Given that the BBC has to endure a daily barrage of envy from less popular competitors, you would think by now it would have become more expert at defending itself.
Private Eye reported that during the summer more than 2,000 articles had been devoted to the means by which Martin Bashir got an interview with Diana, Princess of Wales in 1995. Was the public interested? Not very. When a former Conservative political candidate, Tim Davie, was made director general of the BBC in 2020, much of Fleet Street couldn’t trouble itself to say a single word. But when Jess Brammar was mooted as executive editor of news, after supposedly making some disparaging remarks about Brexit on social media, outrage fired up the presses for weeks. If you support public broadcasting and care about its survival, the BBC’s failure to articulately challenge the obvious hypocrisy of its critics was far more ominous than the one-sided ravings of the critics themselves.
The original purpose of the BBC was to inform, educate and entertain. It was only in the 1990s, under John Birt, that two of those roles were made subservient to the third. Up till then, the BBC had gloried in its properly diverse function of democratising art, music, film and drama, while giving equal emphasis to philosophy, sport, religion, gardening and history – in short, to the culture of the whole country. No other broadcaster could do this, and, to this day, none comes close. That’s the case for its existence. Lutalo Muhammad and Antonia Quirke are meant to have the same status as Huw Edwards.
So when Birt chose to pitch the BBC as the greatest news-gathering organisation in the world, he caused nothing but problems. First, he narrowed the far larger role the BBC was there to play. Second, he encouraged people to start asking why we needed the BBC at all. If its principal purpose was to gather news, there were a whole host of commercial outlets that could do the job just as well. But third, he pushed the culture of non-news departments further towards an alien management style, which the producer Tony Garnett memorably described as “totalitarian micromanagement”. It still prevails.
If you doubt that news is thought to be the primary business, you will find it architecturally expressed if you visit Broadcasting House. Every other department is flattened against the walls of an overblown newsroom that draws all energy to the centre. And yet if you look at the real scandals that have done the BBC lasting harm – its atrocious mismanagement of the revelation that its ex-employee Jimmy Savile was a rapist, or its unlawful broadcast of a police raid on Cliff Richard – they have always been down to the mistakes of news.
Earlier this year, Richard Sharp, a banker from Goldman Sachs and donor of £400,000 to the Conservative party and £35,000 to the controversial Quilliam Foundation, was appointed chair of the BBC. In his oral evidence to the government, Sharp said that he believed there had been a remain-bias on Question Time (though he defended the BBC’s overall Brexit coverage as balanced) and implored the corporation to be “its own toughest critic on impartiality”. Perhaps to that end, he used my TV series about Tories in Westminster, Roadkill, to exemplify leftwing bias. To do this, he deployed what older readers will remember as the Mary Whitehouse line of argument. Sharp said that he himself had been able to enjoy Roadkill, because he was sufficiently well informed to know that my portrait of a charismatic politician in hock to commercial interests was not accurate. (Whitehouse similarly claimed that she herself was far too high-minded to be corrupted by pornography.) However, Sharp was concerned that some people out there, young people in particular, might mistake a drama for the truth.
My first reaction was to think that since my protagonist, Peter Laurence, had been played by Hugh Laurie with 10 times the charm, humour and intelligence of any member of the present cabinet, Sharp should have been discreetly grateful. But my second thought was, “Oh my God, here’s yet another bigwig who doesn’t know the difference between fact and fiction.” All plays are, by their very nature, biased, because they come from an individual’s imagination. Macbeth does not need to be banned because people may mistake it for an attack on Scottish monarchy. Nor does Hamlet’s contemplation of suicide need a warning at the end to anyone who may have been affected to call the Samaritans.
My own experience of the public is that they know far better than the chair of the BBC what a play is. But the newsification of absolutely everything has left all the corporation’s other departments drowning in the News’s extremely choppy wake. The BBC has had a horrible pandemic, with its News at Ten too often reduced to the cheerless reiteration of government press releases. It has become more like a state broadcaster than a public service, with serious investigations abandoned and all mention of the prime minister’s history of lying censored. But the rot is also spreading to once healthy organs. Threats from the government, and alleged interference from one member of the BBC board itself, have succeeded in muting the BBC in its own defence. In the face of terror about the renewal of the licence, current drama on the BBC is markedly uncontentious – just the affirmation of well known truths.
Like all supposedly well-intentioned organisations, the BBC takes special pleasure in betraying its friends, especially the most loyal. We expect it. At this point, too cowed to attack its critics, it prefers instead to round on its supporters. But we are right to fear that unless the BBC’s leaders start to argue with conviction for far wider purposes than being a British CNN, they will play into their enemies’ hands.
This article was amended on 5 October 2021. Tim Davie is a former Conservative political candidate, not a “former Conservative politician” as an earlier version said.
David Hare is a playwright and screenwriter