Peter Rhodes on BBC salaries, an average summer and a close encounter with cluster bombs
Richard Sharp, former (briefly) chair of the BBC, suggests a household levy or broadband tax to fund the Corporation. Here's a better idea. Why doesn't the BBC learn to live within its means?
It could start by reviewing its star salaries. For example, if a BBC presenter has allegedly given £35,000 to a teenager in exchange for indecent images, that star has probably been paid too much. About £35,000 too much.
We were warned that Britain would endure more scorching summers like last year's. So far there's nothing to suggest anything tropical. In fact, with plenty of showers and temperatures hovering around 20C for the next fortnight, it looks like a pretty middling sort of July. But “middling” doesn't make good headlines.
As the world recoils at the prospect of US cluster bombs being unleashed in Ukraine, I recall reporting from the first Gulf War (the legal one) in 1990. The RAF Tornado bombers carried a fiendish cluster device, the JP233 munitions pod, which showered hundreds of bomblets on its targets, usually runways. It was such a nasty beast that the authorities in Bahrain forbade the Tornados from taking off over their city, whatever the wind direction.
We hacks watched a pair of Tornados battling against an unhelpfully stiff tailwind to climb above the Persian Gulf. For a few agonising moments the warplanes vanished into the heat haze at the end of the runway before reappearing to continue their slow, lumbering climb into the azure. Things you never forget.
After 47 years of production, it's the end of the line for Ford's little family car, the Fiesta. At least it's the Fiesta in most places. In Bristol, however, it's the Fiestal. The city has a unique dialect in which an L is added to some words ending with a vowel, giving us cinemal and areal. Ford provided a rich supply of names suitable for this “terminal L”. The Fiestal comes from the same stable as the Cortinal and the Granadal.
A Bristolian once told me of a dance hall in his home city where the band leader announced the Latin-American section, featuring a rumbal, a sambal, a pasol doblel and the ever-popular congal.
