BBC and the Big Society
And so it begins. Another call for the BBC's licence fee to be scrapped, this time from the glorified wanktank of the Adam Smith Institute. (Why they didn't simply dig up Adam Smith's corpse and skullfuck it instead is beyond me - it would have achieved pretty much the same outcome without having to publish so many neoliberal 'papers').
As ever, the Beeb steadfastly covers the story, like a turkey writing a particularly unbiased article about Christmas dinner suggestions. (It's to their credit that they do so, of course, though just for once I'd love them to do a spectacularly partisan article or report sticking two fingers up to the critics.) They'll probably do a Have Your Say on it as well They've even done a Have Your Say on it as well, so that a few chimp-brained fuckknuckles can say "Wurgggh, I hate the BBC, cut everything! I don't like the fact that the BBC is running a forum where I can say that the BBC shouldn't be running a forum" and so on.
Here comes Big Society. Big Society was one of David Cameron's most feeble and hard-t0-sell policies during the election campaign, but like any bad boss who thinks they've had a good idea, he won't let it go. That swimming pool that's closing down? Labour spent too much, you can run it for yourselves if you like, for no money, seeing as you've got nothing better to do. That youth project that's closing down? Labour spent too much, you can run it for yourselves if you like, for no money, seeing as you've got nothing better to do. And so on.
Do it yourselves, or it won't happen at all. Of course, people are very accepting of the need for cuts - that argument appears to have been won, rightly or wrongly - and so an awful lot of them are going to happen, needlessly or not. People seem willing to take the bad medicine in the hope it's going to make them better. Whether it will or not remains to be seen.
And so to the BBC - a state-funded broadcaster who dares to provide programmes, news and things that people like, with a world-class reputation. And which is, therefore, next in the firing line. Of course, the neoliberal Coalition aren't behind this latest report, but no doubt we'll see a trickle over the coming weeks and months. A campaign is being prepared.
It might be too cynical to imagine that this will be not entirely unadjacent to the feverish campaigning for David Cameron conducted by the BBC's commercial rivals during the election. I think it's probably the case that the shock doctrine Coalition don't like the BBC anyway - it smacks of big state and not big society, and therefore it must be shown to be wrong. A successful BBC, or NHS, or anything, means that state funding is capable of being the right solution - this isn't a question of what works and what doesn't. It's a question of blind belief in a particular type of solution - the 'big society' neoliberal solution.
Of course we don't need 'big society' to step in where broadcasting's concerned. I don't think the Tories will close down BBC1 and say that we're more than welcome to have a bash ourselves, if we like, so long as we're prepared to pay for all the programme-making ourselves. But the arguments will begin.
The 6Music and Asian Network debate was just the start, though that was a self-inflicted wound that meant the BBC was itself buying into the 'cuts are inevitable' narrative. But now the whole operation is going to be put under the microscope - not just by the likes of the Adam Smith Institute - although they will of course be the kind of people only to happy to provide the justification and the relevant ammunition - but by the BBC's direct competitors in the media, the people who really have something to gain from their popular and much-loved rivals being broken up, or sold off, or made into a subscription service, or whatever.
The arguments are beginning now, and they're only going to get stronger and louder. If you do like the BBC and don't mind how it's paid for - and I don't remember any political party campaigning very much about this at election time - then you're going to have to get ready to fight for it. Big Society means things like the BBC and its funding method must be seen to be obsolete, outdated, unnecessary... if you disagree, you must be ready to challenge these assumptions.
The first place to go might be that BBC Have Your Say discussion, then. It's already filling up with dozens of commenters who say they don't want the BBC to be funded by anything other than subscription, and they don't even watch the TV anyway. Is that what you think? Maybe it's time you made your voice heard, too.
Winklepedia
Claudia Winkleman's promotion to host Film 2010 isn't the end of the world. It really isn't. It's just a programme about films, not Election Night bloody Special, and you need someone with mainstream appeal, who can do celebrity interviews, and who knows a bit - but not necessarily everything - about the movies.
Jonathan Ross was hardly a deadpan heavyweight, let's not forget. And Barry Norman wasn't AJP Taylor either - but it was his light touch and gentle humour, grumbling away about the England cricket team as an aside during links for example, that made his style watchable, even when the films weren't much cop. So is it really dumbing down to bring in Winkleman? I don't think so.
Today's Mail carries an article by Georgina Littlejohn, which to be fair plays the appointment of Winkleman straight down the line. It mentions that she is to be the first female host of the programme (Joan Bakewell did it back in the 1970s) but it's not written snidely, so you think to yourself, that's fair play; at least this decision isn't going to result in a nasty whiff of lady-bashing. Well you might think that.
But, reader, I made a terrible error of judgement. I looked 'below the line'. I swear there should be a warning that says "Here be dragons" whenever you get to the bottom of an article online. Did you ever read about the 'wisdom of crowds' and think it made sense? Well, I'm here to prove you wrong. A lot of commenters talk about 'dumbing down', which is ironic when you see what they come up with:
A lot of comments are about her appearance (and fringe, more precisely) and you have to wonder: would it all be about that if the new presenter were a man? If it were Kermode would we be having endless conversations about his quiff? I'm not so sure we would.
Again, all about the appearance. And having a go at someone for getting a job just because they have a famous parent, under an article written by Georgina Littlejohn? Hmm.
I like Chris's thinking. "Mariella Frostrup would have been better, but I'm not keen on her". Brilliant. The implication being, of course, that the ultra-PC BBC decided it had to be a woman because of political correctness, or something.
Again, the implication is the female = vacuous and she only got the job because of a famous parent. Same again.
I CRINGE WHEN SHE PRESENT 'STRICTLY' SHOW... thanks for the non-'mindless' comments, Hazel.
Yes, it was the feminist behemoth of Auntie that made her get the job... it must the the only reason. Because what do women know about films or motorcycling? It's not as if they're allowed to do either.
How did that slip through? To be fair there are a handful of these type of comments, but they're in the minority.
It's becoming a familiar theme... she only got the job because of her mother, etc etc. Not so sure that's true really, but that's the theme. A woman presenting a proper job? Must be due to feminism, or PC, or a famous parent... can't be because she's actually good enough!
Not really. She doesn't look like a disembodied hand to me. Do you mean Cousin It? 2/10.
Eh? Eh? Fringe! Scary eyes!
Because she didn't apply for the job?
Yes, women who comment on everything are awful, Jennifer. And what exactly are you doing right now...? Oh, I see. But 'men a dying breed as presnters'? I don't think that's quite the case, is it? Those pesky feminists! Why you'd think 50% of the population was female, or something!
Women don't possess gravitas and shouldn't comment on sport, or films, or anything, according to Peter. That's the kind of attitude lurking beneath a lot of these grumpy attacks on Winkleman. If you ever linger under the idea that we've moved on since the 1970s, these threads bring you back down to earth.
"If the BBC had to go for a female presenter..." - but they didn't. I imagine it wasn't some diversity exercise about ticking boxes; I am pretty sure it was about getting the best presenter for the job, which they thought was Winkleman. Now we can disagree about whether she's any good or not, but can't we do that on her relative merits or otherwise, without assuming she just got the job because she's a woman, or because of her mother, or anything like that?
Apparently not. As ever, the Mail gives you a whiff of something unpleasant, but it's worth reading, because people there are more nakedly obvious about their views than elsewhere. Perhaps a lot of people do think this, but just mask it better.
Filth!
The Express has long been spiralling into self-parody, trying to outdo itself daily with the spittle-flecked outrage, thinly veiled racism and pearl-clutching horror. It's got to the state now where you see a front page like this
and you start thinking to yourself: no, come off it, this can't be real. Even they wouldn't do a story about BBC 'FILTH', would they? But I'm here to tell you it is real. That one less hour in bed hasn't frazzled your brain; this is a real front page of a real national newspaper.
"Children as young as five" is one of those wonderful catch-all tabloid phrases. It's like JUST YARDS FROM A SCHOOL, which gets wheeled out every now and then when talking about paedophiles or any kind of frowned-upon behaviour - since pretty much everywhere in the world is yards from a school (we're just not saying how many yards), it's always true, and always sounds about 110 times more shocking than the reality. If you've dipped into a tabloid recently, chances are you will have read that children AS YOUNG AS FIVE, or six, or seven, or eight - or whichever age sounds simultaneously the most plausible and terrifying - were being 'exposed to mephedrone'. Were they? It doesn't matter! If one five-year-old, once, was in the same room as a packet of meow meow, then that's a five-year-old being exposed to mephedrone. Is it really the same as m-cat parties in the local playgroup? Of course not. It's not about representing the facts; it's about ramping up the fear factor.
How are families being HIT by this BBC 'FILTH', anyway? Is Mark Thompson chucking lumps of donkey shit out of a bucket from the top of Broadcasting House? Well, let's see.
CHILDREN as young as five are watching horrific post-watershed TV scenes of sex and violence at the click of a button.
...
TV regulator, Ofcom, found that three per cent of children from five to seven have internet in their own bedrooms, which they can use to watch the TV-on-demand websites.
It also discovered that only 12 per cent of parents with children aged five to 15 had bothered to set up a PIN or password, and almost 40 per cent of parents had “no idea” the safeguards even existed.
You might say it's a bit of a leap from 'three per cent of children aged five to seven have internet in their own bedrooms' to 'children as young as five are watching a load of old smut and gore'. The password percentage is also a bit misleading because older children are involved. What's the percentage of parents of five to seven-year-olds who have set up a password or PIN? But even then, there's no guarantee that five-year-olds are sitting up in their rooms watching sexually explicit or violent programmes - and you could add that if they've got unrestricted access to the internet with no parental controls, they may well come across a whole lot worse than Wallander on the world wide web.
Oh, didn't I mention? The Express has used angst-ridden Swedish detective series Wallander - which as you know, I'm a big fan of - as an example of the terrible filth that five-year-olds can watch on the BBC iPlayer:
The Sunday Express watched an episode of the adult crime drama Wallander on the BBC iPlayer by simply confirming, with one click, that we were over 16.
The episode showed a jogger in the woods pursued by a hooded man who strangles him. There were also graphic, bloody images of a man’s corpse with cane spears poking through his chest.
Now I'm not a parent, but I don't know if many five-year-olds would think: Ooh, an hour and a half of existential meanderings with Kenneth Branagh: that beats the hell out of Ooglies any day! Who knows. I don't think I'd sit my non-existent kids down and watch it and I doubt they'd thank me if I did (though of course I'd be delighted). It's a hell of a leap to imagine young children would select this kind of programme in the first place and that they'd have the attention span to watch it till the gory bits, if we're to imagine they stumbled across it accidentally out of curiosity; and if they are there just looking for the gory bits, then as I've said, they're going to find a whole lot worse than a man impaled on bamboo canes elsewhere on the web.
Do we really want Auntie to be a nanny, and to step in where parents don't impose controls? Shouldn't it be up to the parents of these children to decide what they watch on TV and online? As the article states, the iPlayer has those controls, should parents wish to exercise them: if they don't, then you can't go around saying "Oh no, look at what these children have access to!" because you have to assume the parents don't really mind, or are very thick. Must we always reduce everything to the level of the very thick? Or should we think: well, these parents have actually had children, which is quite grown up, and social services haven't taken them away yet, so let's give them a chance and assume they know what they're doing, or at the very least that they're doing what they want, and who are we to intervene?
Well no. Of course not, if you're a tabloid and you're trying to manufacture some outrage over the BBC's 'filth'* and assume that the Watershed, far from being a guideline for parents to decide, is there to protect the little ones from themselves and their parents - everything after 9pm could corrupt you, whereas everything before won't! So here comes MediaWatch, who if you're not familiar with them are the Taxpayers Alliance / MigrationWatch of broadcasting, always there with a sharp intake of breath whenever you need them:
“I’m very disturbed by what I was able to access,” said Vivienne Pattison, director of Mediawatch. “I don’t want these shows banned, just access to them restricted. It makes a mockery of the watershed.”
Sigh. But there already is access restricted. Parents can set as many controls as they want on these things; it's just that the default setting is for there to be no controls because most TV viewers aren't young children, and furthermore, not unreasonably the broadcasters might think that it's up to the parents to do this, you know, because they're parents and they should take responsibility for their own children...? No...? No.
If you were wondering where the 'filth' from the headline came from, you should give a hearty round of applause to Labour rentagob Barry Sheerman, who vomited up this, when probed:
Labour MP Barry Sheerman, Chairman of the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee, said: “Our broadcasters who put this sort of filth online should be forced to ensure children are unable to access it.”
Filth? The shows mentioned in the article are Wallander, Live At The Apollo, Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, Being Human and Misfits. None of which I'd regard as 'filth'. (You might say the acting in 'Secret Diary' is pretty atrocious, but apart from that it's not offensive: just a silly bit of very, very softcore stuff.) You could find any MP to make the contrary point, that it's the parents' responsibility to police what their kids watch and have access to, but the Express (or possibly whoever put this story together for them) chose Barry. Because he's just as worried about it as they are, and besides, he used the key word 'filth', which rings a ruddy great bell when it comes to this kind of article.
You have to give the tabloids credit, though; they like to juggle around the bogeymen and keep it fresh. Will it be cancer, or drugs, or immigrants, or TV filth, or the internet? Life at the Express is like a box of chocolates: except with all the centres filled up with a different kind of shit every day.
* There is another element as to why the Express might be so keen to get rid of free-to-air 'filth' (if it did exist) of course. That would mean Express publishers Northern & Shell would have less competition for its premium porn services Television X, Redhot and Gay TV. But I am sure it was just the concern for the little bairns that led to this article being produced.
Bollocks, Bullshitting Cunts
Today's Sun does something remarkable which I didn't think was ever possible: they've made Biased BBC look relatively reasonable and intelligent in comparison with their dribbling inanity about Auntie's horrific pro-Labour bias.
What evidence is there?
...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.
Oh. Well in the face of that evidence, it's a fucking slam dunk then, isn't it? What else:
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.
Or, to put it another way, David Cameron made himself look like a laughing stock by his preening on Sky News, which was picked up by YouTube and eventually ended up on the Beeb. If he hadn't been preening, then there wouldn't have been anything for the sinister state-funded broadcasters to broadcast, would there?
Is this really the kind of anti-BBC campaigning we can expect all the way throughout the election from Murdoch's slobbering pitbulls at the Sun? I hope not. Cameron's hair and Basil Brush evidence of Labourlove from Auntie? Come off it.
And besides, Basil Brush is just worried about the Tories scrapping the ban on hunting.
6Musing
I imagine we're all searching for tortured analogies to try and describe the Beeb's decision to scrap 6Music. Some may liken it to a self-harming emo trying to draw attention to their greater underlying woes by cutting themselves; others may say it's like a navy scuttling their own ships for a tactical advantage.
For me, the dreadful 1978 Where-Eagles-Dare-in-Africa film The Wild Geese* comes to mind. It's obscured and tortured enough for one of my analogies, anyway. I am particularly thinking of the sequence where a hobbling and wounded Richard Harris, realising he won't make it onto the taxiing plane getting the mercenaries out of their fictional African dictatorship, begs friend Richard Burton to machine-gun him to death, to spare him a far worse death at the hands of the angry troops closing in on him.
Mark Thompson is Richard Burton and 6Music is Richard Harris. Far better, goes the logic, to be humanely despatched by your pal than to be torn to pieces by the angry forces who are looming in the distance.
As I said yesterday, there's a bit of a danger in assuming the need for cutbacks, which this pre-emptive strike by Auntie does. Because then people won't only say "Wait, how could you do that to my beloved 6Music?" but also come along with their own shopping lists of cutbacks. There will always be people who don't like a tax-funded broadcaster at all, others - with very loud voices and of course a platform from which to shout - who don't like quality state-funded competition with their own output, and others who just think the decisions are wrong.
What we don't know is how this will pan out, because a lot will depend on what happens at the general election. And we can all argue about the relative merits of the stations involved - as I've said before, personally 6Music never really troubles me at all, and I can't stand George 'Sacrificial' Lamb. But on the other hand, I spent a pleasant morning listening to live cricket on Radio 4 from Bangladesh, and I'd be mightily pissed off if that sort of thing got chucked out of the window. We've all got likes and dislikes; the question is how many likes should be catered for and whose likes trump other people's likes.
But what I do wonder is how much this decision has opened the door to further snipes at what money gets spent where at the BBC. You can actually see that as a positive thing, in some ways, and this decision has engaged with a demographic who might not ordinarily be concerned with BBC spending or writing to the Trust to put across their views. Quite a cost to pay for that, of course, so it's not been done deliberately to achieve this. Whatever the outcome of consultation over this matter, this won't be the end. The BBC has itself sent out the message loud and clear: We're spending too much. They may have picked a couple of things they regard as being more losable than others, but it might not be their choice as to what goes next. First 6Music and Asian Network and a quarter of the website output, and then what...?
The BBC's enemies - the commercial competitors who want bigger profits - aren't going to be content with just a couple of radio stations and a bit of the website going. Not that anyone thought they would be, I suppose. But they might sense an opportunity, ahead of an election, to make it a big issue, particularly if the Conservatives are planning even bigger cuts if they're returned to power.
Sometimes I just wish the BBC would grow a pair and fight hard for the things it believes in rather than bending over backwards and being hand-wringingly fair to critics who are less than fair when it comes to their attacks. But it appears we're not going to get that. It's not just Richard Harris who's going to get machine-gunned in this. There are a whole lot of people on that runway, struggling to get on that plane before it leaves.
/tortured analogy
* It really is a bad film. I mean, bad. It hums. When Roger Moore is one of the more restrained and credible performances in a film, you know there's trouble.
Either/or choices
The either/or* argument is something we'll have to get used to over the next few weeks, as the election rumbles into town - your town, my town, every single crummy town around. You can only have one thing or another. There is no other choice, so this is what you're stuck with.
People use the argument when talking about a finite pot of money from which things must be paid. Why don't we just scrap Trident and use the money to pay for better schools and hospitals? Or, alternatively, why don't we just sack loads of public sector workers and then we can afford lovely tax cuts for the poor hard-working private sector people who are so hard done by in comparison? The trouble is, I think, when you open the door to one of those either/or arguments, you validate the other; and then it's simply a question of whose MPs get over the finishing line first, rather than what's actually best.
I might not like replenishing Trident, for example, but I imagine a lot of the billions of pounds quoted for its installation will come in the form of wages to keep people in gainful employment, often in deprived areas. To argue against it in mere cost terms is a detriment to the genuine counter-arguments in terms of whether it's really needed, whether it's an effective deterrent to the modern threats, and so on. And you might not like public sector workers, but you have to bear in mind that a third of that money quoted for their wages goes straight back in tax and national insurance as well, so arguing against them in pure cost terms isn't the whole story either.
Sometimes it's not so simple to just say you can make a saving by doing something; you have to attack it with a series of arguments beyond cost. A lot of things cost money, and they're good or even reasonable value for money. Just saying you could save X, Y and Z is enough, and it could be harmful to your cause.
The either/or choice is also an argument that people are using when trying to save BBC 6Music and, to a lesser extent, the BBC Asian Network radio station and the BBC website. It's the idea that if you, for example, simply threw Chris Moyles under a bus, or blew up BBC3, you'd have the funds available to keep everything ticking over. You'll have heard a lot of these arguments over the past few days after the news that the radio stations could be scrapped.
This kind of negotiation is a bad idea, I think. Firstly, it is telling the BBC that you don't mind them making cuts - you are simply disagreeing with the cuts they are making. That automatically assumes that there's a need for cuts to be made. If you think there is, then fine, but you need to give business reasons. It's not true, for example, to say that all of the BBC's competitors have suffered throughout the recession - Sky has taken on many more subscribers. So is it really the time when Auntie must cut back operations in order to help her beleaguered commercial rivals? Or is it just that simplistic "It's a recession, the public sector must suffer" attitude that I keep hearing?
Don't get me wrong. The BBC is, I'm pretty sure, an organisation that could do with a bit of trimming here and there, as most big corporations are. A lot of us, in the private and public sector, work in offices where a man walking in with a shotgun and massacring a quarter of the workforce - so long as it was the quarter of the workforce who happened to be the ones who don't do a lot of work - wouldn't make a material difference to output whatsoever. But it's not that kind of either/or, either. It's easy to imagine you could just come in and sack a few people, and that would improve things; but that would assume that (a) management consultants know what they're doing and (b) that the sackings would justify the utterly enormous fees those consultants would command. It's not always the case.
A better argument, I think, and one that is happily being made in this instance, I should add, would be to look at the positive output of Asian Network and 6Music and the BBC website - the things they do that aren't done anywhere else and wouldn't be picked up by commercial rivals. That makes them unique products which should be supported by the licence fee. Sure, you could behead Chris Evans and pay for several journalists, but that's not the point; the point is that you need to be making a case for Chris Evans and the journalists remaining intact. You need to make the case why 6Music and the Asian Network and the quarter of the BBC website under threat are doing things that are brilliant and shiny, and commercially irreplaceable. That's the battleground, not saying that someone somewhere else should get the chop.
Which isn't to say that I listen to 6Music or Asian Network, because I don't, and I do happen to think that Chris Moyles is an abomination who makes me cry through the sheer misery of it all whenever I stray across his radio programme in the morning. But that's not the point. I still think they should exist, and they have a right to exist, and each one is vital. I can't stand BBC3, either, and some of the programmes on it seem to me like they were made as a joke, but then I only have 30 days left before my 35th birthday, and I'm not allowed to watch it after that, anyway. I may think BBC3 is shit, but that doesn't mean I don't think it should exist, if it's doing stuff that other people like. It's not an either/or choice, and it's not about what I like or dislike.
Having said all of which, and I'm going to be really hypocritical now, if the BBC really is going to take a machete to its website, can I make a personal plea. While I think it's been a delightful experiment to allow some of the most noxious arseholes in Britain to have a blank canvas on which to vomit up last night's pease pudding, if you're going to start anywhere, could you please start with BBC Have Your Say? It doesn't serve any purpose other than to make prejudice, kneejerk unpleasantness, xenophobia and the BNP seem more popular than they really are, and I'm fairly sure that wasn't what people had in mind when it was set up. All it's done is made people learn how to be slightly more careful when expressing their racism.
In that instance, I would like there to be an either/or choice, and I would like the choice to be for HYS to be chucked in the bin. Keep all the moderators on in jobs, mind - they have done such sterling service in sieving out the hatefulness that they should be given medals really - but that's the only place where I would really love my licence fee not to be spent on something. Just my own personal prejudice, you understand, and I know that in reality all the great stuff on the BBC website will go, and HYS will remain like a stumpy boil, but I am asking all the same. Go on, BBC, I love you really.
* It's funny, but when I write 'either/or' I use a slash, which, come to think of it, means 'and-or', so in effect I'm saying 'either and or or', which isn't especially beautiful. I think that's when little symbols like slashes can come to your rescue a bit.
Let’s give up BBC bashing for Lent
Perhaps that's what the Telegraph was doing today with what at first glance appears to be a rather amusing parody of an outraged Daily Mail story bashing the BBC. You know, one big bloated blowout of lardy pretend-shock before Ash Wednesday; a carne vale, but saying goodbye to silly stories about the BBC doing something entirely inoffensive, rather than bacon butties. Maybe...? Surely. They can't be serious about this, can they? I mean, they won't be so pearl-clutchingly shocked by the idea of a man taking part in a women's race that they use CAPITAL LETTERS to tell you what position he finished in, will they?
The historic Shrove Tuesday race, which started in 1445, has only ever been open to women over 18 who have lived in the town for more than six months.
But Joel Defries, 24, put on a scarf, apron and blonde wig and came THIRD in the 415 yard race.
Horrors! No! Murder! Help! Waft something under my delicate nose before I faint onto the verandah! Oh come on, this must be a spoof, mustn't it?
Furious residents said it was a disgrace for the BBC to let its male children's TV presenter take part in the competition, which attracted crowds of more than 2,000 people.
Pfffft. A man dressed as a lady tossing a pancake and running at the same time? They should be delighted - it just goes to show that men can multi-task! But apparently not.
A spokesperson for the BBC said: "The Olney pancake race organisers were keen Blue Peter covered the event and Helen Skelton, its female presenter is currently kayaking in the Amazon for Sports Relief, so they gave Joel special dispensation to take part in the race.
"It would not be in the style of Blue Peter to simply film the race, the whole thing about the programme is that the presenters take part."
Forgive me if I'm wrong - we took The Sun in my house when I was growing up - but did the Daily Telegraph really used to get in a tizzy about Noakes, Purves and Singleton carrying out crazy capers? So some chap went and took part in a women's pancake race to give it some nice publicity - is it really the end of the world? Apparently, it is. But still, maybe this is just a bit of tongue-in-cheek daftness from the Tele, and there's no desire to simply get mock-angry at anything the BBC does.
And I managed to write this whole post without using the word 'tosser' once, so I win!
Spotter's badges: @callummay and @gjcsouthsea
BBC discrimination
The BBC discriminate, we're told today in two different stories - but what sort of discrimination is it? If you're Harriet Harman, it's ageist and sexist discrimination against older women; if you're Lynda La Plante, who's an older woman and who could use that very justification if she wanted, it's discrimination against anyone who isn't a young male Muslim.
They could conceivably both be right. Harman's assertion comes from anecdotal evidence - she says she spoke to an unnamed former BBC executive who told her there was prejudice against older female newsreaders. But we don't know how long ago that policy was in place - and as the article itself points out (as you'd imagine it would, given that the BBC are doing the usual sackcloth-and-ashes "Oh look it's a story about how shit we are, we've got to cover it, unlike every other media outlet ever, otherwise people will think we're somehow evil and they'll want to get rid of the licence fee" self-flagellation) some changes have been put in place recently because of previous criticism:
Following the row the corporation announced it would be recruiting more older women presenters.
Veteran newsreader Julia Somerville is due to return to the BBC as a TV news presenter after an absence of of nearly 23 years.
She will join Westminster correspondent Carole Walker, former ITN newsreader Fiona Armstrong and BBC World presenter Zeinab Badawi on the TV news service.
It's not clear in the article whether the 'row' in question is one involving Moira Stewart or Arlene Phillips. Phillips, of course, now has a primetime BBC show almost all to herself now, so you could say she hasn't done badly at the hands of the 'ageists' - although you could also argue that she might not have been first in the queue to host such a programme if there hadn't been such a furore in the first place over her departure from the other show.
The truth is, we don't know. All corporations have slightly opaque hiring and firing procedures, which doesn't necessarily mean they're hotbeds of discrimination. Harman, perhaps, has come to this story a bit late, with possibly outdated information from someone who no longer works fot the BBC, who may well have described to her a prevailing view some time ago. But there's no way of knowing. All you can say is that it's another "BBC ageism" story all over the other media outlets, who always take particular relish in attacking their state-funded rival.
Which brings me to the Mail and Lynda La Plante. It's not just the Mail who have carried the Lynda La Plante "Poor me, a Muslim would probably have more chance of getting a script accepted, wouldn't they, somehow?" story, but their treatment of it is very different from the Independent, for example, who did it this way:
"If my name were Usafi Iqbadal and I was 19, then they'd probably bring me in and talk," the scriptwriter, who has mainly worked for ITV, told The Daily Telegraph.
But Muslim writers hit back, accusing La Plante of "old-style racism" for reinforcing stereotypes. Max Malik, a novelist and playwright, called her comments "divisive, unhelpful and discouraging for young writers". Mr Malik, who won the Muslim Writers' Award two years ago, added: "She's trying to force me and my ilk into a corner. I don't call her a ginger-haired, middle-aged, female writer. That would be insulting."
Sarfraz Manzoor, journalist, broadcaster and author of the memoir Greetings from Bury Park, said Ms La Plante should "get that chip off her shoulder and return to the real world rather than playing the misunderstood victim in the fantasy world in which she is currently residing." He added: "I would love to meet the Muslim writers whose output is currently clogging up the television schedules: can she name any of these mythical individual,s or are her comments simply a headline- grabbing way to yet again bash the BBC and blame Muslims?"
That's one way of covering it, isn't it - getting both sides of the argument. Or you could just put La Plante's views in unchallenged and then carry on with a bit of BBC-bashing to fill up the space. That's what the Mail does, with a series of unconnected attacks on the BBC in the space of the same story:
PD James criticised the BBC over its 'extraordinarily large' salaries for managers.
the BBC has a target that 12.5 per cent of employees should be from ethnic minorities by December 2012.
In October, BBC Director General Mark Thompson admitted that programme-makers tackle Islam differently from Christianity.
comedian Ben Elton, who accused the BBC of being scared to make jokes about Islam
This week Thompson was also given an unexpected drubbing by P.D. James, the 89-year-old crime writer and former BBC governor.
The Conservative peer likened the BBC to a 'large unwieldy ship' and grilled him over the fact that 375 executives at the corporation earn more than £100,000 a year, and 37 of them more than the Prime Minister's salary of £198,000.
What a shame that the Mail didn't have the space to tell its readers where Thompson got given that 'unexpected drubbing' - was it in the privately-owned media? On a commercial channel? On TalkSport perhaps? No, of course not, it was Radio 4. (and hang on a minute, PD James appears to be an older woman - don't tell Harriet Harman!) Hands up who thinks we'll see James Murdoch get crucified on Sky News primetime... anybody... no...?
The Mail have simply re-hashed the Telegraph article, and can't be bothered to find a new angle, since that might require picking up a telephone and speaking to another human being, wasting valuable C&Ving time. Not that that matters to their readers - any mention of positive discrimination, even if it's anecdotal and totally unproven - why didn't La Plante simply submit a script under an assumed Muslim-sounding name to test out her theory? Or would it then mean she'd have nowhere to hide? - brings out the roars of disapproval against the evil Stalinist BBC:
All these anti-Beeb stories are good news for those commercial operations which would like to see them blown out of the water - and for those politicians who would like to dismantle the licence fee. If there are genuine concerns, beyond an anecdotal level, then these of course need to be investigated.
But what would the reaction be if a freelance made a big song and dance about not getting articles submitted to the Telegraph because they're not a hoary old Tory? Or to the Mail because they write accurate stories about immigration? Do you think we'd see their cause valiantly taken up by the rest of the media, with the publications in question happy to report on their own attacks? I think not. Which to me is one good argument for why we need the BBC.
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