BBC needs a ‘woke-up’ call before it’s too late
Will the BBC live to see its 100th birthday in 2022? As its directorgeneral, Tony Hall, steps down, the corporation’s reputation for impartiality is in tatters. It faces huge compensation payments to female broadcasters after unlawfully underpaying them, while foolishly overpaying the likes of Gary Lineker. It has welshed on its deal for viewers over 75, who actually watch the telly, as it desperately pursues young people who don’t.
It must deal with a landslide Conservative Government, which is likely to be in power until the BBC Charter comes up for renewal in 2027. However, of its 22,401 staff, only one is believed to have voted for Boris – Brian who works in Archives in Perivale, but he’s coming up for retirement.
The BBC has a metropolitan, globalist point of view, which prevents it from tuning into the national mood. In December, a Yougov poll found that fewer than half (44 per cent) of Britons trusted BBC journalists to tell the truth, a fall of seven percentage points since October.
Most dangerously of all, it has a Prime Minister who wonders aloud why, with so many excellent subscription channels, the British people should go on paying a compulsory tax for a public-service broadcaster that doesn’t seem to much like the public or their views.
Twenty years ago, when I was employed as a TV critic, there was very little criticism of the BBC. In fact, there was widespread affection for Auntie. Documentaries were generally of a high standard, and drama series did not exist to ram a multicultural agenda down the audience’s throat. For instance, it was not mandatory for every police detective to have an ethnic-minority spouse, regardless of how accurately that reflected the real world.
The BBC of 2020 is obsessed with promoting what Lord Hall calls “our values”. The fact those values so seldom coincide with those of the majority of people who pay their wages seems to be a matter of supreme unconcern. The BBC is only able to show such disdain for its customers because they have paid their money before entering the shop.
That complacency may well prove fatal. Now that they have a choice, customers are choosing to go into another store. I am surprised how many friends say they now listen to LBC instead of Radio 4, but then I switched recently to ITN’S News at Ten.
The number of people giving up their TV licences has soared. Coverage of Brexit alone must have seen hundreds of thousands of viewers switch off. BBC bias was embarrassingly
evident with panels of six people featuring only one Leaver, studio audiences packed with choleric Corbynistas and editors drip-feeding viewers a daily diet of Project Fear.
One morning, a Telegraph colleague found herself waiting in a BBC newsroom before she went into the studio where Anna Soubry was screeching one of her mad, anti-brexit arias. When Soubry finished, staff broke into applause, my astonished colleague reported. I wonder, do you think they will get Huw Edwards to wear a black tie on Brexit Day?
Nowadays, if I start watching a BBC period drama, I am always braced for the ahistorical nonsense with which producers chastise the past for being insufficiently politically correct. Sophisticated US and French dramas don’t insult the viewer as BBC productions do, with their diversity-by-numbers. There is diversity in Spiral, my favourite French detective series, but it occurs perfectly naturally and no one gives a damn if the villains turn out to be immigrants. C’est la vie, eh?
Will a new DG be able to restore public trust in the BBC? My fear is that institutional smuggery runs too deep at New Broadcasting House to admit that change is urgently needed. Old Tories like Wogan and Brucie are gone, and in their place are the Guardianistas who have just been rejected by the country. If you look at an electoral map of Britain, the few small islets of Labour red are where BBC staff live and from which they draw their ideas.
To justify demanding a TV tax from every household, you have to truly speak for the nation, not an elite corner of London. The new DG would do well to ponder what was said about Charles Dickens: “Dickens didn’t just give the people what they wanted. He wanted what the people wanted.”