BBC in Crisis

Last night the BBC chairman issued the following statement.

Here at the BBC we are beginning to get very concerned about our future. The current moral bankruptcy of the Labour Party could have serious repercussions for us at the BBC, and – quite possibly - at several other media organisations such as the Guardian, Daily Mirror and Independent newspapers.

If the current deepening slide of the Labour Party into its own slough of despond is not halted soon, it could have very serious repercussions for those of us still on the fashionable Left. If the Trendy Left worldview does go out of fashion amongst the chattering classes that make up the core recruitment pool - and social circle - of all of us in these areas of the media, then… I don’t know what we’ll do.

We may – if the worst comes to the worst - have to start admitting that our comfortable received opinions, stock responses to the world and trite hackneyed answers put forward as solutions to every problem or difficulty have been shown to be utter failures when actually tried in reality.

There is also the very real danger that this crisis of the Left could get so severe we may even have to stop sneering at Americans. We may even have to stop deriding the very economic system that gives us our comfortable middle-class existences, and – even- if the worst comes to the worst, we will have to stop fawning over right-on rock stars and movie actors when they desire to use us as the medium for their banal, idealistic pontificating to the world.

A senior BBC News Editor agreed with the Chairman’s analysis, adding:

It could be worse than even the chairman has said. Our reporters, on our several news outlets, will have to begin to question their own assumptions about the nature of the world they are meant to be reporting on, and confront their own inherent biases. They may even have to discard their highly-cherished PC attitudes that perpetuate and exacerbate the very problems they are meant to avoid by creating no-go areas in place of debate and questioning. We may even have to go so far as to examine our routine championing of victim groups that condemn the people who end up classed as such inside a virtual ghetto where everything about them is limited by the rigid definitions of what it means to be in that group. It could all end up completely altering all BBC news output as we now know it, so these are very worrying times indeed.

Senior executives within the BBC’s entertainment departments were also very concerned, with one of them saying:

If it is true that the Left has had it, then we may have to stop commissioning programmes featuring some of our favourite Lefty ‘comedians’. It will be difficult because we have come to depend on them, and their superannuated student politics humour. We’d have to find replacements for people like Mark Steel, Jeremy Hardy, Marcus Brigstocke and all those others that are regurgitated with wearying regularity on radio 4 comedy programmes, such as The Now Show and The News Quiz, but are then flogged even further past their death, post mortem and cremation in TV spin-offs.

I suppose what none of us has seemed to realise is what was anti-establishment, vibrant and new back in the 1960s (our most holy decade and the font of all we believe to be true about the world) is now the establishment worldview and conventional wisdom. What was once edgy and dangerous is now safe and predictable.

Being as the BBC does play an important role, if not the central one it likes to imagine, in the lives of many people in the UK, whatever changes do come from this soul-searching and re-evaluation of all the corporation’s mindset holds dear could have profound consequences for us all.