Auntie’s lost nation’s love
THE BBC got a new DirectorGeneral this week – can there ever have been a more challenging time for anyone to step into the role?
In a recent poll, the public gave the organisation a massive thumbs down and made it plain that it no longer speaks for us.
The ro rot has set in over a long period, period and Tim Davie, right, will need a mix of shrewdness, po political savvy, determinatio tion and sheer bloodymindedness to navigate the challenges ahead.
I have worked for the BBC on television in roles including b being a stand-in Newsnight present presenter (I was as surprised as you that I wa was ever asked!).
I was also a regular presenter on one of their radio stations and have spent the last 20 years on LBC, a radio station seeking to lure listeners away from the BBC.
A recent poll showed more than half the country no longer had confidence in the BBC to reflect their views or concerns – and it is easy to see why. Having spectacularly misjudged the national mood over immigration, and treating anyone who had entirely valid concerns about it as if they were a knuckle-dragging member of the BNP, the Beeb was always going to get the result of the Brexit vote wrong. This despite having more than 20,000 staff in dozens of bureaus and offices nationwide.
This was a damning indictment of how the corporation is dominated and controlled by a metropolitan elite living in a desperately narrow corridor between north and west London.
Having blundered over Brexit, they missed the Boris phenomenon too as they filled programmes with anyone happy to deride the man who was clearly on his way to a thumping parliamentary majority.
But the story that really eally exposed the state of the BBC BC was the decision to ban the e singing of Land Of Hope
And Glory and Rule, Britannia! from the Last t Night of the Proms – something they have broadcast st for the last 90 years.
The decision was overturned urned last week, but the fact it ever er got out of a planning meeting tells you everything you need to know about how the BBC operates right now.
The reservoir of affection for “Auntie” is being drained fast, and in the face of Netflix and other, better 24-hour news services, the BBC will have to adapt.
Whether it can, and quickly enough, is set to be their defining moment.