A history to be proud of ... so why does the BBC loathe Britain?

ALMOST everything that is wrong with the BBC is contained in an unfunny skit on CBBC, supposedly about Brexit and presented by Nish Kumar, who is said by some observers to be a comedian. Whether this is actually so remains in serious doubt. One recent audience booed him off the stage.

The item has virtually nothing to do with Brexit and is simply an excuse to mock British patriotism. It is aimed at children between six and 12 years old. Many of them might find it too juvenile. But its most witless segment features Queen Victoria, singing a duet with a footman, during which he informs her that tea, sugar and cotton are not British (as she oddly seems to think) and nor is she.

There are, of course, the obligatory heavy-handed mentions of slavery, empire and war, the only things about our past that the BBC is interested in.

First of all, it seems odd that an organisation which claims to be so opposed to xenophobia should make so much of the German origins of the British Royal House of Hanover. Why is it acceptable to sneer at them, when it would mean instant dismissal for anyone at the BBC to sneer in the same way at others for their migrant origins?

And then there is the utter ignorance of our actual history. At the end of the duet, the words ‘British things! There are none, we declare!’ are sung.

This is astoundingly untrue. If freedom under the law is a ‘ thing’, then Britain can certainly claim to have pioneered it, from Magna Carta to jury trial. If the organised study of science is a thing, then the Royal Society, that great nursery of knowledge and inquiry, is the oldest national scientific institution in the world.

The agricultural and industrial revolutions both began here, pioneered by British inventors – a few examples are Jethro Tull’s seed drill; Abraham Darby’s new method of making i r o n ; J a mes Hargr e a ves ’s s pi nni ng j e nny; Edmund Cartwright’s power loom; and Henry Bessemer’s revolutionary steel process. And this is not even to mention the great railway pioneers, among them James Watt and George Stephenson.

In more modern times, countless millions owe their lives to Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin.

Then there is the abolition of slavery – a horror which the programme suggests Queen Victoria knew and cared nothing about. In fact, Caribbean slavery was finally abolished by Britain in 1838, in the second year of her reign. And it was Queen Victoria’s mighty navy that led the fight to stamp out the international slave trade. There are plenty of ‘British things’, for those who are interested.

Why does the BBC seem to loathe this country so much that it cannot even recognise its great and inspiring past? If it carries on in this way, it may find itself left behind by the new independent future that began at last on Friday night, which it did so much to try to prevent.

Three hours? That’s a licence to bore . . .

THE heart sinks at the prospect of a three- hour Bond adventure, part of a worrying and pretentious new fashion for interminable films.

Add in the trailers and the advertisements, and the whole thing will last as long as a flight from London to Moscow. No Time To Die? More like ‘too long to bear’. We British are tough, but even 007 needs to go to the loo sometimes, and we don’t have his trained endurance.