My advice to the BBC’s new DG

The job of George Entwistle, the new Director General of the BBC, will be to manage a gentle decline, rather than hurtling with great enthusiasm towards a state of inexistence. A very ticklish balance needs to be maintained on the issue of the BBC’s moral cross subsidisation – that is, the extent to which the corporation justifies its &”special” existence by doing intelligent and worthy programming which nobody else does and which pulls in few viewers, and the extent to which it justifies its mass appeal by broadcasting cretinous pap which every other broadcaster can do and which drags in lots of viewers. Good luck with that one. My own view is that the BBC has embraced the mass appeal business with rather too much alacrity of late, and that its overall intelligence and thus claims to uniqueness has suffered. But, at the same time, the BBC needs to avoid becoming a sort of marginalised PBS rump concerned solely with putting out cheap documentaries about how awful Israel is and why everybody in Britain is racist. That may well be how it ends up, one of these days. But not yet, surely. Here are some of my suggestions as to what the new DG should address:

First – Diversity. The BBC is not hideously white, but it is hideously monocultural. Its programme makers of whatever colour or creed display metropolitan liberal bias which is not shared by the majority of its audience. It is not so much a left-wing bias, per se, as a sort of complacent assumption that its own opinions are civilised and decent, and those which contrast with them are not merely wrong and beyond the pale but not even worthy of articulation. The corporation needs, both behind the scenes and in front of the camera, a more diverse range of voices who might challenge all those cosy certainties and liberal shibboleths.