Gunpowder

A BBC radio programme I particularly enjoy is Radio 3's Free Thinking.

It's like a higher-quality version of Radio 4's Start the Week, and it's usually on for five nights a week. Its presenters are excellent and the range of topics is wide. It goes pleasingly deep too. And it's surprisingly broad-minded too on matters political.

Catching up with the more promising-looking editions of last week's offerings I came across an interview with Ronan Bennett, the writer of a new, three-part, prime-time BBC One historical drama about the Gunpowder Plot.

My ears pricked up as he talked about his intentions and reading the BBC's mission statement about the series confirms those intentions. 

Yes, this high-profile drama (which the Telegraph's Tim Stanley says is "edge-of-the-seat" stuff) will be about "showing the consequences of what can happen when a religious minority is persecuted". And it will have a "contemporary resonance”. 

The Catholic would-terrorists of 1605 will be cast as sympathetic human beings who had valid reasons to feel anger against the "relentlessly repressive" state, though there would be plenty of nuance and their violent intentions won't (it appears) be condoned.

Presenter Rana Mitter pointed out that James I began as a good deal less repressive towards Catholics than Elizabeth I, but Ronan was sticking to his guns (so to speak) and was clearly not allowing facts to get in the way of a good plot (so to speak). 

Rana also drew out of Ronan Bennett what those "contemporary resonances" would be. They would be (a) to suggest to English Brexit voters that they take a good long look back at history and realise that English nationalism isn't a good thing and (b) that Muslims today are in a similar situation to Catholics in Jacobean England and that the state shouldn't be repressive towards them.

Why do BBC dramas have to always be like this, pushing messages all the time (and almost always the same kind of messages to boot)?

Rana reminded us of Ronan's controversial past and asked if it led him to sympathise with the would-be terrorists of 1605. (That's why I like Free Thinking. It doesn't give its guests a free ride).

Now Rana said that, yes, the series does have plenty of nuance and Ronan said that he wasn't trying to be propagandist. So we'll have to see.

Alas I remember Ronan Bennett's last high-profile BBC drama - a much-promoted radio play for Radio 4 about the migrant crisis called 'Our Sea'. I wrote about it at the time, calling it "agitprop" and "shocking bias from the BBC".

If it's anything like that then the anti-Brexit, be-nice-to-the-Muslims stuff will be laid on with a Spanish Armada-sized trowel.

I do hope not (but I will not be holding my breath).

Our Sea

Tonight on BBC Radio 4 started badly, and then got even worse.

BBC Radio 4 one-and-a-quarter-hour-long The Migration Debate at 8.00 pm had a panel of four, but it was far from being a balanced one.

On one side stood David Goodhart from Demos; on the other (pro-immigration) side stood Heaven Crawley of Coventry University, barrister Hashi Mohamed and Dr Stephanie Collins of Coventry University. 

(Yes, it was that unbalanced. A 3:1 pro-immigration bias).

And to make things worse, Hashi Mohammed and Heaven Crawley kept on interrupting David Goodhart (especially Hashi).

Add to that Tim Harford from More and Less, whose contributions all made the same point: that the numbers coming to Europe aren't anywhere near as significant as many people think. ('Nothing to see here, move along, move along').

Now, yes, that was certainly biased....

....but what followed was almost beyond belief: a drama called Our Sea. The bias went off the scale.

Ronan Bennett drama about the desperate migrant crisis in the Mediterranean. Mahmoud, Yasser, Shaibul, Marwan and Letebrhane share their experiences as they fight for their lives hours after their boat is sank by traffickers. Lindsay Duncan and Stephen Rea star.

The story arc was that the 'narrator' (played by Lindsay Duncan) went angrily off-script in protest at the migrant crisis and at the writer's attempts to sound neutral, forcing the writer to search his soul. 

This was set alongside the 'harrowing' stories of drowning migrants (all but one of whom drowned as the play went on): 

The narrator's points included:

"If these people were white!!...."

"It is an affront".

"The answers are obvious".

"It is wrong to be neutral. It's wrong not to be outraged"

"What our government is doing is heartless and cruel"

"I don't know how the hell they [the British government] sleep at night"....

...and that those who make the kind of points you find on blogs like this are "bigots".

And 'the writer' ended by soulfully making his plea for us to see the migrants as human beings.

The word for this, of course, is "agitprop".

And guess where the first drowning migrant came from? Gaza, of course. And he had a story to tell. 

His tale began, "Gaza!!! "I lost my three fingers in an Israeli missile strike in Gaza one night"...plus a bone in his right arm and his pancreas. He had the right papers and tried to cross into Israel to get to a hospital there for treatment. At the border checkpoint, the Israelis arrested him. He got three years as a suspected terrorist. And then got sent back to rubble-strewn Gaza, still minus his three fingers, bone and pancreas.

Yes, pure agitprop, with a typical, nasty anti-Israeli bite to it.....

Being placed in the Radio 4 schedule tonight where it was - at 9.15 pm, straight after a major special on the migrant crisis - this was truly shocking bias from the BBC.

The BBC have 'surpassed themselves' tonight.

******

The writer responsible for this travesty, incidentally, was Irish novelist and screenwriter Ronan Bennett. 

His Irish Republican past is colourful - so colourful that he was banned by the Speaker of the House of Commons from working in parliament after Jeremy Corbyn made him his research assistant in 1987. Another controversy arose in 2000 when he said he wouldn't turn in the perpetrators of the Omagh bombing if he knew their identities.