The plot against the BBC
“If the BBC has often fallen short of its high ideals, one should at least be grateful that it still has them,” says the New Statesman’s Leader this week. After a wave of justified criticism, the BBC has lost the trust of many. But if there is consolation to be drawn from the events of recent weeks, it is that so many expected better from the BBC. We have come to expect failings from successive institutions – parliament, the private press, the police. The BBC, however, retains our trust in its idealism. In this week’s issue, we bring together many voices in defence of the broadcaster, and consider its future.
The editor of the New Statesman, Jason Cowley, writes:
If you were setting up a national broadcaster today you wouldn’t create the BBC in its present form, with its many layers of middle management, labyrinthine processes and structures and its desire to be all things to all people. Yet the BBC remains one of few British institutions . . . admired throughout the world, for its impartiality, the range and quality of its programmes and, in spite of the Newsnight debacle, commitment to truth-telling.
As a senior source at the corporation tells Cowley:
The search for someone to blame is always successful. But the solution to each crisis seems to sow the seeds for the next. So we will probably end up with even more managers, more box ticking, and more compliance ‘to stop this happening again’. I knew something was wrong when the compliance officer became the most powerful person in the building.
Compliance should be left to engineering firms. The BBC needs to restore the culture where producers are given the confidence to produce and editors the confidence to edit. Because that climate was destroyed after Hutton and Brand.
The broadcaster, writer and Labour peer Joan Bakewell puts things into perspective:
Hundreds of hours of [well-researched, responsibly written and overall excellent] programmes pour from the BBC every day. They reach every corner of the country, spread across the world, earn money and reputation . . . and have no commercials! So let’s have a sense of perspective, can we? . . .
Nonetheless wherever broadcasters come together they moan about the BBC. It’s always the same gripe: too many managers . . . Nothing that has happened this week has surprised me. There has always been a paradox at the very top of the BBC.
The head of BBC Television, Roger Mosey, writes about why he promoted George Entwistle, the director general he respected for “his intelligence, his decency and his humour”:
History will judge what George and the BBC could have done better in fighting the firestorm but what I do know is that he’s a good man who shouldn’t be held responsible for the evils of previous decades. And as his colleague and friend in recent days, I know he didn’t deserve the level of national vilification that now seems to be the punishment for anyone who makes mistakes in public office.
In the end, Mosey argues, it is the long-term quality of BBC output that will define the corporation, not its “scandals” and “meltdowns”.
We hold others accountable, so there’s no argument that we should be accountable too. But as a journalistic culture, we should apply ourselves to the difference between what’s serious wrongdoing in the sense of being criminal or wicked – and what’s just a “good” story with fallible human beings at the centre of it.
There’s no question we’ve taken multiple hits as an organisation but you can’t be a BBC boss and not expect periodic crises . . . we know that the BBC’s corporate reputation is destined to have a roller-coaster ride. But the deeper test is what audiences think about our programmes rather than about the corporation itself.
Here there is reason for confidence.
ELSEWHERE IN THE MAGAZINE:
Terry Pratchett: The day he nearly died – and who’s taking over the Discworld
Laurie Penny, who returns to the New Statesman as a contributing editor this week, interviews the comic novelist, campaigner and “professional morbid bastard” Terry Pratchett about his life and work.
Pratchett discloses a near death experience, and also reveals the plan for his daughter Rhianna to “take over the Discworld when I’m gone”. Read exclusive extracts from the story here.
Rafael Behr: George Osborne doesn’t see that voters can love the idea of benefit cuts but end up hating the cutters
In the Politics Column this week, Rafael Behr writes about the Welfare Reform Act – due to be voted in on 21 November. “As a piece of theatre,” Behr writes, “the vote on a statutory instrument filling gaps in the Welfare Reform Act is a non-event.”
Yet this shuffling of regulations into law is momentous for hundreds, possibly thousands of families. It finalises the conditions that mean, after April 2013, they could be evicted from their homes. That is when the “benefits cap” comes into force, limiting the amount any household can receive to £500 per week, £350 for childless singles.
Few households are technically in receipt of benefits above the capped level – about 20,000, mostly in London. None of them feels it as disposable income. The numbers are inflated by housing benefit (already subject to a separate cap), which has run out of control chasing the capital’s exorbitant rents. But outrage at perversities in the current system is greater than attention to the detail of who is affected by coalition policy. That anger has been successfully exploited by Conservatives, painting Labour as the party for handing public money to wastrels.
While some of the coalition’s welfare policies might be honourably motivated, the function of this particular change is neither budget consolidation nor reform. It is a gesture of pure political positioning by George Osborne that happens as a side effect to turn some of London’s poorest families out of their homes.
“What is the point of me? I don’t really know.” Charlie Brooker interviewed by Helen Lewis
The career of the university drop-out, cartoonist, games reviewer, broadcaster and celebrity satirist Charlie Brooker “has been more a series of drunken lurches than an orderly line”. Helen Lewis talks to Brooker about his most recent pitch-black comedy trilogy, Black Mirror:
Brooker is writing a second series of the show, but I have to ask him: how did it get made in the first place? How do you tell Channel 4 that you want to show the prime minister porking a pig? “That episode was a replacement,” he says. “There’s a script that is as yet unmade, that was bleaker.”
At short notice, he had to pitch to Jay Hunt, Channel 4’s creative officer . . . In the end, Channel 4’s only quibble was whether it had to be a pig. “We went around the houses. We thought about different animals: about frozen supermarket chicken, at one point a big block of cheese. But whatever you tried to substitute for it wasn’t quite the same – like if it’s a sheep, that’s just too comic. I suggested a duck, but that’s again just too weird. A pig is disgusting enough.
Ed Smith: King of the spinners
In our lead book review this week, the former Test cricketer and now NS columnist Ed Smith reviews Gideon Haigh’s biography of Shane Warne. “Facing Shane Warne was only incidentally about cricket,” Smith writes. “Sport was the medium but the substance was drama.”
Warne’s cultivation of a distinctive and compelling on-field persona, Smith suggests, was not without its costs:
In seeking mastery of an authentic personality on the stage, authenticity in “civilian” life becomes ever more elusive . . . All great actors sacrifice something of themselves in the pursuit of a truthful performance. So do sportsmen. Warne, the great method actor of modern sport, has perhaps paid a higher price than most.
For a review of what’s in The Critics section of the New Statesman this week, have a look at our “In the Critics” feature here.
Purchase a copy of this week’s New Statesman in newsstands today, or online at: www.newstatesman.com/subscribe
Content from our partners
Related
