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Originally Posted by RichardCoulter
Just been reading that the BBC said that BBC2 itself would be under threat had they continued with free licenses for all pensioners aged 75 or over.
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That sounds slightly hysterical. Or at least, designed to scare people into not complaining too much.
One of the unforeseen consequences of BBC Scotland, incidentally, is that a very long running gardening programme, called The Beechgrove Garden, has had its output cut. Originally it was made for BBC One Scotland, but it moved to BBC Two Scotland a number of years ago. Of course, Two Scotland no longer exists, so in order for The Beechgrove Garden to continue to be shown, it either has to go back to One (which it won’t, as its audience is far too small these days) or move onto BBC Two Scotland’s effective successor channel, the BBC Scotland Channel, which is what they have done.
But ... and here’s the kicker ... because they’re having to fund more new content to justify the channel’s existence, and to make it distinctive, The Beechgrove Garden is no longer competing for funds from what was previously available to make the relatively small number of opt-outs on BBC Two Scotland; it is instead competing for funding with everything being made for the BBC Scotland Channel. The result is that it will now only get 14 editions per series, where previously it had 26. And the show’s original presenter (who did it for 40 years) is complaining that they should have just left it on BBC Two, which simply demonstrates that a lot of people in Scotland still don’t understand the massive accounting trick the BBC has pulled off in order to make the BBC Scotland Channel happen.
BBC Two Scotland no longer exists, but nobody seems to have noticed...