Opt-outs and orchestras

BBC staff are waiting for smoke from the conclave of Caversham. DG Thommo and his Delivering Quality First team have been meeting in the conference rooms of BBC Monitoring this week to draw up a list of cuts to propose to the Trust.  Who may well reject some of them, in what has become known as the Lyons Gavotte, and probably will be renamed the Patten Polka.

News proposals are said to include cutting dedicated tv news bulletins produced in Oxford, Cambridge and the Channel Islands.  For example, the news for Oxford would come from the South Today team in Southampton; 22 staff work on tv output at BBC Oxford, but they could be reduced to a single crew working from Banbury Road feeding into the programme transmitted produced 72 miles south.

The sacred cows that are the 5 BBC orchestras are also, finally, under discussion. The BBC Philharmonic is paddling hard and just has a new purpose built home at MediaCityUK; the BBC Concert Orchestra has always been "flexible" and very useful to Radio 2; the BBC probably can't reduce spend in Wales and Scotland under Out-of-London targets, so the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra are probably safe.

Will DG Thommo take the extraordinary decision to put the BBC Symphony Orchestra on the condemned list ? London's first permanent salaried orchestra, founded in 1930, is the anchor of The BBC Proms.  In 2008, the BBCSO didn't appear in a Gramophone critics' league table of the world's best orchestras - even with Radio 3's Rob Cowan on the judging panel.  In 2005, The Times' chief music critic Richard Morrison rated it only 4th in the UK, behind the Halle, the LSO and the Northern Sinfonia.

The orchestra's "home" is the Maida Vale studios - in need of an almost constant programme of repair, and a potentially valuable freehold site which could release much needed capital into the BBC coffers.

What could be the alternative ?  Some sort of contract with the LSO (number 4 in the 2008 Gramophone list), which has a very nice televisual home at St Luke's ?  Or is this just one of those ideas that DG Thommo will push to The Trust, moderately secure in the knowledge that Lord Patten will kick this assault on "quality" into touch very firmly ?  And do we think the Chancellor of Oxford University will enjoy closing the city's only dedicated tv news service ?