Mark Lawson

speaker

194 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 23 Jul

Mark Lawson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Today in Focus · What does the BBC do for you? · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

Yeah, the proms, certainly.

I have late relatives who paid the license fee respectively for the archers and for songs of praise.

And that was a real thing.

You have these very few events, essentially the final of the traitors, the final traitors.

of Strictly Come Dancing, where you have to watch on the night because otherwise you'll find out who's won.

So you have to, but those can still get very big audiences.

But there is no one area now in which the BBC produces the absolute best.

CBeebies?

I'm just coming back into that via grandchildren.

But yes, I mean, arguably, but if they were going to make the case on children's, the children won't be paying the subscription or whatever replacement for the household levy.

I can see that.

It spent a lot of its 104 years in crisis because, in fact, of the funding mechanism, that this curious thing that the money is effectively collected and enforced by the government and then given to the BBC to spend.

But you've got to be quite saintly not to start exerting some power.

over the BBC and Margaret Thatcher but also Harold Wilson before that they both exerted really terrifying political pressure on the BBC and also because they appoint the chairman and all this kind of stuff and they put people on the board and

And so it's always been legal in that way, however you are right.

But it's the three S's, scandal, salary, streaming.

So what you were asking earlier, which is perfectly fair, which is that everyone has something that connects them to the BBC in terms of programming, and I think that's true.

Unfortunately, now almost everyone has something that disconnects them from the BBC.

And unfortunately, everyone who has on one side of the ledger, this is why I pay the license fee, now has on the other side, this is why I don't want to.

Yes, there are three types of scandals.

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