BU
An interesting letter in The Independent from March 1993 from one David Liddiment:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/letter-granadas-strength-in-liverpool-1496892.html
Looks like by that point GMTV, lates and weekend bulletins were based in Liverpool. Quite amusing reading in hindsight given what happened to the Liverpool operation within just 5 years...
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/letter-granadas-strength-in-liverpool-1496892.html
Looks like by that point GMTV, lates and weekend bulletins were based in Liverpool. Quite amusing reading in hindsight given what happened to the Liverpool operation within just 5 years...
GE
This from Jeremy Clarkson.....apologies if this has already been posted as I am a new member.
Jeremy Clarkson, writing in the Sunday Times on 10th July 2011...
...A lot of the arguments against the BBC's move have been centred on the expense, but I believe there's a more important problem than money. In short, Salford is up north.
I do not speak now as a trendy southern poof who misses Tony Blair and has angst about sending my kids to private school. A television show found that since 1740 every single person in my family tree was born, married and died within 12 miles of one Yorkshire village. I am therefore a pure-blood northerner, a man who makes Michael Parkinson look like Brian Sewell. Cut me in half and you'd find I run on coal and whippets.
But here's the thing. While I was being raised in the north, my parents would occasionally risk the highwaymen and take me to London on trips. There are photographs that show a six-year-old me looking at an elephant in London zoo and pointing at a black man on Bayswater Road. I remember trying to make a soldier in a busby blink and gazing in open-mouthed wonderment at the sheer size of the Palace of Westminster. It all seemed so much more exciting somehow than anything I'd ever encountered oop north.
And now, 30 years after I escaped from Yorkshire, that still holds true. I still get a tinkle fizz when the motorway ends and I'm plunged into the labyrinth. I still get a kick out of the BT tower and from hailing a black cab. I absolutely love London. And I'm sorry but if the BBC now said I had to move back up north, I'd resign in a heartbeat. Many others faced with the same problem have done exactly the same thing.
We are told that too many BBC shows are made by Londoners in London, but that simply is not true. Top Gear, the show on which I work, is based in the capital but, so far as I know, every single one of the production team is originally from somewhere else. The producer is from Glossop, in Derbyshire.
One of the researchers is from Loughborough, in Leicestershire. Until recently we even employed a Scot. Richard Hammond is from Birmingham. James May is from one of the moons of Jupiter. We are therefore as "London" as the Chelsea football team... when John Terry is ill.
London is full of the cream. The bright. The sharp. The ambitious. People who had the gumption at some point to up sticks and leave the two-bit town in which they were raised and do a Dick Whittington. You see it as you drive about: cafes rammed full of people reading big newspapers and talking about big things and drinking coffee that people in Salford have never heard of.
It's where the shows are. It's where films premiere. It's the nation's Oxbridge. It's the best of the best of the best.
Salford? It's just Salford. A small suburb with a Starbucks and a canal with ducks on it. It's a box that has been ticked. A gentle tousle of the politicians' mop. According to Wikipedia, its only real claim to fame is that a man there was ran over by Stephenson's Rocket. Oh, and someone once found a head in a bog.
This does not qualify it as a great place to make television shows. Indeed it's a very bad place. Every week we have to try to entice a guest to our studios, which are in Guildford. Sometimes it's tricky. But it's nowhere near as tricky as it would be if we had to get them up to Manchester. Or as expensive. Every week I'd have to say: "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome... Stuart Hall. Again." That might become wearing.
And how could a news programme run from Salford? It's nowhere near any court that matters and nowhere near a single politician.
Furthermore, if we ran the show from Salford, we'd be employing people from Salford. People who were born there and thought, "Yes. I like this. I see no reason to go anywhere else." And in the world of television that could be a genuine handicap. Every year we'd end up making a Christmas special from the Dog and Duck or the nearest Arndale centre. A television show needs to be run by worldly people. Not people who are frightened to death of the next town.
And what would be the upside? Who cares where a show is made? Who cares whether the Blue Peter garden is in London or not? Who cares whether Simon Mayo is speaking to you from Portland Place or a glass-fronted tower up north? It makes not a jot of difference. At the end of a show now it often says BBC Wales or BBC Scotland. If at the end of Top Gear we put up an ident saying BBC England there'd be hell to pay internally. But why? Nobody who'd paid for the joke would give a damn.
The big problem here is that politicians - and they're behind this shift, be in no doubt about that - have got it into their heads that Britain is a big place. But it isn't, really. It's titchy. Moving half the BBC from London to Salford is the same as a parish council moving the table around which it meets from the village hall to the community centre.
Britain is a small place with a whopping great world-class city in its bottom right-hand corner. It therefore makes sense to me that every head office, every government department, every newspaper and, most of all, every television and radio show is based there.
copyright Jeremy Clarkson. Sunday Times
Jeremy Clarkson, writing in the Sunday Times on 10th July 2011...
...A lot of the arguments against the BBC's move have been centred on the expense, but I believe there's a more important problem than money. In short, Salford is up north.
I do not speak now as a trendy southern poof who misses Tony Blair and has angst about sending my kids to private school. A television show found that since 1740 every single person in my family tree was born, married and died within 12 miles of one Yorkshire village. I am therefore a pure-blood northerner, a man who makes Michael Parkinson look like Brian Sewell. Cut me in half and you'd find I run on coal and whippets.
But here's the thing. While I was being raised in the north, my parents would occasionally risk the highwaymen and take me to London on trips. There are photographs that show a six-year-old me looking at an elephant in London zoo and pointing at a black man on Bayswater Road. I remember trying to make a soldier in a busby blink and gazing in open-mouthed wonderment at the sheer size of the Palace of Westminster. It all seemed so much more exciting somehow than anything I'd ever encountered oop north.
And now, 30 years after I escaped from Yorkshire, that still holds true. I still get a tinkle fizz when the motorway ends and I'm plunged into the labyrinth. I still get a kick out of the BT tower and from hailing a black cab. I absolutely love London. And I'm sorry but if the BBC now said I had to move back up north, I'd resign in a heartbeat. Many others faced with the same problem have done exactly the same thing.
We are told that too many BBC shows are made by Londoners in London, but that simply is not true. Top Gear, the show on which I work, is based in the capital but, so far as I know, every single one of the production team is originally from somewhere else. The producer is from Glossop, in Derbyshire.
One of the researchers is from Loughborough, in Leicestershire. Until recently we even employed a Scot. Richard Hammond is from Birmingham. James May is from one of the moons of Jupiter. We are therefore as "London" as the Chelsea football team... when John Terry is ill.
London is full of the cream. The bright. The sharp. The ambitious. People who had the gumption at some point to up sticks and leave the two-bit town in which they were raised and do a Dick Whittington. You see it as you drive about: cafes rammed full of people reading big newspapers and talking about big things and drinking coffee that people in Salford have never heard of.
It's where the shows are. It's where films premiere. It's the nation's Oxbridge. It's the best of the best of the best.
Salford? It's just Salford. A small suburb with a Starbucks and a canal with ducks on it. It's a box that has been ticked. A gentle tousle of the politicians' mop. According to Wikipedia, its only real claim to fame is that a man there was ran over by Stephenson's Rocket. Oh, and someone once found a head in a bog.
This does not qualify it as a great place to make television shows. Indeed it's a very bad place. Every week we have to try to entice a guest to our studios, which are in Guildford. Sometimes it's tricky. But it's nowhere near as tricky as it would be if we had to get them up to Manchester. Or as expensive. Every week I'd have to say: "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome... Stuart Hall. Again." That might become wearing.
And how could a news programme run from Salford? It's nowhere near any court that matters and nowhere near a single politician.
Furthermore, if we ran the show from Salford, we'd be employing people from Salford. People who were born there and thought, "Yes. I like this. I see no reason to go anywhere else." And in the world of television that could be a genuine handicap. Every year we'd end up making a Christmas special from the Dog and Duck or the nearest Arndale centre. A television show needs to be run by worldly people. Not people who are frightened to death of the next town.
And what would be the upside? Who cares where a show is made? Who cares whether the Blue Peter garden is in London or not? Who cares whether Simon Mayo is speaking to you from Portland Place or a glass-fronted tower up north? It makes not a jot of difference. At the end of a show now it often says BBC Wales or BBC Scotland. If at the end of Top Gear we put up an ident saying BBC England there'd be hell to pay internally. But why? Nobody who'd paid for the joke would give a damn.
The big problem here is that politicians - and they're behind this shift, be in no doubt about that - have got it into their heads that Britain is a big place. But it isn't, really. It's titchy. Moving half the BBC from London to Salford is the same as a parish council moving the table around which it meets from the village hall to the community centre.
Britain is a small place with a whopping great world-class city in its bottom right-hand corner. It therefore makes sense to me that every head office, every government department, every newspaper and, most of all, every television and radio show is based there.
copyright Jeremy Clarkson. Sunday Times
CH
Awful article, and I generally like Clarkson's articles.
One minute he's saying Salford is too far away for guests to go and the next he's saying the country is tiny. I also don't know how many times we have to point out that the majority of politician interviews are done down-the-line to Westminster anyway so it makes no difference I don't know.
Some programmes are moving up north and will have very little affect on programme quality. The only move I can see affecting programme quality is Waterloo Road's move to Scotland (and that's only because they even plan to move the story to Scotland).
Fundamentally, rightly or wrongly in many people's opinions, a decision has been made and moaning about it, whether it be on TV Forum or in your Times Column, it won't make a blind bit of difference.
One minute he's saying Salford is too far away for guests to go and the next he's saying the country is tiny. I also don't know how many times we have to point out that the majority of politician interviews are done down-the-line to Westminster anyway so it makes no difference I don't know.
Some programmes are moving up north and will have very little affect on programme quality. The only move I can see affecting programme quality is Waterloo Road's move to Scotland (and that's only because they even plan to move the story to Scotland).
Fundamentally, rightly or wrongly in many people's opinions, a decision has been made and moaning about it, whether it be on TV Forum or in your Times Column, it won't make a blind bit of difference.
CH
You picked up on the exact same point I made above!
Must have been on the same hymn sheet.
Probably more helpful if you just link to articles of that length. 
Typical Clarkson wind-up gabble by the looks of it; on the one hand Manchester is an isolated cultural wasteland, equivalent to enticing capital-based celebrity guests to the North Pole whilst on the other "Britain is actually an incredibly titchy island."
Typical Clarkson wind-up gabble by the looks of it; on the one hand Manchester is an isolated cultural wasteland, equivalent to enticing capital-based celebrity guests to the North Pole whilst on the other "Britain is actually an incredibly titchy island."
You picked up on the exact same point I made above!
Must have been on the same hymn sheet.
GS
Would these comments be from the same Mr Clarkson who wanted to move the filming site from Surrey to Oxfordshire because he couldn't be bothered with the commute?
Call me old fashioned, but I thought professionals got on with the job - moving base when necessary - and didn't bump their gums about being inconvenienced?
Or is that only when it suits some of them?
Gavin Scott
Founding member
A glaring contradiction, isn't it? Of course, it's deeply unwise to take anything he spouts out seriously but he usually has better bait than that.
Would these comments be from the same Mr Clarkson who wanted to move the filming site from Surrey to Oxfordshire because he couldn't be bothered with the commute?
Call me old fashioned, but I thought professionals got on with the job - moving base when necessary - and didn't bump their gums about being inconvenienced?
Or is that only when it suits some of them?
MO
Completely agree with every single point he makes. Anyone who doesn't is quite simply wrong.
Those who suggest his arguments about guests not willing to travel outside London and the UK being tiny don't tally just don't get it. Because the UK is tiny, it makes having a central place where everyone meets easy. It's easy for everyone to get there, and while you're there you do other business. Having multiple centres is just silly.
This from Jeremy Clarkson.....apologies if this has already been posted as I am a new member.
Jeremy Clarkson, writing in the Sunday Times on 10th July 2011...
Jeremy Clarkson, writing in the Sunday Times on 10th July 2011...
Completely agree with every single point he makes. Anyone who doesn't is quite simply wrong.
Those who suggest his arguments about guests not willing to travel outside London and the UK being tiny don't tally just don't get it. Because the UK is tiny, it makes having a central place where everyone meets easy. It's easy for everyone to get there, and while you're there you do other business. Having multiple centres is just silly.
ST
So you would be happy if they moved the whole of the BBC to Salford?
Having multiple centres is just silly.
So you would be happy if they moved the whole of the BBC to Salford?
TH
As someone who lives near Dunsfold, where Top Gear is filmed, I can tell you it would be easier to get guests to Salford than it is to Dunsfold. Finding that airfield down all the back roads is very tricky, so getting to MediaCity would probably be a lot more simple than getting to the Top Gear studios.