Lines on the Beeb

In Competition No. 2849 you were invited to submit a poem in praise or dispraise of the BBC. The entry felt a bit flat this week and you seemed to be lacking in any real conviction either way. Roger Theobald’s opening lines pretty much reflected the general mood: ‘To praise or dispraise: well, if that’s the question,/ The record is too mixed to be quite sure.’ An honourable mention goes to Jerome Betts for his pithy four-liner. Basil Ransome-Davies romps home with the extra fiver and the rest pocket £30 each.

I always treasured Auntie. She was such
   a damn good sport.
Thanks to BBC steam wireless I was
   entertained and taught.
She had lofty Reithian standards and she
   never sold them short,
But Auntie isn’t quite herself these days.

We had ITMA kicking Hitler with a touch of the
   absurd;
We had talks and foreign music on the high-
   falutin’ Third;
The Home Service kept us civil. Public service
   was the word.
Don’t Aunties love to cling to settled ways?

Then the market, brute and powerful, came
   along with shark-sharp teeth.
It was build the corporate profile now, forget
   the dreams of Reith.
You want to mourn the Beeb that was? Just
   leave a funeral wreath
(Forgetting Jimmy Savile, if you please).

What’s left after the scandals, the largesse, the
   Birtist blight?
A micro-managed omnishambles, scorned by
   left and right,
Whose populist agenda — keep it simple, safe
   and light —
Is eating umpteen million licence fees.
Basil Ransome-Davies

When I have fears that it might cease to be,
Culled by some spineless vengeful government
Whose plot to sabotage the licence fee
Turns on the argument of how it’s spent;
When I fear ‘public service’ thrown away,
Sold to the dodgiest bidder with a taste
For game shows, adverts, chatter, everyday
Endless banality, good gone to waste;
That’s when I cling to Rev and Radio 3,
Today, the shipping forecast, In Our Time,
Programmes in depth on art and history,
Even the drenching gloom of Scandi-crime,
And trust for all its faults the BBC
Can hang on and see out the century.