Will Someone Tell The Overgrown Teenagers Running The BBC That The Licence-Fee Party Is Over

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For weeks now, Britain has been consumed by a crisis over public sector excess.

Revelations of MPs flipping allowances and claiming for duck-houses have changed the course of politics. With forecasts of savage cuts ahead, an age of austerity has dawned.

Could someone please tell the BBC?

The five-day annual Glastonbury rock festival and mud-fest finished last night. The BBC sent more than 400 people to cover it at an estimated cost of £1.5 million. presenters, producers, directors or technical crew, plus about 130 short-term contractors hired by the BBC to provide rigging, security and other support.

To be fair, a huge outside broadcast event such as this can't be covered with a handful of staff. But 400-plus? Was there not inevitably a vast amount of duplication?

To which one can only ask - why? Glastonbury might be popular among the young, along with a bunch of superannuated hippies vicariously revisiting their lost adolescence, but it hardly caused the nation to cancel its social engagements en masse in order to sit at home glued to the television.

The BBC says that last year's festival broadcasts attracted 14 million TV viewers and six million radio listeners. But that was over several days. To put it into context, some 12 million people tuned into the Wimbledon men's final last year.

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