So, the Beeb is off to the South Pacific, jammy buggers. The broadcaster is about to start filming one of its massive, natural history docu-epics on the most watery corner of the globe, which, we're told, covers 11m square miles.
I'm sure the end result will be spectacular - after all, this is the broadcasting outfit that gave us the peerless Planet Earth and Blue Planet. But is this kind of mega-project something the BBC should be doing with our money? It's obviously going to cost the equivalent of a medium-sized lottery win. Could it instead plough the cash into, say, religious broadcasting, which is something of a public-service ghetto these days; or perhaps into some educational programmes?
Doubtless the worldwide sales of this series, once it's done, will help recoup the cost, but we'll never know the full story of the numbers: will it come out at a loss or will it return a profit for the Beeb? Should the BBC chieftains account to us, the licence-fee payers, on this kind of micro-level? And in this day and age of handwringing over carbon footprints, how many flights for how many people and how many hotel room nights is this all going to add up to? There's an irony in the fact that the very process of bringing the exquisite South Pacific into our living rooms might be contributing to the trashing of the planet. Is it valid to stamp carbon bootprints all over the globe in order to show us its glory?
