Hello, Tom Hidderley here. I joined the BBC in Bush House in 1964 as a TechOp. I was assigned to TO course #22 in 1965 and returned to LCR as a TO. We were converted to SMs in 1967 and I left in 1970 for the Anglo American film unit in Zambia on a five year contract. I moved to Toronto Canada in 1975 and have been freelancing here ever since. I finally retired in 2017 and am enjoying life, as an expat, here in London Ontario.

Hello, I was a Tech Op on TO22 in 1965 and joined BH London.
I parlayed my world-class training at the BBC into a freelance recording career and ended up in Canada where I am now retired. I'd love to hear from anyone on TO22 and was trying to contact a lecturer at the time Chris Daubney.
Thanks.

According to this Press Gazette report by Charlotte Tobitt,

"BBC to cut 500 more jobs as revenue falls 6% to £5.4bn
BBC says it is facing "serious pressure" on its finances.

The BBC is planning to cut a further 500 jobs by March 2026 and has opened a round of voluntary redundancies amid “serious pressure” on its finances."

I wonder just how many of them are still watching BBC channels!!

Roughly £83million of a loss to the Corporation - which isn't really sustainable in the longer term.

According to this Guardian Report on the state of the BBC's Annual Report......

"Half a million households cancelled BBC licence fee last year"

FWIW, PM says he wants to keep tv licence until at least 2032.

The BBC has again lost in its attempt to play jiggery-pokery with the rules of the BBC pension scheme. You may recall that last year it went to the High Court for permission to alter the meaning of the rule that protects the scheme and its members from being altered, to their disadvantage, by the BBC. The BBC said it would appeal and it did so last month. Its arguments were simply a straightforward rehash of last year's ones. But with remarkable swiftness - in just 12 days - the three Appeal Court judges handed down their judgement (published on Tuesday here: https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewca/civ/2024/767) in which they smacked the BBC right out of the ground. They supported entirely the judgement of the original High Court judge and provided a comprehensive rebuttal of the arguments put forward this second time around by the BBC's KC.  So, for the time being, things stay as they are for active members. The BBC is prevented from doing things like reducing the accrual rate, at which future pension is built up, or imposing higher contribution rates on those members. The BBC issued a rather churlish statement to staff saying it would not pursue its legal arguments any further but threatened to do something unspecified to their pension arrangements anyway. I suspect the BBC will simply close the scheme entirely. It has been closed to new joiners for more than a decade now, and the BBC could simply close it to further accrual. As a former elected trustee myself, I thought the attitude of the current trustees to the recent court hearings was remarkably relaxed. They took part more or less as a neutral observer rather than as any sort of defender of the members' interests. For its part, the BBC Pensioners Association wasn't interested at all, believing that any changes could have no effect on the security of pensions already in payment. We may be about to find out of that is true or not.

For anyone who hasn't seen the BBC Alumni response to this matter ...

"The BBC’s Information Security Team alerted us to a data security incident, in which some files containing personal information of some BBC Pension Scheme members were copied from a cloud-based storage service.
The files include some Pension Scheme members’ personal information - including details such as Names, National Insurance numbers, Dates of Birth and home addresses.

It is important to note that this information did not contain ...

any telephone numbers,
email addresses,
bank details,
financial information,
usernames or passwords

The breach did not involve the BBC Pension Scheme website, or its member portal myPension Online, or the 'existence checking service' myPensionID.

It is also important to note that analysis undertaken by our Specialist Teams currently shows no evidence that the files affected have been misused."

Charles Vincent Anstey Duggleby MBE (born 23 January 1939) has died.
Touching piece on Bill Rogers' blog here: https://tradingaswdr.blogspot.com/2024/06/vincent-duggleby.html

The date for Sue Wilson’s funeral has been set for Friday, 19th July, at 2.00pm - at SW Middlesex Crematorium.