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?
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.