This is from "The Guardian"

Terry Wogan says the BBC has spent too much money on buildings


Terry Wogan today said the BBC needed to be slimmed down and had spent too much money on buildings such its new Salford broadcasting base, saying it had become the "British Building Corporation".

Wogan, who stepped down from his BBC Radio 2 breakfast show at the end of 2008 and now presents a live Sunday morning show on the network, said the corporation had expanded into too many networks and services which should not exist.

"The problem with the BBC frankly is it's got too big," Wogan told Richard Bacon on BBC Radio 5 Live today.

"It's got a bit unwieldy, there are far too many people employed to keep this big machine going. It might be better if there was a bit of slimming down.

"If you look at the money that has been spent on buildings, for instance the building work that's going on at the top of Regent Street [the Broadcasting House redevelopment] and the work that's going on in Salford.

"I don't know if it's a mistake or not. It seems as if it's the British Building Corporation rather than broadcasting. It is the greatest broadcaster the world has ever seen, it cannot lose sight of the fact it's supposed to be making programmes, and that's where the money should go."

The latest licence fee settlement means the BBC faces an effective 16% cut in funding, with the BBC's director general, Mark Thompson, having to make £300m of further cost savings.

"If you expand into innumerable wavelengths and networks you must have people who service them," said Wogan.

"I thought it was probably inevitable with the success of this great broadcasting organisation that it would expand. It's always going to be human nature.

"For me the BBC has slightly outgrown its strength. Not slightly, it has outgrown its strength. I don't ever want this country to abandon the principle of the BBC, of a licence fee, because as Michael Grade said years ago, it's the BBC that keeps everybody else straight.

"If the BBC ever abandons the idea of the BBC it'll be a very sad day. It would be terrible. I do want the BBC as the greatest broadcaster of its time to continue. I wouldn't like to see it being dismantled or take away part of the licence fee to support some other broadcaster. Let's try and keep the BBC."

By:- John Plunkett

Source:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/16/terry-wogan-bbc-money-buidings

So that there is more money for him?

Surely NOT!!

Mike

Blarney!

Reading parts of this I was reminded of Peter Black's book celebrating fifty years of the BBC, The Biggest Aspidistra in the World, where 'aspidistra' is defined as "a useful and decorative plant that thrives in parlours, sitting-rooms and the like;  it prospers in temperate conditions and reproduces itself by division"!