The BBC - enough, already

BBC Television Centre, White City, London

 

Some days ago I embarked on Ezra Pound's Cantos.  Armed with a commentary, I try and tackle a Canto a day.  A couple of days ago I read Canto XIV, which describes an inferno inhabited by politicians, profiteers, financiers etc.:

 

"...the air without refuge of silence,

      the drift of lice, teething,

and above it the mouthing of orators,

      the arse-belching of preachers.

      And Invidia,

the corruptio, foetor, fungus,

liquid animals, melted ossifications,

slow rot, foetid combustion...."

 

You get the drift.  It has seemed particularly relevant these past days when the BBC has been a revolting spectacle, beginning with obsessive and self-centred conspiracy theories following Newsnight's failure to broadcast the programme on Jimmy Savile, and culminating in the resignation of the Director-General on Saturday for having failed to keep tabs on the same Newsnight's broadcasting of a programme accusing Lord Macalpine by innuendo of being a paedophile - an accusation then found to be entirely without foundation.

 

All of this has been stupid enough.  What has been particularly loathsome, however, is the spectacle of BBC newscasters tearing their own organisation apart.  The resignation of George Entwistle as Director-General became almost inevitable after a disastrous interview with John Humphrys of the Today programme on - yes - BBC Radio 4.  My views on John Humphrys generally are unprintable.  But this antagonism towards the bosses, posing as a quest for objective truth, seems now to be the fashion: on the World at One today on Radio 4, Eddie Mair - no relation, I hasten to add - was persistently aggressive towards the stand-in Director-General, for no evident purpose that could be discerned other than scoring a point.

 

Not only is the process unedifying: the newscasters appear to have lost sight of the fact that other things might be happening in the world, apart from the BBC shenanigans.  On the World at One today we were treated to details of BBC affairs for the first twenty minutes of the programme.  Self-obsessed, riven with internal politics, and increasingly running round like a headless chicken, the BBC needs to get back to its essential job of providing accurate news and information rather than peering up its own fundament.  Pound's words about politicians in Canto XIV could equally apply to the BBC newsmen:

 

"Standing bare bum,

faces smeared on their rumps,

          wide eye on flat buttock,

Bush hanging for beard,

    Addressing crowds through their arse-holes,

Addressing the multitudes in the ooze,

         newts, water-slugs, water-maggots..."  

 

Antony Mair