BBC sacks 2,500 skilled staff

SHADOW OF ITS FORMER SELF, the BBC, has outlined plans to sell off its London HQ and make 2,500 staff redundant in a bid to address its £2 billion budget shortfall.

In a plan entitled Delivering Creative Future, which is obviously written in a language hitherto unknown on this planet, Dalek Supreme Mark Thompson, who is putting his lack of money where his mouth is by patently not being able to afford razor blades, plans to axe 2,500 jobs over the next six years, sadly not including his own.

The staff cuts will come primarily in news, programme-making and regional centres. The corporation also plans to sell-off its flagship Television Centre in West London, relocating to a new prestigious HQ under a railway arch in Wigan.

Thompson said his plan would deliver 'a smaller, but fitter, BBC in the digital age', whatever that is, and blames the Government for failing to up the licence fee to an adequate level.

Delivering Creative Future. WTF does that mean? Well, it means savage cuts in original programming, more repeats, dumbing down news by rolling TV, radio, online and regional news together, flogging off valuable real estate, scrapping plans for new local radio stations and axing almost 400 journalists.

Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the NUJ, told a BBC hack who was clearing his desk: "Nothing said today reassures us that the BBC is committed to meaningful negotiations over the change. Unless the BBC reconsiders its position, strike action looks inevitable."

While this reporter has traditionally taken a somewhat critical stance on the BBC's newsgathering skills - particularly in the science and technology areas - he cannot but feel a few pangs of remorse that jobbing hacks face the dole queue while overpaid imbeciles remain at the helm of a once-great organisation.

Read more (industrial action permitting) over on the Beeb site here. µ