I grew up with the BBC. I’ve watched it for most of my life without having to pay for it. I achieved this by living outside the UK but on the BBC weather map. As the world has become smaller and as the BBC’s weather map has become global I’ve been able to stay tuned in.
On one unforgettable occasion I was rescued from some particularly spartan accommodation in Delhi and found myself 30 minutes later in a nice hotel room with air conditioning, a minibar with scotch and, to my surprise and pleasure, BBC World TV. In the years that followed BBC World TV was increasingly available wherever I traveled and was always a welcome alternative to CNN — the war as entertainment channel. Regrettably, BBC World TV is not available in the UK and BBC News 24 is not a subsitute for it, though much programming is shared.
To really appreciate the BBC, however, you have to travel to the wastelands of television overseas. Returning to the BBC afterwards is a relief. It’s not quite as good as being offered a cold beer and a European newspaper or three when you board a flight after spending some time in a hot country where these are either illegal or unobtainable or both, but it’s close.
Some of this feeling is, of course, familiarity; but not all. Without a doubt, for all its faults, the BBC is one of the finest institutions in public life anywhere. The licence fee is popularly resented but I am only too happy to pay it, and would pay more, cheerfully. Just for David Attenborough. Or John Simpson. And many more. At less than the cost of a daily newspaper the BBC is one of the best bargains going.
Chief among the resenters and begrudgers are the BBC’s competitors who would love to close it down. I confess I have enjoyed chills of pleasure listening to poppy-eyed, purse-lipped begrudgers like the current editor of the Daily Telegraph hissing at the BBC like a toothless snake. They are especially annoyed at the BBC’s ventures into new media. When politicians want to castrate the BBC they just remind us all why it is necessary that they have no such power and why it’s good for them to be cut down to size now and then, whether by the BBC (like this, e.g.) or the older “meja”. Here’s The Times on Tony Blair’s recent whimperings about the “feral media.”
When the BBC annoys me it’s often because it has copied an American innovation I’d have preferred stayed in America.
For example, I detest news programs with alternating talking heads sitting on sofas and finishing each other’s sentences, in between interviewing celebrities and a lot of unprofessional smalltalk about each other’s birthdays, clothes, haircuts, holidays etc.
Alas, BBC Breakfast television is increasingly a sickening facsimile of the worst American television. Thankfully, it hasn’t yet plumbed the depths of inanity and partisanship reached by NBC with Katie Couric wearing an apron and cooking for the boys in the desert (more war as entertainment) nor the levels of narcissistic banality, with accompanying eyerolling and chimpanzee grimaces of Fox and Friends as they diss the bad guys in eye-rak and eye-ran whose names they can’t pronounce.
Imagine my surprise then on reading this in the Sunday Times yesterday. The naughty BBC has decided to smack its own bottom! I agree with the arguments made, though the “Roneo mentality” line is a revealing bit of total outdatedness, and was pleased to see, at the end, the criticism of a recent interview with Bill Gates which truly was sycophantic, as reported.
I was so disgusted with Gates’s blowing off the question of why Microsoft Vista was 100% more expensive in the UK than in the US, and getting away with it, that I wrote to the Department of Trade and Industry requesting an investigation of Microsoft’s monopolistic practices and discriminatory pricing. More about that another time. (I don’t mind paying my Gates Foundation taxes for international development but I object to being ripped off.)
This morning I had to switch off when promised an imminent interview with yet another celebrity who had returned from Africa with a first hand account of hunger and poverty. I was sufficiently annoyed that I wrote to the program:
If you want to do a story on hunger and poverty in Africa could you please interview Africans, reporters based in Africa and staff of non-governmental organizations working on the issues.
PLEASE JUST STOP THIS CELEBRITY NONSENSE. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.
I blame UNICEF and its goodwill ambassadors for this. And I think perhaps it’s time for Bono and Geldof to shut up for a while. For a long time I have supported, even enjoyed their manipulation of politicians and the media. I know that they are driven by a sense of justice, anger and compassion that are partly rooted in Ireland’s folk memory of the potato famine. Most British people are rather more aware of their tax dodging machinations and are cynical and fatigued, as evidenced by this piece in the Sunday Times a while ago
Bono, the people’s moaner
The G8 might be better rechristened the G9, since an inevitable presence at these convocations is the People’s Republic of Bono. Perhaps he should have a seat on the United Nations security council, too.
The incalculably pompous Irish singer in the perpetual wraparound shades was in Heiligendamm “holding private meetings with G8 leaders”. Why was he? What convinced them of the necessity to turn up and listen to his interminable, faux-humble, faux-naive “Oi’m only a rock star, but . . .” schtick?
Why didn’t they tell him to get stuffed, or punch him? Or just do what the rest of us do and ignore him entirely?
His eminence carped at the fact that the world’s richest nations are giving only £30 billion to fight disease in, primarily, Africa. The countries holding out were, he alleged, Italy and Canada: well, good for them.
There is no respite from this man’s megalomania, induced by the mysteriously impressive record sales from his lumpen rock band. One day soon he will announce that he is developing nuclear weapons. Perhaps then he will have at last found what he was looking for.
It remains to be seen how long Gordon Brown will last as Prime Minister. However brief his tenure, it seems likely that he will begin to move political life, in 10 Downing Street at least, away from the culture of celebrity. What chance the BBC can be persuaded to do a little growing up too?
