The BBC’s decision to snub its core audience will only hasten its demise
The other day I helped my mother put out beer for the slugs who’ve been ravaging her seedlings. One by one they clambered into the bowl, drawn to the fatal beverage, and drowned, (one hopes) drunk and happy. As we disposed of the casualties, I was irresistibly reminded of the BBC, whose recent output has left me wondering whether it has a similar death wish.
What else could explain its mindboggling priorities? With extreme tactlessness, the corporation unveiled a £100m diversity scheme to “accelerate on-air inclusion” on the same day that it announced hundreds of job cuts in already depleted regional newsrooms. This encapsulates much of what has gone wrong in BBC decision-making. While claiming a public service remit, it is slashing local coverage – a service often neglected by other broadcasters – while channelling funds towards an area where it already excels. According to a Creative Diversity Network survey, BAME people appear disproportionately on screen compared with UK demographics, making up 23 per cent of contributions while comprising just 14 per cent of the population. The BBC’s editorial priorities seem equally baffling; axing much-loved shows like and (so far at least) halting its flagship political show ostensibly on Covid grounds. While sidelining stars like the peerless Andrew Neil, and his co-host Jo Coburn, one of the BBC’s fairest and most professional presenters, the content prioritised instead speaks volumes.
The No Country for Young Women podcast exemplifies this vapid identitarian drift, the result of a doomed crusade for younger viewers who don’t consume media in the same way as their elders, and are unlikely ever to do so. Last week’s edition featured three millennial contributors advising white women on how to avoid being “Karens” – a pejorative term for apparently bigoted, middleaged, working or lower middle-class women. (Their remedy, for any Karens who missed the memo, was “educate yourself ” “read some books” and “stop being so loud”.) Quite why they would seek to alienate so many potential listeners seems a mystery, though knowing the BBC it won’t be long before Jenni Murray and Jane Garvey are sacked and these three are presenting “Womxn’s Hour”.
The decision by Auntie to anger its core audience by scrapping pensioner perks and pandering to younger demographics with vapid “yoof ” content only compounds the sense of skewed values.
A sense of sanctimony pervades editorialising news and current affairs output, BBC dramas and the smug offerings which now pass for comedy. Newspeak masquerades as impartial coverage on the BBC website, which recently described one of the vehicles detonated by Islamist terrorists during the 7/7 bombings as “the bus that exploded”, as if it had done so spontaneously, and characterised Black Lives Matter protests in which 27 police officers were admitted to hospital as “largely peaceful”.
Such errors are not just dishonest, but amateurish, as though the newsroom were staffed by interns. Tellingly, the BBC was forced to apologise to the conservative commentator Darren Grimes for misrepresenting his YouTube channel’s description, after it emerged it had used an inaccurate article by the LGBT news outlet Pink News as its source. Given the widening disconnect from traditionally minded viewers, the BBC’s directive for staff to state their gender pronouns in email signatures (“Huw Edwards, he/him”) has the air of rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
Is the BBC beyond redemption? Appointing Tim Davie as DirectorGeneral – a conservative numbers man, not a typical programme-making exec – suggests some, at least, in the corporation understand the scale of the problem. But this should be just the start. Recruiting a more balanced political mix is vital. Instead of expanding in genres well-served by existing markets such as podcasts and rolling news, the corporation should stick to areas of genuine comparative advantage like the World Service or regional broadcasting. Ironically, supporting robust local journalism would probably do more to foster the type of diversity the BBC lacks (ideological, regional and class-based) than any number of gimmicky internal audits. The corporation’s London focus has already created a mandarin broadcasting clique that tends to play to its peers, rather than to the rest of the country. The cushion of the licence fee, though designed to protect public service journalism, has more often generated complacency and given producers carte blanche to ignore majority opinion.
Insiders may claim that, like the NHS, the BBC still enjoys an iconic place in the national psyche. They forget that, to endure, loyalty and respect must continue to be earned.
‘Scrapping pensioner perks and pandering to younger viewers with vapid “yoof” content only compounds the sense of skewed values’