One hundred and eighty pounds is a lot of money, and for most of my old audience at BBC WM, it will be a hell of a lot of dough to find.
And it's these people whom I feel sorry for the most. Hosting a three-hour phone-in show every weekday morning, I heard firsthand how skint some were.
Working-class listeners scraping a living, calling me up to vent frustrations around everyday issues such as bin collections and potholes.
Typical fodder for local radio phone-ins. Then came the Brexit referendum, which shifted things. These same working-class listeners, who were typically older and once welcomed with open arms to come on air, were now sneered at because they were “Brexity”.
These are the people I feel sorry for when I hear the licence fee is going up to £180.
There is a method behind this discriminatory madness, however. The BBC’s future is dependent on it connecting with a younger audience because they’re the next generation of licence fee payers.
BBC local radio for Birmingham now attracts just one in every hundred radio listeners in the city. It used to be around one in 12.
The connection with its once massive working-class audience is broken. The pensioners soon figured out they were no longer wanted. They’ve tuned in elsewhere.
I worked for the BBC. This is the real cynical motivation behind the unpopular licence fee rise - Danny Kelly
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Go woke, go broke has never been truer than for BBC Local Radio. When I left, the BBC had been seeminly gripped by something new. It appeared to have an obsession with race after the George Floyd murder in America.
If you wonder why BBC output doesn’t resonate with you anymore, now you know why. The BBC doesn’t care about you.
So long as you keep paying your fee every year, you’re taken for granted.
I’m often asked about whether the licence fee should be scrapped completely. Resort to a subscription model like Netflix or Amazon Prime.
My answer is always no, but I do believe the fee should be dramatically lower. It's how they lower the figure that is the challenging part. One hundred and eighty quid is too much.
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