David Dimbleby is right that the BBC is bedevilled by managerialism. He makes an apt comparison with the National Health Service, where his wife, who works in mental health, reports similar horrors. But no one goes on to ask why this is so. It is assumed that the answer is to appoint robust journalists (or, in the case of the NHS, doctors) instead of ‘suits’. Unfortunately, this is not so, dismal though the suits are. The BBC is hopelessly managed because, as George Entwistle himself put it while being waterboarded by John Humphrys on Saturday, ‘The organisation is too big. There is too much journalism going on.’ This is absolutely inevitable if the BBC continues to be an organisation trying to offer all types of broadcasting. And that, in turn, is inevitable, because of the way it is compulsorily funded by almost everyone who owns a television. The BBC, aged 90 this week, is therefore unmanageable. It is also conflicted. It has so many interests that its editor-in-chief is seen to be acting improperly if he intervenes in programmes. Therefore he doesn’t intervene, and therefore he can’t edit. It is as if the editor of a newspaper was not allowed to see the front page until after it had been published. Nothing can change this except break-up, and different methods of funding. The same is true of the NHS. But British people, being sentimental, refuse to see that the fault lies with the nature of the institutions even more than their personnel. And so disaster after disaster ensues.
If we are to talk of personnel, however, I wonder if the BBC will adopt the modern, diversity-oriented, 21st-century solution to all establishment leadership problems, which is to appoint an Etonian. At present, I can think of only one on the staff, nice Bill Turnbull, who appears at breakfast. Time to make the corporation ‘look like modern Britain’.
It is entirely fitting that the BBC crisis should be provoked by the subject of child abuse. Those most ready with child abuse accusations are some of the nastiest people in the world. They exploit our natural disgust at the crime to promote hatred while appearing righteous. File in your mind for future reference the dreadful behaviour of people like the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Sally Bercow, Tom Watson and George Monbiot. Be very suspicious, too, of those who most zealously assaulted the BBC for not running the Newsnight revelations about Jimmy Savile last Christmas. The BBC’s caution erred on the right side. The fact that Savile was a) horrible and b) dead does not automatically mean that hard-to-prove and often anonymous accusations should have been hurriedly published against him. If such caution had been replicated in the ‘McAlpine’ Newsnight on 2 November, the BBC would not now be headless. Tim Davie, the acting director-general, said in his first interview in the role that the BBC’s task should be to look at ‘the terrible accusations of child abuse’ and work out ‘how we support those victims’. He thus repeated the fateful elision which has caused so much grief and injustice — that an accusation, because it is terrible, is necessarily true. It is a disturbing feature of human psychology that people think this way. A friend of mine served on a jury in which a man was tried for child abuse. The only evidence against him, which concerned events decades ago, was the testimony of two brothers who, in his opinion, were unreliable. But he could make no impression on his fellow jurors. They maintained that no one would falsely accuse someone of something so horrible. They found the man guilty. I felt this effect myself when the McAlpine rumours surfaced recently. I have known Alistair McAlpine for 25 years. I have stayed with him in Venice (with my children). I have always liked and admired him. I can scarcely think of anyone who seems less like a child abuser. And yet, such is the power of accusation, I found myself reviewing everything I knew about him, asking myself ‘Could it possibly be…?’ False accusation has an insidious power. When made with malevolent calculation by people with public influence, it is truly wicked.
The best encapsulation of how sexual abuse allegations work on television is to be found in The Simpsons, in a 1994 episode. Homer is accused of molesting the babysitter. In reality, he simply pulled off a piece of candy which had stuck to her bottom. The media assume guilt and soon Homer becomes a hate figure. On a chat-show, a sobbing woman speaks: ‘I don’t know Homer Simpson, I — I never met Homer Simpson, or had any real contact with him, but — I’m sorry, I can’t go on.’ ‘That’s OK,’ says the interviewer, ‘your tears say more than real evidence ever could.’ Newsnight and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism have copied these methods faithfully.
Loyal readers may remember that, a few years ago, I had a run-in with the BBC about my flat in London. I do not have a television there, and I refused to answer the letters from TV Licensing demanding that I prove this fact. After making lots of public complaints, I was left alone, but recently TV Licensing resumed its pursuit. As with a lot of hate mail, its first communications were reasonably civil at first, but then turned nasty. The latest (the sixth) begins, ‘You have not responded to our previous letters. We want to ensure you have information you may need before a hearing is set at your local court.’ Are such implied accusations legal?
How one admires Valerie Eliot’s ferocious protection of her husband for the nearly 50 years that she survived him. The composer Robin Holloway once sought her permission to quote from ‘The Waste Land’ in a work of his own. She refused, because she did not like some of the other words in the composition. The words Holloway wanted to quote were, in full, ‘la la’.
Did you know that the verb ‘to skunkworks’ has now been spotted on the No. 10 website?
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