Why the BBC keeps on blundering

The dust is settling on the BBC’s latest crisis over its sloppy editing of a Donald Trump video, but it won’t be long before the next blunder. The reality is that every BBC crisis is epiphenomenal: the anger that periodically flares up against the BBC is rooted in our frustration that it fails to do the impossible and provide cultural order and unity. This is hard to articulate, so we magnify secondary issues like the pay of its top presenters, and perceived bias in the news. In doing so, we ignore the real problem: that the BBC can’t win.

Providing common culture in a diverse nation has never been easy. In its formative decades, the BBC succeeded in pulling off this juggling act. The BBC is not the Church of England, the established church of the nation, issuing moral teachings. But nor is it a neutral mirror of the national culture. For most of its life, it was taken for granted that the BBC espoused the official moral conservatism of the nation, like a secular arm of the national church.

Then the official moral conservatism of the nation crumbled somewhat. So the BBC repositioned itself as less of a guardian of morality, more of a mirror of a morally diverse nation. But people still wanted it to be a fairly conservative provider of common culture. The rise of independent broadcasting underlined this. People could go elsewhere for their news, information and entertainment, and pop music on the radio, but the established provider remained hugely popular. It now had the aura of a bulwark against a complete free market in culture.

This is difficult to reflect on, because we are so used to assuming that cultural freedom is all good. The survival of the BBC shows that this is not the whole story. We want cultural freedom to be balanced by cultural order, or at least a semblance of it – by an official body providing ‘common culture’.

Much of the BBC’s troubles can be blamed on the rise of the international entertainment industry. If a culture has no official source of moral authority, and allows liberal capitalism free rein, it hands huge moral authority to the entertainment industry.

Liberals have evaded this problem: let’s just allow a free market in moral values! Let culture be free to express viewpoint A and also free to express viewpoint B. But culture doesn’t work like that. If it suits the entertainment industry to promote viewpoint A, it acquires an aura of normality, or orthodoxy, and viewpoint B is subtly marginalised as a minority view.

At the risk of donning my Mary Whitehouse wig (again), the key issue is attitudes to casual sex. It suits the entertainment industry to treat casual sex as normal, and as morally neutral, for there is so much dramatic potential in its representation.

A small example. The other night I watched the first half hour of Bridget Jones’ Baby (on BBC1). The eponymous character, turning 43, decided she needed to have more fun, meaning some casual flings. Cue lots of excited approval from her friends, because casual sex is cool and fun. In real life, the film’s audience has a more nuanced view, but it is a sort of conceit that enables a piece of escapist entertainment. We hardly know how to question something so pervasive. Call it sexertainment. This has now leaked out of the realm of fiction: reality TV has its own brand of titillating ‘frankness’.

What about the BBC’s own output? Its recent dating show Stranded on Honeymoon Island was a worrying sign. Fronted by Davina McCall, it set up new couples who lived together in luxury beach huts after mock-weddings, to see if they’d get on. Such a set up subtly marginalises the idea that one should not jump into bed with a stranger, and subtly normalises a more up-for-it view.

Another example is the stand-up show Live at the Apollo: the comedians commonly joke about causal sex as a way of creating a sort of unifying vibe, breaking down stuffy barriers. So what, you may say – that’s just a few voices, and the viewer takes their bawdy humour with a pinch of salt. But the BBC should be a bit more cautious about the accumulated power of such voices to redefine normality.

As some readers will know, I am not a fan of ‘post-liberalism’. But in relation to culture it has a point. Liberals have a naïve idea that a free market in culture will serve society. They fail to confront the entertainment industry’s power to determine values. In the past, the sort of liberals who ran the BBC had some vaguely religious moral conservatism in their blood. We could just about trust them to uphold an idea of common culture.

This is why there is a semi-permanent crisis of trust in the BBC. In the past, it could be trusted to reflect the quiet, vague conservatism of the majority. But it is no longer clear that the BBC understands its traditional function as the morally restrained counterweight to the entertainment industry. We can no longer trust it to shelter us from the cold winds of the international entertainment industry.