According to BBC Feedback, Radio 4’s audience is shrinking. If you’re a regular reader of the Canary, you know why we don’t care for the national broadcaster, but what did the wider British public have to say?

Let’s wade through the now-turned-off comment section to find out:

Thank you for your input. Comments will be closing today at 4.00pm BST.

— BBC Feedback (@BBCR4Feedback) August 17, 2023

X-rated

Twitter recently changed its name to ‘X’, and if you’re wondering what the ‘X’ stands for, a perusal of the site suggests the answer is ‘transphobia’. This was obvious in the replies to the BBC tweet:

Going off Barry’s other content, what he means here is transgender people as opposed to David Walliams or Matt Lucas. The BBC isn’t prioritising trans guests, of course, and when they do have them on, it’s to justify their existence in response to whichever celebrity has gone after them now. Imagine if every time a football player or actor was on the BBC the segment was titled:

Should cis men be allowed to use public bathrooms?

Comments below this one had more sensible things to say, but Twitter prioritises the hate-laced screeds of people with £8 a month to spend on a little blue check – i.e. you always have to read the worst comments first. Another member of the Blue-Check Brigade had this to say:

To be fair, this is true if you don’t understand what the phrase ‘left wing’ entails. If you think it means supporting the right-wing capitalist system we live in but not openly calling for the genocide of minority groups, then yes, the BBC is very left-wing. If you understand it means backing a system of societal organisation in which conditions are as equal as possible for all within it, then of course you don’t fucking think that.

People with more brain cells than blue check marks had smarter things to say on the matter:

The BBC – and the British media at large – has been losing trust for as long as it’s been untrustworthy. Accordingly, not every listener they’ve lost was lost as of late:

A dipshit writes…

Talking of people with more blue check marks than brain cells:

Here’s a selection of programming from today’s Radio 4 schedule as an example:

If anything, it’s surprising just how capital-T ‘Traditional’ this schedule is. Given that BBC Radio 4 is clearly still targeting a middle-class, middle-England audience, Atherton’s issue is obviously that Black and LGBTQ+ people get any representation at all. There is no ‘Gay Black Astrology’ podcast on the BBC, but if there was, would it be more annoying than any other podcast?

Some British people are Black; some are LGBTQ+, and the ‘British’ in ‘British Broadcasting Corporation’ suggests it should speak to all of us in some fashion. Atherton clearly thinks that first ‘B’ stands for ‘Bowl-Cut’, and that the channel should speak exclusively to him:

BB-C you later

It’s unclear if BBC Feedback always planned on turning the comments off at 4pm, or if it all just got too much. Either way, we know one thing for certain: whether it’s comment sections or its general listenership, the BBC are now experts at turning people off.

Featured image via Pexels