Barbara Ellen is far too ready to do Rupert Murdoch’s job for him. (“Here we go. Now the poor shouldn’t even watch TV”, Comment.) Half the UK population doesn’t choose to have subscription TV; those that do watch the free-to-air channels much more than the channels for which they pay extra. Sports minister Tracey Crouch may have been wrong to link tax-credit reforms with the savings people might make in forgoing pay TV, but pay TV costs far more per hour than is generally recognised.
The average UK household watches some 9.3 hours of TV per day. At £145.50, an annual TV licence costs each household 40p per day, while a typical Sky subscription plus the TV licence fee costs some £2 per day. Assuming a similar number of viewing hours, that’s 4.3p per hour for free-to-air homes and 22.3p per hour in Sky homes. The BBC’s share across all UK homes went up from 29.5% in 2004 to 32.4% in 2013, while the national share for Sky’s portfolio of channels decreased from 10.4% to 8.3%. Yet Sky’s pay TV income was some £6bn from the UK and Ireland, when licence fees contributed just £3.7bn to the BBC’s total income of £5bn for TV, radio and the World Service.
So maybe Tracey Crouch did have a point after all. Meanwhile, John Whittingdale strives to tell us ahead of charter renewal that the BBC must cut back so as to give the pay TV channels a fair go!
Hugh Sheppard
Chairman, BBC Pensioners’ Association
Hook
Hampshire
Bit of a learning curve
The image of Ernest Bevin school that appeared in your interview with of Sadiq Khan is absolutely not one remembered by staff and students who were here at the time (“And in the red corner…” New Review). Indeed it is contrary to how Mr Khan recalls his own experiences at our school. In a recent flier to promote his mayoral campaign he says: “I got a fantastic state school education.”
Rukhsana Sheikh
Principal, Ernest Bevin College
London SW17
Our motive is academic
In 1773, the cleric Edward Tatham wrote to express “his disapprobation” of Oxford University’s new-fangled Radcliffe Camera, which he felt “destroys the regularity of the area”. Tatham’s spirit appears to live on in your critique of Oxford’s latest building developments (“Dreaming spires and hard cash”, New Review).
You also ask whether these new projects are driven by academic purpose or the desire to attract funders. The answer, in every example you give, is academic purpose. The need for a global School of Government was identified long before a donor was. Extra book storage space created the possibility of new exhibition galleries in the Weston Library, which have attracted 500,000 visitors in their first six months. The Mathematical Institute’s Andrew Wiles building, largely funded by the university itself, united three scattered groups of academics who are ranked first in the UK for the quality of their research.
Only once the academic priorities are determined do we talk to potential donors about how they could help. Their generosity, like that of John Radcliffe, is helping to create imaginative, purpose-led buildings likely to outlast the verdicts of today’s Edward Tathams.
Professor William James
Pro vice-chancellor, planning and resources
University of Oxford
The painter’s not the point
Connoisseurship is not, as you suggest, about differentiating one painter from another, as if a forensic science (“Is it a Canaletto or a Bellotto? Don’t ask an art historian… News. It is about discernment and judgment in differentiating the better from the poorer work.
Training in the former skill performs a minor capitalist service in fixing art-market profit, in the Berenson tradition. Training in the latter would encourage us all to see quality more clearly and to discriminate solely on the basis of the work we are engaging with and without prejudice. Core curriculum stuff, I’d suggest, for everyone.
John McKean
Friuli
Italy
A dose of her own medicine
Shirley Williams complains of cuts in nurse training in 2012 (“George Osborne has 10 days left to save the NHS”, Comment). Does she not remember when she was a minister in a government that cut both nurse and doctor training in the 1970s? The NHS has suffered from chronic understaffing ever since, though possibly not in management, not to mention constant reorganisations in the way the service is run. As Basil Fawlty famously said: “You started it.”
David Grantley
Wortham
Suffolk
The elusive tax office
Kevin McGrath (Letters) will be disappointed if he hopes for more local tax offices. The plan is to end up with a small number of regional centres. For example, the centre for anyone living in north Norfolk will be Stratford, London.
Alison Childs
King’s Lynn, Norfolk
