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BBC Forcing Switch To Metric To Cut News24 Costs Gerrard Ran 86 Metres To Score, Says Alan Shearer If They Said Yards, BBC Would Have To Make Separate Film BBC, Having Fun, Trashing Your Values Using Your License Fee To: John Whittingdale, MP 27DEC07 Chairman, Culture, Media and Sport from: Neil Winton Watching Match of the Day on Boxing Day, I was shaken to attention by a line from Alan Shearer. The former Newcastle and England centre-forward was analysing Liverpool’s winner at Derby County, and he described how Stephen Gerrard had raced 86 metres to score the goal. You can’t tell me that Mr Shearer used metres and not yards because he found it more convenient! This is not an isolated incident. It is common on BBCTV and Radio when reporters say things like “visibility was cut to 50 metres on motorways”. Since when have distances on our transport system been in metric? You only have to look out of the window to see that everything still is in yards and miles. The BBC also used kilometres when it was reporting on the exclusion zone for the foot and mouth epidemic, against all logic and tradition. (I realise our wretched government bends the knee to the European Union by announcing these things in metric, but can’t the BBC reporters do the maths or are they too idle or too dumb?) One of the BBC’s operatives, Joanna Bower of BBC Information, tells me (see copy of letter attached) that “Imperial measurements are not excluded from our broadcasts”. Isn’t that nice? So why does the BBC seem to think it has a role to change one of our basic cultural er yardsticks? I know it is never happier than when it is trashing some of our most cherished traditions. But this time it is more than cultural vandalism. The BBC, I suspect, has told its employees like Mr Shearer, to go heavy on the metrics because that means it can use the same film on its BBC24 hour worldwide network, without having to produce another metric version. So the BBC is mangling our programmes paid for by us, to bolster its efforts in a world market for a service we’ll never see. Are you not scandalised by this wanton destruction of a mainstay of British life? Wouldn’t you think that the BBC would have a duty to report to its home audience who pay its wages, in a traditional way? Has there been some democratic mandate of which I‘m not aware to measure distances in metric and dump Imperial? I’d hope that your committee would demand from the BBC that they conform to our Imperial standards of distance as soon as possible. Yours sincerely Neil Winton
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