BY STEWART SLATER
What was the most important thing for you to know early on Saturday evening? What was the key thing which had happened in the world? America’s failure, once more, to launch its new rocket perhaps? The ongoing humanitarian catastrophe caused by the floods in Pakistan maybe? The fact that we were inching ever closer to Larry the Cat finally getting a new house-mate? No, according to those in charge of the running order of the BBC early evening news, the one thing you absolutely had to know was that Serena Williams had retired.
She was, there is no doubt, a great tennis player, but she was just a tennis player (over her “friendship” with Meghan Markle we shall draw a discreet veil). Her retirement had happened overnight U.K. time, so was at least one news cycle in the past.
It is unlikely that historians of future generations will look back at her departure from professional sport and decide that it was the point at which everything changed.
She obviously, though, ticked a lot of diversity boxes, and we might see this as an example of the BBC choosing to celebrate an individual whom the metropolitan liberal values of its apparatchiks order should be celebrated. Putting Serena Williams at the top of the running order is a way for its employees to signal to their Islington-dwelling chums that they are good people, the right sort to invite to an Ottolenghi-fuelled kitchen supper.
That those values may not be shared universally is unfortunate but not, ultimately, important. The gammon-faced throw-backs might not be interested in Serena Williams but they still have to pay the licence fee. There is nothing wrong with being out of touch as long as you’re out of touch with the right people.
Being out of step with a proportion of the country is one thing, and would lead one towards one set of solutions, but there is another way in which the BBC is an outlier, one which poses a greater long term danger to it: the increasingly undeserved reverence with which it treats itself.
A few days earlier, at a time when it was a live question whether Ukraine would be the first country to see two nuclear plants go boom, the corporation decided that the most important event in the world was the death of one of its former employees. It is undoubtedly sad that Bill Turnbull died. 66 is, these days, a young age. But the deaths which lead the news are those of monarchs, statesmen and, on rare occasions, iconic entertainers and sportsmen, those who make the news rather than read it.
There is an adage of relatively recent invention that we are all the stars of our own movies, but bit-players in everyone else’s. Put simply, things that are important to us are not quite so central to other people. To his co-workers, Bill Turnbull’s death may well have been the most significant event in their lives that day, but the assumption the Corporation made was that this was true for the wider world.
But this is a feature of the BBC’s cast of mind, for a brief glance at the schedule suggests that there is little it likes more than talking about itself.
It is currently offering Days That Shook the BBC With David Dimbleby, a series looking at certain recent events through their impact on the Corporation – “enough about you, let’s talk about me”. Fans of Strictly can enjoy It Takes Two five nights a week which is a BBC show in which people who are in another BBC show talk about being in a BBC show – reminiscent, perhaps, of the scene in every high school movie where the “cool kids” graciously invite one of the geeks to join them at the lunch table for a glimpse into their fabulous lives. The last series of Great British Menu was a “celebration of 100 years of British Broadcasting” by which, of course, the BBC meant the BBC. The cast lists of any of the countless efforts to re-cycle tired formats by appending the word “Celebrity” to them show that to earn the honorific, it is sufficient, in the BBC’s eyes, merely to have been on the BBC.
Most retirees take up gardening or perhaps a bit of gentle woodwork. Those who have laboured at the coal face in Broadcasting House seem to get their kicks mainly by talking about their former employer, usually in tones dripping with self-regard. Like its current staff, they never fail to give the impression that it is a shining beacon of culture which only the churlish could see as anything less than the Eighth Wonder of the World, amplifying the portentous puff pieces, lavishly funded by the licence-fee payer, with which it chooses to fill what would, on commercial channels, be ad breaks.
But the BBC is just a media company, albeit one with an unusual revenue model. It is like ITV, Fuji Television or (whisper it) Fox. Some of its products are good, some (the entire output of BBC Three) less so. Not every word that drips from the pens of its screenwriters can go toe-to-toe with Shakespeare. The Great British Bake-Off may, or may not, be your thing, but there is little sign that moving to Channel 4 has made it any worse.
Piggy-backing off the country’s worship of “Our NHS”, the BBC likes to portray itself as “ours”. But this is increasingly untrue. Of the programmes which have shaped mass culture over the past decades – Harry Potter, Downton Abbey and Game of Thrones – Aunty has had a hand in creating exactly zero of them.
Gone are the days when families up and down the land huddled around the wireless to listen to the Home Service. Younger demographics in particular are still tuning in (to any of the profusion of media now on offer) but they are increasingly dropping out (of the loving embrace of the Beeb). No longer a monopoly, the BBC is less like our sainted provider of healthcare, and more like a supermarket, a place to be visited when it has what one wants and ignored when it doesn’t. Not a source of identity (save for those who work there) just an institution with which one has a commercial relationship – albeit one enforceable by a prison sentence.
In the words of the youth audience which, like a trendy vicar, it is embarrassingly desperate to “get down with”, the Beeb needs to “get over itself”.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.