the utter garbage on ITV and Channel 4 to see that the pursuit of advertising and commercial interest is damaging to broadcasting. The BBC are already utterly riddled with left-leaning political bias, imagine heaping commercial bias on top of that mess!

 

On the subject of this particularly story, it is indeed a shabby affair but one must consider that this behaviour has taken place inside a small corner of the BBC. As mentioned previously, different shows are put together by different teams with their own individual budget and in that budget, they look to squeeze and scrimp where they can. The tactic of stiffing musicians is an obvious one to go with as they're so easily replaced. If the band complains about being asked to play for free, they can just be replaced with some piped-in stock music! Even the essential staff get squeezed, and I've heard it all before from a friend of mine who was a freelance cameraman for the BBC and ITV in the 80's and 90's. He eventually left the join the police, probably because the working environment was more pleasant! 

Whilst we would undoubtedly consider tactics like asking the band to play for free (or asking them to sell tickets to a certain point to release their fee) are sleazy, the musicians are partly to blame for this. Not all musicians work to the same standard. I used to work in the conference and banqueting section of a hotel and some of the bands we had in were utterly dreadful and hardly deserving of payment. For every decent band of highly skilled musicians who warm up with jazz fusion standards, there will be another twenty or thirty bad wedding bands and pub-bangers who have songs like 'Mustang Sally' and rubbish by the likes of Bruno Mars on their setlist. When the person footing the bill has to pay out for a bad performance, they are less inclined to do so again in future. Were the musicians asking for payment all uniformly excellent, they would be in a much stronger position. 

 

On that note, has anyone here ever been asked to sell tickets for their own gig to ensure that they could meet what the venue-owner would consider to be an acceptable take? 

[Owen]

Every programme which pitches to the people who hold the purse strings to have a band on have a union approved rate in their budget. If individual production companies try to rip off musicians that is not within the control of the BBC at that moment. I presume that that production company have been told that this was not cool. Some production companies in Wales have long had a non union rate and a union rate. They offer the 50% rate until you mutter MU and then the magic happens.

 

UK PLC knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This is not just muscians and being paid. It is the society we live in. It is the society we, as a country, have chosen. 

 

[silverfoxnik]

9 hours ago, owen said:

Every programme which pitches to the people who hold the purse strings to have a band on have a union approved rate in their budget. If individual production companies try to rip off musicians that is not within the control of the BBC at that moment. I presume that that production company have been told that this was not cool. Some production companies in Wales have long had a non union rate and a union rate. They offer the 50% rate until you mutter MU and then the magic happens.

 

UK PLC knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This is not just muscians and being paid. It is the society we live in. It is the society we, as a country, have chosen. 

 

Couldn't agree more with you @owen.

😞

 

[peteb]

11 hours ago, owen said:

Every programme which pitches to the people who hold the purse strings to have a band on have a union approved rate in their budget. If individual production companies try to rip off musicians that is not within the control of the BBC at that moment. I presume that that production company have been told that this was not cool. Some production companies in Wales have long had a non union rate and a union rate. They offer the 50% rate until you mutter MU and then the magic happens.

 

UK PLC knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This is not just muscians and being paid. It is the society we live in. It is the society we, as a country, have chosen. 

 

Absolutely..! 

I am always amazed that people are prepared to buy in into this anti-BBC agenda that is being promoted by certain parts of the right to make way for some Fox like news channel with a far-right slant to operate without any real competition. No one seems to be able to entertain the possibility that this is a band that simply got cut from the programme (as the BBC have said) and have decided to exploit the situation for publicity.