You couldn't make it up dept. no.33: All Britain is talking about it

[fpb]

And sniggering. A couple of days ago, a BBC TV show invited an expert on internet economics to discuss recent developments. Owing to some sort of mix-up, they showed into the studio, not the expert, but the cabbie who had driven him in. The cabbie had no idea what was going on, but, with years of experience on the road chatting to all sorts of customers, he acquitted himself quite well.

Morale no.1: what with the constant pressure on employees, the privatization, casualization, and increasingly temporary nature of jobs, professional skills are dying out and being replaced by a despair to get the product out no matter what.

Morale no.2: 50% of being an expert is, and has always been, a matter of being able to bullshit your way through a situation. Especially on TV.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As much as I loathe the BBC, I do not think this will be the case. They are not yet as brutalized as a great deal of private big business is. On the surface at least, they have made a great joke of it and been the first to laugh at themselves - where do you think I first heard of it? And I think this did something to blunt the inevitable attacks from the BBC's sworn enemies, especially the Rupert Murdoch empire. I was quite surprised to see that his SUN newspaper only had the story in an inside page, and pretty much as a joke. If they had tried to cover it up, let alone sack people, Murdoch would have been all over them.