THE LETTER BELOW SENT TO STEPHEN FRY BOUNCED

I have not found an email address for him that I can use without
joining something. If anyone reads this and can copy it to him,
I'll be grateful.

The BBC's constant ruining of documentaries and announcements by
irrelevant, patronsing, obtrusive background noises makes me feel
they no longer deserve my licence fee (well not all of it), since so
much of what they do is now intolerable to listen to.

Is anyone interested in joining a campaign to refuse to pay the full
fee because so much of what is broadcast is ruined that way?

This especially applies to older listeners, many of whom are likely
to have presbycusis.

Thanks.
Aaron



From Aaron Sloman Thu Aug 20 03:44:24 BST 2009
To: stephen.fry@bbc.co.uk
Subject: Someone is using you to ruin the music on the Today programme
Cc: today@bbc.co.uk

Dear Stephen,

Have you noticed how various Radio 4 programmes that used to be talk
only have increasingly been adding coy little snippets of music?

Presumably they are hoping to put Radio3 and Classic FM out of
business. I really like listening to good music though I prefer it
not to come in tiny snippets.

However what's really awful, is that they keep ruining the music
with voiceovers. In particular, several of the recent musical
interludes on the Today programme have been totally ruined by
someone playing a tape of you saying something about words. (I don't
know exactly what you were saying, because it was the music that
grabbed my attention, though I was very annoyed that I could not
hear it on its own).

I can't believe someone as cultured as you would allow Radio4
producers to use your recordings to ruin the musical interludes that
way, if you knew they were doing it. So I thought I would write
begging you to ask them to stop it.

Please!

(Maybe they can be persuaded to listen to the recently broadcast
episode of radio 4's "Word of mouth" in which Prof Rich Mayer was
interviewed. He reported on research that showed that because of
limited capacity of our information processing channels, multi-media
communications were often less effective than single media
communications, even if people claimed to enjoy the multi-media
version more.)

I sincerely hope that Radio 3 and Classic FM don't follow Radio 4's
dreadful example of adding background chatter to fine music.

Thanks in anticipation.

Aaron
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/

Aaron Sloman
Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science
    [But really a philosopher]
    (Retired, but still working full time.)
School of Computer Science,
The University of Birmingham
Birmingham B15 2TT UK
EMAIL A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk