Of all the BBC programmes on a poor (cheap) Radio 4 daytime schedule, You and Yours is the most openly and regularly biased. It expresses its BBC soft left bias in a number of ways – in the way it approaches subjects, and the subjects that it chooses to cover. Here is You and Yours in a nutshell:
– People are never responsible for their own actions, people are various types of victim
– Companies are bad
– Government intervention is always good
– ‘Something must be done’
Today’s programme was a classic.
‘Why don’t black and ethnic minority people visit rural places like the Peak District?’
First of all, let me tell you about visiting the Peak District – I did this on a weekly basis not so long ago.
1. Get up at 6:00 am
2. Buy train ticket to Matlock, Derbyshire
3. Take train to Matlock
4. Exit station
5. Start walking, ideally in a north or north-west direction
6. Avoid fields with bulls in them
7. Return when tired, wet or sunburnt (or all three together on some days)
8. Er, that’s it
Now, back to racism in the countryside.
Cue a lunatic from the ‘Black Environment Network’. Non-whites don’t access the countryside due to ‘blatant racism’. Apparently some lunatics are holding a conference somewhere on this subject.
Cue black BBC reporter sent to Hathersage. Hathersage is a pretty little village by the Derwent on the Manchester/Sheffield train line. Our reporter laments a ‘lack of black faces’, but admires the view and buys a cake from a cheerful young woman. I’ve obviously missed this, but I didn’t think that black people were now compulsory in every location – but evidently they are.
To be fair to the hapless reporter, I think he was rather embarrassed about this assignment. Even he said the reason he was not a regular rural visitor was because he preferred cities – ‘I prefer cinemas’.
Cue more lunatics, explaining it’s all about racism. The You and Yours presenter laps this up.
I’ve got news for You and Yours. Just because some nutters are holding a conference, it doesn’t mean you need to take them seriously, or devote 15 minutes of airtime. So long as people are free, and not impeded from spending their time as they choose, what is the problem? Although the BBC indoctrinates its staff to believe that race is the root of all evil, sometimes it just might not be true.
Well here’s the answer :
Either round up “ethnic minorities” and force them to the Peak District
or dig up the Peak District and drop it on Brick Lane.
God almighty. As Dennis Leary would say..whathefuck. What are we supposed to do? Send the Peak District for counselling?
“Our reporter laments a ‘lack of black faces’,”
If our reporter went to Brick Lane, (as I regularly do) and lamented a ‘lack of white faces’ do you think the CRE would start action?
I think the countryside is racist in not pandering enough to the temperature loving communities, whereby they (quite sensibly IMHO) take holidays in warmer climes! Global Warming can now be seen as Affirmative Action for the racist topology of the north of England!
To be fair to the BBC the four characteristics you descibe are true of every consumer-rights programme and organization. The attitude that “I stuck my hand in a blender and lost all my fingers therefore they ought to be banned” is a depressingly common one. So is the belief that government can save us from every form of human stupidity, especially one’s own. ‘You and Yours’ merely panders to this kind of fallacious thinking.
When I go to the open countryside I hope for a lack of faces of any colour.
“To be fair to the BBC the four characteristics you descibe are true of every consumer-rights programme and organization.”
True, but YaY is worse than most. It’s like ‘That’s Life’ on steroids.
“the BBC indoctrinates its staff to believe that race is the root of all evil” – what a load of rubbish.
The problem is that some people here are going to take such twaddle seriously.
The polls elsewhere on the BBC say the US, globalisation and corruption are the root of all evil. Please make your mind up.
This item in ITN news http://www.itv.com/news/2068919.html comfirms my view. A ten year old boy burns himself copying a stunt he saw on ‘Jackass’ and his mother’s call for censorship is treated with kid-glove respect.
What ought to have been reported is that a 10 year old learn a valuable lesson in impulse control, but the modern science of victimology dictates that all arguments are valid in direct proportion to the arguer’s suffering. This is true if you are a victim of your own folly, as in this case, or of acts of God or the inexplicable in human nature. Thus anything can be justified from shutting down TV programmes to banning handguns.
Actually, Annelise, Andy is only folowing the great and ineluctable media bandwagon in mild but significant misquotation. The real quote is ‘the root of all kinds of evil’.
It’s the BBC that has difficulty distinguishing between the ‘roots’ of evil. It can’t decide whether it’s racism that’s the cause of the US (with its many years of slavery and recent segregationalist past- not forgetting that we have the great cities of Liverpool and Bristol, but that was, obviously, a long time ago, and when the BBC looks at itself it sees a truly modern British institution, with none of that old-style Englishness) or if the US is the cause of racism. Tough call that.
Analease
“The problem is that some people here are going to take such twaddle seriously.”
Surely the twaddle is with the BBC?
This site is great – BBC comment but not controlled by the beeb.
This morning’s BBC World Update had a look at suburbs in the UK and the US. Dan Damon’s toss off comment was that of course in America, “one always thought of white flight in connection with suburbs”. . .Where’s he been for the past 20 years?
I think Wimmins Hour is worse than You and Yours. Presented usually by an ex-Guardian writer, often all it does is bleat.
Nice to see that the Beeb has chosen for this year’s Reith lectures someone who has spent much of the time criticising Britain or British politicians. He comes from a largely corrupt country – it would have been far better if he had enlightened us on that issue more deeply.
CLF, “When I go to the open countryside I hope for a lack of faces of any colour.”
Is this a gag and I’m just not getting it or is Ron Atkinson commenting here?
Sorry I’m an idiot it’s late forgive me!
JohninLondon – it’s not Wimmins Hour.
It’s Woman Sour !
(and strangely enough when PC presenter Jeni Murray’s kids hit puberty, she moved from lovely Wandsworth to where ? A Peak district valley !)
I can just about recall “You and Yours” before Patti Caldwell arrived in 1981. In those days consumer affairs programs still treated a significant fraction of calls as cautionary tales emphasizing the importance of reading agreements before signing them. Then again, in those days the idea of global warming from an intensification of the CO2 greenhouse effect was decried as a scare story put out by the nuclear industry, and school children were taught that it was a sign of Britain’s backwardness that we had scarcely any more miles of motorway than Denmark. I am still not quite forty!