Save the rabbits from the predatory BBC

For a while, as a 13-year-old, I was obsessed with rabbits — the consequence of having read Watership Down by Richard Adams. I tried to share my enthusiasm for the book with my parents, but my father told me that he thought the scenario depicted by Adams was ‘improbable’. However, they did consent to take me to that indeterminate, shifting area where the novel is set, with its back legs in Berkshire and its front paws in the last remaining unspoilt quadrant of Hampshire.

We were on the way home from a holiday at some grim Methodist guest house in the West Country and were undoubtedly tired from the drive. But still they followed me around with my map and tried to look excited when I suddenly proclaimed: ‘Look, that’s the combe where Bigwig met the fox!’ And a little further along: ‘I wonder if that’s the site of the Efrafa Warren!’ It was very kind of them to indulge me in this. A year later I was similarly obsessed by Jack Kerouac, but somehow they never got around to taking me to Big Sur.

I’ve just watched the four-part animated series of Watership Down, shown on the BBC, with my daughter. She was slightly more aghast than me to discover that the aforementioned Bigwig was a bruv from the ’hood. And still more repelled by the elevation of a minor female rabbit character into a doughty campaigner for justice, the transgendering of a rabbit called Strawberry, and, most hilariously, the does calling each other ‘sister’ and keening a song of freedom in an orgy of #MeToo victimhood — their importance to the book she too had loved vastly exaggerated for fatuous political reasons.

None of this surprised me terribly, as I have become accustomed to the liberal, white, middle-class BBC bosses shoe-horning their absurd social justice twattery into every single drama production they commission.