What has the BBC ever done for me?
BBC, MARK ALLAN; BBC, JEFF OVERS
The outcome will be a stepped subscription system: a basic service of news, children’s, Wimbledon, Songs of Praise provided free to all and subsidised and different packages.
IN MONTY PYTHON’S Life of Brian (1979), John Cleese, as a Judaean revolutionary, asks: “What have the Romans ever done for us?” He is humiliated by a list including “medicine, irrigation, health, roads, cheese and education, baths”. Seeming to define a stupid, rhetorical question, the line was adapted by the BBC for a 1985 ad, encouraging licence fee renewal, in which Cleese asked: “What has the BBC ever given us?” David Attenborough, Terry Wogan, David Dimbleby, The Two Ronnies and others silenced the diatribe by citing their own work.
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