The BBC the Edinburgh Festival and the Eurovision Dance Competition

One of the major criticisms of BBC TV made earlier in the EAR was their abject failure to cover the Festival, three half hour programmes in 3 weeks was an insult to the greatest arts festival in the world.As I said at the time no doubt all of the BBC resources were diverted to China for the Olympics! The truth is that Scotland pays 9% of the licence fee and gets only 3% of the expenditure it is time we had a change of control.This feeling was compounded when I saw the tv schedules for today, Saturday 6th September for BBC TV.Of course there was no coverage of the Scotland world cup qualifying game against Macedonia since the SFA had sold off the TV rights to Sky and of course the BBC didnt bid !However tonight you will be able to watch live from Glasgow 2 hours and 15 minutes of expensively produced live coverage (estimated cost half a million pounds) of the Eurovision Dance Contest, well that tells you something of the BBC priorities! If that doesnt shock you then the news that last year the BBC spent £3 million pounds on business class travel for its executives might.That is of course not to mention the 18 million pounds they are paying Jonathan Ross!Now I am a great defender of public service broadcasting in general and the BBC in particular indeed when I was an MEP I spent a long time drawing up rules to protect public service broadcasting, however sometimes the BBC makes itself difficult to defend,today is one of those days what do you think?

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