Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Bullets over the Beeb

Expect more infighting and buck-passing from the corporation

Ring, ring, goes the telephone, every hour that God sends. And it’s always some producer from the BBC, ringing me up to ask me on to some programme to stick the boot in to the BBC. Newsnight, The World at One, This Week, BBC Good Morning Biddulph, BBC Top o’The Mornin’ Paddy. It is not enough that they should, like nematode worms which stab themselves to death with their own penises, -simply attack the BBC themselves; they want multitudes of other people to do it, too. ‘Tell me, just how useless is the BBC, and in particular its senior executives? Could they be more useless if they tried?’ This is evidence, if the BBC’s senior managers are to be believed, of the corporation’s honest and open approach to its own affairs.

Yes, up to a point, so it is. That’s in there somewhere, along with schadenfreude at the plight of other bits of the BBC and internecine rivalry, and perhaps also a weird self-flagellating tendency that often grips the corporation, unsure as it is of why it still exists. But also, this openness, this candour, is a measure of the contempt in which the boss class of the BBC are held by the thousands of minions below. Rightly, in many cases, I should add. And so, as this ghastly Savile business unfolds, the little BBC programmes — the fiefdoms, the satrapies of the corporation — have gone for it with an excitation, hyperbole and overkill which almost matches the excitation, hyperbole and overkill of their phone-hacking coverage. Meanwhile, the director-general (at time of writing, check your local bookmaker for odds), George Entwistle, squirms before a House of Commons select committee — appearing not to have been briefed on anything except for maybe his own name — and clings to his decision to allow Panorama to stick the boot into Newsnight (they need little encouragement, by the way) as evidence that the BBC is honest, and its journalism impartial and to be trusted.

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