“A horribly preachy [BBC] drama”

Even the left-wing, pro-BBC New Statesman has a problem with BBC drama. It headlines a review by Rachel Cooke of BBC Two's My Name is Leon “a horribly preachy drama” and summarises it in this way:

This BBC film about a child dealing with racism in 1980s Birmingham promises real-world lessons but delivers saccharine platitudes.

Rachel Cooke further chargrills it thusly: 

Horribly preachy and overly schematic, this film feels more like one made for children than for adults – and sure enough, every single actor in it turns in the kind of ostentatiously heart-warming performance that suggests they’re present as much as a matter of duty as because they relish their role; that they have, in fact, signed up to teach an important lesson rather than to perform a subtle, complex drama.

You may not be surprised to learn that Sir Lenny Henry is its executive producer. 

Meanwhile, it seems that BBC comedy is no laughing matter either. 

Romesh Ranganathan’s new BBC One show Avoidance doesn't appear to be exercising too many people's chuckle muscles. The Daily Telegraph's Marianka Swain charitably says it has “almost no redeeming features”. Naturally, I've not seen it, but the top-rated comment at the Telegraph describes it like this.

Let's just get this right...an Asian bloke in a mixed-race marriage runs to his sister who is in a lesbian mixed race marriage. Yup! 5 out of 5 for reflecting normal life on the BBC.

A Saturday Selection

I've been a bit out-of-action recently, but here are a few things I noted down this week:

I

Never mind Partygate. Sue Gray and Dame Dick need to investigate the Foreign Office for blowing lots of licence fee payers' money on a sparkling farewell party for departing BBC North America editor Jon Sopel. 

That's reported by Steerpike at the Spectator. 

You'll find beneath his piece this comment from former Harry's Place regular Lamia which will doubtless strike a chord with many of us:

Sopel spent the four years of Donald Trump's presidency Tweeting his disapproval of Trump and his Tweets, helping keep the humble folk of Broadcasting House and North London in a permanent state of gratified superior outrage. Once Joe Biden got into power, Sopel and the BBC simply lost interest in reporting about the US President, except what flavour of ice cream he likes. Sopel is a worthless journalist, let alone a journalist for a supposedly impartial broadcaster, because his personal and political biases have infected and dictated everything he reports (and everything he doesn't report about). Not only should he not be the BBC's political editor - if the BBC had any standards (yes, we know it doesn't...) then he would have been sacked years ago. So obviously he's a shoe-in as BBC political editor.

II

Rod Liddle probably ought to hang up his satirical spurs because BBC reality is outpacing him faster than the winner of the Kentucky Derby. A Guardian exclusive reports that the BBC is preparing to broadcast a new take on Dickens's Oliver Twist that will “make a conscious effort” to put food poverty “to the fore” and echo footballer Marcus Rashford’s campaign to reduce child hunger. Very BBC.

III

The BBC is celebrating what they call “a hundred years of our BBC” and they've released a two-minute campaign video - in response to Nadine Dorries - about how the “BBC belongs to all of us”. As you'd expect,  the last word - “every one of us” - goes to Sir David Attenborough and the whole party political broadcast on behalf of the BBC ends with the caption, “This is our BBC.”

The estimable Lance Forman responded:

If the BBC belongs to me - Please can they release the Balen Report which examined anti-Israel bias at the BBC. The BBC have spent circa £500,000 to keep this covered up. With antisemitism rampant there is a public interest in releasing this. Transparency belongs to us all!

IV

The BBC's world affairs editor John Simpson pompously gives us “a reminder”:

Just a quick constitutional reminder for the BBC’s 100th anniversary: it belongs to the people of the UK. It doesn’t belong to the government. And, contrary to what the current Culture Secretary seems to think, it isn’t state-funded.

It may not be, but it still drags thousands of reluctant viewers through the courts.

V

As Paul Homewood notes, BBC Future has a piece by some white woke guy called Jeremy Williams headlined Climate change divides along racial lines. Could tackling it help address longstanding injustices? The pasty-faced gentleman in question has a book out too, Climate Change is Racist: Race, Privilege and the Struggle for Climate Justice, thereby evidently making him absolutely irresistible to the BBC. I'm not sure I was even aware of BBC Future. The BBC has no many tentacles it's hard to keep track.

VI(a)

I see some people on Twitter have been complaining that BBC One's main new bulletins gave mere seconds to the jailing of former Labour peer Lord Ahmed of Rotherham for paedophilia last night. Indeed, News at Six gave the story 17 seconds and News at Ten gave the story 13 seconds. It beggars belief.

VI(b)

It remains a telling fact that Newsnight has still never covered the Barry Gardiner/Chinese Communist Party influence story or that their policy editor Lewis Goodall, despite being a hyperactive Twitterer, has never tweeted about it either - despite the CCP's influence on the UK being one of the biggest new stories out there. I put it down to bias. 

VII

Wagner's Ring cycle lasts 17 hours and runs for over four days. In it the bronzed Valkyrie Brünnhilde disobeys the Director-General of the gods Wotan, ensconced in Valhalla House. The weak Wotan, despite Brünnhilde's flagrant disregard of Valhalla editorial guidelines, merely slaps her wrist by giving her a talking-to and then sentences her to a good night's sleep on a luxury bed surrounded by fire. The dragon-slaying idiot Siegfried awakens her with a kiss and an embittered, self-righteous Brünnhilde then - after various twists and turns - mounts her mighty steed Grane and, immolating herself in the process too, brings about the fiery destruction of Valhalla House and the godly board. Similarly long-lasting is the BBC's Monologue cycle. In this saga the bronzed Emily Maitlis disobeys pasty-faced chief god of the BBC Tim Davie. Tim Davie weakly slaps her wrist by mildly saying she might, possibly, not have been quite entirely right - and then does nothing more. She disobeys him again. And again. And again. Always playing throughout to her main audience, her fellow Valkyries on Twitter. The Trump-slaying Jon Sopel awakens her with a kiss and she mounts her mighty stallion Twitter and disobeys Tim Davie yet again. So what happens next? Well, if my tortuous Wagner analogy runs on, Emily's biased behaviour will help precipitate BBCdämmerung, The Twilight of the BBC, as Tim Davie sits forlorn in Broadcasting House as everything around him goes up in flames and, amid floodwaters, the Thamesmaidens swim in to take back the BBC licence fee. So is Tim Davie ever going to do something about her? She's making a mockery of 'BBC impartiality' and sneering at her BBC bosses, but I doubt he'll do anything. He doesn't seem the type to tackle BBC bias full on. As BBC TV sitcom Valkyrie Mrs Slocombe was wont to say, he's ''weak as water''. 

VIII

BBC disinformation reporter Marianna Spring has been busy promoting a new 10-part podcast series “investigating the human cost of pandemic conspiracies online in one town, who believes them - and why” for Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. She “will share more details soon!” This drew a sarcastic reply from Peter Hitchens: “Looking forward to this, Marianna Spring. Obviously this is the most urgent lack in BBC coverage of the last two years. But will a mere ten episodes be enough?”

IX

The BBC's diplomatic correspondent James Landale followed UK PM Boris Johnson to a press conference in Ukraine with the Ukrainian president and provoked criticism in some quarters for “making the UK look like a joke” by asking Boris about Partygate rather than Russia-Ukraine. I suspect that as extraterrestrials first emerge from their twenty-mile-long mothership to make contact with humanity for the first time BBC types will be there at the front of the press pack asking about the Sue Gray report. 

Cod liver oil commissioning

Sunday Times arts columnist Patricia Nicol has written a piece headlined Why changes are needed at Radio 4. 

Despite the headline, she's a huge fan of BBC Radio 4 and doesn't accept many of the criticisms being made of it. Her only real beefs with the channel are with its comedy and drama output. “When did a new comedy format on Radio 4 last make you laugh out loud? Or a drama warm your cockles?”, she asks. 

My favourite line from her column is:

Too much of Radio 4’s drama feels like cod liver oil commissioning, sternly administered to do you good.

''Wokeness knows no bounds''

  

Passepartout and Phileas Fogg, BBC-style

The Daily Mail reports that actor David Tennant, due to star as Phileas Fogg in the BBC's new version of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, is wringing his hands about it, despite his adopted son also appearing in it. 

He tells The Radio Times that Phileas Fogg ''represents everything that’s alarming and peculiar about that old sense of British Empire. Potentially, it’s a story about an England that should elicit very little sympathy.'' 

The comments below the Mail piece give this short shrift: 

• Criticising a fictional character, wokeness knows no bounds.
• Written by a Frenchman as well. Blaming the French for Britishness is a new one on me.
• It's fiction, written by a Frenchman.
• With his views, maybe he should have turned down the part.
• Not alarming enough to refuse the role or have his son play a part too ... ridiculous!
• A fine actor, who hasn't learnt wokery mixed with nepotism is a bad look.

They Don’t Know the BBC

I caught the above Guardian tweet the other day but forgot to share it:

‘I didn’t think this would air on the BBC’: the stars of shocking legal drama You Don’t Know Me. Samuel Adewunmi, Bukky Bakray and writer Tom Edge discuss highlighting startling racial prejudice in the justice system – and showing that it isn’t fit for purpose.

...to which my immediate first thought was: Never mind You Don’t Know Me, they obviously don't know the BBC. Nothing was more likely to air on the BBC than this at the moment. 

Bloodbath Reviews

 

I much preferring reading reviews of TV dramas these days to watching those dramas. My loss maybe, or maybe not. Anyhow, here are two Times reviews of BBC One's latest moody drama, first from Carol Midgley:

I watched the first half of Bloodlands, possibly like you, with a sense of “been here, done this” ennui. James Nesbitt was a brooding, sad-faced detective with a tragic backstory (tick). He was put on a case that he thought was connected to another (highly sensitive) one, but was told to “just leave it. It’s in the past” (tick). That case involved his murdered wife (“She’s gone. Nothing’s gonna bring her back”) and now he was on an angry mission to solve it (tick). Pass the déjà vu tablets, I think we’re going to need them.

The second came from Camilla Long and was slightly less charitable:

What is even more embarrassing than having produced Bloodlands, the most lumpen, graceless, cheapest cop drama in living memory? The answer is: scheduling it in the same week as [ITV's] Unforgotten, one of the best and most elegant, complete with its subtle script, understated acting, and, of course, Nicola Walker. 

There is no comparison, for example, between spending an hour with James Nesbitt, grinding his awful gears as some detective in a shockingly basic, bothy-strewn, Nor’n Irish crime drama, and giving yourself over to the finely tuned Walker, who returns to Unforgotten for a fourth series and one last unsolved murder. 

It felt loved and cared for, unlike the incomparably ugly Bloodlands, which felt as if the BBC only ran it because they’d lost a drunken bet. The script, we’re told, was nurtured by Jed Mercurio, the creator of Line of Duty, which suggested a tight, fraught drama with backstabbing and bent coppers, not a vanilla cop-style product that felt as if it had been written by a 15-year-old Jed Mercurio fan, which the BBC then showed out of pity and guilt. 

I think I'd stick with reading the reviews. 

The Brixton uprising

The sound of yet more small axes being ground at the BBC...

It looks as if the 'woke' BBC has rebranded the 1981 Brixton riot as "the Brixton uprising":

[Click to enlarge and read, especially if you're eyesight's as bad as mine]

In fairness, that decade, and the decade before it, were marked by other uprisings in the UK - especially by those branded by their fascist oppressors as "football hooligans". 

Millwall supporters, to quote just one famous example, were responsible for a large-scale popular uprising in Luton in 1985 during the quarter-final of the FA Cup. They stormed the Winter Palace end apparently. 

So What Robin Aitken's Saying Is

Peter Whittle's So What You're Saying Is interviews are reliably good, and this week's is excellent. It involves Robin Aitken, the former BBC man responsible for three books about BBC bias: Can We Trust the BBC?, Can We Still Trust the BBC? and The Noble Liar. 

The one bit I'll highlight in advance concerns the aftermath of Robin's recent appearance on The Moral Maze. Having listened to it and heard his complaints about the lack of diversity of opinion in the BBC's output as a whole, a woman who works on one of the BBC's longest-running drama staples - he didn't name which, so I'll guess EastEnders or Casualty - got in contact with him. She was asking for his help. The problem is that everyone who writes for the show shares the same socially liberal, left-of-centre outlook, and she couldn't think how to help them start creating sympathetic conservative characters or write convincing expressions of a conservative points of view. She hoped Robin would come to talk to them for her.

It's promising that someone of influence in BBC drama sees there's a problem and wants to do something about it, but it reveals how far the BBC has to go to bring in fresh thinking and burst the BBC bubble.

Why 'Downton Abbey' isn't on the BBC

Julian Fellowes, interviewed by The Times today, explains why his period dramas (like Downton Abbey) appear on ITV rather than the BBC:

I don’t want to get into a BBC fight, but they are interventionist, and want their drama and their other programmes to reflect their own position on various issues. That means that if you disagree with the BBC, then you’re not the writer for them, really.

You don't say!

Marples

Talking of Peter Hitchens, his latest Mail on Sunday column has another BBC-related section:

The Beeb’s scandalous addiction to Profumo

Here we go again, this time it’s the BBC making a series called The Trial Of Christine Keeler in which the sad 1960s call girl will be beautifully impersonated by Sophie Cookson. 

You’d think nothing happened in that era apart from the Profumo Affair, which didn’t matter at all. But it was packed with scandal. 

A decent drama about the Suez Crisis or the anti-railways Transport Minister Ernest Marples, who actually skipped the country (in a train), are badly needed. But they don’t involve sex. Could that be the problem?

That sent me looking up Ernest Marples as, beyond a vague recognition of his name, I know nothing about him. It turns out that he was the man behind Dr. Beeching and his notorious railway cuts (plus premium bonds, postcodes and the M1), and that he ended up fleeing the taxman and bolting to Monte Carlo in 1975 before ending up on his 45-acre vineyard estate in the Rhône Valley. Alas for Mr Hitchens though, Wikipedia has a section which says:

Use of prostitutes 

When Lord Denning made his 1963 investigation into the security aspects of the Profumo Affair and the rumoured affair between the Minister of Defence, Duncan Sandys, and the Duchess of Argyll, he confirmed to Macmillan that a rumour that Ernest Marples was in the habit of using prostitutes appeared to be true. The story was suppressed and did not appear in Denning's final report.

So even if he got his BBC Ernest Marples drama - presumably to be called Marples -  Mr H. would still be unable to escape the Profumo affair, or the sex. 

In fact, the BBC - should they learn about this - will doubtless think that Marples is a cracking idea. I should probably start writing it now:

Marples: Dr. Beeching, I'd like to see you take an axe to the national railway system.
Beeching: (in the style of Sid James) We'll can do it together Ernie. I hear you're very handy with a chopper. (Dirty laugh)

Continuing...

The previous post is, shock horror!, 'fake news'.

Well, as far as I'm aware anyhow - though I wouldn't put any of it past the BBC.

It was prompted by Rod Liddle's latest Spectator piece about the BBC's adaptation of Watership Down, which says the following:

I’ve just watched the four-part animated series of Watership Down, shown on the BBC, with my daughter. She was slightly more aghast than me to discover that the aforementioned Bigwig was a bruv from the ’hood. And still more repelled by the elevation of a minor female rabbit character into a doughty campaigner for justice, the transgendering of a rabbit called Strawberry, and, most hilariously, the does calling each other ‘sister’ and keening a song of freedom in an orgy of #MeToo victimhood — their importance to the book she too had loved vastly exaggerated for fatuous political reasons

That all sounds very BBC. 

And it follows in the wake of a dramatisation of Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders which its writer declared to be a parable on 1930s xenophobia and fascism in the UK with relevance to Brexit Britain, and a Les Miserables that even its star felt was ahistorical in the 'diversity' of its casting.

Ah but, but don't forget impartial, left-leaning BBC Trending editor Mike Wendling...

Yes, BBC drama may have a massive, massive bias towards his way of thinking, despite all that 'BBC impartiality' thing, but aren't people like us 'snowflakes' for objecting?

(Answer: No).

Winnie-the-Racist (A Satire)

Fans of Winnie-the-Pooh will be delighted to hear that the BBC is bringing its CGI magic to bear (oh yes!) on the first volume of AA Milne's stories, Winnie-the-Pooh. 

The series will be broadcast on BBC One, beginning on April 1st. 

Sue and I were invited by Big Mike from BBC Trending to wendle along and attend an advanced viewing of Episode Seven, based on Chapter Seven of the book, 'In which Kanga and baby Roo come to the forest, and Piglet has a bath'. 

In it we see how asylum seekers Kanga (a single mother) and baby Roo, having sailed in a tiny dinghy all the way from darkest Australia, are initially treated with suspicion and hostility by the prejudiced inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood. 

The character of Rabbit, who leads the campaign against them, is in this BBC adaptation dressed in a black-collared, tanned-coloured coat which goes down to his furry knees, from behind which his fluffy white tail stands up.

Big Mike from the BBC whispered to me that Nigel Farage is famous for wearing such a coat, and that it's called a 'covert coat'. "Aha!", I replied. 

But, to huge applause from the mainly BBC audience, the plucky pouch-sporting migrants outsmart the dim-witted locals and, in the process, win them over - except for Rabbit, who flounces off in the direction of Watership Down. 

(A curious thing re Rabbit, famous for his many, many "friends-and-relations", is how diverse his many, many "friends-and-relations" are in this new BBC adaptation.)  

Meanwhile, Piglet, after being scrubbed clean in a prank by Kanga, learns a valuable lesson about skin colour and racism. And Eeyore, voiced by Alastair Campbell, is depressed about Brexit. 

And Big Mike from BBC Trending also let slip that Episode Eight, 'In Which Christopher Robin Leads an Expotition to the North Pole', will be about the effects of man-made global warming on polar ice and sea levels, and that this will be followed by Episode Nine, 'In Which Piglet is Entirely Surrounded by Water', concerning a recent incident of localised flooding in the Hundred Acre Wood, which will hammer the point home.

And the little boy at the centre of the story, Christopher Robin, will be shown wearing a dress, putting (vegan) voodoo pins into her/his Katie Hopkins doll, and calling herself/himself Chrissie Robyn. 

You couldn't make it up! And even if you could, the BBC would probably soon outstrip you and make parody seem bland in comparison!

BBC drama accused of 'Islamophobia'

So a BBC drama - BBC One's The Bodyguard - has been accused of 'Islamophobia'. 

According to The Times:

The opening episode included a scene in which a would-be suicide bomber appeared to act under the influence of her jihadist husband. Sergeant David Budd, a police protection officer played by Richard Madden, tells the woman that she has been brainwashed. 

Some viewers criticised the writers for depicting Muslims as terrorists and said the plot perpetuated the trope that Muslim women were controlled by their husbands.

 The show's creator Jed Mercurio has put up the following defence:

You need to watch the whole drama for a comprehensive idea of who is plotting to do harm. 

Unfortunately the reality of our situation is that the principal terror threats in the UK do originate from Islamist sympathisers. 

I do understand that’s different from the religion of Islam, but it’s the reality of who the perpetrators are of the majority of the offences. If the show were set in the recent British past, the attackers might be Irish Republicans.

The comments below the article at the Times give the BBC's critics short shrift but, perhaps picking up on Jed saying, "You need to watch the whole drama for a comprehensive idea of who is plotting to do harm", one posits an idea that wouldn't surprise me in the least if it turned out to be correct:

Oh come on, we know perfectly well that it will turn out that the poor, innocent Muslims will turn out to have been manipulated into it by the sinister combination of the devious head of the security services and Big Business.

Now that's something you would expect from a BBC drama.

"The propaganda arm of our ruling class"

What Sunday would be complete without Peter Hitchens? 

His Mail on Sunday column today begins by talking about "our new power elite" and their "hate" for "lifelong marriage", and the BBC is his specific target: 

Why does the propaganda arm of our ruling class, the BBC, promote a drama called Wanderlust with publicity which, in the BBC’s own words, ‘asks whether lifelong monogamy is possible – or even desirable’. You know as well as I do that they’re not really asking. 

They are saying, amid countless wearisome and embarrassing bedroom scenes, that it is neither possible nor desirable. This is a lie, as millions of honest, generous and kind men and women proved in the better generations which came before this one.

Mr. Hitchens, of course, knows as well as we do (if not more) that the BBC is a 'progressive', 'socially liberal' organisation and that BBC drama has been relentless in promoting that particular outlook for donkey's years. 

In writing that sentence and using the term "donkey's years" I was inspired to 'do a Peter Hitchens' and investigate that phrase - in true blogger's style. 

According to the OED, it's a “punning allusion to the length of a donkey’s ears and to the vulgar pronunciation of ears as years.”

I'd actually assumed it itself had been around for donkey's years, but it's apparently more recent than I though - i.e. just over a hundred year's old, which I don't count as being donkey's year ago. 

Two 1916 books - a novel by E.V. Lucas called 'The Vermillion Box' and 'With Jellicoe in the North Sea' by Frank Hubert Shaw - used the earliest published references to it, respectively:

“Now for my first bath for what the men call ‘Donkey’s ears,’ meaning years and years” 

and

“This isn’t a battleship war at all; it’s a destroyer-submarine-light cruiser show. They’ll never come out in donkey’s years, not they. They know jolly well we shall scupper ’em if they so much as dare to show their noses outside the wet triangle.” 

The E.V. Lucas quote points to the outstanding question of which came first: “donkey’s ears” or “donkey’s years.” It looks as if it may have been “donkey’s ears”. 

Anyhow, I won't be watching Wanderlust, however steamy it is. 

"Contains some strong language and some sexual content"

An Agatha Christie character shows off her pussy on BBC One

There are quite a few very Agatha Christie fans in my family (and not only the older members), so any adaptation gets watched. BBC One's latest version of The Witness For The Prosecution didn't get good reviews from them. It was far too dimly-lit for starters and it just didn't feel like Agatha Christie, they said. 

And Peter Hitchens agrees with them. 

His review is a brilliant piece of writing - so much so that I'm going to copy and paste it all for once:

Indulgent BBC has its history wrong, again
Agatha Christie’s Witness For The Prosecution was a successful play before becoming a classic film of the 1950s.
It’s not a work of genius, but it is a good courtroom drama with a surprise at the end. How could the BBC possibly have made such a mess of it, as it did in its TV version last week?
The answer is simple. The BBC cannot leave the past alone, but does not understand that it was really different from the present.
It thinks that if it shows enough characters smoking, and shoots everything in a sort of gravy-stained dingy light, it has recreated the 1920s.
I think I counted seven people lighting up cigarettes in the first two minutes. After that, I stopped counting in case I got cancer.
I also spotted characters, plainly supposed to be reporters, smoking in court during an Old Bailey trial, which in the real 1920s would have earned them a spell in the cells for contempt of court.
Having done this, it made most of the characters (including a cat) behave and speak as if they were appearing in EastEnders.
A knighted barrister unhesitatingly used the f-word. The police were shown as thugs who arrested a suspect by bursting in on him without a warrant and beating him with truncheons, even though he was asleep in bed. Nobody seemed to know the law of England.
Lawyers blatantly and unlawfully coached witnesses. The only Christian (of course) was a plain, sour, repressed lesbian with a secret passion for her mistress, who was then wrongfully hanged.
A cat was lingeringly shown licking up its dead owner’s blood. A character who had been gassed in the war was shown coughing up yet more blood. No doubt this is all much more modern and ‘truthful’ than the 1957 film version.
But it is also much worse, and the portentous music and pretentious camera work only underline that.
The BBC licence fee is not collected under the threat of imprisonment to allow people to indulge themselves in this way.

Naturally, I didn't watch it.

Not a witness, silent or otherwise

The previous post mentioned Holby City. 

I only watched that (or the bit that mattered) because I'd read numerous people complaining about its anti-Brexit bias elsewhere.

I'm actually rather allergic to 'serious' BBC dramas of this kind. Years back I started to find them a bit preachy. Enduring episodes of them at other people's houses only confirmed that feeling (especially a fateful episode of Judge John Deed).

But still, it has to be said that as I very rarely watch BBC dramas I'm not really able to comment on the bias found (or not found) therein. 

A commenter at Biased BBC, however, wrote this yesterday about the new levels of 'selling the message' via such BBC programmes:

I think the bias in the form of programme propaganda is now reaching epic levels. A peruse of the current schedule will make you weep. Sherlock is on about Thatcher, Silent Witness is about illegal Syrian migrants; and BBC4 has a film about an Irish cross dresser. 

As I won't be watching any of them I couldn't possibly comment.

However, I will copy and paste the BBC Media Centre's preview of that episode of Silent Witness, as it sounds exactly like the kind of thing that's kept me away from 'serious' dramas of the Holby City kind for years (which may or may not be my loss!):

Some Sunday morning reading

Other links you might care to read this morning (if you haven't already done so) include: 

What I learnt from my BBC Question Time experience

by Steven Woolfe, UKIP MEP

On Thursday night I was due to fill in for Suzanne Evans on BBC Question Time as she was unfortunately taken ill and could not attend.

Let us put some emphasis that word, ‘due’, as on the morning of the programme my appearance was cancelled as it turns out at that I am not in fact a woman.

My perception of the BBC has been affected in two ways as a result of this incident. First, it seems fairly incompetent of the BBC to have not known that a person named ‘Steven’ is a bloke, and therefore if they wanted a woman why book me in the first place. Second, focusing on a guest’s gender and not on what they actually might have to say is a retrograde step for the BBC’s public service remit.

Yes but, it's a very BBC thing to do, Steven, and didn't surprise me in the least. They've just gotta have their diverse panels or the world as we know it would end.

Also, courtesy of the Mail on Sunday, comes this:

BBC accused of political bias in adaptation of JK Rowling drama The Casual Vacancy just weeks before Election

by Chris Hastings, arts correspondent

• BBC is under fire over its adaptation of JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy
• Broadcaster has been accused of ramping up Left-wing issues in the book
• Scenes have been added to the drama which do not appear in the novel
• Critics say storyline is disguised attack on the Government’s welfare cuts

The MOS article cites three examples of how the BBC has "ramped up" the left-wing issues in JK's book:

SCENE 1  

The BBC: In the opening scenes, Councillor Howard Mollison, played by Sir Michael Gambon, and his social-climbing wife Shirley (Julia McKenzie) discuss plans for a luxury hotel and spa development. A gleeful Shirley tells her husband: ‘It’s beautiful. You feel better just looking at it. You can’t let Barry Fairbrother and his tribe of do-gooders stand in the way of progress. They’ll have to accept that Sweetlove House has had its day.’

In the novel: The plan for a luxury hotel and spa does not appear at all.

SCENE 2

The BBC: Opposing the plans, Councillor Fairbrother says: ‘That is social engineering. That’s apartheid. Herding people into ghettos because they don’t fit the aesthetic. There is a name for that, isn’t there. Bill, you stormed the Normandy beaches didn’t you, fighting fascism... That house helps people to live. The parish council is not here to make a quick buck for someone who already has more than enough... Is the legacy still of benefit? Yes. It has never been so important.’

In the novel: Councillor Fairbrother dies on page two having hardly uttered a word.

SCENE 3

The BBC: When progressive councillor Parminder Jawanda tells her colleagues that drug addicts will have to travel to nearby Yarvil to get help, a rival tells her: ‘They would crawl on their knees over broken glass if there were drugs to be had.’

In the novel: She uses far milder language, saying addicts should have their benefits cut.

Some of that dialogue could come straight out of a parody of a typical clunking, agitprop BBC Radio 4 afternoon drama. My favourite line is "You can’t let Barry Fairbrother and his tribe of do-gooders stand in the way of progress." Tee hee!

BBC dramas

Not being someone who watches BBC dramas very often, I really don't have much to say about them. Tim Montgomerie of the Times, on the other hand, seems  watch quite a view of them and has plenty to say about them:

I understand guidelines on drama output will come under intense scrutiny next year when the BBC charter is due for renewal. Leading Tory ministers know that a nation’s long-term values are forged in drama, documentaries and comedy. We all remember stories more than we remember facts. It is, after all, why Jesus told parables.

***

Let’s...have more of Peter Moffat’s Silk series with its anti-austerity, pro-euthanasia storylines, if BBC commissioners choose. Or Jimmy McGovern’s regular left-field assaults on social taboos. And certainly more of Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty — a drama as good as anything produced by HBO and rightly targeting police corruption. But could we just occasionally have something a bit more surprising too? Why are villains of BBC dramas nearly always the same? Thatcher. Business leaders. Bent coppers. Tory toffs. Catholic priests. American Republicans. The Israeli security services.

America’s cultural conservatives are some way ahead of their British equivalents in thinking about these issues. The American right may win as many political contests as the American left but they know they’ve lost the culture wars. And because they know politics is downstream from culture, that bodes ill for their future. The billionaire philanthropist Philip Anschutz has formed Walden Media to even things up. Over the past decade he has poured money into producing something different from the standard Hollywood fare. Walden’s most famous investments brought CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia to the big screen. 

Anschutz and Walden recognise that there’s a new establishment in place and want to encourage an arts scene that challenges this new establishment’s mores. The BBC, if true to its values, should want to do the same. Where is the play exposing the environmental groups who want to deny African children access to life-saving GM crops? Or how about a portrait of a world in which America has become isolationist, so terrorist powers run amok? The BBC could even try a comedy about the leader of a small European country who, despite being rejected by his own voters and being embroiled in a tax avoidance scandal, becomes president of the European Commission? Truth always provides some of the best inspirations for drama.

The problem, identified earlier in the same piece, is that:

According to Andrew Marr his employer’s bias reflects the large proportion of its employees who are younger, more metropolitan and more avant-garde than the average Briton. On their Facebook profiles BBC staff were 11 times more likely to identify themselves as liberal than conservative — at least until they were ordered to stop self-identifying. The corporation, Marr noted, “depends on the state’s approval at least for its funding mechanism and this creates an innate liberal bias . . . which is much more clearly expressed as a cultural bias than as a party political bias”.

All of which provides yet another reason why a large-scale blood transfusion is urgently needed at the BBC, most of it from very different blood types.