The snobbish ignorance of the BBC
Town & Country Planning, May 2008
I remember Simon Jenkins, years ago, arguing that – if you listened carefully to the tone with which interviewers asked their questions – it was clear that the BBC had an economic policy of their very own. It was more public spending.
Using this same principle, especially at election time, they also have an administrative policy: they want to centralise things. They don’t like ‘postcode lotteries’.
Not long after Simon Jenkins’ article, I came to a similar conclusion about them myself, listening to an innocuous item on Woman’s Hour about those thoughtless people who don’t display their house number clearly enough for ambulance drivers to read it. All the interviewer could think to ask about it was: “When is the government going to legislate?”
Actually, all this is rather insidious, and especially so if you were unfortunate enough to turn on a BBC local election night special – with David Dimbleby presiding in all his eminence – in order to learn the remotest thing about local government.
All those interviewed are either national politicians, psephologists and pollsters. All the questions are about national trends and the implications for general elections and, in this deeply boring format, the party spokespeople go through their inevitable and predictable motions around whatever the results happen to be.
I’ve just turned on BBC News 24 in order to get details of the local election results – voting was yesterday – and could only find Jeremy Vine pointing to an expensive computer graphic which identified precisely where Bury was on a map of Britain. “Those two Labour MPs in Bury must be quaking in their shoes,” he said.
Well, maybe they are. But should not the BBC’s famous mission to explain have taken me a little more deeply into the political situation in Bury, and anywhere else which had changed hands.
What were the local issues? Why Bury? Who are the local personalities and why? How does that relate to other parts of the country?
But if you were interested in the answers to any of those questions, or indeed anything else about the election issues – rather than what would happen if you extrapolated the results to Westminster – you would have remained ignorant.
The truth is that the ignorance of the BBC about local government knows no bounds. It isn’t necessary: the BBC local radio network should give them an insight into what is actually happening on the ground and why, place by place.
The trouble is, it isn’t really an oversight either. The BBC has never covered local government, believes people are bored by it, believes they know nothing about it by choice, when actually these convictions are to some extent self-fulfilling.
Of course people know nothing about local government if the BBC never covers it. Tune into their regional television news programmes hoping to find out something, and all you get is pictures of the latest car crashes. It’s more like The Shipping News.
There is more than a whiff here of the kind of effete snobbery that the British metropolitan establishment has about anything local, and which underpins the sclerotic centralisation which bedevils anything worthwhile here.
A little over a decade ago, when I was editor of one of the party political weeklies – there is only one of them left now that Labour Weekly and Conservative News have gone the way of all flesh – I wrote an editorial about BBC local election coverage.
I wrote it in the middle of the night, having been incensed by the vacuous stuff trotted out again by Dimbleby, and stuck a headline on the top which described the problem as ‘The wilful, snobbish ignorance of the BBC’.
A day or so later, I heard on the grapevine that somebody had photocopied it and put a copy on every desk over at the BBC Westminster studios.
For a brief period (about ten minutes), I imagined this might be an influential moment – one of my little fantasies, I fear – but of course it didn’t make much difference. We still have the same old rubbish purporting to be local election coverage, the same bizarre local stories and personalities excised from our screens – in case we feel that somehow the BBC has become less than its slick, sophisticated metropolitan self.
It’s a pity, because the idea that our towns and cities are all identical cookie-cutter places, with identical cookie-cutter policies, is a really damaging fantasy which is throttling the life out of them. Thanks, BBC, but no thanks.
