The Incorrigible BBC

As the BBC's lawyers try to find a form of words that will appease the Orange Man Across the Water – to the BBC an embodiment of all that is wrong with the world – and thereby avoid having to pay him extremely hefty damages, I find myself experiencing a strong sense of deja vu. 

This blog was but a few months old when, back in 2008, Radio 2 saw fit to broadcast obscene prank messages left by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross on the answering machine of the elderly actor Andrew Sachs. The Corporation's reaction to the inevitable row managed, as ever, to make a bad situation worse. Here's what I wrote at the time...

'Well, it seems that edgy old BBC has mishandled this one so spectacularly that the story's still making headlines and they've even lost one of these two precious specimens of 'talent' (and, for the time being, have as good as lost the other). This time the old tactic of issuing anodyne statements, setting the bureaucratic mills grinding and waiting for it all to blow over haven't worked. The BBC assumption that the real problem is not with them but with the Public's silly benighted attitudes never fitted the case this time, and they should have dealt with it swiftly and decisively. Yes, I know – 'swiftly and decisively' are words that don't belong in the same sentence, the same world, as BBC management. Now that they've allowed it to blow up into a colossal row, they have predictably drawn their wagons into a circle. Astonishingly (well, it would be if this wasn't the BBC) no senior executive (with one minor exception) has given an interview anywhere in the media. The gaze of the sclerotic, hypertrophied, barely mobile BBC is, as ever, turned inward on itself. The controller of Radio 2 has let it be known that she'll resign if any of her production people are sacked. This can only mean that she thinks the Ross/Brand broadcast was acceptable – in which case it would be better if she did go. We should remind ourselves that what those two did was probably illegal, and the broadcasting of it was certainly a massive editorial misjudgment – and symptomatic, as the scale and duration of this row have demonstrated, of something very wrong with the BBC.'

In 2012, the Corporation made a massive mistake in promoting one George Entwistle to be Director General. He lasted 54 days, creating yet another crisis at the top of the BBC. The night before he departed I happened to catch a documentary about Lord Reith, the effective creator of the BBC...

'... the giant Reith was also a full-blown megalomaniac, who created the BBC in his own  megalomaniac image – and the megalomania survives in the institutional DNA of the Corporation. Having worked for a (mercifully) few years inside the BBC, I  must say that I have never encountered  an organisation with such delusions of grandeur, so unshakably convinced of its manifest destiny and its innate, self-evident superiority, despite all the human evidence to the contrary seated around its meeting tables (which is where most BBC staff seem to spend most of their time). Megalomaniac organisations are fine so long as they are dominated by personalities and talent, however maverick (some newspapers still fit this image), but the BBC has become over the years an organisation so dominated by structures, by faceless management, navel-gazing  and endless bureaucratic procedures that it rewards mediocrity – hence the rise of Entwistle to the top – while stifling originality and creativity. And of course it continues to pat itself on the back – insisting that it is still has the public's 'trust', whatever that means – even as it falls apart. Clearly the BBC is in need of a radical shake-up; incredibly, those who appointed him thought Entwistle, the 'insider's insider', was just the man to do the job. Only the BBC could delude itself on quite such an epic scale.'

That was 13 years ago, but it was only a couple of years back, in December 2023, that the BBC was told a few home truths in a research report it had itself commissioned. Both the charges against the BBC and the Corporation's response almost exactly parallel the recent furore. This is an organisation that is apparently incapable of learning, let alone adjusting its world view to something a little closer to that of the majority of those who pay its licence fee. The trouble is... well, I come to that here –

'Back in May 2021 the BBC board commissioned a survey to monitor its output and ensure that impartiality reigned and a wide range of viewpoints was represented. The results are now in, and show clearly that – and I know you're going to find this hard to believe – the BBC feeds its viewers (and listeners) 'a steady diet of woke bias', with slavery (i.e. Britain's historical role in the triangular trade tout court, nothing else) and issues of gender and race (only one attitude permitted) relentlessly overemphasised and shoehorned into all kinds of programmes. Who knew? And here is the BBC's response: 'Cherry-picking a handful of examples or highlighting genuine mistakes in thousands of hours of output does not constitute analysis and is not a true representation of BBC content. We are proud that our output seeks to represent all audiences and a range of stories and perspectives. Across the entirety of our services there will, of course, be occasions when people disagree with or want to challenge what they have watched or heard and we have well-publicised routes for them to do that.' So that's all right then, nothing to see here. The trouble is, I fear, that the BBC is now so completely imbued with woke bias that it sees its own worldview as simple, middle-of-the-road, non-controversial common sense, therefore those who dissent from it can only be crackpots, fanatics or ignorant deplorables. The result is that it simply cannot see its own bias, and, while it continues to exist in its present form, I don't suppose it ever will.'