Muammar Al Khadafi

Poor old Auntie (or anti) British Broadcasting Corporation, it just isn't having a good time of it.

Journalists at BBC Plymouth are set to strike tomorrow with picket lines expected at the BBC's Seymour Road studios in response to the threat of compulsory redundancies.

Despite promises of cutbacks across the board, newly released figures show far too many stars - using the term loosely - on huge salaries, and a rise in those earning six figure salaries.

The atrocious Graham Norton worth a reported £2million a year? Gary Lineker worth the same amount? Make up your own minds, both make many of us reach for the off button.

Not only overpaid 'stars' but also less drama, with recent reports showing that drama output on the BBC has been cut by 630 hours a year.

You'll not notice any cut in the amount you're paying for a TV license fee though.

The number of complaints to the BBC has risen, standing at approximately 240,000 for the year, 20,000 higher than the previous year. Only 81% of these were dealt with inside 10 days, compared to 94% the year before.

As for repeats? Using the most recent figures we can obtain, which were released under a Freedom of Information request, we learn that for 2009/2010 :

BBC 1 - 33.0% of programming was repeats.
BBC 2 - 46.1% of programming was repeats.
BBC 3 - 84.6% of programming was repeats.
BBC 4 - 78.4% of programming was repeats.

Of course it won't be counted as a repeat so not in those figures, but many would also consider 'recycling' of content, such as when BBC1 or BBC2 switch to airing BBC News 24 all night as another form of repeat.

Quality? Many would agree that the standard of programming has plummeted, with schedules made up of banal soaps with their left wing social engineering subtext, moronic shows with no substance, and dumbed down current affairs with, of course, an agenda in play yet again.

Forget unbiased or neutral, program after program ram home the same messages and ideology, the Biased Broadcasting Corporation would be a far more apt name.

Given that many in Britain are struggling to make ends meet then perhaps it is time to scrap the TV License fee and allow us to choose whether we want to pay for the BBC or not.

We're certainly not getting value for money as things stand, and many would rather spend that TV tax on something else like feeding the kids in the face of ever growing grocery bills, or softening the impact of those huge increases in power costs.