The BBC is trapped in its own smug bubble

An incalculable number of trees have been hewn down recently in order to provide paper for people writing lengthy, largely admiring books about the BBC. There have been at least five since Charlotte Higgins’s eloquent but slightly eccentric study This New Noise in 2018, including The War Against the BBC by Patrick Barwise and Peter York and The BBC: Myth of a Public Service by Tom Mills. I suppose it would be both cruel and facile to suggest that ending the licence fee might turn out to be the UK’s greatest contribution to reducing global warming.

David Hendy’s offering is subtitled ‘A People’s History’, but I have no idea what that means exactly. Luckily for Hendy, it was published in the week that the government announced a freezing of the licence fee, together with some vaguely baleful threats about what might happen to this anachronistic tax a few years down the line — thus placing the BBC once again at the centre of the national political debate.

That the government is motivated by an animus against the corporation is without doubt. That the said animus is at least partly justified, and shared by much of the population, is less a matter of contention than would have been the case even ten years ago. Hendy’s book might, then, be an epitaph — a fitting one, too, seeing that the author is as incapable of discerning a left-liberal bias in the BBC’s output as are the employees of that benighted institution, despite study after study and report after report which surely prove the case. That, in the end, is the BBC’s big problem — a lack of self-awareness which verges on arrogance.

It is Hendy’s problem, too. This is a lucid, well-researched, middlebrow account of the corporation’s history; but it is largely devoid of any new insight into what foreigners (we keep being told) consider our country’s greatest asset.