The UNreal world of the BBC

Watching the "where are they now" show confirms that Dragon's Den provides some pretty outrageous promotion for those who appear on the show. TMP remembers the good old days of BBC propriety, when Blue Peter religiously used to cover the name of "Ever Ready" on its distinct blue batteries, using black tape.

It's not as if Peter "as seen on TV" Jones, Theo Profiterole & Co need any freebies - especially as their victims get quite thoroughly mugged for equity in a manner that borders on disgraceful, where they are blatantly using their benefits of celebrity – provided by the BBC licence payer – to leverage the poor mugs off their own businesses. With gullible souls like this eagerly turning up to be brutally insulted and financially raped on TV, it's a mystery how any of these ideas ever make any money.

The BBC has a long history of interfering with and distorting commercial markets since the BBC Acorn micro started out doing some good, but quickly became a terrible distraction that arguably set UK education back a generation, when the rest of the world was getting on with the more versatile and vastly more relevant IBM PC.

TMP respectfully suggests that part of the work of reforming the BBC might include asking the Dragons to hand back half the equity they have stolen, by exploiting the BBC and our licence fees? Better still, let's adopt an interactive format and more liquid market where the entire audience can choose to participate and "buy shares" in the ideas being paraded.

However "good" the TV, the idea that an entrepreneur is required to spill the beans on their business idea in a way that alerts competition must be fundamentally wrong.

And then however attractive the proposition, the Dragons nearly always end up saying they'll invest only if it's a guaranteed monopoly with patents to squash any of the competition (that has just been woken up) - and if the owner hands over half the business in return for a ride with the licence-payer funded publicity machine.

Don't have your say... we're the BBC

The BBC's "have you say" bulletin board that discusses topical news and events is watched over by Auntie as thoroughly as you might expect, with every "debate" getting a fair number of rejected comments.

Despite the best efforts of the BBCs censors, the generally unsympathetic tone of the silent majority venting its spleen on the serial stupidity and foolishness of the PC left, manages to prevail; much to the chagrin, no doubt, of the Guardianistas that otherwise rule the output the BBC to try and ensure that it avoids populism as far as possible. But let's be honest, with a process of sanitisation like this, the only comments we're really interested in reading are the rejected ones, such as this that was sent to TMP the other day by a bemused poster who wondered just what rule had been broken:

"I was going to suggest that we should put Robert Mugabe in charge of the 2012 Olympic judging, then there's a chance we might win everything, and have a thoroughly entertaining time. But now it seems that even that old rogue can't fiddle the books for ever. Maybe instead we can introduce "postal judging", with the submissions opened in Birmingham?"

TMP is considering putting up a BBS system where BBC rejects can be guaranteed a place to post their messages...