[HCDX] Fwd: BBC Goes Quiet: The REAL Reasons
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[HCDX] Fwd: BBC Goes Quiet: The REAL Reasons
If you have not heard about the BBC's dropping all of their
broadcasts via Shortwave to North America and the Pacific (New
Zealand, Ausralia, etc.), then be aware that they leave the air
tomorrow, June 31, 2001. The following was found on
rec.radio.shortwave, and is a fine list of reasons WHY the BBC is
dropping these services... (for more info, though, you might wish
to visit http://savebbc.org)
In rec.radio.shortwave, "hamilton" <hamilton@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
========================================================================
We've all heard the excuses about why the BBC World Service
is going to shut down broadcasts to North America and the
Antipodes. They are summed up by:
1. Gazillions of people are staying up all night to try to
find an occasional BBC program rebroadcast on an NPR
station. Well, OK, so it's only thousands, that's still
a large number. Errr, well, a few hundred isn't bad,
continent-wide. We have changed our definition of the
"target audience" to consist of hard-core FM DXers who are
willing to try to pursue these hard-to-hear broadcasts.
2. There are certainly a lot of people, thousands maybe,
who are listening on Internet streaming audio. We have
redefined our target audience to amount to hacker geeks
who don't have anything better to do with $1000+ computers
than make them replace $100 radios. We need to reach these
guys very quickly, because the ones who are doing it at the
office are likely to be fired as soon as their managers
discover that the kiddies are hogging the company's
bandwidth for simple audio.
3. There will soon be satellite-to-ground radio. Of course,
you can only pick it up in your car, and it costs $10 per
month,
but this gets us in touch with our latest target audience:
long haul lorry drivers, the only people who spend enough
time behind the wheel to make such services worthwhile.
OK, OK, OK, that's just what Mark Byford says. By planting secret
listening devices inside Bush House, your reporter can now reveal
the
REAL REASONS FOR THE BLACKOUT
1. Britain's image in those countries is good enough, and we
don't want to risk damaging it with our newest dumbed-down
program content.
2. Britain's image there is so bad that we can't do anything
about it.
3. As a part of the "Kewl Britannia" campaign, we have been
directed to pretend that the Spice Girls are the pinnacle of
British culture. This involves hoping that nobody remembers
the traditional BBC content.
4. We're switching to the euro. As a result, we will be unable
to afford to pay for transmitter time, because nobody in his
right mind will accept euros as payment. We were hoping that
Sackville might be in Newfoundland (where passing fake money
might
work), but we just discovered that it's in New Brunswick.
5. We have appointed Hugh Grant to be our ambassador to Hollywood,
and trust that he will make intimate contact with the locals.
6. All those people in Australia are deported criminals. We're
going to pretend that we don't know any of them.
7. As a part of thus "EU" thingamajig, we have to do what the
Germans say, and they won't let us broadcast so much anymore.
They also say that they won the war, and a new Disney movie
will show things working out that way, the same way that the
studio sanitised the Pearl Harbour attack.
8. The Americans sent Bill Clinton here on an extended speaking
and bribe-collection tour. We are retaliating by suspending
communications.
9. It is becoming increasingly difficult to locate inhabitants
of the UK who can speak proper English. Rather than subject
listeners to a barrage of announcers who drop their leading
and trailing consonants, we are only going to broadcast in
English to non-English-speaking countries.
10. We have decided to call it the "BBC Local Service."
11. We have discovered that the American media portray our country
as being composed of quaint castles, polite old ladies, and
race riots. That's good enough, we won't try to contradict it.
12. America is not a soccer-playing country. Thus, our hooligan
fans have not busted up any American cities, and so we will
spend our time apologising to those countries that they have
visited and wrecked.
13. OK, so Brandi Chastain plays soccer. But, the only reason
anybody watches her is to see if she's going to take her
shirt off again.
14. The more we broadcast, the more people send investment capital
here. As proper socialists, New Labour requests that all
such funds go somewhere else instead.
15. Why would anybody in New Zealand be listening to us?
The original Zealand is in Holland, so let Radio Nederland
broadcast to them. They're probably Dutch, anyway, just
like those funny Afrikaaners.
16. We've decided that the British Empire was a mistake, and that
the Belgians were supposed to take over the world instead.
At least, that's what they keep telling us in Brussels,
our new capital.
17. As royalists, we are shocked to learn what kind of person you
refer to as a "queen" in San Francisco. We call that type of
person a "Tory back-bencher."
18. We're ticked off. Bill and Hillary Clinton were here, and they
BOTH groped Cherie Blair. We're going to go invisible for a
while, and hope that those two go away and don't try to put
their hands on HM.
19. We KNOW that you're not going to buy any of our beef, and
suspect that you aren't going to buy anything else from us
as long as we have exotic Third-World diseases running loose,
so we're going to stop trying to have a global business image.
20. It was taking too long for the radio signals to reach Australia
and New Zealand. When we would start a "summer" schedule, the
listeners would report that it was winter when they heard it.
As liberal arts graduates, this phenomenon is inexpicable to
us.
21. Tony was hoping that Algore would win the American election,
or at least maybe Barbra Streisand or Steven Spielberg.
If you're going to elect somebody who lacks Hollywood approval,
we're going to take our marbles home.
22. We were going to take our marbles home, but we seem to have
lost
all of them.
23. Our new "green" transmitters are powered by bicycle pedals,
and lack the power to cross oceans.
24. We're located in London, but all the people with common sense
and real guts are in Scotland, and they refuse to come down
here and help us make the place run properly.
25. We are worried about where these broadcasts could be winding
up.
The other day we drilled a hole in the ground and, instead of
finding water or oil, we ran into France. Ever since then,
we have been beseiged by snails and frogs walking in and
asking for political asylum.
26. Americans keep writing in and asking to hear the sound of Big
Ben.
We are too embarassed to admit that we lost the tape.
27. We're selling the BBC to Rupert Murdoch, who intends to operate
it the same way he does the Fox News Channel. The problem is
that
FNC's shallow, flashy, video effects don't work on the radio.
28. After years of having Bush House barricaded and only the gift
shop open to the public due to IRA threats, we have decided to
completely throw in the towel, and this is the first step.
29. Tony tried to give honours to a couple of Canadians, and got a
nasty letter from that Quebecker who runs the joint nowadays.
Some gratitude - to hell with Canadians!
30. Producing radio shows is too hard. We don't care if nobody
can hear us. Can we go to sleep now?
========================================================================
End of Newsgroup Posting.
73, folks!
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