True crime expert and psychologist Emma Kenny has insisted “people need choice” over the BBC licence fee. Speaking at CrimeCon – an annual true crime convention – in London, Emma exclusively told Express.co.uk that what matters is “choice”.
Emma, who has appeared on various BBC programmes over the years, including The One Show and BBC Breakfast, said “everyone’s struggling” to make ends meet – and the publicly-funded broadcaster isn’t making things any easier.
“Why would you not have choice?”
She said: “I think, ‘Why would you not have choice?’ “If you don’t want to watch it, don’t watch it. If you do want to watch it, pay for it. But the idea of coercing a whole population into doing so is going to make the population angry and resistant. It’s not going to do that much for the power that you want.
“I think the BBC – whether I watch it or not, which I don’t, it’s irrelevant – but the BBC is a little bit like the Royal Family. It’s a British institution. “It’s something we might not think we need, but I think we should probably keep. That’s my true view.
“It’s just another cost”
“I’m not anti-establishment, as much as people probably think I am to some degree. I very much think there’s room for everybody. But I do think when they try and make everyone [pay for it]… We’re all struggling now and it’s very expensive, and it’s just another cost.”
Emma, who was a regular agony aunt on ITV’s This Morning, as well as appearing in various television documentaries over the years, launched a career in public speaking and YouTube after being “kicked out” of TV.
Career after TV
She explained: “When Covid happened, TV kind of crashed. I was really anti-lockdown, I was really anti- anything that, as a woman, said you had to do anything with your body. People didn’t like that in the mainstream.
“The other thing was, when you’ve worked with abuse, the last thing I wanted was to see men locked up with women and children. “I was out from the get-go, and from then I wasn’t as popular. I was always a sweetheart – on This Morning as the agony aunt, as someone who had always just tried to solve the ills of the nation in five minutes.
“I genuinely loved it. I was so grateful for it. But after that, I felt like, ‘I want power, I want control’.”
