Bbc

Assuming the BBC is still in existence by the time you read this, the scale of the task facing the next director-general would have been evident by listening to the output on Monday, the day after Tim Davie and Deborah Turness resigned. This was an organisation in utter denial. It began with Nick Robinson, puffed up with even more pompous self-regard than normal, treating Today listeners to a psychedelic monologue in which he disappeared down several capacious rabbit holes, jabbering about a sort of palace coup at the BBC, an assault by sinister right-wing forces.

Sarah Pochin’s gonna take a lot of coachin’. You can’t just turn up on the telly and say you’re sick of all the blacks everywhere. And the Asians. Un-accountably, perhaps, you will be accused of racism, the definition of the term having been extended rather further than my interpretation: to discriminate against an individual on the grounds of his or her race. There will be outrage among the deluded; there will be faux outrage among the opportunistic. Your own party leader will slap you down by saying, in effect: ‘Well, she’s right, obvs, but you can’t say stuff like that.’ And her own leader is not wrong. The Overton window may have shifted but it hasn’t yet been smashed.

YouTube has now overtaken ITV to become Britain’s second most watched media service, beaten only narrowly by the BBC. Hardly surprising. For many of us, YouTube has become the answer to more and more of life’s questions. True, you may never want to watch a film which explains how to unstick the filler cap on a Volvo XC60. Until, that is, you rent a Volvo XC60 and find yourself stranded at a Portuguese petrol station in 100˚F heat. At that moment, the 30-second explanation by Olivia from York, Pennsylvania, is better than Martin Scorsese. If I were destitute, the last expense I’d forgo would be my YouTube Premium subscription. At £13 a month, it is cheaper than the BBC licence fee.

At the end of Sky News’s coverage of last year’s Notting Hill Carnival, its correspondent recited the usual list of arrests, stabbings and so on before concluding her piece to camera by saying: ‘But overall it’s been a really peaceful and enjoyable day.’ This year the honour of summing up the beauty of the event was left to Sky’s arts and entertainment correspondent, Katie Spencer. The reason it is important for two million people to gather in the tight streets of Notting Hill over the August bank holiday, she said, is because of ‘resistance to racism’. ‘This is a place where community comes together,’ she went on, ignoring all the shops in the area that had been boarded up. ‘You don’t walk around constantly looking over your shoulder.

The BBC chef Gregg Wallace has been sacked for his objectionable behaviour over many years, but has blamed the BBC for not taking the action which, he claims, would have saved him from himself. Aristotle (d. 322 bc) would have doubted that. Let us assume, says Aristotle, that it is possible for any human to wish to do what is good. But a mere wish counts for nothing. Goodness will find its expression only in the way a man deals with the means he adopts to bring about the wished-for result. But what if he is just not the sort of man to take the trouble? That is surely a consequence of the style of life which he has adopted: after all, one acquires particular attributes only by constantly behaving in particular ways.

Did you take part in any of the mysterious commemorations last weekend? The newspapers were full of it – something called 7/7, apparently. I read a long report on the BBC’s website about this tragedy but remained entirely unclear as to who killed the people on those trains and bus. The report said ‘bombs were detonated’ on the Tube, as if the bombs – anxious to fulfil their purpose in life – had blown themselves up, without the aid of any external agency. Nowhere in the report did it mention who brought the bombs down from Yorkshire and then set them off. Nowhere in the entire article were the words ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamist’ or even ‘Muslim’ mentioned, nor even the names of the murderers.