If anything could turn me into a free-marketeer, fists pounding at the keyboard as my bloviated carcus undulates with rage at the latest offence against common or garden decency, this astonishing piece of intimidation from the BBC could well be the catalyst.
First the Kermodian twaddle. Panning across a cityscape, the camera swoops between high rises and under bridges but something serreptitious and sinister is being imparted. All is not as it would appear, for we are the victims of a visual sleight of hand. This landscape is actually a printed circuit board, where electronic components represent the familiar density of a city centre and regimented rows of microchips are substitued for the spread of suburbia. In this distopian mise en scene (a 2:2 in Film Studies is surely mine for the taking) the metaphor is as stark as the insult to our intelligence is clumsy. Our towns, our streets and our homes are under the aegis of the “database,” from which nobody should attempt to escape, lest they wish to hear the dreaded knock at the door, of which we are reminded at the end of the film.
If I were to awake from uneasy dreams to find myself transformed into the insect I described above, I may well issue that moth-eaten cri de coeur so beloved of my fellow travellers, and as no other metaphor will suffice, I must employ here. This is rather nannyish, is it not? Hitching itself onto the current zeitgeist for hectoring us for that we which haven’t done and had no intention of doing in the first place, we are assumed to be guilty and admonished accordingly. Such blandishments are nothing new on the BBC, which these days rarely passes on an opportunity for self-aggrandisement and cross-promotion and never ceases to hotly tell us what “the BBC has learned” when they’re parroting the same line as every other news outlet.
You must not assume that I would wish to see the BBC privatised, nor do I propose here to enjoin with those laptop libertarians who never cease to inform us how we’re in the grip of a liberal conspiracy. Despite all of my misgivings enough fondness for Auntie remains for me to still hope, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that it will recover and thrive in the face of increasing competition.
Whenever I am asked if I caught a particular programme the night previously, for the sake of brevity I often respond that I do not own a television. This is untrue. A portable resides under the bed and occasionally, should the desire take me, it is given temporary berth whereupon it almost never fails to raise the blood pressure, as it did last Thursday evening when it delivered to me the juvenile witterings of Jeremy Vine and the terrifying blank-eyed stare of a second generation Miliband unit. For this I am reconciled to paying the licence fee and pathetically, to be bullied whilst doing so, having no option other than metamorphing into a bug.
