When will the BBC get a grip? The corporation which, remember, is funded by licence payers, appears to be strangely overgenerous to its ‘marginalised’ executives with saintly protected characteristics. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT), ethnic minority, disabled and female BBC bosses typically earn more money than their colleagues, statistics buried in the corporation’s annual report have revealed. Senior managers who are LGBT earn salaries 15.6 per cent larger than those who are not, the Daily Telegraph reported – while top bosses from ethnic minority backgrounds earn around 12 per cent more than those who are white.
This questionable generosity with licence fee cash comes after a slew of other recent BBC shockers. Disgraced former star presenter Huw Edwards has failed to return £200,000 he ‘earned’ – or, more correctly, was paid – between his arrest and resignation last year. And last month the BBC covered itself in shame after it emerged that its documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone featured a child narrator who was the son of a Hamas government official.
Meanwhile, though, the Beeb carries on with its day job of churning out more nonsense. The culture section of its news site currently tells us, ‘You probably know American influencer Dylan Mulvaney from her viral social media videos, detailing her (sic) gender transition’ while puffing this gruesome clown’s new book.
What is most depressing, however, is that most people have such low expectations of the BBC that its failures barely generate much of a reaction. We expect these regular outrages, we sigh, we roll our eyes when we are told we’re imagining it all, and then we move on. The BBC promises to learn their lesson and that they’ll never do it again – until the next time. The BBC is, after all, a part of the furniture. We’ve got used to it. In the same way we’d get used to a primed man-trap next to the coffee table, eventually.
Roger Mosey, the BBC’s own former head of television news, has written a good summary of the corporations problems, but perhaps not in the way he realises. In a piece in the Telegraph, he says ‘Loss of talent, a liberal world view and a failure to keep up with competitors are among the BBC’s problems’. But there’s far more to the BBC’s problems than just that.
Nice old chaps like Mosey cannot really see the grievous wrongness of the place; they are, or have been, surrounded by it for too long, in the same way fish have no idea that they are wet. They are immersed in a quiet, warm grey puddle and don’t, after a while, notice it. When your livelihood depends on you not noticing something, believe me, you will not notice it. Or, if you do, you’ll find excuses to offer to the world and to yourself, like a black-eyed wife getting up off the kitchen floor and saying ‘he has many good qualities’.
As a former BBC employee, I did this myself for a good few years. Mosey has helpfully collected the essence of what I used to think about Auntie – ‘It’s only a few bad apples. It’s getting harder to make a distinctive offering. The figures are still good, considering’ – before I came to my senses.
Indeed, what is becoming obvious to everyone, apart from the BBC itself, is that the license fee is untenable. As media technology continues to change, and viewers are offered more and more choice about what to watch, the idea of forking out £169.50 a year for watching live telly becomes impossible to defend.
Broadcast TV may well already be over, to all intents and purposes (and streaming may not be far behind). This is a sobering thought for those of us reared on it and steeped in it, but it must be faced. TV’s demise was tech-led, yes, but it was hastened to its doom by a cultural elite that lost connection to the mass audience, preferring to scold rather than entertain them.
What made this especially frustrating is that the BBC – if it had actually stuck to its guiding principles – should have been our protector during the holiday from reason of the last decade or so, when the rise of grievance-based identity politics unfolded. Instead, the BBC was the worst enabler of this nonsense.
Every crackpot idea, every explosive contradiction, from gender woo woo to two-tier coverage of issues to do with race, was invited in, watered, and encouraged to spread tendrils across the width of the BBC’s output. It was not, at least in Auntie’s eyes, polite to notice or comment on the dizzying demographic change caused by haywire immigration, except to say ‘And a jolly good thing too’. The polite and accommodating nature of the Beeb’s ageing nabobs made them the easiest of marks for every malefactor going, from loopy troublemakers to actual terrorists.
ITV has been as bad, maybe worse. But the BBC was designed to be different, to resist such pressures. It should’ve been insulated against nasty ideologies and crazy, posh-kid fads. Execs could and should have noticed what was going on, and at least attempted to address it. Instead, even the most mainstream shows – Doctors, EastEnders, Waterloo Road, Doctor Who – were coated in this rubbish. It was telling that the huge BBC ratings success last Christmas came courtesy of ancient brands like Wallace & Gromit and Gavin and Stacey, which contained not a drop of this acid.
Nearly seven in ten Brits still get their news mainly from the BBC – and, scarily, they still trust it. Many people rely on the previous good rep of the BBC’s brand, and don’t even know what they’re not being told. I can’t count the times I’ve told people about gender-related outrages and they refuse to believe me; ‘that can’t be true’, they say, ‘it would’ve been on the news’.
These viewers don’t realise that the BBC probably hates them, and effectively bills them for the pleasure. Imagine any other product or service behaving in the way the BBC does. Picture, for instance, if you needed a toilet license to spend a penny. The convenience in question won’t flush and stinks the place out, but you have to stump up for it, because it used to work perfectly fifty years ago.
The BBC’s charter is coming up for renewal fairly soon. It is in no danger. This awful government is its kindred spirit; an irrelevant invention of the early twentieth century. The charter will likely be renewed until 2038.
It remains to be seen whether the country still exists in recognisable form by then. Ironically, the British Broadcasting Corporation might well outlive Britain.
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