The BBC should have called Gary Lineker’s bluff
Gary Lineker may, in Jane Austen’s immortal phrase, have ‘delighted us long enough’
Yesterday, it was the directorgeneral of the BBC, Tim Davie, and not Gary Lineker, who had to use the words “apologise” and “sorry”. True, Mr Davie mutters that Lineker will not break editorial guidelines in future, but he has visibly lost his battle on the subject which he had previously made his own – impartiality.
Seen managerially, his decision makes some sense. He had not bargained for a strike by BBC staff. Viewers naturally want their football back fast, and now they will get it. But strategically, his decision is disastrous.
To the question, “Do BBC impartiality rules on using social media apply to famous, rich BBC presenters?”, Mr Davie’s implied answer is “No”. This fracas has raised another question, “Can you control your staff ?” The answer is also “No”.
Outsiders will wonder whether it really had to be this way. Surely the Lineker supporters’ strike was a perfect opportunity for Mr Davie to assert his authority. Like Rupert Murdoch during the famous Wapping dispute over his newspapers in the mid-1980s, he could have let the protesters flounce out and employed high-quality “scab” labour to do their work instead.
The almost year-long Wapping battle ended in the utter defeat of the protesters and the return of newspapers to the economic success my trade had not enjoyed for the previous, strike-ridden quarter of a century. Mr Davie perhaps caught a glimpse of such sunlit uplands for the BBC but has not been brave enough to climb out of the dark valley.
Although Lineker is undoubtedly an effective broadcaster, he has done the job a very long time. He may, in Jane Austen’s immortal phrase, have “delighted us long enough”. The main thing about football is the football itself, and it can be happily watched without Lineker. It may even be that people would prefer the sport to be less intermediated. Match of the Day viewing figures actually rose for last Saturday’s Lineker-free broadcast.
And if new commentary is needed, this country is full of outstanding football experts who would step up and do the job very competently while asking for a tiny fraction of the £1.35million a year that Lineker receives. If you add to the Lineker pay packet the large, though lesser ones of his supporting colleagues, you reach a saving of well over £3million a year if they all stayed out. Mr Davie had the perfect chance to call the bluff of the self-inflated “talent”. He has thrown it away.
His talk of impartiality over the past two years now looks more like a public relations exercise to get politicians off the BBC’S back than a serious restoration of the BBC’S raison d’etre.
If the BBC were preoccupied more with its work than with itself, we might get a higher level of public service. At roughly the same time as the Lineker row came the remarkable story that Saudi Arabia has just reopened diplomatic relations with its sworn foe, Iran, and that this dramatic change had been accomplished by China.
With correspondents covering all three countries, a diplomatic editor, a reporter from Israel and several US staff capable of analysing the defeat for President Biden’s policy which the Saudi turnabout reveals, the BBC is better placed than any other European media outlet to cover all this fully. Instead, the story got perfunctory attention and no added value.
Our village church, where my wife is churchwarden, stands at the bottom of the High Street, a busy A-road. There are few parking spaces for churchgoers. The rest of that section is a double yellow line.
Parking is a problem throughout the village because, 200 yards from the church, is a mainline railway station. On weekdays, those wishing to catch a train without paying the station carpark fee dump their cars up the street and neighbouring lane, sometimes blocking pedestrians and impeding traffic flow. Villagers have complained about this to the council for years, in vain.
And then suddenly, along comes a previously unseen entity – a traffic warden. Good news, you might think. But his chosen day of arrival was last Sunday, a time when parking problems are minimal and the church is in use. The congregation that morning was quite large, so some worshippers had parked on the double yellow lines.
As the congregants emerged from prayer, they found a parking ticket slapped on every offending windscreen – an involuntary second collection of £70 per vehicle, in aid of the council. If that is to be the new weekly tax for churchgoing, we shan’t see them again.
Well, some had indeed broken the law, but the penalty still seemed extraordinarily lacking in Christian charity. The old or infirm really had no choice, since legal parking is too far away to walk.
Could the warden not have worked out that there was a service (the church door being 25 yards from the cars), and warned the rector to ask his flock to take care in future? Could he not have come back on a weekday when there would have been no service, and more serious infringements to punish? Or was it much more fun to screw roughly £700 out of godly octogenarians?
In the Victorian era, Anthony Trollope wrote a great ecclesiastical novel called The Warden. I am contemplating a 21st-century equivalent called The Traffic Warden.