Tuesday, August 04, 2015 

"Where are my testicles, Summer?"


"Nobody exists on purpose.  Nobody belongs anywhere.  Everybody's going to die."

One of the lines doing the rounds following the government's green paper on the future of the BBC was, if the BBC's so great and worth the £145.50 every household must pay on pain of fines and even prison, why can't it make Game of Thrones?  The line, naturally, can be altered to be about your favourite non-BBC and probably not made by a British broadcaster at all show and still retain the point.  Why indeed can the BBC not make The Wire, Breaking Bad, or as some wag soon had it, House of Cards, despite its vast income?

This set me thinking on what British television as a whole has never been any good at.  Best answer I could come up with: adult animation.  With the exceptions of Stressed Eric and Monkey Dust (both BBC productions, natch), the attempts at adult animation from our main broadcasters have been fairly horrific.  You could say there's not much point in trying to compete with the Americans when their output is so good, and yet, if you take a proper look, it's not strictly true, is it?  Family Guy and the Simpsons are so past their best (if Family Guy had a best) it's painful, American Dad and the various spin-offs from Family Guy can be good and yet still don't really satisfy, which leaves you with, well what?  South Park, which was great when both political and funny, and now more often than not is just political?  Bob's Burgers?  It might as well not exist such is the time slot it gets over here.

Bearing that in mind, it doesn't necessarily say much that Rick and Morty has yet to be picked up by a broadcaster in this country.  A new show from the guys at Adult Swim, it'll just be the same old same old, won't it?  Robot Chicken never made much of an impact here, let alone Aqua Teen Hunger Force.  A bit too screwball for UK sensibilities seems to be the opinion.  We like our animation shows with families, where the father despite being fat/and or an idiot is in fact the hero of the piece, where the female characters are either stereotypes (Hayley) or ciphers (Meg, Lois, Francine, and despite the attempts to flesh her out, some of which have been great, Marge too) and where each week there's a new moral lesson on offer.

Which is precisely what makes Rick and Morty the kind of show so good you feel you have to proselytise about it.  It is that familiar set-up we all know, the mother and father, the two kids (we'll not count either Maggie or Meg, as the show's respective producers certainly don't) only in this instance with the addition of the mom's own father, returned after years away for reasons never properly explained.  Only it takes those conventions and in the space of a single season of 11 episodes manages to fundamentally subvert them, to define these 5 characters in a way that other series have failed to do in 10 seasons.  Yes, it remains the case that Beth, the mom, the horse surgeon, is still the most transparent of the 5, but 17-year-old Summer, the other child that it looks is set to be neglected just like those other female characters, rises up in the latter half of the series to play a role almost equal to that of Rick, the grandfather, and 14-year-old serial masturbator Morty.  Jerry, the dad, moreover, is an idiot and a loser, who just like Homer, Peter and Stan managed to marry out of his league, only he's played as an idiot and a loser on the apparent brink every episode of being ditched by Beth.

Oh, and Rick just happens to be an alcoholic genius scientist who has a portal gun that can transport anyone to another dimension or any of the infinite parallel universes that exist alongside our own particular version of reality in an instant.  He's the Doctor and Doc Brown, only he's also on the edge of insanity and mania, whether driven there by his trips into the unknown, his drinking or by the sheer scale of his intellect we can't quite tell.  And to be clear, Rick spends almost the entire opening half of the first season essentially abusing Morty through their adventures.  In the pilot episode Morty breaks his legs after Rick fails to tell him he needs to turn his special shoes on before descending down a sheer cliff, then Rick informs him he needs to stuff the huge seeds they're collecting up his butthole to get through alien customs as they're out of portal juice after Rick had to get a cure for Morty's busted legs.  Rick's own sphincter just can't handle it any more.  After Rick and Jerry get trapped in an alien simulation with a uncannily real Morty in another episode, Rick stumbles drunkenly into Morty's room and holds a knife to his throat, until he's convinced this Morty isn't a simulation.  When Morty finally does object to how Rick uses him and demands they go on an adventure of his choosing, Morty's reward is to be nearly raped by a anthropomorphic jellybean in the toilet of an olde worlde inn.

Doing a show as wildly inventive, some would say almost as tiresomely inventive as Rick and Morty justice in words is difficult in of itself.  In that first pilot episode there's a chase scene at the alien customs/airport that contains more ideas in a single minute than other shows have in entire episodes, one creature brought into existence by Morty going through its entire life-cycle in the space of five seconds.  Even properly cataloguing its influences and references is hard: the domestic tensions at work are nearly straight out of the Simpsons (indeed, most people will probably get their first dose of Rick and Morty from the incredible, extended couch gag co-creator Justin Roiland provided for the Simpsons' season finale), just as the science fiction backdrop owes a debt to Futurama.  At the same time the wackiness and instinct to break things reminds of the best episodes of American Dad, while the writers also acknowledge how many gags they've stolen from Douglas Adams.

What truly marks Rick and Morty out though is just how far the writers are willing to take things.  In Rick Potion #9 our two heroes completely wreck their Earth, transforming every other human except for Beth, Jerry and Summer into deformed, monstrous creatures Rick swiftly dubs "Cronenbergs".  Unable to fix it, Rick simply searches for an alternate universe/timeline where he both did fix it and he and Morty die almost immediately afterwards, our pair taking their place, burying their doubles' bodies in the backyard.  Morty, like the viewer, takes quite a while to get his head around this total mindfuck, which comes right in the middle of the season rather than as a finale as you might normally expect.  

Then there's Rixty Minutes, where Rick installs cable TV "from every conceivable reality" in response to being forced to watch the Bachelor, only the family catching sight of an alternate universe Jerry on Letterman soon makes Beth, Jerry and Summer far more interested in their alternate selves than infinite TV.  The episode plays out between Rick and Morty watching adverts and shows that Roiland for the most part ad-libbed and improvised, and Summer's distress at finding out that in most alternate realities she doesn't exist as Beth had an abortion and never married Jerry.  It's only when Morty tells Summer of the epiphany he's had, thanks to the events of Rick Potion #9, including the quotes at the top, that she retreats from running away and goes back downstairs to watch a trailer for a parody of Weekend at Bernie's 2, involving an dead woman being "operated" by her cats.

The one apparent problem, that when so many ideas are thrown into a single episode there's a risk creative burnout will be hit all the sooner, thankfully doesn't seem to be manifesting itself as yet.  The first episode of the second season doesn't quite hit the heights almost all the shows from the first did, but the next two are right up there again at the top.  This said, I can't help hoping that Rick and Morty doesn't turn into one of those shows that carries on for series after series, long after the point at which the creators themselves have often wanted to put their characters out of their misery.  Nor does it feel like that kind of show: it seems special, with writers and creators who'll know when they've taken it as far as they can.

To return to the BBC, one of the other complaints heard was that with so many other channels and sources of entertainment Auntie is nearly irrelevant.   They almost never take into account how many of those channels are reliant on old BBC programmes to fill their schedules, or had their origins in doing nothing but showing repeats.  The most watched channels on Sky, despite everything, remain the BBC ones.  The assumption that if only the BBC got out of the way the commercial broadcasters would be able to further innovate and grow rather falls down when they show no indication of doing the things the BBC already doesn't, or does badly.  If they can't see the worth in a show like Rick and Morty, or won't try and produce an equivalent, why believe things would be any different after the fact?

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8/04/2015 10:27:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, July 02, 2015 

Let's call the whole thing off.

Have you heard about the debate that's been electrifying Westminster the past few days?  No, it's not the Labour leadership contest, or the government's plan to abolish child poverty by deciding it henceforth doesn't exist.  And no, it's not the one about the Kim Kardashian flag at Glastonbury either.

Yep, the big fight in parliament this week has been over what the BBC calls Islamic State.  The fiends in charge of news at Auntie have been calling Islamic State Islamic State, with the reasoning that's what Islamic State is called.  Apparently though this name is deeply discomforting, not to Muslims who know full well they're not being tarred with the same brush by a broadcaster referring to a terrorist group by its actual name, but to politicians who instead insist on calling Islamic State Isil.  Which is an acronym of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.  Or there's others who insist on referring to Islamic State by the acronym Daesh, which is arrived at via Islamic State's literal Arabic name, al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil Iraq wa’al Sham.  Only this was mainly adopted in the first place because it sounds like the Arabic term Dahes, which means to sow discord, and so is meant pejoratively.

The debate is, all but needless to say, unbelievably fucking stupid.  All of the names have problems: calling the group by what it calls itself should be the obvious thing to do, but then the media have almost never done so previously.  IS originates from the group started by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which fairly swiftly pledged allegiance to al-Qaida, and so became known as al-Qaida in Iraq, the name it was almost always referred to as by the media up until last year.  It in fact went through two more name changes, becoming the Mujahideen Shura Council for a time, before changing to the simple Islamic State of Iraq at the height of its (then) control of Iraqi territory.  The Guardian, for instance, tends to split the difference and call it Isis, which makes something approaching sense as referring to Syria as either the Levant or Sham, both archaic terms, is exceptionally daft.

According to David Cameron, calling Islamic State Islamic State is misleading and potentially damaging as it is neither Islamic nor a state.  To which one response should be: how about you go and tell Mr al-Baghdadi to his face that his group isn't Islamic and the territory it holds doesn't amount to a state, Dave?  I envision a scene akin to the one from Mars Attacks, where President Jack Nicholson delivers a why can't we all be friends speech with such passion it brings tears to the Martian leader's eyes.  They shake hands, then a contraption pierces Nicholson straight through the heart and a little Martian flag pops out the end.  Even if you agree with Cameron, that doesn't alter the fact that if you use Isil or Daesh you're still calling it Islamic State, you're just not spelling the damn thing out.  If we're going to be precious about it, we might as well just call them Those Murderous Jihadist Cunts and be done with it.

Part of the reason our leaders have been squabbling about what the BBC is doing is, predictably, because they haven't gone the first clue about what to do to respond to the attack in Tunisia.  If you start claiming there's going to be a full spectrum response against a group that poses an "existential threat" while not actually doing anything new you are rather asking for it.  Hence the feelers put out today about extending airstrikes into Syria itself, which to give the government its due, isn't as cretinous an idea as it once was.  It's fairly pointless being opposed to ourselves chucking bombs at IS in Syria when the Americans have been doing it for nigh on 10 months now, especially when it's long been obvious they have been informing the Syrians of where they're going to be targeting.

It's also fairly pointless to be opposed because just chucking bombs at IS has been shown to be fairly pointless.  IS controls more territory in the two countries now than they did when the airstrikes began: the only times they've had an effect has been in Kobane, where the Kurds were effectively allied with the US and calling in strikes themselves, in breaking the siege on Mount Sinjar, and in softening up the IS forces on the ground ahead of advances by the Iraqi "army", i.e. the Shia militias that are now the de facto army.  As the new chair of the foreign affairs committee Crispin Blunt said this morning, joining in the strikes now adds up to nothing more than sharing the burden of attacks with the Americans, while putting the country into a legally grey area.  IS cannot be defeated from the air: the gains against it have only been won in partnership with ground forces.  Without a stronger ally in both Iraq and Syria, and neither the Kurdish militias or the Shia equivalent can be that ally, IS isn't going anywhere.

The Americans have been complaining for a while there is no strategy for defeating IS, and that's because the current stalemate seems preferable, terrible as it is to the alternatives.  If we swallow our pride and ally with Assad now despite everything, we risk driving the jihadis fighting IS back into their arms.  Even if IS was pushed back into Iraq solely, that won't change the fact the country's Sunnis in the main welcomed the jihadis because of the discrimination and contempt they faced under Maliki, which hasn't gone away.  Nor do they rate their chances of survival when faced with the militias that previously acted as death squads at the time of the all out civil conflict.  The only realistic solutions are federalism or complete partition, with three separate states, something that would be opposed by all sides (excepting the Kurds), all of whom still believe everything can return to how things stood this time last year without explaining how.  Faced with these options, it's not surprising politicians would rather chide the BBC than explain how desperate the situation is for the people in the region, if not in truth for us.  That Iraq war, eh?

P.S. 

Staying with that thought, here's some number crunching:

187 - number of Syrian refugees so far granted asylum in the UK under the Vulnerable Person Relocation scheme

664 - number of children Nicholas Winton, who died yesterday, helped to escape the Nazis in 1939

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7/02/2015 07:15:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, November 12, 2012 

Through the media looking glass.

Where to even begin? It's as though over the weekend we fell through the looking glass, into an eerily familiar yet entirely different world. It's one where the Sun, yes, the Sun, can accuse both the BBC and the Guardian of "paedophile hysteria". It's one where spectres of the past can re-emerge and be regarded as wise sages, where newspaper editors that ignored or played down their own failings can cheer the bloodshed at a rival and demand more, and one where there's always something or someone else that can be blamed.

We must though start with Newsnight. We could, as the report by Ken Macquarrie has done, put the majority of the blame on the fact that the programme was in disarray following the "stepping aside" of numerous editors and managers while the various inquiries into the failings over Savile are taking place. It certainly explains somewhat how the report on the abuse at Bryn Estyn came to be broadcast within a week of the investigation being authorised. It doesn't however even begin to make clear how the journalists responsible for the piece justified it to themselves: this was a story that would have disgraced most blogs. Believing that by not naming the senior former Tory politician they were accusing they had protected themselves, they didn't so much as show Steve Messham a photograph of Lord McAlpine, nor did they contact McAlpine for comment. Rather than trace the other source who backed Messham's account, they simply ran with it. The first rule of investigative journalism is that you check the facts repeatedly, and then you check once again for good measure.

As has since become clear, Messham has spent the last twenty years wrongly believing that Lord McAlpine was one of his abusers. It seems to be an honest mistake based on more than understandable confusion, but it was one that would have fallen apart had this been a proper investigation.  Most importantly, as the Graun's piece on Friday reported, the Waterhouse inquiry discounted the possibility McAlpine was involved in the abuse as Messham's evidence was inconclusive.  Also key was that Messham believed his abuser was dead at the time of the inquiry, while McAlpine is still very much alive now.  Moreover, this isn't the first time Messham has taken his allegations to the media: there was as the Heresiarch notes a BBC documentary on Bryn Estyn in 1999; Private Eye according to reports discounted the possibility of McAlpine's involvement; and, fatefully, the long defunct Scallywag magazine ran the claims back in the early 90s.

Those reports from Scallywag, reprinted by the truly credible son of God David Icke, have been doing the rounds on the internet for years.  Often featured alongside the thoroughly debunked claims of a establishment paedophile ring in Scotland and Tony Blair's slapping of a D-Notice on Peter Mandelson's involvement in child abuse (reports which ignore entirely how the D-Notice committee works), they've become a conspiracy staple.  That the BBC, of all organisations, either didn't know of how long-standing these allegations were and how dubious those pushing them are, or simply wasn't aware is inexcusable.  As much as you can understand Newsnight's apparent determination to get back on the front foot as soon as it could, alarm bells should have rang from the outset.  Is it possible the journalists responsible, including those from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, felt this was a way to get back at all those, the Conservative party among them, who had criticised the BBC by pointing the finger straight back at them?

Whether it was or not, George Entwistle was right to resign.  Scapegoat or otherwise, his not being aware of the Graun's report on the accuracy of Newsnight's story as he was preparing to give a speech spoke of someone out of the loop, unable or unwilling to get a grip.  The decision by the acting director-general Tim Davie to set out exactly who is in a position of responsibility is a good start, but it must be a very temporary situation: if possible, the Pollard review should be accelerated so that those who've "stepped aside" can either return to their jobs or replacements can be made forthwith.  Equally clear is that the BBC's management structure needs an urgent overhaul; the BBC Trust, acting as both regulator and defender cannot continue to exist in its current state.  An wholly independent trust is now needed.  Likewise, the director-general simply cannot remain as editor-in-chief of news, expected to be aware of every investigative report, while also running an organisation as large as the BBC has become (and it should be stressed, should more or less remain).

Some perspective is nonetheless sorely needed.  Ever since the Exposure programme on Savile, what's happened is a classic instance of a moral panic.  To say this helps absolutely no one is an understatement: we've gone from one extreme, that of silence, to one where allegations about almost anyone famous during the 70s so much as hugging someone young a little too tightly have been sprayed about like deodorant by a malodorous hormonal teenager.  With the collapse of Newsnight's credibility, there's the potential that we'll go back to the original position.  If that happens, the BBC is hardly the only organisation to blame.  The Sun last week ran a series of utterly ludicrous articles linking Savile to the Yorkshire Ripper, based on little more than how the body of one of Peter Sutcliffe's victims was found near to Savile's flat in Leeds.  Considering how quickly Savile has gone from charity fundraiser to "one of those most prolific child sex offenders" the country has seen, as well as potential necrophile, murderer was bound to come up sooner or later.  The Daily Star meanwhile has ran a Savile story on its front page every day for the past two weeks.

Even those who should know better, such as George Monbiot, have found themselves caught up in this storm of paedophile finding.  When a mood like this takes over, it's often the case that those who previously were rightly ignored and ridiculed find their imaginings are seen in a different light.  All it takes is a tweet from someone with a decent number of followers, and the damage can be done.  When we then get Philip Schofield presenting the prime minister with a whole series of names his researchers have dug up via a Google search, asking that he speak with them, it's the equivalent of taking seriously the proclamations of street preachers.

It's also a wonderful opportunity for the settling of scores.  The press as a whole is terrified that Leveson's shortly to be revealed recommendations for reform of regulation will involve some variety of statutory underpinning, and it sees this as a great chance to prove that everyone is equally guilty.  The Sun's attack today on Chris Patten is remarkable for its brutality, and it is of course in no way influenced by the way Patten showed how Murdoch caved into the Chinese authorities by refusing to publish his book on his time as last governor of Hong Kong.  Its linking of the Guardian to the BBC is also utterly transparent, on Saturday picking on Monbiot without mentioning it was the Graun that debunked the Newsnight report, while today it describes the BBC "[A]s the broadcasting arm of the muck-raking Guardian newspaper".  Would that be the same muck-raking Guardian newspaper that exposed the phone hacking scandal by any chance, and the same scandal that the Sun's former editor is awaiting criminal trial over?  The Mail meanwhile could hardly be banging the drum harder against more rigorous regulation, with Paul Dacre in apparent terror of Leveson's personal judgement on him, at least according to Private Eye.

None of this is to understate the BBC's failings.  The resignations forced by Lord Hutton's report into the sexed up Iraq dossier were one thing; this has been a disaster entirely of the BBC's own making.  What needs to happen now is a further opening up of the corporation, with cutbacks made not to programmes or journalists as has been the pattern of the last few years but to the layers of management that so singularly failed to prevent this travesty.  Only then can a fightback begin, both to regain lost trust and beat back those who wish for an end to the licence fee altogether.

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11/12/2012 11:59:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, October 24, 2012 

In danger, as ever, of forgetting the real victims.

There's something almost touching about the way the vast majority of the media gave George Entwistle a kicking for his performance in front of the parliamentary media committee yesterday.  Far from the image of hacks, and editors especially being grizzled, tough and all but impervious individuals, it turns out that their feelings are really rather easily hurt.  Why else would they have been so hysterically critical of the BBC's new director general, only just over a month into the job, if they hadn't been so scarred by their own appearances before the Leveson inquiry?

This isn't to say that Entwistle was convincing yesterday, as on a number of issues he clearly wasn't.  To start with, he most certainly should have been better prepared.  His lack of inquiry into why exactly Jimmy Savile was being investigated by Newsnight when he was told of the potential problem by Helen Boaden is not adequately explained by his stated refusal to interfere in matters outside of his remit.  Postponing the planned tributes to Savile until after the investigation was completed would have a perfectly reasonable precaution to take.  Likewise, his failure to delve deeper into whether Peter Rippon's blog post was completely accurate despite being warned that it was misleading by the producer of Newsnight's spiked report is both perplexing and worrying.  Also in need of clarification is a report in today's Times which suggests Boaden may well have had more input into the investigation than has previously been stated.

Some of the questioning was though both irrelevant and completely over-the-top.  What point exactly was served by Philip Davies inquiring about the names of those who authorised the transporting of young girls to Savile's shows, and then allowed them to stay on afterwards?  Entwistle didn't know because he doesn't need to know; as long as none of those involved are still working at the BBC, which is highly unlikely, it's now a matter both for the police and for the inquiry he's set-up rather than the director general.  Just as off the mark was Therese Coffey's highlighting of a comment by Rippon in an email that the sources they had were "just the women", taking it as proof they weren't being believed.  Rather than challenging her interpretation, pointing out that this is more likely a reference to how they should also question those working on the programmes at the time, he demurred.  Later on, Entwistle was compared to James Murdoch, as though his failings are in some way comparable to the man in charge of running an company that the media committee itself said seemed to be suffering from "collective amnesia" and which Murdoch senior later admitted had instigated a cover-up.

It still took quite some chutzpah for the Sun, of all papers, to splash on Entwistle's problems and describe him as baffled, bumbling and clueless.  Considering that the paper's last editor is currently awaiting trial for perverting the course of justice and conspiracy to intercept communications, a little humility would be nice.  Similarly, as we await Lord Leveson's report, perhaps Paul Dacre could reflect on what it might say about his own paper and editorship, rather than accuse the BBC of "manipulating the facts".  Or perhaps Dacre is annoyed as that's his job.

Just as opportunistic has been Maria Miller, who felt she just had to write to Chris Patten to register her concern at the BBC's ability to investigate itself, despite the media committee deciding they would allow the Pollard review to reach its own conclusions.  It's understandable she might feel aggrieved at how her predecessor nearly lost his job after acting as the minister for Murdoch, but that was hardly the BBC's doing.  Patten was entirely justified in effectively telling Miller what she could do with her concern.

All of this focus on Newsnight runs the risk of taking attention away not from why Savile got away with hiding in plain sight for so long but how.  Monday's Panorama made clear that even if not common knowledge, there were plenty of people who either suspected or had seen for themselves Savile's activities, and yet for the most part they either did nothing about it or their attempts to get it looked into floundered.  Without wanting to criticise those who must now bitterly regret not doing more, it still seems remarkable that some of those who knew didn't push harder, either going to the police or finding others with the same worries and then approaching managers to give their concerns extra weight.

This can't all be explained by the culture of the time; indeed, it was barely cited by those who've now come forward.  Certain commentators, while quick to assign blame to the liberal left either down to permissiveness, or because the abuse took place within the BBC or other state institutions, have ignored almost entirely Savile's links to other parts of the establishment. He befriended both royalty and politicians, spending Christmas at Chequers with Margaret Thatcher throughout the 80s, something the same right-wing tabloid press that worshipped the ground she walked on don't seem to want to discuss.

The greatest difficulty victims of abuse have always faced is being believed, as still shown by the failings of the police, social services and the CPS in Rochdale.  It wasn't political correctness that allowed the rape of vulnerable young girls to continue, but that the victims either weren't believed or even felt by those who should have been protecting them to be "making their own choice".  In an age before child abuse became synonymous with the darkest reaches of the internet, it often took the actual catching of a paedophile in the act for a charge to be brought and a conviction achieved.  Nick Davies wrote a whole series of articles on abuse in the late 90s that are just as applicable today, in spite of the advances in investigation that have been made.  Those in positions of power have always been able, either through connections, lawyers or influence to get their abuses either dropped or hushed up, the testimony of the weak disregarded or ridiculed.

That this now seems to have happened to a limited extent at the BBC is not surprising.  Compared to other powerful institutions that have either dragged their feet or gone into complete denial when faced with such accusations, it has acted with relative speed, albeit not swiftly enough.  What this shouldn't be allowed to become is another witch-hunt, where those who have made limited but understandable mistakes today pay the price for the much greater failings of the past (just as the News of the World should never have been sacrificed in an attempt to save Brooks and the Murdochs).  Savile is dead.  His victims and those who facilitated him are not.

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10/24/2012 09:57:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, October 22, 2012 

The BBC leaves an open goal. Again.

It's all but impossible to overstate just what a catastrophic decision the now ex-Newsnight editor Peter Rippon made when he spiked the Jimmy Savile investigation pieced together by reporter Liz MacKean and producer Meirion Jones.  Working barely a month after Savile's death, it now seems apparent that there was just enough evidence for a report to have been broadcast. Indeed, on its own the revelation that Savile had been investigated by Surrey police, even if no charges were brought for lack of evidence, ought to have been enough to get something on the air.

Had Peter Rippon not for reasons still unknown ended the investigation, we might now be experiencing the opposite to what has happened since ITV's Exposure was broadcast at the beginning of the month.  While it's obvious that there would still be major questions about who knew what, if anything about Savile's proclivities beyond rumours, and almost certainly an investigation into the culture at Television Centre during Savile's time at the BBC, we wouldn't now be having to endure the Mail and much of the rest of the media's latent schadenfreude at the corporation's difficulties.  The BBC's coverage both of the phone hacking scandal and then the Leveson inquiry is well and truly being avenged.  It's even possible the corporation would be getting a certain amount of grudging praise for investigating itself, too late for Savile to be brought to account or not.

Quite how the BBC has managed to respond so ineffectively and poorly is a mystery.  The corporation's incredibly well paid managers really do seem to have learned absolutely nothing, whether from Sachsgate or indeed from the phone hacking debacle.  The obvious lesson from both crises, one serious and one not so much, is that you have to get your investigations, apologies and statements out as quickly as possible while at the same time making sure that they're as accurate as can be.  If you don't, then you can't possibly complain when you get turned over.  In this instance, the BBC has fallen at almost every hurdle: its initial statements were either inadequate, or as it now turns out in the case of Peter Rippon's blog post, inaccurate.  The corporation didn't apologise quick enough, nor did it set-up the independent investigations into what happened until far too late.

These failures have been exacerbated further by how it's apparent that those at the top of the BBC were aware of Newsnight's initial investigation, and yet did nothing to prepare for just such an eventuality as this one.  They must have known it was possible that the allegations would be followed up by someone else, especially when the disquiet in the newsroom at Rippon's decision was soon leaked to the press, with the Oldie even going so far as to make direct accusations against Savile.

The key question remains why Rippon decided that the broadcast could not go ahead, one which the specific investigation into Newsnight has to uncover quickly.  Highly doubtful though is the claim that Rippon either came under direct pressure from those higher-up in the BBC to drop the investigation, or that the forthcoming tributes to Savile, which hardly made up a substantial part of the BBC's Christmas schedule were thought as more important than exposing a man now being described, possibly hyperbolically, as one of the most prolific child sex offenders the country has seen.

Far more likely is that is Rippon, completely mistakenly, decided of his own accord that the story was just too potentially toxic for the amount of evidence that had been put together.  You can see his predicament: Newsnight only had on camera, in person testimony from Karin Ward, with the other statements coming from women who had been at the Duncroft approved school in the 70s who weren't prepared to appear in the film.  Ward's allegations, and I'm not doubting them here for a second, almost seem too good to be true from a journalistic point of view: she alleges that as well as being abused by Savile, she also saw Gary Glitter having sex with a girl in the alcove of Savile's dressing room.  Ward did indeed appear on a show with both Savile and Glitter, but the inclusion of the country's most notorious "celebrity" paedophile was always going to ring alarm bells.  Add in how the Crown Prosecution Service had decided not to press charges, Surrey police having spent what the Telegraph is now reporting as 2 years investigating possible abuse at Duncroft, and you can almost understand why Rippon bottled out at the last moment.

Almost, but not quite.  It reminds of the BBC's (and Newsnight's) cowardice in the Trafigura case, deciding to settle rather than contest a lawsuit from Carter-Fuck over the programme's report that Trafigura's dumping of toxic sludge in the Ivory Coast had killed rather than simply injured those who came into contact with it, despite an UN report concluding there had been deaths.  The reporter in that instance was... Liz MacKean.  No wonder that both she and her producer feel so strongly that Rippon was wrong, with Meirion Jones predicting at the time in an email that regardless of the reality, should someone else follow up the story it would be seen as a cover-up.

So it has come to pass.   Quite clearly there is the the usual amount of humbug from the press, whom with the exception of the Sunday Mirror in 1994 completely failed to investigate Savile at all, leaving it to ITV to do the hard work once Newsnight had bowed out.  It's also laughable for the Sun of all papers to take the moral high ground when News International so spectacularly failed to investigate phone hacking at the News of the World until it was forced into it at the beginning of last year, just the four years after Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire were sent down.  The BBC was positively sprightly by contrast in realising the seriousness of the allegations against it.  It's also clear that the BBC can investigate itself to an extent that the rest of the media can't or won't, even if the full inquiries must be independent: tonight's Panorama is evidence of that.  Nor is it true this is the BBC's worst crisis in 50 years, even if it was John Simpson who said so.  Has everyone already forgotten the Hutton whitewash when both the director general and chairman of the BBC resigned?

The sad fact is though, as so often in the past, this is a disaster of the BBC's own making.  Some might well point to that very Hutton inquiry and to the extra compliance regulations brought in after Sachsgate as explanation as to why the BBC has been timid and overly cautious ever since, but neither stopped the corporation from broadcasting the documentaries which exposed abuse in both secure and care homes.  It may very well turn out that this is a simple case of an enormous mistake by an editor, and of a culture in the past that was all but universal, but that doesn't explain the BBC's incompetence once the allegations finally came to light.  At a time when public service broadcasting is still in peril, regardless of the collapse of the BSkyB-News Corp merger, the last thing the BBC needed was to leave an open goal for their enemies to attack.

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10/22/2012 09:09:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, June 06, 2012 

The shape of things to come.

As you might have noticed, I decided not to pass too much comment on the jubilee. With the exciting four days of fun, frolics and relentless sycophancy finally past, it would have been nice if the same policy had been adopted in general. Almost every single article or broadcast could have been done in advance, with a sub or work experience kid left to edit them as appropriate, such was the predictability of it all. From the papers on the right that couldn't hold themselves back in praise of this Britain that they wish still existed, to the Guardian treating the whole thing semi-ironically, everything you expected to be written was and nothing that might have enlivened proceedings was allowed to puncture the atmosphere of stifling conformity.

It also proves once and for all that whatever the BBC does, it will get criticised for it. Having decided to televise the Thames pageant almost in its entirety, it was left with the task of making something inherently tedious that lasts for hours as interesting as it possibly could. This it did by not focusing wholly on the sight of boats slowly making their way along the river, but by occasionally switching to segments presented by the likes of Tess Daly and Fearne Cotton. Asking for it as this perhaps was, the idea that these segments were in any way worse than the interminable shots of the Queen and the rest of the family, equally bored as the rain poured down, is ludicrous. If the BBC hadn't brown nosed enough (and it's worth remembering that the tabloids complained that Peter Sissons wasn't wearing a black tie when he announced the Queen Mother's death) then the press would have screamed just as loudly; as it turns out, if anything the Beeb's been critiqued for being too obsequious, but then it always has been towards the royals. Anyone subsequently claiming that the organisation is dominated by Trots should be forced to watch the BBC's entire output of the last four days, Ludovico technique style.

Doubly ironic is that Monday's concert, widely regarded as the best of a bad lot, was entirely funded and produced by... the Beeb. Then again, it didn't exactly have much to compete with, especially when so many in the face of all evidence declared that the torrential rain on Sunday hadn't dampened the pageant, and if anything improved it. Yes, some really do seem to be back in the old habit of trying to convince themselves that regardless of how bleak everything seems, the reality is that Britain always comes up trumps when the moment arrives. And look at the selfless dedication of the monarch and hangers-on regardless of the unpleasant conditions: they sat there and shivered like everyone else! Hardly anyone dared to suggest that the whole thing would have been a bit shit even if there hadn't been a cloud in the sky; about the closest we got was Simon Jenkins suggesting it would have made sense to postpone it until a clear day, and that some of the rowers, having been on the water for 8 hours, were angry and in distress by the end.

The whole weekend suggested though that if there's one thing the establishment doesn't have, it's sense. You would have imagined for example that there would have been hundreds, if not thousands of people prepared to volunteer to act as stewards for the Sunday, even if they required a crash course to do so. The last thing you thought would have been allowed to happen was for some of the job to be farmed out not just to the private sector, but to firms taking part in the DWP's inaccurately named work programme. Having been burned over those forced to work for their benefits in the likes of Poundland and Tesco, only something on the scale of making a group of the unemployed stand in the rain for 16 hours, having dumped them under London Bridge at 3am without anywhere to sleep, wash or change clothes could reignite the protests over workfare. The juxtaposition of hereditary patronage, unearned wealth and class superiority all being fawned over while this sad crew monitors it for either £2.80 an hour or sweet Fanny Adams, with the empty promise of a job doing the same at the Olympics the only sweetener really couldn't be starker.

Downing Street shoots back that it was a "one-off" and that Close Protection UK has apologised. In truth, they only thing they've said sorry about was dumping them under London Bridge at 3am when they weren't meant to be there until 5; leaving them with nowhere to change and without access to toilets for 24 hours is apparently part of the job, as is then taking them to a camp site in a swampy field. Buckingham Palace has naturally not commented, although the Queen or those who represent her are astute enough to recognise that this was the last thing they would have wanted.

Regardless of whether you support the principle of the monarchy, are indifferent towards it or loathe it with a passion, there was at least the possibility of avoiding the whole thing, or just dipping into it if you felt like it over the past 96 hours. The viewing figures suggest that despite the hype, far fewer were interested this year than they were for the wedding 12 months previous. There might have been 3,500 street parties, but to claim this was a nation united is absurd, or indeed that there has been communion simply isn't true.

What's more, there's no such opportunity for escape when it comes to the aforementioned Olympics, when there's not just four days of it but a whole three weeks, all of which are work days even if it's during the silly season. London is essentially going to be shut down for the duration, and MI5 and friends are already hyping up the supposed terrorist threat, as though there hadn't been an immense target they decided to ignore on Monday night. Even if the cost of the jubilee was far more than the £15m claimed, it's small change when compared to the £9bn spunked on an extended sports day. The only consolation is that at least when it's over, everyone involved goes home. We seem to be stuck, if not with Liz who you can warm to, then her spoilt obnoxious offspring for some time to come.

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6/06/2012 05:44:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, September 26, 2011 

The wonderful world of Melanie Phillips, pt. 769.

Like all right-thinking people, Melanie Phillips is up in arms over the BBC religion website's decision (and it is only their decision) to use CE and BCE instead of AD and BC. As usual, we must bear in mind that dear old Mel is quite happy to appear on the Moral Maze and Question Time at the licence-fee payer's expense, despite the corporation being dedicated to the destruction of the very culture Mel fights to defend, when she then denounces her occasional employer:

One of the most sinister aspects of political correctness is the way in which its edicts purport to be in the interests of minority groups.

This is despite the fact that, very often, they are not promulgated at the behest of minorities at all, but by members of the majority who want to destroy their own culture and who use minorities to camouflage their true intentions.

The latest manifestation stars once again that all-time world champion of political correctness, the BBC. Apparently, it has decided that the terms AD and BC (Anno Domini, or the Year of Our Lord, and Before Christ) must be replaced by the terms Common Era and Before Common Era.

Well, yes. Or it could be down to the fact that using AD and BC on a website dedicated to discussing all religions without passing judgement on them would be rather silly, when there's a perfectly good, relatively neutral system which can be used instead. The BBC's justification isn't worded very well, it must be said, but that's the real reason for doing so.

For as Mel goes on to say:

Well, I am a Jew, so I am presumably a member of this group that must not be alienated.

It so happens, however, that along with many other Jewish people I sometimes use CE and BCE since the terms BC and AD are not appropriate to me.

If the BBC really was dedicated to the destruction of Judeo-Christian culture, it would be looking towards introducing the Hijra (Islamic) calendar, where a year has 354 or (355) days and it's currently 1432. Then it might just be time to worry.

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9/26/2011 09:46:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, November 30, 2010 

Scum-watch: Taking the Fifa line on Panorama.

There's something almost wearingly inevitable about the Sun criticising the BBC for daring to broadcast last night's Panorama on corruption within Fifa, coming as it did only 3 days before the body decides on the host of the 2018 World Cup. After all, this is the same paper that back in March claimed Basil Brush was biased against the Conservatives, in one of its most insane outbursts since the days of the attacks on the "loony left" in the 80s.

As only a paper owned by an Australian-American can be, the Sun is nothing if not cynically patriotic. It doesn't then matter much if our bid never had much of a chance in the first place, the idea that even the possibility of "bringing football home" could be put in jeopardy by an outbreak of investigative journalism is wholly repugnant. At least, this would be the position the paper would take if it could; unfortunately, the Sun's sister the Sunday Times only 6 weeks ago exposed two members of the committee that will decide on which country hosts the tournament as either agreeing to take money in return for a vote or asking for a payment which would influence it.

Not even the Sun could be brazen enough to ignore entirely the actions of their fellow prisoners in Wapping, and so this puts the paper in a rather difficult position. How to criticise the BBC without coming across as completely and utterly hypocritical? Well, it's easy as it happens. Just misrepresent the programme broadcast entirely, as the Sun's article does. Both in the main body of the text and the "explainer" panel it claims that Panorama's accusations were either "re-hashed" or contained "few fresh allegations". While the programme did deal with previously aired claims of corruption within Fifa, Issa Hayatou's name had not been raised before in connection with what is known as the International Sports and Leisure affair. Likewise, while Jack Warner previously donated $1 million to charity after Panorama showed he had sold 2006 World Cup tickets to touts, the claim that he tried to do exactly the same thing again this year, only for the deal to fall through, was new. Both Hayatou and Warner will be among the 23-strong committee voting on the various bids. Worth noting is that through portraying Panorama in such a way, the paper is taking exactly the same line on the programme as Fifa themselves.

The paper's leader doesn't even bother to suggest that Panorama's allegations were a unnecessary dredging up of the past, or even that as the claims don't involve specific accusations of vote buying that they're irrelevant to the bidding process. Instead it just concentrates on the timing (temporary link, leader is quoted in full below):

WELL, that should do our chances of hosting the 2018 World Cup a power of good.

The BBC chose last night of all nights to accuse FIFA members of corruption - as they gathered in Zurich for Thursday's vote.

Don't the Beeb want England to win?

The timing of last night's Panorama TV investigation, targeting the very officials deciding England's fate, seemed calculated to inflict maximum damage on our bid.

Legitimate inquiries earlier by The Sunday Times, a sister paper of The Sun, have already revealed dodgy dealings involving FIFA members, for which two were suspended.

The BBC could have shown its film any time. Why pick the worst possible moment for English football?

Dismayed England bid chiefs fear our prospects could be wrecked.

Is this what we pay our licence fee for?

The reason for the timing is simple, as Tom Giles explains over on the BBC Editors blog. The key information behind the new allegations was only obtained in the last month. As for the argument the Sun appears to be making without actually setting it out, that the BBC should have delayed it until after the vote, if we ignore the risible claim that the corporation has deliberately set out to sabotage the English bid, isn't this exactly the time that such revelations should be made? It might not be exactly earth-shattering to learn that individuals within Fifa may well be corrupt, yet the very fact that those on the body which decides whom to award the tournament to have been alleged to have either taken back-handers or tried to sell tickets on the black market should cast into doubt their ability to make a decision based on the merits of the respective bids. Also of note is how the host country has to enact special legislation for the duration of the tournament, protecting the chosen sponsors, who also have to be given tax exempt status along with Fifa. Then again, seeing as Rupert Murdoch has in the past tried to avoid paying his fair share of tax in this country it's not surprising that his papers make nary a peep about such demands. The public, as the likes of the Sun would normally doubtless protest, have a right to know such details ahead of the decision being made, rather than after it.

In any case, the idea that the Sunday Times investigation, denounced by Fifa's "ethics committee" for sensationalism and twisting the facts has been forgotten because it happened more than 3 days before the bid is made is nonsense. Also worth remembering is the Mail on Sunday's truly unnecessary publication of an indiscreet conversation the then FA chairman had, which involved unprovable claims that the Russians had been bribing referees for the Spanish, who in return would vote for their bid for the 2018 cup. The Mail, strangely, came in for very little actual criticism from its rivals who instead focused on "rescuing" the bid. Dog doesn't always not eat dog in what used to be known as Fleet Street, but what is clear is that the right-wing press always bites the BBC, regardless of how it would never allow such concerns expressed in the Sun's editorial, even patriotic ones, to influence when and what they decide to publish.

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11/30/2010 11:59:00 pm | | | links to this post

Friday, August 27, 2010 

Quotes of the year.

Finally – and this is the mark of true class – if you can, you should insult your audience. Counter-intuitive perhaps, but it always seems to go down well. Remember James last year? He told you that you were the "Addams family of world media". And this being the British TV industry, there were quite a few people in the hall nodding wisely and thinking: "Yes of course, you're so right James, thank you for saying so."

You know, you really shouldn't encourage him. He was so pleased with his attack on the BBC here that a few months later he decided to sink his teeth into another of those sinister forces that lurks in the undergrowth of our national life. Yep, the British Library.

Do you know what they actually do at the British Library? They gather books together and then encourage people to come in and read them for free. The sick bastards. Now they were proposing to put their newspaper archive online and ask some users to pay a small charge. Outrageous.

The British Army? The British Cheese Awards? Who knows where he'll strike next....


And, as for Five, well I don't think I can do better than the Daily Express: "Great new era for British television" was how they greeted Richard Desmond's purchase of the channel. Nice to see a newspaper being positive about TV for a change.

If this is the result when the BBC actually bothers to respond to criticism from the likes of the Murdochs, why on earth don't they do so more often?

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8/27/2010 10:56:00 pm | | | links to this post

Friday, March 19, 2010 

Scum-watch: The anti-Conservative bias of Basil Brush.

Has the BBC done something I haven't noticed to upset the Murdoch stable? I know there doesn't generally need to be a reason for the Sun to attack the corporation, only it seems rather odd to suddenly decide to "investigate" the inherent "bias" that the Beeb has against the Tories, especially when the evidence produced is so completely laughable. In fact, laughable really doesn't do justice to the dossier they've produced to prove that the BBC favours Labour over the Tories: pathetic, hilarious and carpet-chewingly insane only begin to describe the scraping of barrels involved.

This apparently is the best that Tom Newton Dunn and Kevin Schofield could come up with:

BBC News gave disproportionate coverage to the row over Tory donor Lord Ashcroft's tax status;

...

The BBC's Lord Ashcroft coverage alone triggered 104 complaints.

When the row over his "non-dom" status broke three weeks ago it led the Beeb's TV and radio bulletins for up to six days - long after commercial broadcasters dropped it.

But controversy over the similar status of up to eight Labour donors got just a fraction of the coverage.


Taking the Sun's word for it that it did lead broadcasts for up to six days, that doesn't seem "disproportionate" when compared to the coverage not just on other "commercial broadcasters" but to that in newspapers, another prism through which it should be judged. It certainly is however disproportionate when compared to the Sun's coverage of the Ashcroft affair, which to judge by the reports on their website was a complete non-story. There are only three reports dedicated to the revelations concerning Ashcroft's non-dom status, all of which are either favourable or overwhelmingly favourable to the Tories: the first is headlined Tory Lord vows to pay full tax, the second is a report on the spat between Labour and the Tories over non-doms, and the third is on Ashcroft being cleared over the donations to the Tories through his Bearwood Corporate Services company.

Next, and we're already onto hardly the most convincing of evidence:

LABOUR panellists were given more time to speak on flagship political show Question Time;

...

The Sun's analysis showed Labour politicians on Question Time were allowed to speak for a full minute longer than Tory counterparts.

On March 11 ex-Labour minister Caroline Flint got SIX minutes more than Tory Justine Greenings.

And on February 18 Labour veteran Roy Hattersley spoke for nearly three minutes longer than Tory Rory Stewart.


This couldn't possibly be anything to do with the Tory politicians giving shorter answers rather than not being allowed to speak, could it? There's also the minor point that if you're not the first to be called on, the others can rather steal your thunder with their answers, hence there being no point going over the same ground. Also worth keeping in mind is that as Labour are in government the audience often directly ask questions of them, and are sometimes also given an opportunity to respond to a criticism of the government either from a member of the panel or the audience. None of this is evidence of bias, and if the politicians themselves are annoyed with how much time they've been given they can take it up with the producers afterwards, which there has been no indication of them doing, or even during the show if they so wish by complaining to David Dimbleby. Incidentally, there is no such politician as Justine Greenings; there is however a Justine Greening.

A POLL on The One Show ignored issues with Gordon Brown to ask only, Is David Cameron too much of a toff to be PM?

...

A total of 219 viewers complained about The One Show poll, which followed a five-minute piece about Mr Cameron's "posh" upbringing.

Dozens more wrote on the show's blog.

One said: "The BBC should be ashamed of its blatant electioneering."

That would be the One Show which is renowned for its high standard of investigative journalism, would it? For those imagining that this happened recently, it was in fact screened over two months ago, and the BBC said that the piece wasn't good enough at the time. They have since ran in-depth looks at all of the political parties. In any case, why isn't Cameron's background a reasonable topic for discussion? As the New Statesman points out, Cameron hasn't received anywhere near the same amount of scrutiny as Brown.

THE Tory leader was stitched up when footage of him adjusting his hair was sneakily fed to all broadcasters;

...

Last week bosses tried to make Mr Cameron look a laughing stock by putting out footage of him checking his hair in the wind before making a serious statement on Northern Ireland.

Party chiefs complained.

And who was it that initially shot this footage? Why, that would be Sky News, who may themselves have "sneakily fed" it to all broadcasters, or they could have picked it up from YouTube. Sky News we should point out, has absolutely no connection to the Sun whatsoever. They just provide the video on the Sun's website. Oh, and the ultimate parent company of the Sun controls a third of the shares in Sky. Apart from that they're completely separate entities.

Lastly, the real clincher:

THE Basil Brush Show featured a school election with a cheat called Dave wearing a blue rosette.

...

Then last Sunday BBC2's Basil Brush Show featured nasty "Dave" - complete with blue rosette.

He beat nice Rosie, with a purple rosette, by promising free ice cream but was arrested because it was out of date.


No, I'm not making this up. The Sun really is trying to suggest that Basil Brush is biased against the Conservatives. Then again, perhaps it isn't so ridiculous: after all, the Tories have promised to bring back fox hunting. To be serious when perhaps it doesn't deserve it, when you start seeing political bias in a children's programme featuring a puppet fox, it really might be time to start questioning your own sanity. In any case, and because I'm truly sad, I went and looked to see when this episode was made: surprise, surprise, it was first broadcast on the 22nd of October 2004, before the last election, let alone this one. Unless the Sun is suggesting that the writers of Basil Brush are so prescient that months before David Cameron became Conservative party leader they were already out to get him, this really can be dismissed as the mouth-frothing madness that it is. They also got the girl's name wrong: she's Molly, not Rosie.

Away from ludicrous accusations of bias, the paper is still trying to claim that teachers are having to give 4-MMC back to students they confiscate it from:

DEADLY drug meow meow is rife in prisons, warns the Justice Department.

An urgent memo urges governors to stop inmates getting hold of it.

Yet while the Government protects convicts, it won't save schoolchildren. Teachers must return confiscated meow meow to pupils even though it may kill them.


Just in case you didn't take my own word for it, some actual journalists as opposed to scaremongering tabloid hacks bothered to ask both teachers and police what their real approach to 4-MMC is:

Despite national reports claiming teachers would be forced to hand back seized packets of mephedrone at the final bell, Plymouth police and the vice-chair of the Association of Secondary Head Teachers in Plymouth, Andy Birkett, have insisted it will not happen here.

"We already have effective policies to deal with substances found in schools; if we're in any doubt we ask the expert's opinion," said Mr Birkett.

"The police have always advised us that if we don't know what we've seized, regardless of what the child tells us, then call the police. We seek to put the child's safety and the safety of the school first and will hand over such items to police.

"As far as we're concerned, nothing has changed. We'll deal with this drug in the same way we always have."

Drug liaison officer Det Con Stuart Payne said: "The advice we have given schools is if they seize a suspected item, then they can give it to us to deal with.

"The school may wish to deal with the matter in-house or they may wish to tell us who it came from. People should note that current force policy is that those found in possession of the suspect powder will be arrested.

"It should be remembered that samples of mephedrone we have already seized have been mixed with controlled drugs, including cocaine and amphetamine, or legal drugs such as benzocaine, which is used by dentists. It emphasises that you don't know what you're taking."

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3/19/2010 09:53:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, March 02, 2010 

Putting quality last.

There really is no institution quite like the British Broadcasting Corporation. Here is, as polls attest, one of the most trusted and liked large organisations in the country, which you would imagine should exude confidence as a result; instead, it presents itself as troubled and insecure, prone to self-flagellation at the slightest criticism, and unable to defend itself anywhere near adequately when attacked. It should be able to approach its strategy review, which has been effectively forced upon it both by the Conservatives, who have made no secret of their plans should they be elected to cut the corporation, and by the "opposition" as it were, led by the egregious James Murdoch, from a position of strength; instead it seems almost panicked, clutching at what it thinks it can throw to the pack of dogs pursuing it without causing a backlash amongst its supporters.

When I suggested that the recent report by Policy Exchange was a step by step guide on how to emasculate the BBC without mentioning the dreaded M name, I wasn't expecting that the BBC themselves would take a look at it and decide that much of it was worth stealing. In reality, the two reviews have likely ran side by side, but it's still difficult not to think there might have been some last minute changes after the PE report came out, such is the similarity in some of what they propose. While PE didn't recommend the most eye-catching cuts which the BBC's strategy review has outlined, the closure of the 6 Music and Asian Network radio stations, much of the rest is almost a carbon copy. The strategy review intends to cap spending on sport rights, slash it on foreign imports, close Switch and Blast! and cut back extremely heavily on web content, all recommended by Mark Oliver.

All of this is quite clearly, as alluded to above, a pre-emptive attempt at out manoeuvring the BBC's enemies before they have a chance of actually suggesting, let alone implementing their own ideas on how the corporation should be cut. Yet while it's a half-hearted effort, it's also one which suggests the BBC simply doesn't understand why the likes of 6 Music and Asian Network have found their own niche and why their closure is likely to be so vigorously opposed: it's because they offer something so radically different and which no commercial rival has the resources or nous to deliver. On the face of it 6 Music is ostensibly an indie music station, but it goes far beyond that through the relationship it cultivates with its listeners, and through the genuine love of music which the vast majority of the presenters on it have and want to share. Asian Network, even if its audience has been declining, offers a voice to those who otherwise find it difficult to make themselves heard, even if it can be seen as self-defeating through the ghettoising of the content. Plainly, the BBC thinks it can do away with both mainly because middle Britain is interested in neither, and only cares about Radio 2 and Radio 4, a sacrifice which it can justify to itself easily. Some cynics are suggesting that it's chosen 6 Music and Asian Network specifically because it knows that they have such a dedicated following that the uproar at their disappearance will ensure the BBC Trust intervenes, and while it's difficult to dismiss entirely, the other parts of the report are just as apparently ignorant of why it remains popular.

Why else would the BBC so bizarrely ignore BBC3 when it was considering what could be cut? Here's a station that costs a staggering £115m a year and which has in its years of broadcast created at best 5 programmes which have been either critical or commercial successes, the latest of which is Being Human. The BBC openly admits that Channel 4 has been better than them at reaching the 16-25 market, hence the closure of Switch and Blast, so why not chuck the execrable BBC3 on the bonfire as well? It does nothing which BBC2 or BBC4 couldn't commission instead, and would be a statement of intent which would reverberate far beyond the shutting of 6 Music and the Asian Network. Extend it further and you could also justify the privatising of Radio 1 or/and the closure of 1Xtra. 1Xtra looks an especially expensive and slow to react indulgence when compared to say, the vibrancy with which the pirate stations in London, Rinse FM especially, have all while under the threat of raids and imminent closure. This would still leave the BBC able to target the 16-35 demographic which the PE report wanted the BBC to leave to others, but with a respectable budget and without patronising them on their "own" stations, as it has done for years with the utterly crass comedies BBC3 has mostly offered.

Along with the emasculation of BBC4, with the removal of "entertainment" and comedy, which presumably means Charlie Brooker is out of a job unless a home is found for him on BBC2, the whole report is the BBC retreating to what it thinks it's good at it and what it thinks others think it's good at. It seems to be a report which falls directly into how the BBC is stereotyped abroad: all those worthy costume dramas and as bias free journalism as it's possible to produce without realising that as admired the corporation is for those things, it's also liked because the licence fee means it can do things that others would never imagine doing or could never justify. As much as we love the HD nature documentaries, we'd like some bite and the unusual along with it. This report is likely to be the first step in a retrenchment strategy which leads to the Kelvin MacKenzie and Murdoch-approved final solution of a BBC consisting of BBC1, BBC2 and Radio 4, all thoroughly non-threatening and all as dull as dishwater. Why else, after all, unless you were seeking Murdoch approval, would you leak a draft of the report to the Times, which then savaged it as not going anywhere near far enough? When the BBC stops caring what rivals think about it and becomes comfortable and confident enough to defend itself on its own terms, then the programmes might also reflect that strength and purpose. Until then it seems that death by a thousands cuts is the way of the future.

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3/02/2010 10:42:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, January 14, 2010 

How to destroy the BBC without mentioning Murdoch.

It's been obvious for some time now that the BBC under a Conservative government is going to be facing a vastly different climate to the one that it currently enjoys under a somewhat supportive Labour party. Facing not just the accusations from the usual suspects of an innate liberal bias, but also now the outright fury of the Murdochs for daring to provide a free to use news website, with many certain that the deal between Cameron and Murdoch for his support must involve some kind of emasculation of the BBC once the new Tories gain power, there still hasn't been a set-out policy from how this is going to be achieved. Thankfully, Policy Exchange, the right-wing think-tank with notable links to the few within the Cameron set with an ideological bent has come up with a step-by-step guide on how destroy the BBC by a thousand cuts which doesn't so much as mention Murdoch.

Not that Policy Exchange itself is completely free from Murdoch devotees or those who call him their boss. The trustees of the think-tank include Camilla Cavendish and Alice Thomson, both Times hacks, while Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and who refused to pay the licence fee until Jonathan Ross left the corporation is the chairman of the board. Also a trustee is Rachel Whetstone, whose partner is Steve Hilton, Cameron's director of strategy. Whetstone was also a godparent to the late Ivan Cameron. The report itself is by Mark Oliver, who was director of strategy at the Beeb between 1989 and 1995, during John Birt's much-loved tenure as director-general. Oliver it seems isn't a blue-sky thinker to rival Birt however; his plans are much simpler.

His chief recommendation (PDF) is that the BBC should focus on quality first and reach second. On paper this is a reasonable proposal: the BBC has for too long tried to be all things to all people, although its reason for doing so is that all of the people are of course forced to pay a regressive tax to fund it. Oliver's pointed recommendations on what it shouldn't be doing though give the game away: it shouldn't be spending money on sports rights when the commercial channels do the job just as well when they win the bids. Has Oliver seen ITV's football coverage, one wonders? About the only sport ITV has covered well in recent years was F1, and they decided to not bid for the rights the last time they came up because of the money they'd spent on the FA Cup. The other thing the BBC should stop trying to do is 16-35 coverage, which really drives the point home. The real proposal here is that by stopping catering for the youth audience, the hope is that the young lose the reverence for the BBC which the older demographic continues to have, even if if that has been diluted in recent years. There is a case, as I've argued in the past, for shutting down BBC3 and privatising Radio 1, not to stop catering for the young but because the money spent on both could be better distributed and spent elsewhere. BBC3 in nearly 7 years of broadcasting has produced at most 5 programmes of actual worth, and all of them could have been easily made for and accommodated on BBC2. Radio 1 is just shit, end of story.

Along with Oliver's proposal to end the spending on talent and on overseas programmes which the other channels would bid for, this removes the justification for the keeping of the licence fee right down to the public service credentials - in short, the BBC should do the bare minimum, stay purely highbrow and in doing so, would lose the support which it currently still has across the ages and classes. The first step in this process was clearly the Sachsgate affair, resulting in the stifling layer of compliance which producers now have to go through, and which is discouraging even the slightest amount of risk-taking or programmes which might cause anything approaching offence. If, after Sachsgate, the BBC was allowed to keep its bollocks, just not allowed to use them, then Oliver's proposals would complete the castration.

Oliver's other key recommendations involving the BBC include the abolition of the BBC Trust, which hasn't held the corporation to sufficient account even though it has put its foot down on a number of occasions, while also recommending the "bottom-slicing" of the licence fee, which as the BBC has repeatedly rightly argued, would end the special relationship it has with licence-fee payers, leaving it no longer able to justify itself fully to the public. Finally, a Public Service Content Trust would be set up, another quango to which the BBC would have to justify itself to.

The other two eye-catching proposals which don't involve the BBC are that Channel 4 should be privatised - after all, ITV is a shining example of the benefits of such a move, or the Simon Cowell channel as it is shortly to be renamed. Lastly, ownership and competition constraints should be relaxed in exchange for programme investment commitments, or as it may as well be called, the Murdoch clause. The vision which this report set outs is a media environment in which Murdoch's every wish comes true - allowed to buy ITV and Channel 5, those pesky rules on impartiality dropped, and a BBC reduced to a husk. Whether we should go the whole way and rename the country Murdochland is probably the subject of Policy Exchange's next report.

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1/14/2010 09:21:00 pm | | | links to this post

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