£3billion Beeb repeats itself

The BBC is showing twice as many repeats as ten years ago in spite of being ordered by the Government to stop padding its schedules with re-runs.

Vintage sitcoms such as Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, The Good Life, Fawlty Towers and Only Fools and Horses all currently feature in the BBC schedules, along with reruns of more recent offerings such as Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Viewers are also being treated to repeats of a wealth of other programmes including Porridge, The Simpsons, Before They Were Famous and The Antiques Roadshow.

The worst offender is BBC2, which tomorrow will show 13 hours of repeats out of a total of 18 hours of broadcasting.

One industry insider said: 'In 1993 the licence fee was £83. Now it's £33 more at £116. Yet in some ways viewers were getting a better service ten years ago as more of the programmes were new.'

The BBC receives £3billion a year from the licence fee and was told by the Government three years ago to cut the number of re-runs.

Television watchdogs last night condemned the figures as 'highly regrettable', and accused the corporation of 'selling less for more'.

But the BBC tried to duck the criticism, bizarrely claiming that a programme was not necessarily a repeat if viewers did not see it first time around.

John Milton Whatmore, chairman of the television watchdog Mediawatch UK, said the BBC was trying to fudge the issue.

'It is highly regrettable that the BBC is showing so many repeats,' he said.

'It is also regrettable they see the need to fudge the definition of what they are showing.'

'This business of "it's not a repeat if people have not seen it before" is totally off the wall.'

The latest figures come hard on the heels of a Daily Mail survey which discovered that, in total, a third of all BBC TV's programmes are now repeats. Despite spending an extra £165million on new shows, the corporation is still serving up a large helping of old fare.