What's the big idea ?

It was not a bravura performance from the BBC's Tim Davie and Jonathan Munro in front of the joint select committees looking at the future of the World Service. 

They came with two 'asks'; please shift the total burden of paying for the World Service back to general taxation, as it used to be. And then, please double the funding, setting us a doubled weekly reach target of around 800m listeners/viewers/unique users per week around the world. 

But, like a pair of conservatory salesmen who've forgotten to bring the glossy brochures, there was no vision of how, where and why the extra spending would deliver.  It would, they assured us, be a conservatory to compete with the Russian and Chinese jobs down the road, if inevitably a little smaller, but there was no idea of what it would actually look like.