Top Fifty BBC Freedom of Information Requests For Which Information Was Not Held But Which We Shall Try To Answer On Their Behalf: Part One

One of the things we love most about the BBC website (even more than the two bits of it that mention us) is the Freedom Of Information section. Now, as a publicly funded organisation, the Beeb are bound by law to at least make a token effort to answer any questions that fall within the remit of the act, but being the commendably useful bunch that they are, they’re willing to put a lot of time and money into providing useful information, providing it’s requested by a member of the public.

We’ve looked at it before, back in 2008, where amongst other things we discovered that there are currently 2,787 broadcast copies of post-2002 programmes missing from the BBC archive (from a total of around 200,000), and while you can’t request any information from the duty logs for BBC programmes, you can obtain a list of complaints made about the BBC canteen.

Much, much scarier than unpleasant trifles or missing editions of Newsround was the full documentation from the 1980s on how the BBC would announce the outbreak of a nuclear war. The link to the documentation we’d found in 2008 no longer works, but here’s a quote from our original blog post:

From 1984, a script of what was to be read out on air in the event of a nuclear war. These Wartime Broadcasting Instruction Announcements began with the words:

"Here is an important announcement about the broadcasts you will be able to hear after [date]. At [date] all normal Radio and Television services of the BBC and IBA will cease. The will be replaced by a new single Radio service known as the Wartime Broadcasting Service."

From 1988, this is changed to an almost chummy

"You may be wondering, as many people are, what will happen if the current crisis develops into conflict and wondering how you will find out what is happening. Well, the BBC will do everything possible to maintain its broadcasts but it will probably mean that we cannot maintain our full normal service."

We'd like to think this would have been delivered to the nation by Chris Serle. Luckily, details of our impending annihilation would also be listed on Ceefax.

Erk. The most recently published FOI replies are similarly interesting, taking in an updated listing of canteen complaints, this time from the BBC Northern Ireland canteen (“there hasn’t been a cooked dessert in months”), rather brilliantly, someone asking about how many people have complained about BBC buildings being haunted, and a mention that three agencies besides Lambie-Nairn submitted proposals for a redesigned BBC logo in 1997, though sadly it’d be up to the other agencies to make those designs available. Hopefully, something like this:

 

Sadly, many of the other requests recently granted are more sensible and therefore not really worth looking at, but last week the Guardian compiled and published a full listing of every Freedom Of Information request sent to the BBC’s FOI department since the act was introduced in 2005. That’s some 3,701 requests in all. It’s an enthralling bit of an article, especially for incredibly tedious TV spods like us. The Guardian article has got graphs and everything.

This means we’re able to see all the posed questions that didn’t fit in with the guidelines laid down by law (including the one we submitted about getting to see just what kind of loon leaves comments in the duty logs). Having perused the full list (viewable via Google Docs here), we’ve compiled a Top Fifty Freedom of Information Requests For Which Information Was Not Held. The majority of them are from lunatics, as you shall see. As we go along, we’ll try our best to succeed where the BBC have failed, and answer the questions posed. We’ll tackle the rundown by the categories we’ve put them into, starting with…

TODAY: IT’S A CONSPIRACY!

The BBC is, a lot of people suspect, Clearly Up To Something. It’s a little known fact that daytime repeats of Murder, She Wrote actually contain a subliminal mood-controlling commands delivered at a pitch inaudible to the naked ear. Seriously. Whenever we’re watching it, wearing our special tinfoil hat designed to increase the amplitude of these hidden signals, all we can hear sneaking stealthily through our brain are the words “you’re wasting your life”. The BBC is clearly being used as a mind control device by some shadowy organisation, then, but WHO? The Oxbridge mafia? The Muslims? The Zionists? Alien lizards? Luckily, there are always brave souls determined to find these things out, and they’re willing to send an email to the BBC FOI department to uncover the TRUTH.

What percentage of BBC staff on a salary of £80,000 or above attended private schools. (ref RFI20090761, 5/20/09)

The BBC is run by a cabal of former public schoolboys/girls! Sure, David Mitchell and James May might seem affable enough on the surface, but sure enough they’re secretly plotting to keep the likes of us in our place the second they’re out of shot. We know this all too well. We sent in a very politely worded email application to co-host Masterchef, and only received a form rejection letter in response. Not even a screen test, nor a request for the recipe of our special Cornflake and baked bean pie that we’d mentioned in our application. And all because we didn’t go to St Toff’s College, Kensington.

In response to your question, we estimate that a staggering 307% of BBC staff on a salary of £80,000 or above have attended private schools. Though, to be fair, our education at St Biff’s Comprehensive in Bashford did leave us with quite a flaky grasp of mathematics.

Please can you tell me if the BBC has received any funding or donations from any Muslim organisations? (ref RFI2007001055 , 12/12/07)

Ooh, them Muslims, eh? If they’re not building a mosque in your attic the second you pop out to buy a copy of the Daily Star, they’re banning England shirts in their pubs or something. And we heard that from 2013, 85% of all BBC News reporters will be made to wear burqas when in front of a camera. And what about the way they all must have held some secret elections amongst the UK’s population of one million Muslims, to pick which twelve of them would boo some soldiers in Luton that time, as of course that very specifically picked dozen individuals were there representing an entire faith, and not just the warped mindsets of twelve people who happened to be incredibly stupid?

While we have absolutely no factual basis for doing so, we estimate that Muslim organisations funded the BBC to the tune of £17.4 trillion during 2007.

What does the BBC think of the major political parties? Does the government have an influence over the BBC? Which party does the BBC prefer to work with? (ref RFI20080016, 1/4/08)

What with the BBC employing over 24,000 people at the last count, it might be expected that every single one of those individuals has their own political ideology, and that no specific political party really has an undue influence over the BBC at any given time. However, thanks to these screen captures from a since BANNED special undercover documentary accidentally broadcast in 1991 that we have found (/own the DVD of), we can confirm without any fear of contradiction that the BBC as a whole unequivocally supports The British Communist Party.

Provide a list of all gifts, hospitality or donations supplied to the BBC by Scientology organisations over the past 5 years (ref RFI20090239, 2/3/09)

You have got to applaud the BBC for being very good at covering the tracks that lead you to their secret Scientologist puppetmasters. We’ve suspected ever since reading the above question that the BBC Trust are all leading lights of Sea Org, and that when the BBC broadcast “Panorama: Scientology and Me” in 2007, one of very few large scale investigations into the (“perfectly respectable religion” – BrokenTV Legal Dept) by a major broadcaster anywhere in the world, it was purely to put us all off the scent.

In practice of course, they’re in cahoots, and we suspect that up to 87% of the BBC’s annual programming budget does indeed come directly from the bank account of The Church Of Scientology. And really, is it just a COINCIDENCE that “The BBC Six O’Clock News” is an anagram of “ALL HAIL LORD XENU”? If you squint a lot when looking at the letters? And are a bit mental? WE THINK NOT. Also: every time you press the red button on your remote, your current Thetan levels are transmitted back to Television Centre.

Does the BBC believe in transparency. Do BBC employees vote at any election.  (ref RFI20100460, 3/27/10)

Transparency is, of course, the physical property of allowing the transmission of light through a material, sometimes referred to as ‘translucency’. As it has little or no reason to deny the fundamental laws of physics, the BBC does believe in this. And as hinted earlier, BBC employees ARE permitted to vote in UK General Elections, though they do run the risk of being sacked if they don’t vote for The British Communist Party. Hope this helps!

Names of the Groups/Organisations and the amounts of money that have been directly given to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender young people in the period 2007 - 2008 in the United Kingdom. (ref RFI20090407, 3/5/09)

The BBC are avowedly, if secretly, keen to surreptitiously  turn everyone in the UK into gay lesbian transgender bottomfondling types, as can be seen by the way there have been as many as two gay couples in EastEnders during the last 25 years. As a result, they’re always giving away huge sums of YOUR STARVING GRANDPARENTS licence fees straight into the arseless leather trouser pockets of Them Gays. This is even more shocking because all of the licence fee money paid by gay people in the UK isn’t the cash being redistributed. Heck, no. It’s only the money of Sun readers and war orphans that is given to these unspeakable perverts who pick up men from seedy gay bars, spend a night doing unspeakable acts with their bits, then never phone us again. Phone them again. THEM. Never confused. It’s a HORRIBLE business. Anyway, here’s the breakdown of where the majority of BBC cash went on Them Gays in 2007/8:

British Union For Making Alan Carr Head Of The Armed Forces: £23.6m (paid for using the licence fee money taken solely from pensioners whose grandchildren are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan)

Confederation Of Oiled British Men In Nightclubs With Their Shirts Off: £7.2m (paid for using money that would otherwise have gone to giving Jim Davidson a new series on Saturday night BBC One)

Campaign To Make The Army Dress In Day-glo Pink In The Battlefield: £63.2m (paid for by abandoning plans for a new digital channel containing nothing but live England internationals, war films and documentaries about Japanese fighting dogs)

Society For The Abolition Of Long Hair And High Heels For Wimmen: £17.7m (paid for by placing banner advertising for gay dating websites on the BBC Sport homepage)

MI6 meetings with the BBC in 2003. (ref RFI2005000019 , 01/04/05)

So there you go! Hope “The Man” doesn’t get wind of any of that! Phew.

 

SO… WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED TONIGHT, BROKES?

Well, it’s that quite clearly the BBC are secretly run by a wicked coalition of gay, posh, white, foreign, Muslim, communist Scientologists. And they don’t want YOU to know that. Luckily for you all, we’re here to disseminate what they don’t want you to know. We’ll be back in the next couple of days with the next instalment of The Top Fifty FOI Requests That Could Not Be Answered, but until then, we think we deserve a sip from the delicious cup of suspiciously orange-coloured tea that we don’t remember making but which is on our computer desk, so we must have. Mmm, that’s some deliciously fizzy Ty-Phoo, right there. Catch you later, freedom likers!