There’s No Place Like Tyrone, BBC 1, Monday at 10.35pm
It’s perhaps a tad unfair to refer to the BBC’s new policy on licences for the elderly every time a dud like this is aired, but sure life is unfair.
The BBC has decided to essentially threaten over-75s with jail if they don’t give it £154.50 a year to waste on nonsense like There’s No Place Like Tyrone.
Director General Tony Hall said it would be impossible to find the £750 million needed by cutting the excessive salaries of star presenters and it would be “unfair” to remove services like BBC 4 television or some of the BBC’s plethora of radio stations.
But how close could you get to the £750 million needed if the BBC simply stopped doing what the commercial broadcasters are doing already?
What would be left to find if you, for instance, cut Gary Lineker’s salary (£1.7m) in half, combined BBC2 and 4, got rid of all its music stations, cut the children’s channels and asked the British foreign office to pay for its own ‘soft power’ World Service?
I’m also slightly suspicious about the BBC figures.
Roughly eight per cent of the UK’s population is over-75 (5.3 million people), while the BBC figure of £750 million assumes 4.9 million licences for over-75s. That appears high to me when you consider the number of elderly couples who will have one licence, the number of over-75s in care homes and the number of eligible people who simply never apply as the licence is not issued automatically. Government figures show that only around 60 per cent of those eligible claim pension credit.
It also doesn’t tally with the BBC’s decision to continue giving free licences to over-75s on benefits. By its own estimate this will amount to approximately 1.5 million out of the 5.3 million.
So when Tony Hall says it would be unfair to cut services, consider There’s No Place Like Tyrone.
This is a mercifully three-part trial series about the apparent unique lifestyle of Tyrone. This week, in episode three, Bobby almost pops the question to Linda after a charity black-tie ball at the local mart, an idea so stupid not even the local sports club would try it.
It was embarrassingly bad, but would make perfect evidence if an elderly relative is standing in court threatened with jail for not giving the BBC some money. Ask for an episode of There’s No Place Like Tyrone to be played to the court and rest your defence.
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Top Gear, BBC 2, Sunday at 8pm
Top Gear is one of the number of BBC formats which makes money for the organisation, so it’s hard to criticise it on the basis of cost.
This week it was back for another series with new presenters, as it continues to struggle after the sacking of Jeremy Clarkson.
In have stepped Paddy McGuinness (Take Me Out) and former cricketer Freddie Flintoff to keep the lads-on-tour humour going.
Top Gear is a huge hit so there’s no way the producers are going to mess with the format, so Flintoff, Clarkson and Harris (a survivor from the last series) were sent to the mountains of Ethiopia with a £4,000 version of their first car and told to drive to Afar Triangle, one of the hottest places on earth.
It was predictable and contrived - such as when each presenter pretended to have set up a driving test in the desert - but not without some funny bits. It's not the BBC at its finest but neither is it a journey to Tyrone.
