Thursday, 29 May 2008
Filth
Last night on TV, I caught a very watchable, and surprisingly sympathetic docu-comedy-drama about Mary Whitehouse (a Times piece about it here). What struck me most about it was Hugh Bonneville's portrayal of Sir Hugh Carleton Greene - - in liberal mythology, the urbane guardian of free expression against the legion of small-minded Mrs Grundys - as a smug, foul-mouthed, raging, supremely arrogant monster. . In fact, this drama exposed the adamantine smugness of the BBC mindset - which basically hasn't changed since Greene's time (I've worked in the belly of that beast) - like nothing else I've seen, least of all on the BBC. Did they realise?
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There were many fascists in disguise back in those days of yore, the good old greyscale days, I remember the original Muggeridge + Archbishop hello duckie v Palin + Cleese interview, one of the most pornographic TV programmes ever aired.
ReplyDeleteMuggeridge must have been one of history's biggest hypocrites. I can remember La Whitehouse as just a dotty old broad, fairly harmless. The BBC is, as an entity, histories No 1 hypocrite.
AA.Gill, an alleged TV reviewer, and a person for whom I have very little time, describes them as Tristrams. He seems to be one himself.