My heart sinks just a little at this BBC Girl Power
For the first time, a flagship BBC politics programme will be fronted by three women. Emily Maitlis, Kirsty Wark and Emma Barnett are the all-female presenting team on BBC2’s Newsnight.
‘Boom. Let’s do this,’ Emma said when the news was announced.
This gave the impression the plucky threesome were girding their loinettes for some kind of battle, when the truth is the war has already been won.
In Beeb Central, the Time of Men — the old order of broadcasting patriarchy — is going, going, gone; replaced with furious alacrity by an illustrious regiment of women.
Leading men across all spheres, from showbiz to politics, are falling like kneecapped dominoes.
There is a female Doctor Who and a toothsome female duo presenting Strictly Come Dancing, the Beeb’s most popular light entertainment show. Female DJs have replaced Chris Evans and Simon Mayo on radio 2, while the golden but entitled Age of the Dimblebys is crumbling into dust.
BBC1’s Question Time David has been replaced by Fiona Bruce, while the successor to radio 4’s Any Questions Jonathan has yet to be announced, but the smart money is on A (for Any) Woman — quite possibly Woman’s Hour’s Jane Garvey, or Fi Glover of the station’s The Listening Project.
From now until for ever, it seems every high- profile onscreen appointment will be given to a her, not a him, in this brave new broadcasting She-domain.
My heart should sing at this display of raw female power yet, instead, it sinks. Just a little — a dip, not a plunge. But the trajectory is definitely downwards.
It’s not that I object to the promotion of this trio of talented Newsnight women, each at the top of her game in myriad brilliant ways. No, it’s more that the BBC’s response to accusations of gender imbalance and its protracted gender pay-gap dispute has been so clumsy, so silly and, ironically, so devoid of fairness and equality.
For there is nothing positive about positive discrimination. All these well- meaning attempts to end discrimination simply end up with more discrimination.
At the BBC, a sometimes flawed meritocracy has been replaced by something far, far worse; blunderbuss gender politics in a workplace where white, middle-class males are treated like lepers.
Take Andrew Neil, by far the best political interviewer across the BBC network, who will step down from his BBC1 This Week programme in July — probably in exasperation at being continually shuffled off into a late-night ‘graveyard slot’.
BBC Director of News Fran Unsworth then cheerily said she would axe the show because ‘we couldn’t imagine it’ without Neil.
If she’s such a fan, why has the old bloodsucker been kept in his latenight coffin all these years? NEIL
is still appearing in his lunchtime Politics Live show. Yesterday, he ticked off the voluble remainer MP for Broxtowe, saying: ‘This is not the Anna Soubry Hour. I think you have had more than a fair say.’ Authoritative yet still polite, a firstclass act in a second-class slot.
Elsewhere, a traineeship scheme for radio 1’s Newsbeat is only to take black, Asian, mixed ethnicity or lower socio- economic applicants. This means applications from ambitious middle- class white girls — and particularly boys — would go in the bin. Fair enough, you might think. Perhaps it’s time for men to suffer and understand what it feels like to be marginalised, sidelined and overlooked just because of their sex.
Imagine how Emily Maitlis must have felt on discovering that fellow Newsnight presenter Evan Davis, a broadcaster not fit to clean her overthe-knee boots, was paid a third more for doing the same job.
Clearly there has been a gender pay imbalance at the BBC, just like the one in society. Maybe it is true that, for too long, power and equality were denied to women at the BBC. Yet certain kinds of privilege and bias still have their place.
For Emily, Kirsty and Emma are a certain kind of BBC woman. Shiny of hair and blue of stocking, they are all good middle-class gels who went to posh schools (two of them feepaying), then good universities.
Most importantly, I’ll wager they are all Left-leaning liberals with Guardianista sensibilities running through them. And if any of the trio isn’t a dyed-in-the-cashmere-wool remainer, I’ll join the Brexit Betrayal March myself.
Which suggests BBC bosses are keen on diversification in all its forms, but only in areas where it suits them.
It would be impossible to imagine a right-leaning, Brexit-supporting female broadcaster — Julia HartleyBrewer, for example — even being considered for a Newsnight job.
And when I interviewed Sky TV’s Kay Burley recently, she said that as a working-class girl from Wigan who left school after her o-levels, she ‘didn’t have the right accent or education to work at the BBC’.
Have things changed? In every way, but also in no way whatsoever.
The broadcasting regulator ofcom is reviewing the BBC’s news and current affairs output to ensure it remains relevant and trusted in the capricious, polarised and challenging world of multi-sourced news.
The new Newsnight team will give them much to ponder over. But in the meantime, let me stop you right there, as Emily would say, and ask: is one woman’s equality another man’s injustice?