Divide, rule and placate

I really should get around to reading Lynsey Hanley’s apparently excellent book Estates. If it is anything like her article condeming the BBC it’ll be a joy.

Someone up there decided, some years ago, that most of us were daft but that a few of us were really clever. The clever ones would find the channel for clever people, because they were clever. The daft people would get what they were given and like it, except a couple of times a year when we all got some “event TV” such as Planet Earth. The white people, black people and Asian people would all listen to their own stations and not one for everyone. We would forget that such an idea as making the popular good and the good popular ever existed. It’s as though the BBC has forgotten – along with its reason for existing – just how powerful, and therefore responsible, it still is.

That’s as good a summation of the abject state of the BBC as I’ve read for a while. Johann Hari’s recent skilful dissemination of the age-old complaint that the BBC is biased (Yes, the BBC is biased – to the right, Independent 8th April 2007) and John Harris’s attack on the culture that blithely assumes we’re all affluent (Guardian, October 24th 2006) are also worthy of mention.

If the BBC intends on clearing anything remotely challenging off into specialist enclaves then it ceases to serve any purpose at all and we might as well capitulate to those wish to see it dismantled and privatised. I’m reminded of a Fry & Laurie sketch in which a – presumably Tory – MP is flattered to be recognised by the maître d’, who enthuses about the government’s forthcoming plans to introduce satellite television and the improvement that choice will bring the viewer. He then scuttles off with the silver cutlery before returning to up-end a large box of plastic tea-stirrers onto the table. “There you are, sir. Now you’ve got a choice.”

I once spent a pleasant evening utterly failing to get off with a beautiful young BBC journalist. I was on fertile ground mocking Natasha Kaplinsky but it was when I voiced my concern that often, especially on a station like Five Live, there appeared to be a tendency to give undue time to bar-room sages and blowhards that I scuffed it wide. “The world,” she informed me, “isn’t populated by people with pleasant middle-class opinions like yours.” Which was odd, because I’m not middle-class and therein lies the rub. It seems that BBC assumes that to be working-class is to somehow not be interested in current affairs at any meaningful level. Science is apparently beyond us too and we’ll only watch Panorama if any pretence at serious journalism is removed. Keep it short, keep it fast and keep it shiny like a bauble, lest we wonder off into the nether-regions of satellite and don’t come back.

I’m working-class and I’m proud of it. I live in a northern city that gave the world Jarvis Cocker, Barry Hines, Richard Hawley, Arctic Monkeys, Clock DVA and Cabaret Voltaire. There’s a proud intellectual tradition within the working-class, but it seems the BBC assumes we’re all one more immigration scandal from voting BNP and are so terminally dense we need everything accompanied by an imbecilic graphic, preferably projected onto Mylene Klass’s chest.