Top 100 Quotes About Bbc
#1. Before I joined the BBC I was, like most of the intelligentsia, prejudiced not only against that institution but against broadcasting in general.
Louis MacNeice
#2. I was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown.
Sarah Hall
#3. I don't think the BBC supporting digital switchover is top slicing. Top slicing is putting the license fee up for grabs for other broadcasters to bid for.
Jeremy Hunt
#4. I sat on the floor and watched TV
Thanking Christ for the BBC
A stupid fucking place to be
Down Rain Street
Shane MacGowan
#5. Your brother needs to stop watching the BBC network." Logan shouted from inside, "I heard that, and never, woman. BBC holds my heart like no vixen ever shall.
Tijan
#6. She had been dumped a couple of years before by a sort of male equivalent to Charlie, a guy called Michael who wanted to be something at the BBC. (He never made it, the wanker, and each day we never saw him on TV or heard him on the radio, something inside us rejoiced.)
Nick Hornby
#7. Shakespeare, adrenal glands, professional bowling, and the bizarre reproductive patterns of wasps (along with teams of BBC cameraman to document them(
N.D. Wilson
#8. Colin Morgan gives a stunning performance in Parked; he plays Merlin in the BBC TV show and he says the two characters are like night and day. Watch him. He's got everything it takes to be top notch.
Colm Meaney
#9. Getting to do what I think was my fifth BBC drama with Nikki Amuka-Bird - we've done 'Shoot The Messenger,' 'Five Days,' 'The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency,' 'Born Equal' and now 'Small Island' - was another highlight for me. And filming in Jamaica was great, too.
David Oyelowo
#10. I have been to Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street but cannot get on the BBC. I am very disappointed because it boils down to snobbery.
Phil Taylor
#11. When I was a kid, I wrote to the BBC, and the producers sent me a huge package through the post with 'Doctor Who' scripts. I'd never even seen a script and couldn't believe that they actually wrote this stuff down. It sort of opened a door.
Peter Capaldi
#12. My first paid role was my first job out of drama school, which was 'Just William.' It was a BBC TV show. I played Ethel.
Lily James
#13. The prospect of the UK without a BBC funded by the licence fee is anywhere between improbable and impossible.
Tessa Jowell
#14. I've played the leads in two British TV series. I've done a bunch of mini-series. Everybody in Australia is a bit in awe of BBC. I've worked for there, and that was a great experience.
Robert Taylor
#15. My YouTube videos have literally millions of views ... Yet I'm still airbrushed out of the BBC Stalinist revision of history; the chart shows have been instructed not to play my music!
Jonathan King
#16. I refuse to have a life partner who spends his days pretending to be on a BBC show.
Lisa Lutz
#17. The BBC did a survey of the top 50 things to do before we die. Not while we're still alive, before we die.
Bill Bailey
#18. We're big fans of the show on BBC, and some of the greatest actors in film and television have done this character, from Basil Rathbone to Nicol Williamson to Michael Caine. (Executive producer) Rob Doherty came in with the pitch last season, it was immediately a show that we gravitated towards.
Nina Tassler
#21. My fantasy is, if I wasn't on 'Dexter,' I would move my family to London and work for the BBC on 'Doctor Who.'
Manny Coto
#22. I used to do all my programming on a BBC computer. It was limited to 16 tracks, and you used the keyboard, not a mouse, to input, but I was using it so long, I got quite fast at it.
Vince Clarke
#23. It's sad that the BBC is toning down Dennis the Menace for a cartoon series. He is losing his weapons, catapult and peashooter, will no longer pick on Walter the Softy, and his ferocious grimace is to be replaced by a charming, boyish smile.
Simon Hoggart
#24. The BBC said I could stay on air until I was named. Well, I was named within the week. So I made no broadcasts after I'd been arrested, and the BBC stopped paying me at precisely the time when I needed the money most.
Paul Gambaccini
#25. My first job was a film called 'Storm Damage' for the BBC. I was 16 and working with really respected British actors. I didn't have an agent at the time, and it kind of threw me into real acting.
Ashley Madekwe
#26. I've gotten more flack from the remake nature of our 'Being Human' from American audiences than I have from British fans. Every fan of the BBC original that I've bumped into seemed very excited and interested in seeing what we did with it - at least to my face!
Samuel Witwer
#27. People in the BBC are always dying to get out of their open-plan offices.
Andrew Davies
#28. I did six series for the BBC and that was enough. I've been writing for ten years, which is more challenging artistically.
Alexei Sayle
#29. The BBC knew I was successful from early on, but they weren't sure why, and they still aren't sure. What I do has been unconventional from the beginning, so they've never been sure. It just works. It just does.
Terry Wogan
#30. I honestly don't think you're taken seriously until you're 30. Any ideas I've ever taken to the BBC, they've told me I wasn't ready for it.
Rhys Thomas
#31. We are rather in the position that used to exist at the BBC, where you feel that you can pick up the phone to people who are experts in their field and they will be very favourably disposed to you and share their knowledge.
Rory Bremner
#32. I do have a regard for the musicality of language that came from BBC sitcoms like 'Fawlty Towers.'
Russell Brand
#33. What comes with a job as a staff member of the BBC is a certain self-censoring that you get utterly used to. You don't say everything you think. You hold back on some things.
Evan Davis
#34. The BBC can be infuriating at times but I love it with a passion.
John Sweeney
#35. It's only because you can now watch cheerfully biased Fox News that you begin to realize how cheerlessly biased CNN really is - and always was. Or CBS. Or ABC. Or the BBC.
Andrew Sullivan
#36. I wish I hadn't lost it, and for the rest of my life I can never again lose my temper on TV. The BBC could have sacked me and that would have been the end of my career on TV.
John Sweeney
#37. [The] BBC was known as Auntie suggesting someone prudish and Victorian and that she still is on some days. On others she's a champagne-soaked floozie, her skirts in disarray, her mind in the gutter, and the mixture can be quite wonderful.
Morley Safer
#38. When I was a young kid, the best stuff on television was always the BBC period dramas - it was what we sat down as a family to watch and what people talked about and looked forward to.
Neil Jackson
#39. I'm working harder now than ever before. I couldn't turn down the BBC job because I've never been offered the opportunity of killing three or four people on screen before!
Adam Faith
#40. That's what I think is smart about 'Durham County.' It's not derivative of anything American. It's more in the vein of the BBC miniseries I grew up with.
Michelle Forbes
#41. The BBC is very good at period drama - world-famous for getting the details right.
Lynne Reid Banks
#42. He is more rooted to the idea of home. He created this home...and established routines like watching the BBC and cooking barbecues for friends. It's much harder to dismantle that world and to rebuild it somewhere else.
Azar Nafisi
#43. The BBC is another part of the destruction of Great Britain.
Norman Tebbit
#44. All I can do is advocate changes at the BBC while respecting editorial independence upon which the success of the BBC rests. I can't do anything that requires the BBC to pay certain people certain amounts.
Jeremy Hunt
#45. When I joined Granada - which, you don't want to start crying about these things, but Granada was a very, very hot place to be, it was my good fortune to be there at that time - the BBC was firmly asleep.
Michael Apted
#46. I'd like to thank the BBC for allowing me to work here. And I'd like to thank the wife and kids for making it necessary.
Les Dawson
#47. There are traditionalists, and there are people in the middle, which is where I am. I still get my newspaper delivered. I love the ritual of it. But I also jump into the cab when I leave home and I look at some BBC on my iPad.
Glenda Bailey
#48. The word conservative is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.
Norman Tebbit
#49. Any nerd who grew up around the time that I did, BBC programming was a treasure chest for us.
Chris Hardwick
#50. I hate when you play therapist. Especially with your accent. It makes everything you say sound so BBC.
Augusten Burroughs
#51. I want the BBC to be a mass market public service broadcaster still funded by the licence fee ... and the licence fee is more durable than many people in the commercial sector believe.
Gavyn Davies
#52. I believe that the BBC, in spite of the stupidity of its foreign propaganda and the unbearable voices of its announcers, is very truthful. It is generally regarded here as more reliable than the press.
George Orwell
#53. I don't really get a chance to watch much television. I mostly watch BBC Worldwide and repeats of Seinfeld and Everybody Loves Raymond.
Will Estes
#55. No, solitude did not trouble her. She could spend long minutes gazing out the window, hours listening to the BBC on the public radio station. She relished the very texture of her privacy, its depth of space and freedom, much of an entire day hers alone.
Daphne Kalotay
#56. Because of England's lack of social mobility, unless they make truly heroic efforts, writers who are privately educated and then go on to Oxbridge or an institution like the BBC will generally embarrass themselves when they attempt to have a go at working- or lower middle-class characters.
Adrian McKinty
#57. Along with the rest of the establishment, the BBC which, to be fair, can make superb documentaries has swallowed wholesale the lies and distortions about domestic violence promoted by extreme, man-hating feminism through the vehicle of deeply dodgy 'research'.
Melanie Phillips
#58. We took up the offer with the BBC, and that was Monty Python's Flying Circus. I didn't have to submit my ideas to the group. I used to turn up on the days we recorded with a can of film under my arm, and in it went.
Terry Gilliam
#59. Without the BBC, the proliferation of television and radio channels by the private sector would simply result in more and more channels, with tiny audiences, all seeking to do the same thing. The future would be one of fragmentation - fragmentation without either plurality or diversity.
Gavyn Davies
#60. There were all us baby boomers who had a grammar school education, started to learn, then went on the pill, the whole thing, and so there are today a lot more women writers, editors, producers, and so a lot more women's stories. God, the BBC's practically run by women.
Julie Walters
#61. Greg Dyke is on record as saying that once the BBC was attacked, it was their job to defend themselves. But that is not their job.
Alastair Campbell
#62. I like BBC news; I like some London news because you can get it earlier then anywhere else. I like Charlie Rose a lot.
Brian Grazer
#63. Ifemelu and Jane laughed when they discovered how similar their childhoods in Grenada and Nigeria had been, with Enid Blyton books and Anglophile teachers and fathers who worshipped the BBC World Service.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#64. I wanted to say, "I'm the Doctor and this is my companion," but I doubted Sophie was a fan of the long-running BBC series. Forget the TARDIS and the sonic screwdriver, the Doctor's best gadget was the psychic paper. I can't tell you how many times I wished I had some.
Kevin Hearne
#65. I have been listening to sport and watching sport on the BBC since I was a tiny boy.
Allan McNish
#66. It was regarded as a responsibility of the BBC to provide programs which have a broad spectrum of interest, and if there was a hole in that spectrum, then the BBC would fill it.
David Attenborough
#67. I started writing sketches with Dennis Kelly, who I ended up writing 'Pulling' with. We entered a BBC competition and did quite well, then started writing bits for other people's shows. You wheedle your way in, write pilots and eventually you end up writing a sitcom.
Sharon Horgan
#68. This Tony Haywire guy, whatever his name is, he told the BBC on Sunday that he believes the new oil cap that they've installed will eventually capture the vast majority of oil spewing from the well. You know, if they could capture half the BS spewing from Tony Hayward, people would be thrilled.
Jay Leno
#69. The BBC provides the commentary on our lives, the soundtrack of the nation. It is one of the most powerful unifying forces in the United Kingdom today.
Gavyn Davies
#70. You know, the BBC had not been particularly generous in its deliverance of blues and esoteric kinds of music.
Keith Richards
#71. Prof Stephen Hawking, one of Britain's pre-eminent scientists, has said that efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence. He told the BBC:The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.
Stephen Hawking
#72. The BBC's aim, along with schools, libraries and literacy groups, to involve more people in reading groups is an exciting idea and one that I hope will keep readers all over the UK exploring and sharing the wonderful world of books.
Tessa Jowell
#73. Inspector Rebus is a great character, so when the opportunity came up to revive the role for 'BBC Children in Need,' and really have a bit of fun with it, I was happy to take part.
Ken Stott
#74. If, Sir, I possessed the power of conveying unlimited sexual attraction through the potency of my voice, I would not be reduced to accepting a miserable pittance from the BBC for interviewing a faded female in a damp basement.
Gilbert Harding
#75. The BBC sports department when I was there was seriously to the right of Ghengis Khan, and if people think I am strange, they should have met some of the production staff I worked with. Margaret Thatcher and the Queen were the pin up girls for many of them.
David Icke
#76. [Taken from a BBC documentary]
Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1943. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long atheism, which he shared with his communist parents.
Tariq Ali
#77. When the BBC decided to bring Doctor Who back as a feature film a few years ago, one national newspaper ran a poll to ask its readers who should be the new Doctor, and I topped it.
Simon Callow
#78. The establishment is a dirty, dangerous beast, and the BBC is a mouthpiece for that.
Ken Stott
#79. Our blessed radio. It gives us eyes and ears out into the world. We listen to the German station only for good music. And we listen to the BBC for hope.
Anne Frank
#80. I exist as an annexe of the BBC. I'm down the road a bit from the main building, in a little hut.
Alexei Sayle
#81. I was in Britain that year [1963] and some music publishing people in Denmark Street in London suggested me to the BBC. So I found myself in front of a British television show, which was a nice surprise.
Gordon Lightfoot
#82. The challenge is the culture. You have to have a vision for the BBC-it can't merely be that it's big and has a place in the market.
Jonathan Dimbleby
#83. BBC had tried to develop the book, set in England, as a two-hour movie. I went to a meeting and they said, "Look at this," and I thought the book was outstanding. I was like, "Can I do this?"
Glen Morgan
#84. I'm not from a particularly sci-fi background. I'm not anti sci-fi at all, but I've never been known as a sci-fi writer and, suddenly, I was creating a flagship BBC sci-fi show, which is terrifying sometimes.
Ben Richards
#85. I haven't heard any music on the BBC World Service in a long time. Maybe I'm listening at the wrong times. But not one single piece of music.
Aung San Suu Kyi
#86. It was just at the end of the golden era of BBC comedy, which was fantastic.
John Leeson
#87. I used to do a Saturday drama group called Young Blood Theatre Company with school-friends in west London - nothing to do with my mum and dad. A casting director came to pick people out for a new BBC children's series called 'MI High.' She picked me, I auditioned, and I got the job.
Bel Powley
#88. BBC TV gets hold of an idea and beats it to death until we're all heartily sick of it. They buy people without thinking what they're going to do with them. It's the wrong way around. What they should be doing is employing really good ideas people to come up with good ideas.
Terry Wogan
#89. The BBC is locked to the reading of the economy that is run out of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls' office. They think if only you spend and borrow more money you can create growth everywhere.
Iain Duncan Smith
#90. You know how it is
you get older, you get wiser, you start to ask yourself 'is it any use being able to summon creatures of the nether deeps when I could be watching BBC 4?
Kate Griffin
#91. We have an agreement," she explained. "I watch nothing to do with a hobbit, Vulcan, or comic book hero, and in return, Dexter's not forced to sit through a foreign romance, a BBC production, or one my classic films.
Kristin Billerbeck
#92. WI played a young Helena Bonham Carter in a BBC film called 'A Dark Adapted Eye,' and I thought she was a completely spellbinding person. Totally unmoved by other people's expectations, fashions or opinions. She's probably the coolest English actress there is. Incredibly idiosyncratic.
Honeysuckle Weeks
#93. A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.
Clive James
#94. The first thing we did was to proclaim our Liverpoolness to the world, and say 'It's all right to come from Liverpool and talk like this'. Before, anybody from Liverpool who made it, like Ted Ray, Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, had to lose their accent to get on the BBC.
John Lennon
#95. Working at BBC, at the head of one of the top dramas, is a tradition for great actors.
Idris Elba
#96. The BBC were not playing the music that was happening on the street so we did an independent production because we knew we had an audience. Then we licensed the album to EMI.
Georgie Fame
#97. The BBC has the obligation to think big. And at the moment, that clarion call sounds an uncertain note to me.
Jonathan Dimbleby
#98. Like every big organisation these days, the BBC is obsessed with the wellbeing of those who set foot on its premises. Studios must display warning notices if there is real glass on the set, and the other day I was presented with a booklet explaining how to use a door. I am not kidding.
Jeremy Clarkson
#99. I'm quite grateful to the BBC. They helped me back onto the touring circuit.
Louise Jameson
#100. The story of Harold Fry and his unlikely pilgrimage began as an afternoon play for radio. For many years, I have been writing plays and adapting novels for 'Woman's Hour' and the 'Classic' series. So this was originally a three-hander play, broadcast one sunny afternoon on BBC Radio 4.
Rachel Joyce
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