BBC unveils one last amazing season before TV Licence slashed

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The BBC will blow the last of its TV Licence cash on a series of big-budget ‘watercooler moments’ before politicians slash funding in the run-up to the next election. 

David Cameron, Ed Miliband and the other bloke have all agreed it will be OK to not have a TV Licence in a desperate act of populism aimed at angry and unreasonable voters. 

What’s left of the BBC’s budget has already been earmarked to compensate the victims of Jimmy Savile and other celebrity sex offenders from the Golden Age of light entertainment. 

BBC director-general Tony Hart said: “We could have tried to slowly scale down in a series of painful public cuts and go through the whole 6Music thing a dozen times.

“Instead we decided to blow it all on the the best programmes we’ve ever bloody made so you can all remember what a colossal bunch of short-sighted selfish jerks you were when it’s round-the-clock Ant and Dec and X-Factor.

“You know Sky will just give up making anything ambitious when there’s no more competition, and ITV will give up on the whole highbrow-but-popular thing it’s done so well.”

Following the BBC’s Last Hurrah season, BBC Two, BBC Four, CBeebies and CBBC will follow BBC Three into the dustbin of publicly-funded multichannel ambition.

Radio 1 and Radio 2 will be sold to the Daily Mail Group, Radio 3 will close down, Radio 4 will simulcast the BBC news readings in-between re-runs of The Archers, and the digital channels will become Spotify playlists.

In a statement, former BBC senior management said: “We thoughtlessly slagged off our former employer for a moment in the spotlight, but we didn’t really think it through. Sorry.”

BBC Parliament will continue to run because Westminster has no concept or the world outside its self-referential borders.

Highlights of The Last Hurrah will include:

• The Top Gear Manhattan Project Special will see Clarkson, Hammond and May abandon their cartoonish right-wing outlooks when they realise the gravy train is over, and construct an atomic bomb which they park in Parliament Square to force a last-minute change of plan. The bomb fails to detonate but all three suffer fatal radiation poisoning.
• Professor Brian Cox to be sent to Alpha Centauri and back at one-quarter the speed of light in The Wonders Of Relativity, while the actor Brian Cox remains on Earth.
• Eastenders will feature A-list Hollywood talent including Johnny Depp, Alan Rickman and Samuel L Jackson before fast-forwarding to a future where Albert Square is a submerged monument to our collective stupidity.
• In We Can’t Save Them All, celebrities including Dappy and Chris Moyles champion their favourite endangered species before a panel of judges including Sir David Attenborough and panda-hater Chris Packham. The losing species will be competitively exterminated by Ray Mears and Bear Grylls (also in 3D on Sky).
• All new detective shows will be set in exotic locations where the cast can laze on the beach with cocktails before drunkenly rehashing an old Agatha Christie plot with a modern twist featuring a mobile phone or email or something. Alexander Armstrong and that bloke out of the BT ads star.
• It’s Made With Sellotape will see the Blue Peter team construct fun children’s projects using branded craft items, in preparation for the brutal world of voiceovers and shopping channels that awaits them.
• Radiohead, Van Morrison, Erykah Badu and a host of other musicians will gather to hear their greatest hits bludgeoned by a jazz piano accompanniment on Jools Holland’s Boogie Woogie Blowout.
• On the final night, BBC staff who’ve worked hard behind the scenes for years will take part in The Great British F**k You, snorting coke and screwing hookers live on air with whatever’s left in the bank, before burning Broadcasting House and Media City to the ground besides flaming effigies of MP Andrew Bridgen.

BBC One after the last hurrah:

• BBC Breakfast will feature Bill Turnbull absent-mindedly reading stories from the newspapers while he has a cup of tea and a bowl of Frosties, with Anna Ford, Sophie Raworth and Huw Edwards repeating the same charade at One, Six and Nine. 
• Jeremy Paxman will look angrily into the camera, live for an hour at 10.30 every night. Closedown will follow the National Anthem at 11.30pm.
• Reruns of 1970s and 1980s TV shows will fill the evening schedules, because everyone says that’s when TV was best. Daytime will be filled with endless re-runs of Cash In The Attic and Doctors.
• The Proms will continue, but will be sponsored by Vodafone and exclusively feature renditions of mobile phone ring tones by the world’s greatest orchestras.
• BBC iPlayer will be exclusively feature videos shot on mobile phones.
• The cast of Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps will continue to churn out ‘new’ episodes to maintain the eternal slumber of Cthulhu.

Image: Ari Helminen/Flickr and R/DV/RS/Flickr under Creative Commons Licence

Disclaimer: This is not a real news story. Any resemblance to real people or organisations is purely for the purposes of comedy, being defined as something which the author thought was funny, and should not be taken as representing reality beyond the confines of his/her subjective perception.