The BBC has all the ingredients to be a Conservative treat
I have a small bone to pick with Nadiya Hussain. Before she was crowned on Wednesday in front of 14 million viewers, the Begum of Bakery had claimed that she first ventured into the land of sponge and pie because desserts had no place at the table of her family’s Bangladeshi culture.
I almost choked, recalling meal after meal during which I risked an artery-clogged demise as rasgulla, sandesh, darbesh, mishti doi and even ladikanis – named for a governor-general’s wife, Lady Canning, who loved to scoff them – bombarded my palate in deadly little grenades of curd cheese, sugar, almonds, spice and cream. True, that was in Calcutta, but Bengal as a whole boasts one of the world’s greatest confectionery traditions. Surely Partition could not have dissolved it overnight. A few enquiries reassured me that sweets still thrive east of Bengal’s borderline. Dhaka has a version of sandesh called pranhara – in Bengali, “heart-stealer”.
With Nadiya Hussain, the BBC has found a world-class heart-stealer of its own. Call it serendipity, or maybe conspiracy, but just as the window for responses closed on the Government’s unfriendly Green Paper on the corporation’s future, the BBC pre-emptively fired a lip-smacking missile at its foes. The Leeds housewife has, through her ratings-topping
victory in the Great British Bake Off, confirmed that a televisual feast of fatty treats can, albeit momentarily, make the people set like a perfectly timed pudding. Nation shall speak grease unto nation. As whispers from high places threaten the ideal of a “universal” BBC, Auntie fights back with every cosy weapon in her One Nation armoury.
On one flank advances Hussain’s Great British lemon-drizzle wedding cake, draped in Union flag sari cloth; on the other, the domesticated glitz and kitsch of Strictly Come
Dancing sashays into battle. Just now, these two homely flagships still steam ahead of any commercial vessel. The latest batch of statistics indicates that BBC1 reaches 45 million people over a week, ITV 37 million, BBC2 31 million and Sky One – the most-watched of Rupert Murdoch’s challenger channels – eight million. If the people voted with remotes, then Auntie would be safe.
At this week’s conference, one wing of the Conservative Party, led by the Prime Minister, sought to reclaim the “common ground” of national life. Another wing yearns and plans for the BBC to vacate that terrain. It wants the corporation to surrender the licence fee either via year-on-year attrition or at one fell swoop, and withdraw into niche-market marginality. With its Royal Charter due for renewal in 2016, the national broadcaster has shown that it will fight to the last scone and the final sequin to stay out of this “market failure” ghetto.
The reality show of Charter Renewal has hardly got beyond its first elimination rounds. Professor Jean Seaton, the official historian of the BBC and the supreme Kremlinologist of Broadcasting House, tells me that “everything is still to play for”, with “the shape and scope of the BBC... still very much in contention”. With the gate for Green Paper submissions due to clang shut late on Thursday, the BBC obeyed the old showbiz rule of “make ’em wait”.
It held fire until Thursday before delivering a 103-page plea for wide horizons and “distinctive, not distinct” programming. This broadbrush apologia stretches from the “basic human right” to information to the percentage of upand-coming bands on Radio 1, under a brand banner that designates the BBC as “Britain’s creative partner”.
Perhaps the corporation should have narrowed its field of fire. Conservative voters, it turns out, value BBC programmes more than other parts of the electorate. The defence of a “Big Beeb” might profitably start from the idea that it remains the most robust and beloved of small-C conservative institutions.
On a level deeper than the daily clamour of politics, with its automatic squawks about bias to the left or right, the BBC pursues a nation-building and nation-boosting mission that dates back to Lord Reith and his granitic pieties. Oddly, it’s this conscious agenda of consensus, solidarity and shared experience that often attracts the bleats of outrage about “political correctness”. When you endeavour, however modestly, to show a nation as it is, you will discomfort those who preferred it as it used to be. In its frequently cack-handed and blundering fashion (many insiders treat the navelgazing satire W1A as little more than a webcam feed from their workplace), the BBC chases “diversity” and inclusiveness as a route to peace and harmony, not change and upheaval.
Media historian Jean Seaton reflects: “The entire nation was gripped by the Great Brit
ish Bake Off. It created a wonderfully positive, enjoyably sunny, emotionally binding picture of Britain in a tent.” That approach, she suggests, unifies a multicultural nation better than flawed counter-extremism strategies such as Prevent. The BBC has a unique capacity “to create spaces in which we can come together with a sort of joyous ridiculousness”. Government, meanwhile, ought to strengthen the projection at home and abroad of liberal freedoms in an age of online fanaticism: “This is about the battlefield inside people’s heads. If this was the Cold War, we wouldn’t be faffing around.”
With church and army enfeebled, parliament and press disparaged, the BBC joins the NHS and the monarchy in an ill-assorted trio of British institutions that still command majority respect.
Yet the BBC can trace its origins only to 1922; the NHS to 1948. Even in this past-obsessed nation, the collective ties that bind can take root pretty fast. In one light, the BBC has already grown into one of the “establishments” that the 18th-century thinker-politician Edmund Burke praised as the foundation of civil order and contentment. For most users (although less so for younger “digital natives”), the BBC retains legitimacy, authority and a pedigree of freedom: Burke’s “liberal descent”.
This week’s Green Paper manifesto defines the corporation both as the partner and the voice of other “great public institutions”. It speaks in Burkean tones. Yet the BBC also displays the failings typical of such a body: a drift into unaccountable hierarchies; a tendency to close ranks against reform; an itch to expel change-makers. The poor bloody infantry of Broadcasting House distrust, even despise, the bloated “officer class”. Engorged salaries and furtive cover-ups cloud the recent record. Shamefully, the journalists who first blew the whistle on Jimmy Savile’s crimes claimed that they had been sidelined or forced out.
Burke insists that “civil institutions” always need scrutiny and amendment, or else they toxify and ossify. But you rip them up at your community’s peril: “The burthen of proof lies heavily on those who tear to pieces the whole frame and texture of their country.” BBCbreakers, take note.
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke regrets that the coming age of “sophists, economists and calculators” will strip beauty, warmth and pleasure from the public realm: “Nothing is left that engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth.” A conservative case for the big-tent BBC might propose that what it does, precisely, is to “engage the affections on the part of the commonwealth” – from World Service to Proms, Bake Off to Olympics. More radical souls will look sceptically at this role as little more than patriotic propaganda. So be it; just at the moment, they are not the minds that Auntie needs to change.
Burke’s prose glows and rolls even when his politics has failed to stand the test of time. Thanks to a tremendous new anthology of Burke’s work, the nobles and the rebels of the BBC can now read him in depth as they recover between the rounds of the coming Charter war. Not irrelevantly, this collection (from Everyman’s Library) has been edited by Burke’s foremost contemporary disciple: the free-thinking Conservative MP, Jesse Norman. In his introduction, Norman notes that his hero “offers a profound critique of the market fundamentalism now prevalent in Western society”, and treats capitalism as a “spectrum of different models” rather than a “one-size-fits-all ideology”.
As it happens, Norman was elected in June by his fellow MPs to chair the Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport. So he will have not just a ringside seat but even a referee’s role as the Burkean paladins of Broadcasting House tangle with the champions of “market fundamentalism”.
In 1788, Burke spoke on behalf of “the people of India” when he impeached Warren Hastings, the corrupt first governor-general of Bengal. Hastings still has his partisans, who point to his passionate immersion in Indian culture. He would have known and cared much more about Bengali cuisine, sweets and all, than his austere Irish accuser. Still, Burke’s thunderous indictment reminds us that a concern for the subcontinent has stood at the heart of British life for much longer than the modern Conservative Party.
So if the “establishment” of the BBC now celebrates a star baker with a hijab and a smile, it merely keeps faith with tradition. As Burke wrote, “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” Which, surely, must include a hybrid lemon-drizzle cake.
Remember what Edmund Burke said about ‘sophists, economists and calculators’ stripping beauty, warmth and pleasure from the public realm, and be thankful for the BBC