Therefore please be assured that I have registered your comments on our audience log. This is an internal document which will then be made available to senior members of Radio 5 Live, as well as senior management across the BBC. Styles and policies are continually reassessed according to feedback we receive from our listeners.
Good work people - this is having an impact - let's keep it going.
[ I never realised until the end of the programme on Saturday that his 'employment' was technically with the production company rather than 5 Live, so let's roll again please folks.
See
www.allout.co.uk for e-mail addresses & if you're going ,to send them a decent e-mail you could copy all their addresses listed there under "people" as well as just the "mail@" address given under "contact us". Tell them you've also complained to 5Live - their principal source of income - and copy the whole thing into the BBC complaints form if you can be bothered. Don't burn yourself out yet though - there'll be plenty in next week's show to complain about too.]
Try to put it in your own words of course, as individual complaints will make far more impact.
Dear All Out Productions & BBC Complaints,
I must congratulate you on yet another fine documentary for Five Live. Sunday's programme on Conscientious Objection & Desertion from Iraq was once again informative and thought-provoking, filling in gaps in a little-reported area. Recently I have enjoyed many of your other Five Live Reports, such as 'the Booze Business', 'First Class Cheats' and 'Britain's Diabetes Timebomb', but Sunday's was one of the best yet.
When I think of All Out Productions, I think of progressive, cutting edge Radio like "Out this Week" and the documentaries for Radio One which combine my musical interests with other fields such as Middle East politics or other issues of the day. Young presenters like Rajesh Mirchandani and producers like Jo Meek really do make your slogan ring true: " a hotbed of ideas and creativity with a strong journalistic edge."
So I find it all the more mystifying that you would stoop to the kind of unoriginal, re-hashed stories peddled by the shameless Kelvin MacKenzie in Saturday's 'World Cup Scandals' programme. When I think of Kelvin MacKenzie and fotball, I think of poor Justin Fashanu tortured by the tabloids in the early 90s. There was absolutely nothing in this first programme that was not known by a schoolboy who has read a few football books, and thus I would compare it to the kind of re-hashed stock footage you would expect from a late night Bravo TV production, not from a decent, principled company such as yourselves. Throw in the odd tongue-in-cheek Xenophobic remark and that was the sum of Mr. MacKenzie's contribution. The other contributors came across as a gang of his old cronies, re-hashing oft-heard tales.
When I think of some of your other progressive young presenters I cannot believe that they would wish to be associated with such a vile, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, lying old school hack. Whose idea was it to hire Mr. Mackenzie ? Yourselves or Radio Five ? Whoever it was will be losing a lot of listeners and a great deal of the respect you have worked for, if the mistake is repeated.
Yours sincerely,
