Michael Grade – Great Comedian of Our Time

I actually wrote on the ITV results and challenges for The Motley Fool, so I won’t repeat myself here.

However in browsing this mornings Financial Times, I thought I’d share with you a couple of jokes from the Sir Michael Grade portfolio:

The first is on spectrum for HD TV:

[We’re asking the Treasury to hold some spectrum back from Ofcom’s planned auction] It doesn’t follow that if there’s a demand and you reduce the supply the price goes down…Reducing the supply, I would have thought, would put the price up.

In other words give us the stuff for free or sub-market price and then the mug telco’s will pay you a premium for what is left and you might even get more money than you expect. Notice that he doesn’t even bother lobbying the industry regulator, OFCOM, he goes straight to Gordon Brown.

Even better is the logic on BSkyB stake:

It is a fact that we get around 63 or 64% turnout at our elections, so if you’re looking for a 75% majority of votes cast, with 17.9% you could well be in a position to block something.

In other words, because our shareholders are too lazy to vote, I think the Murdoch clause should be reduced from 19.9% to 13.4% - we could even call it the Bone Idle Shareholder clause (BIS). Unbelievable…

Personally, I think he should have a word with his new best mate, Gordon Brown, and apply the same logic to general elections: because quite a few of the Great British Public are too lazy to vote, the Nanny State Socialists are over-represented in those actually bothering to vote and the Free-Marketeers are outnumbered, therefore for the good of the nation we should only allow in total the Socialists to have 13.4% of the total votes cast. That'll make the General Elections more interesting...