Robin Aitken

The BBC’s Director General Tim Davie made a speech this week which suggests he’s leaning toward a radical fix for the Corporation’s financial woes. The question is whether even this government will buy an idea that, to put it politely, seems unlikely to be popular. Davie’s problem is that the writing is on the wall for the licence fee. Last year the Corporation’s annual report noted that half a million households had stopped paying in the previous 12 months. All of which makes for grim reading for an organisation which has seen its real-term income fall by over 30 per cent in the last decade. Finding a replacement to the licence fee is now a matter of urgency which must be settled by 2027 when the current BBC charter runs out.

It seems that the BBC has finally acknowledged the truth of George Bernard Shaw’s aphorism. Demonstrating his inherent anti-Englishness, the old Fabian snob declared:  ‘It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.’  And the barb hurts because to an extent we must accept that it is partly true.  Sticking a few more regional accents in front of a microphone doesn’t begin to address the real problems the BBC faces In our defence, it is also true of people other than the English. Every European country, and probably every country in the world (including Shaw’s Ireland) has its own bumpkin regional twang which the boss class looks down on.

As fans of the BBC hit show Line of Duty know very well the ‘one rotten apple’ explanation for police corruption won’t wash. It’s never just the one — corruption flourishes only when it is facilitated by others. The corrupt officer needs others around them; people who will lie for them, cover-up for them, brazenly praise and reward them. This is logical because if the ‘bent copper’ is surrounded only by honest people they will be quickly rumbled; they need others who are dishonest, or morally weak, or who actively collude in their schemes. We know this. We’ve watched the series. And, as it turns out, it’s much the same story when it comes to corrupt journalists.

Once upon a time there was a very powerful news organisation that was watched, respected and loved by almost the whole of the people. And that big organisation put a very special importance on its main news bulletin of the day which it broadcast at nine o'clock in the evening. And all this happened in the faraway land called ‘back then’; and The Word was the BBC’s and the man – for it was always a man – who read out The Word became one of the most recognisable and famous faces in the country. And then things changed and the big organisation became less-loved and its important bulletin became less-watched; which brings us back to today and Jeremy Paxman who has said some very disobliging things about other, lesser, members of his tribe.

Since the start of the pandemic I’ve been observing friends and family and their reactions to the virus. Broadly speaking they fall into two groups; at one end of the spectrum there are the insouciant, apparently unconcerned about a viral threat they think has been exaggerated; at the other are the corona-obsessives who have avidly consumed every scrap of information they can find – of which there has been no shortage. They’ve become minutely informed on everything from T-cells to lateral-flow tests; their lives have been subsumed under a tsunami of technical information. Of the two groups it is the wilfully ignorant who seem happier.

The Six Nations begins today, bringing joy into the hearts of millions of rugby fans. It will, as ever, be a predictably unpredictable tournament – there are always upsets – which will showcase great athletic skill, close teamwork and raw physical courage; and like the first snowdrops, it is one of those reliable harbingers of spring guaranteed to lighten the gloom of cheerless February days. But this year, hovering in the background, is a spectre at the feast; the fast-accumulating evidence that rugby is a danger to the players’ health and well-being. The truth is that many rugby spectators, who love the game, end up feeling guilty.

The ‘pre-appointment hearings’ system overseen by parliament’s select committees doesn’t exactly set the heart racing; a pale imitation of the American system, where presidential nominees (to the Supreme Court for instance) are savaged by senators sitting as a kind of hanging jury, our version is generally bloodless. Certainly Richard Sharp, the government’s candidate for chairman of the BBC, who dutifully presented himself for cross-questioning last week, emerged with never a scratch on him.

If you wanted to start a revolution would you choose an Oxford educated multi-millionaire banker to lead it? Not the obvious choice is it? Which is why the news that the next chairman of the BBC Board is to be ex-Goldman Sachs banker Richard Sharp looks very like a retreat from any serious attempt to reform the Corporation. Tim Davie, the Director-General (DG) and the rest of the BBC executive board will be breathing sighs of relief; it looks very much like ‘business as usual’ at New Broadcasting House. The Revolution is postponed. In choosing Mr Sharp, a walking caricature of the Establishment, the Johnson government is signalling that it’s opting for a quiet life rather than conflict with the BBC. It is also demonstrating a continuing fondness for moneymen.

Along with holly wreaths, unfeasibly large poultry and popular carols played on an endless loop, there is another ritual at this time of year; the BBC unveils its Christmas schedules — followed immediately by a chorus of sour complaint about the fare on offer. The Corporation published details of its programming at the start of December and, true to form, the Daily Mail and its readers were far from pleased: ‘Deja View’ ran the headline ‘BBC Christmas schedule in slammed by viewers’. In uncertain times it’s good to see time-hallowed traditions kept alive.

Another day, another breast-beating confession from a BBC news-wallah about how the Corporation has sinned against diversity. This time it was ‘head of newsgathering’ Jonathan Munro lamenting the fact that most of the editors who labour under him are highly-educated, middle-class white men: 'I don’t think anyone can think that is right or justifiable,' he declaimed piously in a Media Masters podcast. He added: 'We don’t want all our editorial meetings to be dominated by what white people think. We don’t want any single group in society to dominate our editorial thinking, because we are not being diverse in our thought process.

For the first time, there are signs that a Tory government is freeing itself of its Stockholm Syndrome attitude towards the BBC. There have been suggestions it will de-criminalise non-payment of the BBC license fee this autumn, and there are signals that Number 10 is finally seeing the Corporation as what it has become: an enemy of conservatism and a champion of a vapid potpourri of fashionable nonsense. It’s beginning to look like out there in viewer-land, support for the licence fee is ebbing fast In response, it is clear the Corporation is mounting its own defence and once again calling on its friends in high places to take up arms and man the defences on its behalf.

‘Diversity’ — who today would dare to stand up and declare themselves against it? What, after all, is the alternative? Homogeneity? Uniformity? Indistinguishability? But there is clearly a problem with what that term has come to represent. It will come as no surprise then that June Sarpong, the BBC’s ‘director of creative diversity’, has been forced to admit that the corporation has a problem connecting with a white working-class audience.

It is encouraging to hear that the new Director-General of the BBC, Tim Davie, is demanding changes in the BBC’s comedy output to correct its bias to the left. As a starting point for reforming the whole Corporation, comedy might seem an oddly trivial place to begin. This, however, signals intent. Not that reforming comedy shows will be easy; the BBC’s in-house joke-mongers accurately reflect the woke agenda to which the whole organisation subscribes. By choosing comedy as his target, Mr Davie has picked out a loose strand in a great ball of wool; if he tugs hard enough for long enough the whole ball might unravel. But as ‘reform’ seems now to be on Mr Davie’s agenda perhaps he might put some other things on his to-do list.

Lord Hall, the outgoing director general of the BBC, used his valedictory interview on Radio 4’s Media Show this week to ruminate on the question of what funding mechanism should replace the licence fee. But to my mind, this was like listening to a man whose house is perched precariously on the lip of a crumbling cliff talking about whether he should plant an orchard. Somehow one feels it’d be a better use of Hall's time to address the immediate problems rather than worrying about long-term issues. In the BBC’s case, the next Great Leap Forward might well be over the edge of the cliff.

Early on in lockdown, I was picking up my daily paper and was confronted by someone who had contrived his own face mask with polythene bags and masking tape. He seemed blissfully unselfconscious, despite looking as if he was off to a Hannibal Lecter-themed fancy-dress party; I shared a superior snigger with the newsagent and decided I would have no truck with masks. But as time went on I had a change of heart; I do all the shopping in our household (a quirk of our domestic arrangements) and it began to dawn on me that many of my fellow citizens had been scared half to death by the pandemic and viewed every close encounter with a fellow shopper as potentially fatal.