Listicle

Five areas where the BBC World Service gets it wrong: some serious, some trivial.  But for insomniacs such as I am, who rely on the service to get us through the night, they all matter.

• Variability of volume and tone.  BBC sound engineers used to be the best in the world, but nowadays they seem unable to ensure a consistent volume to their output, while different speakers range from admirably clear to intolerably muddy.

• Intrusive music.  It is a mystery to me why programme-makers feel the need to interrupt their programmes with unnecessary bursts of so-called music.  Even more heinous is the playing of background music to accompany speech, thus rendering the latter barely intelligible (at least to those of a certain age whose hearing may not be all it once was).

• Dollarisation.  Is it really necessary to translate all monetary amounts (including Neymar’s transfer fee) into US dollars?

• Devotion to the former British Empire.  Perhaps the service should be re-titled the Africa, Middle-East and India Service because, apart from some obvious tokens, Europe and the Americas are sorely neglected.

• Repetition.  The flagship Newshour programme begins with a statement summarising the programme’s contents; then we get 6 minutes of news; then another statement of the programme’s contents, before the programme proper gets under way.  This is interrupted at a quarter past the hour with a brief statement of the news headlines, until at 25 minutes past the hour we get a trail for some other programme, followed by yet another summary of what is to follow in the next 30 minutes, followed yet again by 3 or 4 minutes of the news, then a further summary of what is yet to come.  And so on, ad infinitum.