2
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London SW1A 2AH
3027
Ente, HER 30611
ник
A J Scott Esq
Secretary for Information
Hong Kong Government
Telephone 01-
No мая
Your reference
Our reference
PBG 306/28
Date
19 August 1981
40
Dar Scott,
BBC TRANSCRIPTION SERVICE
138
1. Thank you for your letter of 23 July to Dirk Clift with whom I have discussed the matter. The BBC have been raising undue alarm and despondency about the future of the Transcription Service. The British Government have decided that the £l million annual subsidy from the FCO vote should cease, but it is not intended or expected that the Transcription Service itself should end completely, and the Topical Tapes Service subsidy of £340,000 per annum is to continue. The Transcription Service, which deals in cultural and light entertainment, is drawn from the BBC's extensive archives, in which they reckon to have 30,000 broadcasting hours of material, and from some 500 additional broadcasting hours produced each year. Of this 500 hours, 60% is drawn from programmes in both the Domestic and the World Services which are being made in the ordinary course of their transmissions. There will therefore be a substantial corpus of recorded material from which to provide a Transcription Service in the future, even if there is difficulty in producing the 40% of current annual output which is made up of specially commissioned material.
2. There should therefore be no reason for RTHK to be starved of material from the BBC. The implication of the withdrawal of the FCO subsidy, however, is that we shall expect broadcasting organisations in countries who can afford it to pay the full production cost of recordings obtained from the Transcription Services. At present the total annual cost of the Services is about £11/2 million, of which some £500,000 (representing roughly the sum needed to cover artists' fees, royalties and despatch costs) is recovered through charges to consumers; balance is made up from the Grant-in-Aid. In broad terms, therefore, the cost of Transcription Service recordings to subscribers (at least in affluent countries) will need to rise roughly threefold. On the basis of the figure which you quote in your letter as RTHK's current payment for the Transcription Service recordings which it receives, I should not have thought that approximately £15,000 a year for the same service would be beyond its
resources.
cc: RD Clift Esq, HKGD
ever
Burgess
A R Burgess Information Department
the
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