>> I tend to agree that BBC coverage has been 'dumbed down' over years. Pretty sure
>> that's part of a deliberate plan to make it more accessible. If you listen to
>> archive reports that crop up now and again on radio/TV from that perspective you might
>> wonder how far they were wholly comprehensible to a significant proportion of the audience.
I agree the output has changed. We watch a lot of older BBC stuff and the presentation is much more "expert talks direct to unmoving camera using words of more than two syllables, and will do so for ten minutes at a stretch. Try to keep up at the back there." Which we like and prefer, incidentally, but that's by the by.
The thing is, should there be a plan to make it "easier" for chunks of the population, or should there be a plan to "enable" the population to appreciate and understand stuff at a more involving and ultimately more interesting level?
The fact that some can't or won't shouldn't mean everyone else has to put up with the lowest common factor.
You might think that the BBC do segregate this stuff off. Simplistically, let BBC4 hold the "hard" stuff, and BBC1 the "easy" - but in fact they just make the BBC4 stuff "easy" as well, so it pleases nobody.
It just means that if you want a bit of challenging, intellectually stimulating output that makes you think "I don't understand that, let me look into it myself and then I'll come back round again" you look away from the BBC.
Maybe there's only six people left who want that kind of stuff, and in the meantime we six have to repeatedly chuck on "The Shock of the New", "Civilisation", "Monitor", "Earth Story"....etc etc.
I'm excluding from this BBC radio, which does still give you the "hard" stuff from time to time.
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