Minority languages…worth spending money on?
The BBC has come under fire lately for a variety of reasons; the most famous of which was its well publicised misrepresentation of the Queen in one of its documentaries. Having escaped this faux pas with our Head of State without the slightest hint of a visit to the Tower of London, the hapless executives of the Corporation managed to get themselves embroiled in a controversy regarding programming.
The funding raised from our licence fees it seems, is insufficient to do much more that allow more bland repeats and also necessitates a drastic reduction in the production of original material. With the Corporation in apparently such dire straits, it came as somewhat of a surprise then, when the BBC announced the proposed setup of a new digital Welsh Language Channel at an estimated cost of some £24 million.
Now no one could argue that Welsh is commonly spoken within Wales, in fact, you might be very hard pressed to find a Welsh speaking Welshman in much of Wales. One other thing is for sure…the rest of us in England would derive even less benefit from this new Welsh Channel. With this in mind, I am forced to question the wisdom of this proposal; surely the BBC, if under any form of budgetary constraint should be looking to cut back to a core of programming acceptable to a majority of viewers and not try to accommodate minorities at the expense of the rest of us? Can the propagation of a minority language be justified under any circumstances, given that a the majority who funds it will be bereft of any benefit therefrom?