THE NEW DAILY CROISSANT · Stephen Faragher

THE NEW DAILY CROISSANT 17 03 26

March 17, 2026·1 hr 55 min·5 clips

Steve Farragher explains how donating £100 to LCR is like giving up just one Greggs steak bake or Starbucks coffee per week.

The BBC licence fee is the main grumble. A read turns into a loose Liverpool lunchtime argument about whether a public broadcaster can still ask for money when viewers have drifted online. iPlayer is the sore bit. The host notes that access to the BBC's streaming service now legally pulls people back into the licence-fee net, which may only make the rebellion feel sharper. The numbers sound rough. A survey of 2,000 adults is read aloud, with responses weighted by age, region, and political views before the presenters start chewing it over. Trust has taken a knock. One respondent links falling payment to distrust in the BBC, and the room treats that as a real problem, not background moaning. Cancellations keep sliding. The BBC is said to have lost one and a half million paid licence fees since 2021, with online viewing expected to keep pushing that change. Sky gets dragged in. Another listener asks why people should pay a licence when they are already paying for television elsewhere, which lands as the everyday-money version of the argument. Then the ad point flips. A different respondent says the lack of commercials is exactly why the fee still feels worth paying, giving the chat a bit of balance. Children's programming polls best. The excerpt says 41 percent of children's-program users see good value in the fee, while news users trail behind at 25 percent. The future is political now. The findings have apparently been shared with the BBC and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport ahead of a government white paper on the broadcaster's future. Nobody nails it shut. The question left hanging is whether the BBC is still too valuable to lose, even after scandals and scepticism have made many people walk away. Hugh Edwards is named. Jimmy Savile is named too, and the host treats those scandals as part of why some listeners have simply decided they are done paying. Still, there is a pull back. The tone stays warm and slightly muddled, like table chat about money, distrust, adverts, and what a national broadcaster is supposed to be.

As heard by us

A loose, local hour that folds a station fundraiser into a clear, neighborly argument about BBC value.

The New Daily Croissant spends this hour on two familiar radio jobs: asking listeners to back LCR Club 100, then opening a plainspoken argument about whether the BBC still deserves its licence fee. The pairing works because the show stays grounded.

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Why you'd press play

You want a local community-radio hour that pairs a Club 100 pledge pitch with a BBC licence-fee debate.

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