Interesting idea for credits

On my travels around bbc.co.uk I noticed this comment on a talking point page about charter renewal.



Now I think this is an interesting idea. For a start it would show people just how expensive TV is and would also show if a show was "wasting money" or was actually el-cheapo to make, shutting up the "waste of money" folks on POV in theory.

I think all broadcasters should be made to do this though, not just the beeb.

Surely there is more of an issue with amount of money that is NOT spent on programmes!

Nice idea, but how would they work out the cost of each programme?

Spend money on more accountants?

On the credits:
This show cost: £10 000
Money raised from idiots who entered are stupidly easy phone competition: £12 000

I admire your attempt at satire, Larry - but to wrestle the budget break down out of the production team / exec producer would not be that difficult to do.

I would like to see a detailed split of how much each programme cost to make, but I would rather see it on BBC On-Line where the interested/nosey viewer would have time to study the value for money quota.
With credits getting squeezed on ECP's or wizzing by at speed to get the info on screen in a 20" gap (on BBC Three) any budget info would be lost or appear on screen for around 0.9 seconds before the roman numerals..

Frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Americanism: Priceless?

It is very difficult. For example how do you price a title sequence? it may have cost £6000 to make but then it has to be divided by the number of episodes, it was used on..... but you don't know how many episodes will use it until the last episode. Same with anything cost that is spread over a number of episodes, a filming trip might have cost £10,000 and they might have used material from that trip in 5 episodes. How do you work out how much of the £10,000 gets allocated to which episode? Same with staffing, some people on that programme won't be working exclusively for that programme

Then there's news, costs are shared amongst several diffrent programmes and resources are used right up to transmission time.... you'd need someone adding up the cost as the programme goes out. You have to have someone runnign around counting how many video tapes had been used that day

As I say it's a nice idea, but totally impractical

This sort of thing I have believed in. I'd like to see the BBC's accounts published yearly on the internet so that the interested viewer can see just how much they spend on what. Since we *directly* fund them, we should have a right to see where that funding is going.

This is a fantastic idea. Every programme should have a grid containing symbols that indicate :

(1) The cost of production
(2) The status of the producer
(3) The method of comissioning
(4) The aggregate bit-rate employed in transmission on each digital platform

OK (4)'s a bit contreversial, but it is late at night.!

Married, single, single(ish), widowed, seperated, divorced, dont-know, dont-care?

Do you mean from their own partner, or sponsoring broadcaster? Are you about to get divorced from the BBC?

Utterly useless proposal.

For those that are interested, and who will understand the information being presented to them, this information should have course be made available online or in free booklet form from the BBC.

However, to simply present a figure to Joe Public stating how much the episode cost is meaningless. To tell them that Wednesday's episode of Chaddlehangers on BBC ONE cost £12,000, whereas over on ITV1 at the same time Smack My Fish Up only cost £4,000 is useless. What do these fingers actually mean? Why did one programme cost more than the other? Does this mean the BBC wastes £8,000 more than ITV1 per half-hour?

People understand the cost of baked beans and sliced bread because it's the stuff that people buy all the time and they understand that it should be around a certain price, and any wild deviations from the norm are to be approached with caution. As the average viewer has no comprehension of how much television programmes cost, nor how the money is spent on individual elements of the production process, simply presenting them with a sum total is a futile exercise. Indeed it is one that would most likely end up in people judging the quality of a programme by how much it cost, which would simply end up being completely counterproductive to the original economic accountability aims of the exercise.