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Greenslade latest to slam BBC move north

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By The Drum Team, Editorial

February 16, 2011 | 3 min read

Media commentator Roy Greenslade has laid into the BBC's move to Salford, saying it will be a "disaster" for the corporation.

In the latest attack on the BBC's relocation plans, Greenslade claimed that London remains “the epicentre of creative media activity in Britain".

He wrote in a blog post for the Evening Standard: “London is where things happen. It is the nation's political pivot, its cultural heart, its legal centre. The capital is the focal point of almost every major activity and interest you care to name”.

He referred to the MediaCityUK banner as “ghastly” and speculated the BBC would struggle to attract enough guests to appear on programmes. “The real crisis for programme-makers in Manchester will be in attracting guests willing to spend more than four hours on a Virgin train from Euston to Manchester and back again," he said.

Greenslade praised BBC units in Bristol and Cardiff but slammed plans by BBC director-general Mark Thompson to relocate more than half of BBC public service employees outside of London by the end of 2016. "What I cannot accept is that the BBC's centre moves away from the country's centre," he wrote.

The journalism professor and former Daily Mirror editor joins a growing chorus of dissenting voices against the BBC's Salford plans, which have been described as "lunacy" by the Daily Mail.

There has also been criticism for the BBC's decision to move the production of Question Time from London to Glasgow, not least from the programme's host.

Presenter David Dimbleby said last week: "It's like trying to report on Holyrood from London. You have to be around the swirl of Westminster life and have access to the highest political levels."

The BBC's move into the regions is the subject of this week's leader column in The Drum magazine, which was due to be published on Friday but is reproduced here in light of the latest coverage.

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