Alan Shearer

3918 days ago

Who Should Present Match of the Day? The BBC thinks hosts re “too white & male”

BBC Director of Television Danny Cohen thanks that Match of the day needs to change. Hanson, Lineker, Shearer et al might know about soccer, be pretty entertaining and have a good on screen rapport but they are all white men. That is clearly no good at all. It is not representative, blah, blah, blah.

So who should host MOTD? Naturally I nominate Hazel Irvine (for whom I have such a soft spot that I even watched a few minutes of the watching paint dry Winter Olympics) who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of soccer. Garth Crooks is excellent. And why not bring in Graham Norton for true diversity and since he appears to be camped out at the BBC so he can appear almost 24 hours a day on our screens.

I am sure Norton would do it. Irvine and Crooks, however, strike me as decent folk who would argue that the current team is excellent (if overpaid) and that merit should out. Neither has risen through the ranks through affirmative action but through natural talent. The BBC once stood for excellence. What is so bad about that?

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4064 days ago

Friday Caption Contest on a Sunday – The appalling BBC Edition

Having seen clips from last week’s Question Time and some of the coverage of the Red Ed vs. The daily Mail issue, I wonder if the BBC has plumbed new depths. Mired in new scandals over payouts for failure, sex crime cover ups and much more besides the real issues are:

Firstly that the taxpayer funded broadcaster produced either the sort of rubbish (everything on Radio 1 for example) which should be the domain of the private sector. If there is a demand for this sort or garbage why should the taxpayer subsidise it? If not then since it is rubbish why produce it at all?

And secondly that the news coverage is anything but impartial. How the audience cheered as the panel bashed the Mail on QT? How the BBC ignored both the facts of this non story and also the double standards in the way that Red Ed had treated those who gloated over the death of Thatcher? Why should my taxes fund propaganda? By the way is the BBC still insisting that the planet is heating up thanks to global warming?

As such I invite your captions for the picture below



My own feeble effort is:

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