Michael Cole
As now even Laura Kuenssberg has a cameo in TV’s Bodyguard ...
ON A lunchtime BBC News bulletin last week, anchor Kate Silverton introduced a pre-recorded report on the new series of the everpopular Strictly Come Dancing.
the segment featured Ms Silverton herself being interviewed about her participation in the ballroom dancing show.
When it was over, and before the bulletin resumed, she joked: ‘Who was that woman in the red dress? I don’t know . . .’ She looked both coy and modest — and it was utterly excruciating. I felt embarrassed for her.
this is not what a principal news presenter should be doing. there are limits and they are crossed at the peril of the presenter and the BBC.
to take another — and certainly more egregious — example, I fear that our national broadcaster is playing with fire by mixing fact with fiction in its current hit drama series Bodyguard.
In the three episodes broadcast so far, spurious authenticity has been added to the story of terrorism in Britain by using the voices and faces of well-known BBC reporters and presenters whom the public associate with serious stories in the real world.
they have included (confirmed by the credits) those stalwarts of Radio 4’s today programme — arguably the BBC’s premier current affairs show — John Humphrys, Nick Robinson, Justin Webb, Mishal Husain and Martha Kearney.
Last night, in the third instalment, the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg also made a fleeting appearance, while news anchor Sophie Raworth had a cameo role.
Frank Gardner, the BBC’s reallife security correspondent, featured prominently in episode one, reporting on a frightening portrayal of an attempt by terrorists to blow up a London-bound passenger train.
Butthe star turn has been the BBC’s former political editor-turnedpresenter Andrew Marr, interviewing the fictional Home Secretary Julia Montague, played by actress Keeley Hawes.
Marr does not act very well and it’s obvious he is voicing a script but, to my mind, this only serves to undermine his authority in his real job, which is holding real politicians to account on Sunday mornings on the same studio set that the BBC stupidly allowed to be used in order to lend verisimilitude to Bodyguard. Marr has attempted, in the Guardian, to defend his role, claiming that he’d agreed to ‘act’ as himself because he was ‘starstruck’ at the prospect of meeting Hawes and ‘fascinated’ by the drama’s writer, Jed Mercurio.
the latter was, said Marr, a ‘ standout talent’ in modern British television.
Which is undoubtedly true, but it distracts from the real issue here: that both Marr and his BBC colleagues were wrong to take part in the drama.
It represents a serious misjudgment across the board.
For 63 years, BBC News has been working to build and maintain its credentials as a news provider, to Britain and the world. And it has succeeded brilliantly. In times of national crisis, twice as many people turn to the BBC over ItV News, while internationally it has a deserved reputation for factual, trustworthy information.
But this latest trend for playing with truth and make-believe is potentially fatal to our trust in public service broadcasting — which is what the BBC is for — in an age of ‘fake news’ and at a time when the organisation has never faced greater pressure from competing news providers.
It is indisputable that Bodyguard is trying its hardest to make the terrorist violence look as real as possible, and it is pulling it off. Some scenes would blend perfectly with real news coverage of recent murderous outrages in Britain.
But that is precisely why it is so dangerous to mix fact and fiction in this way.
If there was anyone left at the top of BBC News and Current Affairs with the experience and judgment required on such sensitive issues as this, then I believe he or she would have immediately vetoed the participation of its leading presenters and reporters. that is what would have happened in the past when we had seasoned journalists who really understood news values — men and women familiar with the old journalistic adage that ‘facts are sacred’ — running the BBC.
ASIt is, the next time that viewers see blood and mayhem, speeding vehicles and screaming bystanders, they would be entitled to ask themselves: is this really happening or is it another BBC drama series? Even for a split- second, this would be highly undesirable.
this is not fanciful. trusted names and voices are essential to the credibility of any broadcasting organisation — when it is our ‘national broadcaster’, recognised as such worldwide, it is even more important.
Bodyguard doesn’t need real BBC reporters to be convincing.
Mercurio, who also penned the acclaimed BBC drama Line Of Duty, has enough ideas to hold the viewers’ attention. the BBC is at serious risk of throwing away its credibility for very little.
Why put a hard-won reputation for truth in jeopardy? For what? Dramatic effect?
As someone who was proud to be a BBC reporter for more than 20 years, I deplore this attitude.
News is news. Entertainment is entertainment. And BBC News has never been in the business of combining both — as ‘infotainment’ — as it is now doing in Bodyguard.
It used to have very strict rules about what its news people did, or did not do, when they were not on the screen being ‘the face of the BBC’ — and there were very good reasons for it.
the familiarity with the Corporation’s famous faces and voices is the essence of the relationship between it and the audience. Its importance cannot be exaggerated.
Before World War II, BBC newsreaders were anonymous. When fighting began, the BBC changed its policy to allow newsreaders such as Alvar Lidell and John Snagge to introduce themselves at the beginning of news bulletins.
the value of this was soon understood. the listeners’ familiarity with their names and voices was the guarantee that they were not listening to German propaganda. Here was the BBC, broadcasting from London and still free to report the facts.
When journalists including Wynford Vaughan-thomas and Richard Dimbleby reported from the D-Day beaches or the liberated concentration camp at BergenBelsen, listeners knew those voices and knew it was the truth, however grim and however hard it was to comprehend on occasion.
If reporters want to be entertainers, they should be allowed to. It’s mixing the two that is wrong. Which brings us back to Kate Silverton.
In 1980, I was a producer on the
first Children In Need fundraising show on BBC1, presented by Terry Wogan and Sue Lawley.
A viewer rang in offering a large sum of money for the charity if Sue would get up from behind her desk to show off her legs. She refused. And quite right, too. She also refused to wear a plastic nose while reading the Six O’Clock News on the first Red Nose Day (for Comic Relief) in 1988.
She was right then, too — even if it meant enduring snide comments from people who ought to have known better that she was a spoilsport.
When John Sergeant — a veteran political reporter for both the BBC and ITN — went on Strictly Come Dancing in 2008, it was after he’d retired from daily journalism.
And when actor Tom Cruise personally appealed to the late Bob Friend, of Sky News, to play a newsreader in the first Mission: Impossible film, Bob told me he’d only agreed because it paid well and he was coming to the end of his journalism career.
What has been happening in Bodyguard — with leading broadcasters taking part in drama — would not be allowed in the U.S. The Federal Communications Commission has very strict rules safeguarding the integrity of what appears on American screens as news — and what does not.
This stems from the infamous CBS radio dramatisation of H. G. Wells’s The War Of The Worlds in 1938.
Produced by the prodigiously gifted Orson Welles, the dramatic story of a Martian invasion of Earth was presented as an extended news broadcast from real locations in America.
Some listeners believed it absolutely and many fled from their homes in panic. It took days before the shame-faced CBS convinced America that it was just a fiction.
At first, it relished the success — but then regretted the notoriety.
The BBC should take note. It may be enjoying the critical acclaim of Bodyguard and high viewing figures (nearly seven million for the opening episode), but I’d be surprised if, upon reflection, it didn’t realise it has made a serious mistake.