What’s the most foolish thing anyone’s ever said to you? I can think of quite a few daft things that have been said to me over the years, but one of them leaped back into my mind this week when I read about the spending cuts. It was something said to me about 18 months ago by a senior employee of Ten Alps Digital – we’ll call him Ron (not his real name). Ten Alps is the company part owned by Sir Bob Geldof which used to run Kent TV. The credit crunch was biting hard and I asked Ron how things were going at Ten Alps? “Great”! he replied cheerfully, “Ten Alps loves recessions”! Then with a breezy smile he wandered off. I stared after him dumbfounded. How could anyone be enjoying the worst recession in living memory? I forgot about his remark until a few months ago, when Kent County Council pulled the plug on Kent TV. And I remembered it again the other day when I heard that a small part of the government’s £81 billion of savings was going to come from axing Teachers TV. The government paid Ten Alps £10.7 million a year to run Teachers TV and its demise is a bitter blow to the company. Shares in Ten Alps lost a third of their value when the news broke. They were once worth almost 70 pence each; they’re currently worth less than 10. I haven’t seen Ron for many months, but I wonder if he still loves the recession quite so much. Another piece of media news that made me reminisce was the extraordinary BBC licence fee settlement. Agreeing the licence fee is a process that usually takes many months of negotiating between the BBC and the government. When I was Assistant Editor at BBC South East Today it was a process I watched from a ringside seat. I remember hundreds of BBC staff used to be mobilised to help ensure the BBC got as much cash as possible. For example there was one manager, we’ll call her Fiona (not her real name) who was given the job of touring Kent and wining and dining key “decision makers”. These included some councillors and local politicians, community leaders, local paper journalists and other people deemed to be influential. Fiona told me the aim was to generate a groundswell of public opinion favourable to the BBC. I remember thinking what a great job this was; spending six months taking people out to lunch and dinner so they’d think nice things about the corporation. Fiona said there were dozens of people doing the same job across the UK. But this time licence fee negotiations didn’t take months. They took just days. The fee was frozen for six years with the BBC agreeing to pick up the tab for installing high speed broadband in rural areas and helping to fund new independent local TV in places like Kent. In real terms it’s a cut of around 16 percent. But I kept thinking of Fiona and her colleagues. How on Earth are they going to keep themselves busy? Graham Majin is a former BBC Assistant Editor. He’s currently Head of Production at Kent video production company kershmedia.co.uk and kwikvid.com