Aaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhh.

The BBC is cutting some language services on the World Service:

The Macedonian, Albanian and Serbian services will be axed, as will English for the Caribbean and Portuguese for Africa, in a bid to save £46m a year

Pa kako je to uopste moguce, bre? Sramota!

One of the few (but real) advantages of moving house to a smaller dwelling is that you are firmly confronted with your own nostalgic insecurity. All around you are possessions – books, furniture, pictures, records, stuff – acquired years ago which now just won’t fit.

No-one wants these things. The hassle of selling them on eBay is way beyond you.

Yet … how can you bear to get rid of them? They are part of what defines you!

Gulp. Sigh. Off to the recycling tip.

Gone.

And the funny thing is, once they’re gone you don’t miss them one bit.

In fact, you actually feel rather better with fewer newer lighter things around you.

The other day I heard Lord Coe on the radio talking about the Olympic Stadium. He pitched part of his argument against the Tottenham proposal to demolish much of the stadium after the 2012 Games in terms of a zany metaphysical loyalty to memories: it would be just awful if a famed medal winner from 2012 returned to the site of his/her triumph many years in the future, only to find the stadium … gone!

Grotesque.

I have no idea whether it makes sense all things considered to favour the Tottenham bid over the West Ham bid. Insofar as I have any personal interest, it is that the Tottenham bid if successful would move the Spurs stadium even further from where I now live, although maybe the road network would make it marginally more accessible than the current squalid White Hart Lane area.

But what makes no sense in current economic circumstances is to have a huge stadium sitting largely unused, unsuitable for football and unfillable when there are the occasional athletics competitions. And to justify the endlessly escalating cost of that by appealing to nostalgic insecurity.

Thus to the new BBC World Service language services chainsaw massacre.

Out comes the regular army of people frothed up by the BBC to bewail the fact that end of civilisation now hurtles in our general direction as these language services are ruthlessly axed.

They conjure up images of heroic people huddled round a crackly radio in a dark Balkan mountain shack, the lights dimmed and the sound turned down lest the KGB hear the Enemy’s voice. Out from the radio comes a BBC programme in the local language – a unique, precious lifeline to a Better World.

All very poignant. It’s just that things have, hem, moved on.

Now, even in the benighted Balkans, people do have choices. Local media outlets proliferate, including some previously set up with UK taxpayers support. And there is the ready availability of the Internet – anyone wanting different views (and different British views) now has myriad choices including free Internet radio stations and other online services. That’s where young people are now – we should be investing mainly in them.

As the FCO is now taking some painful cuts, so must the BBC too. Some things, such as the UK taxpayer coughing up so that some people can read the BBC news in Serbian/Albanian/Macedonian fall into the category of nice – but no longer affordable/necessary.

Lo!, even under the wicked Coalition’s appalling cuts, the BBCWS will (I gather) be enjoying much the same proportion of the FCO budget as it did in 2007/08. Shocking brutality.

So let’s do some spring-cleaning and this time accept without a phoney galama that a smaller, lighter, faster BBC World Service is maybe good enough for current requirements.

One personal memory of the BBC’s Yugoslav service. Back in 1980 before my first posting to Belgrade I went to call on the Yugoslav service, headed by none other than one David Wedgwood Benn, brother of.

D W Benn boasted to me that the Yugoslav service had a proud record of objectivity – it had never had an official complaint from the Yugoslav communist regime.

Great.

What a fine job it must have been doing in spreading Western values of freedom and democracy in that region of Europe. Did anyone ever get to the bottom of just how many Titoist UDBA agents sneaked in to work there over the years?