Monthly Archives: October 2007

at the end of Stephen Fry’s second HIV & Me programme on Tuesday viewers were directed to a new BBC website, G.I. Jonny (caution: not safe for work or children), “a viral information campaign produced by the BBC to raise awareness about HIV in the UK”, aimed at 16-24 year olds, running from October 1st until World AIDS day on December 1st 2007.

Advising people about the risks of HIV and AIDS and how to protect themselves is reasonable enough, but the G.I. Jonny site, designed to appeal to youngsters, and indeed children, is crass and tasteless and open to all without any age advisories or warnings about the site content.

Clicking on the appealing ‘Sketch Show’ link from the home page loads a page that immediately starts to play “the first of several specially commissioned comedy sketches available for download” featuring:

…action-figure Jonny using his ‘protector shield’ to deflect the foam from Captain Bareback’s crotch cannon, laying his foe low with his powerful fisting action, and spying the Commando Bandits through his magic brass eye.

…complete with graphic action-figure animation and a loud voice over (at full volume until you turn it down) blaring rapid-fire sexual innuendo.

Good old BBC. Naturally, were it not for the unique way the BBC is funded and the absence of advertisers with a reputation to maintain, this sort of explicit rubbish wouldn’t see the light of day.

More details in Metro, BBC’s sex video is branded filthy.

Hat tip to my Biased BBC colleague Laban Tall for the Metro link.

Please use this thread for BBC-related comments and analysis. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not (and never has been) an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or use as a chat forum. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

. A previously unseen document found in a skip outside Narrowcasting House gives a unique insight into the years of dedicated training that have gone in to producing some of the Corporation’s brightest stars.

Comrades Jim & John: well known Radio 4 Toady presenters

An excerpt from the full Handbook of the BBC’s Young Pioneers:

“After years of training, John and Jim are finally allowed to run Toady – the most important radio propaganda broadcast.

Jim is so enthusiastic about The Party he sometimes says “we” – meaning him, The Party and all right-minded folk everywhere. But of course he’s a trained BBC Pioneer so he’s never biased.

John thinks it would be good if The Party took more money from everyone so that everything in the country could be perfect. The Party agrees and helps John to make lots of money for himself in return.”

We the undeserving proletarian masses offer our grateful thanks to Comrades Jim, John, Sarah, Carolyn & Ed for their heroic struggle in the service of the People’s Democratic Committee for State Broadcasting and IndoctrinEducation (The BBC-CCCP). We salute you!

Update (11.30pm): Further pages in the Handbook of the BBC’s Young Pioneers have come to light, including Comrade Paxochev and capitalist running-dog-eat-dog smears about Comrade Commissar Mark Thompson.

Update (Friday): More newly discovered information has appeared…

Click the link for full version. Thank you to Bob and another reader for the original link.

a leader article in the Daily Telegraph, Winds of competition:

Not entirely unlike the Royal Mail farrago is the crisis that looms at the BBC. Again, a public sector organisation faces threats of strike action from its unions that could weaken the future of the entire enterprise. But in this case, the decisions of the management seem to be dictated by an irrational bureaucratic mindset.

The corporation has set its face against closing down the little-watched digital channels BBC3 and BBC4, preferring to cut the most distinguished of the BBC’s core services: news and current affairs, and factual programming. To attack the most publicly esteemed areas of its production — rather than admit defeat in its failed experimental ventures — reveals a bizarre system of priorities that takes no account of the logic of market forces. But neither the BBC nor Royal Mail exists in a non-competitive vacuum any longer. They will need disciplined realism if they are to survive among the choices that new technologies offer.

My own view is that there’s a lot of managerial girth at the BBC that should be addressed first – almost two years ago Media Guardian reported Surge in BBC’s top earners, with the news that, at that time, 262 BBC staff took home more than £100,000 per annum as salary – more than 1% of those on the corporation’s payroll, not to mention the large numbers of highly paid individuals hovering below £100,000pa. Needless to say, the BBC defended itself at the time with this old chestnut:

The BBC said that it needs to pay big salaries to attract the best staff and also attributed much of the rise to inflation.

– the same specious argument that was put forward to justify the utterly ridiculous sum of £18m over three years paid to Jonathan Ross. If he can get that much from ITV or anyone else then good luck to him. There are plenty of talented people who’d be honoured to replace Woss for a fraction of that amount.

BBC Three probably should go – the few good bits can easily find new homes, the rest, mostly race-to-the-bottom dross (I love the C-word anyone?) that does nothing for our nation deserves to disappear – certainly from the tellytaxpayer teat. BBC Four should probably stay – it is much closer to the BBC’s public service remit (and is half the cost of BBC Three).

Today’s Daily Mail covers this story at greater length, BBC News and Top Gear face cuts as corporation is forced to axe 3,000 staff:

BBC insiders are mystified that their bosses appear to be targeting areas which are the cornerstone of the corporation’s public service remit.

John Humphrys, among others, has said Mr Thompson should kill off less popular services such as BBC3, rather than slash news and current affairs.

But the BBC seems determined to hold on to the controversial channel, which costs licence fee payers £116million a year.

BBC3, aimed at younger audiences, spends almost £180,000 an hour on its programmes, double what BBC1 spends.

Yet it gets just two per cent of viewers or a tenth of BBC1’s figures.

The channel has also been criticised for lurid programme titles like F*** Off I’m a Hairy Woman and Sex Talk With Mum and Dad.

The Mail also quotes Conservative MP John Whittingdale, chairman of the Commons culture, media and sport select committee, accusing Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, of contradicting his previous statements about wanting to protect quality programming: “He is cutting jobs in the precise areas where there is the greatest need for public service content and where the BBC’s strength lies. They are doing precisely what Mark Thompson said they would not do”.

I have no sympathy for the BBC’s pleas of poverty – a guaranteed £3.5 billion pounds annual income is a lavish amount for any broadcaster, but it is ridiculous that the BBC’s management are threatening genuine public service aspects of the BBC whilst busily expanding the BBC in all sorts of non-core areas, producing all sorts of tosh that could and should be produced more economically by commercial broadcasters.

It’s unusual for Biased BBC to defend (some parts of) the BBC, but it looks as if we’re set to end up with the worst of both worlds – more ratings chasing dross and less quality public service broadcasting – and this from Mark Thompson, who as chief executive of Channel 4 described the BBC as “basking in a Jacuzzi of spare public cash“, claiming that he would produce a stronger BBC that “spent less on process and more on content”.

See also yesterday’s ongoing complaint and comments about the selectivity of what counts as BBC in the news on the BBC Editors Blog.

Sorry that I haven’t been posting for a while. Unfortunately my circumstances aren’t likely to change any time soon, so it is not a good idea to write to me with examples of BBC bias for the present. The odds of me posting your observation, however scandalous it is, are small. Best use the comments instead.

That said, here I am today, home unexpectedly. And Fausta writes, “If you guys thought the Beeb’s adoration of Che in English was bad, wait until you see it in Spanish” – see this post on Fausta’s blog.

UPDATE FROM TELFORD: More appalling hagiographies of Che (in addition to the one we posted on recently) from the BBC this week here, here and here (the last includes a sentence from his critics, which makes it unusually balanced by the BBC’s standards) (via Matthew in comments).

: Having ignored former BBC Governor Dame Pauline Neville-Jones’ devastating broadside in last week’s Mail on Sunday, this week they managed to include Jeff Randall’s article from the Sunday Telegraph, All the BBC needs is proper management, and then ignored an article from Monday’s Daily Mail, Faked footage, rigged votes and a culture of bias. No wonder we’ve lost faith in the BBC, where Melanie Phillips goes to town on a number of BBC issues.

What is the point of BBC in the news if it’s dishonest and partial in reporting genuine cases of BBC in the news?

And again we must ask, why has the option for the public (the people who pay for the BBC) to comment on BBC in the news been removed?

What are The Editors so afraid of that justifies such evasiveness?

there was a report about the North West Passage being free of ice for, according to Sneerboy, “the first time ever” – which of course sounds a lot more dramatic than “the first time in recorded history”, though even that is debatable.

But the thing that really irked was this, in the Stupid BBC category, David Shukman (who of course just had to go to Resolute Bay in Canada to report on a view of the seashore) informed us that a ship travelling from the UK to Japan via the Panama Canal “travels 14,000 miles”, whereas, via the North West Passage “it could save a fortnight”.

How the hell are we supposed to compare 14,000 miles on the one hand with two weeks on the other? It’s apples and pears – it’s meaningless without knowing the mileage or duration of both routes! Clowns!

P.S. David, how many thousand miles was your trip, and how many BBC working hours did it count as? A bit more than a report from White City with some locally supplied footage would have been I expect, and no more informative for all that.

Innocent of inserting noddy shots of himself into interviews not conducted by him, anyway. It turns out that:

In all of the shows, in the four years since Imagine began, fake “noddies” were inserted into precisely none of them. Not one.

So how did it happen then that such a damaging allegation was allowed to gain so much traction? “It’s all my own fault . . . it was foolish of me to respond in that fashion. I did not want to say no to something that might have been yes.”

So when the media asked whether he had allowed noddies to be used to make it look as if he had been where he hadn’t, he said possibly, probably and even suggested it was quite likely because he couldn’t remember and didn’t want to be caught fibbing? Well, baldly, the answer to that question is yes.

Which sounds a bit like confessing to shoplifting just in case you might have done it in the past but can’t quite remember. So why confess?

In all of the shows, in the four years since Imagine began, fake “noddies” were inserted into precisely none of them. Not one.

So how did it happen then that such a damaging allegation was allowed to gain so much traction? “It’s all my own fault . . . it was foolish of me to respond in that fashion. I did not want to say no to something that might have been yes.”

So when the media asked whether he had allowed noddies to be used to make it look as if he had been where he hadn’t, he said possibly, probably and even suggested it was quite likely because he couldn’t remember and didn’t want to be caught fibbing? Well, baldly, the answer to that question is yes.

Trust me, I’m a broadcaster:

He says there needs to be an open debate both within the BBC and beyond – one, importantly, fully open to audiences too – about where lines should be drawn and under what circumstances they might properly be crossed. This is all the more necessary, he says, after “10 years of genre bending and ‘reality’ TV” which have led to what he describes as “a laziness, a routineness about how you make programmes – you want to make them more exciting so you add a bit”; but without that context public service delights like Jamie’s School Dinners simply wouldn’t have happened. The debate so far, he says, has “suggested that you can’t trust anyone – as if programme makers were estate agents, and that’s not true. There are no more motivated people than those who work in broadcasting . . . and ultimately it is about trust and honesty.”

See Steve Hewlett’s original article (linked above) for more details.

, the supremely qualified Jeff Randall, writing in the Telegraph, says All the BBC needs is proper management. Some excerpts:

Queengate and Fincham’s departure:

As Fincham walked, the BBC promised “to implement a comprehensive set of actions to address the weaknesses of communications and co-ordination with other divisions.” Do what?

Hello, it’s not that complicated. This fiasco does not merit another burst of expensive training manuals. There’s no need for yet more weasel worded instructions on internal discourse. You simply tell staff: DON’T MAKE IT UP. If you do, you will be slung out. No ifs, no buts and no compensation. That would do the trick, but it’s not going to happen. Instead, all programme-makers are being sent on truth courses. The BBC should broadcast them: I’d pay good money to see John Humphrys and Jeremy Paxman being lectured by some numpty on why telling fibs is a bad idea.

“Queengate” has been embarrassing. But the source of BBC dysfunctionality lies much deeper than the improper splicing of a documentary about royal life.

Over 80 years, a system has been created in which getting rid of feeble performers is almost impossible. The unions, though they speak for less than half the staff, fight any sacking to the last ditch. The upshot is a large rump of people who shouldn’t be there. They are bitter, disillusioned and going nowhere. They openly resent the success of more talented colleagues. For this grisly bunch, there are no triumphs to enjoy, merely the savouring of other people’s disasters. Their bad karma is palpable, yet they are allowed to cling on like barnacles on a sewage pipe.

The BBC’s problem in short:

At the BBC, red lights should be flashing. It is clearly no longer what it says it is. Well, not entirely. The corporation has always sought to distance itself from other media in terms of integrity, impartiality and fairness, but in recent months it has fallen short on all three. Flagship shows such as Blue Peter, Children in Need, Comic Relief and Sport Relief have been debased by dodgy dealings. Arts supremo Alan Yentob inserted himself into interviews that he never conducted. Worst of all, Her Majesty was stitched up.

Many decent souls in BBC News are furious. They despair at the sclerosis caused by a surfeit of toadying bureaucrats.

Randall’s suspicions about Thompson’s plans:

Thompson is close to delivering his proposals for coping with a licence-fee settlement that was less than management had asked for. I’m told that he plans to chip away at BBC jewels – such as Today, the main television news bulletins and documentaries – instead of throwing out diamanté rubbish.

With more than £3 billion of annual income, the BBC is an exceptionally well funded broadcaster. It doesn’t need extra income to continue with its world-class service. What’s required is management courage to call time on paper-clip collectors while diverting resources to output that really matters.

Another article worth reading in full.

wrote Melanie Phillips in yesterday’s Daily Mail. Some excerpts:

The departure of Peter Fincham:

[F]eeling is growing that Mr Fincham has been made to carry the can for those higher up the BBC hierarchy, such as the grandly titled Director of Vision Jana Bennett, who was also criticised for showing a “lack of curiosity” once she had been told what had happened.

Moreover, the manner of Mr Fincham’s departure is disturbing in the light of reports that he refused to sign a prepared “Soviet-style” letter of resignation blaming him for the debacle and was summarily dismissed instead.

Cutting the BBC’s core output whilst expanding non-core areas:

Mr Thompson is reportedly about to deal with a funding crisis by emasculating the BBC’s core output, with programmes such as Timewatch or Horizon facing the chop along with distinctive TV news bulletins which would be replaced by a rolling news service. Such action suggests that somewhere along the way priorities have gone haywire.

For while it is taking an axe to its core programming, the BBC is spending vast amounts on highly questionable enterprises.

The BBC’s institutional bias:

At the same time, the very core of the BBC’s claim to the licence fee, that it is uniquely trusted for its integrity, is being steadily destroyed. It’s not just the serial fakery to which it has now put its hands up. It’s the fact that its output, including its journalism, is politically as bent as a corkscrew.

As its own impartiality review concluded earlier this year, the BBC operates in a “Leftleaning comfort zone” and has an “innate liberal bias”, dictating what issues it chooses to cover and how it does so.

It is institutionally and viscerally hostile to America, Israel, conservatism, big business, religion, the countryside and family values; it supports multiculturalism, environmentalism, European federalism, human rights law and ‘alternative’ lifestyles.

Worse still, it sees everything through the distorting prism of this “progressive” agenda. As a result, it views its own Left-wing position as the centre ground, and anyone who disagrees is viewed as a Rightwing extremist.

And Melanie’s piercing conclusion: it’s that Marr again:

In place of the former high-minded disciples of Lord Reith, the BBC came to be run by people who stood for nothing except shallow success. Politically correct to a fault, they therefore enforced the Left-wing group think with even greater zeal.

The inevitable outcome has been that the BBC has all but destroyed the very reason for its existence. With its public service ideal thus fatally corrupted, the loss of self confidence which brought that about has also made it unable to stand up to government pressure.

As a result, it has become all too eager to do the bidding of a Government which scarcely bothers to hide its contempt.

So when Gordon Brown announced there would be no General Election, he ignored ITN and Sky and chose to use instead a soft interview by the BBC’s Andrew Marr – who then announced the decision to the nation from Downing Street for all the world as if he were the Prime Minister’s spokesman.

The BBC has lost its way – and it will take more than the removal of an executive or two for it to find it again.

But do read the whole thing – it’s worth it!

Thank you to Biased BBC reader Richy for the link.