Please use this thread for comments about the BBC’s current programming and activities. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog – scroll down for new topic-specific posts. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or chit-chat. Thoughtful comments are encouraged. Comments may be moderated.
The violence was probably faked.
😉
“Eastenders” has always exemplified the deep contempt in which the Tarquins hold the urban English working class. Has any young character on that programme been known to go to school, work hard, get to university and get a decent job? It’s not entirely unheard-of in real life, after all. Might even make an interesting story line.
No, the Beeboid Tarquins prefer to portray white working-class people as a type of pond life.
Pounce: Much appreciated.
I like having David Gregory on here. Don’t agree with him, but that’s not the point.
I can’t say I have a lot of time for Eastenders, it is relentlessy depressing and grim IMO – but the show’s creator and key influencer Tony Jordan is far from being a Tarquin/Tristram.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Jordan
Any similarity between Jordan and Alfie Moon is purely coincidental 😉
As an aside, Jordan was also one of the team responsible for Life on Mars. I remember a while back on this board that I tried to assert that Gene Hunt was the real hero of Life on Mars and a good example of the kind of character “that never appears on the BBC”. Obviously noone here would believe that.
Since then I have been working on some different projects one of which is about how programmes are made based on key audience insights. I now know for a fact that the audience insight driving ‘Life on Mars’ was that “people are fed up with PC”.
The BBC, It’s hatred of the Police and really half a story.
pounce | 16.11.07 – 1:23 am | #
Pounce, it’s a sloppy report and no mistake, seems to omit a few salient points.
However, the police really can’t go around tasering anyone who doesn’t respond to a challenge and who’s carrying a rucksack • that just isn’t acceptable.
Apparently he ‘looks Egyptian’! Not in any of the photos I’ve seen published, he doesn’t.
Also it didn’t occur in a crowded street, it was in an empty bus depot so if he had been a suicide bomber the only person he was a threat to at that point in time was himself and the police.
Take away Eastenders and you will give probably a third of the telly taxed, a reason not to pay anymore.
Eastenders is a token bone, produced by the telly toffs and thrown to the masses to keep them quiet. That way, the TV elite can go spend billions on producing content that makes themselves feel big and important.
Incidentally Eastenders seems to be the last place in the world the BBC would ever try and inject a pro-Islam storyline. So far anyway.
Sarah Jane:-
“Since then I have been working on some different projects one of which is about how programmes are made based on key audience insights. I now know for a fact that the audience insight driving ‘Life on Mars’ was that “people are fed up with PC”.
I’d be interested in finding out how these key audience insights are compiled Sarah Jane.
TV viewers have been fed up with PC for the past 10 years, and the BBC has done nothing except deride that fact or pass them off as nutters or racists.
Admittedly “Life on Mars” is a brilliant show, but the character of Gene Hunt was representative of a by-gone age. Would the BBC ever commission a program where such a character was contemporary and was NOT portrayed as a villain?
I was watching some old episodes of “Only Fools and Horse” on Youtube last night (A nice place to get some free content from the Beeb I think they owe me) and what struck me about the 80’s episodes is that there was a lot of ‘interracial mockery’ throughout some of the shows, that would just be displaced as plain old racism by the BBC nowadays.
“the only person he was a threat to at that point in time was himself and the police”.
Aren’t the police allowed to be threatened then?
It doesn’t matter if the Police are murdered as that’s the risk they are paid to take?
Police not allowed to protect themselves if endangered?
Peculiar attitude you’ve got, perhaps you’ve been watching too many BBC anti-police programmes and it’s rubbed off.
Diederick Santer has worked wonders with EastEnders. The show is far superior to Corrie and the silly Emmerdale. It has been for the most part superb lately.
The prejudice of the writers shines through though, especially towards working class teenagers. Look at what they do with a fantastic character like Stacey. Its annoying.
Gene Hunt is an anti-hero, not a villain, he is kind of like Grimlock to Sam Tyler’s Optimus Prime.
Yesterday and today I searched the BBC news website for the horrible story about the MP whose niece has been arrested after allegedly killing her lover.
Unless I have missed it, I cannot find any such story on the BBC, although it has been widely reported elsewhere.
It wouldn’t be because the MP in question is Quentin Davies now a Labour MP?
I wonder if the Beeb would have happily reported it had Quentin Davies remained a Tory MP?
I guess we will never know.
Llew:
“Neice of Quentin Davies’ (Labour MP) suspect in murder charge…”
Nicely spotted. I can’t find it reported on their web site either.
Never mind, it will just be an ‘oversight’ or ‘mistake’ like all the other percieved pieces of BBC bias dredged up in their thousands around here.
Llew | 16.11.07 – 7:24 pm
I searched the BBC news website for the horrible story about the MP whose niece has been arrested after allegedly killing her lover.
In what sense is this story about the MP?
Hard left BBC regular (News Quiz, Question Time, and presenter of his very own history and philosophy series) bemoaning the fact that the hard propagandising he does for the totalitarian SWP goes unrewarded by those peskily apathetic members of the public.
http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=1051
Boo hoo…
Still, at least he has a regular soapbox amongst his friends at Radio 4.
Another hysterical Climate Change story, Meat & Drink for the BBC control freak fascists
IPCC to warn of ‘abrupt’ warming
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7098902.stm
But just look at the sidebar links, not a single dissenting or sceptical voice to be seen.
Why are the BBC so DESPERATE to push the Climate Change agenda?
Is it because they are anti business, anti America, anti Capitalist NeoSocialists useful only for overdubs of babies crying where actually silence prevails?
Here are the sidebar links:
CLIMATE CHANGE
Animated guide
Find out how the greenhouse effect works and more…
GLOBAL POLITICS
IPCC and Gore win Nobel prize
Critics angry at Bush climate plan
EU/UK POLITICS
Climate bill’s 60% emission cut
Tories pledge energy ‘revolution’
EU climate flight plans ‘deluded’
LATEST SCIENCE
‘Unexpected growth’ in CO2 found
Amazonian forest ‘more resilient’
IPCC ASSESSMENT
Human climate impact defined
Through the climate window
Billions face climate change risk
Mapping climate change
Climate curbs: Who will buy?
FEATURES
Humans failing sustainability audit
Green-tinged conference season
Humanity the biggest challenge
Models ‘key to climate forecasts’
BACKGROUND
State of the planet, in graphics
The evidence
Earth – melting in the heat?
FROM ACROSS THE BBC
Climate change portal
Bangladesh river journey
RELATED INTERNET LINKS
IPCC
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites
TOP SCIENCE/NATURE STORIES
IPCC to warn of ‘abrupt’ warming
US wants freeze on tuna fishing
Doomsday vault begins deep chill
John Reith | 16.11.07 – 7:34 pm
Sorry, my bad editing, whose of course should have read ‘s as in
Yesterday and today I searched the BBC news website for the horrible story about the MP’s niece who has been arrested after allegedly killing her lover.
Well I just read
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7098902.stm
What a load of rubbish.
“Among its top-line conclusions are that climate change is “unequivocal”, that humankind’s emissions of greenhouse gases are more than 90% likely to be the main cause, and that impacts can be reduced at reasonable cost.”
There is no proof, just a lot of excess wind from poorly calibrated models.
pounce’s taser story rings a bell – a couple of days ago I was in the car listening to Radio 4 and there was a programme I came in in the middle of, which I think must have been about/for disabled people. They were having a lengthy piece on tasers and how – allegedly – they were particularly dangerous for mentally ill people. The piece was reasonably fair – there was a “tasers are good – they stop violent incidents quickly” advocate, and a “tasers are bad” advocate. Neither of ’em, nor the BBC presenter could avoid lots of references to how bad the US was (not properly trained, taser as a first resort blah blah blah.) But the BBC presenter insisted on calling them “taser-guns” – it became particularly embarrassing after a while as even the anti-taser advocate didn’t call then that. This taser-gun must be a popular meme to be spread about by the vast left wing conspiracy.
Thank you David Shukman for telling us (and showing illustrative news clips) on BBC 24 that last week’s non-floods in East Anglia were due to MMGW. Of course, the real floods in 1953 never happened. No BBC agenda then!
Small but telling…
During Friday’s ‘Drive’ 23 mins into the show an item on the Scotland vs Italy game cut to a Beeb reporter in Glasgow called something like Lesley Asbal. Referring to the excitement in the city over the match she gushed “Everywhere in the city from the halal butcher shops to the Middle Eastern cafes to the fruit & veg shops (we do actually have some of those)…”
That last remark (a smug comment on those awful pale Scots’ diet?) was particularly apposite coming from someone who prioritises such alien establishments in a verbal snapshot of a major city in NW Europe
R
This week’s Over to You pretended to take a look at the public’s complaints about the BBC’s obsession with climate change:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/over_to_you.shtml
Instead, the deceitful crew grabbed the opportunity to expose us to yet more crap about climate change. So I sent them an e-mail, not that it will help:
Mr. Datar,
I was under the impression that the point of your programme is to deal with complaints and feedback from listeners. Do you have to devote two-thirds of the programme to a meaningless meandering across Bangladesh with pointless recordings of various BBC people giving us comments on climate change?
And then give your BBC representative five times the amount of air time to respond to a brief complaint from a listener, without at least giving that listener the opportunity for a rebuttal?
You should change the name of your programme from “Over to you” to something more appropriate, like “Over to us, to carry on indoctrinating you.”
I found this video clip of British soldiers back from Afghanistan completely by accident, while searching for “Over to you”, only because the BBC has such a crap search engine that it picked up “over” and “to” from the text of the clip:
http://search.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/search/results.pl?scope=all&edition=i&q=Over+to+You&go.x=25&go.y=11
That’s all 49 seconds of it. And I can’t find it in the UK section or anywhere else on the BBC website. And a few weeks ago they had a clip on Newswatch of Jawad Iqbal, a senior TV editor, justifying the decision to only broadcast 10 seconds of coverage of troops returning from Afghanistan while Channel 4 had 3 minutes of it. So here’s the question: is it now official policy of the subversive BBC to give us as little coverage as humanly possible of British troops back on home soil?
Essex Boy, you misunderstand me, the police are only at risk because they were there, so when they arrived the ‘bomber’ was posing a threat to no-one. In fact, he was so dangerous that he was sitting alone in an empty bus in a depot – I know these suicide bombers aren’t the sharpest tools in the box, but that really is stretching it a bit.
I’m certainly not saying the police aren’t entitled to protect themselves, but since when did that extend to pre-emptive strikes before carrying our proper risk assessment?
This case is in court at the moment:
http://www.eastlondonadvertiser.co.uk/content/towerhamlets/advertiser/news/story.aspx?brand=ELAOnline&category=news&tBrand=northlondon24&tCategory=newsela&itemid=WeED03%20May%202006%2017%3A35%3A48%3A163
Can’t seem to find any mention of it on the BBC. Strange really, they are normally very keen on racist murders. In Liverpool they had hundreds covering a racist murder, but they cannot muster a single person to cover one only half a dozen miles away from their HQ.
No doubt there’s some pesky order restricting the hundreds of BBC journos outside the courthouse from reporting it, or something. Surely it would be too cynical to say it is because the victim is white and the attackers Asian.
Or rather, racist attacks. Fortunately, this didn’t turn out to be a murder, but it was attempted murder.
Bryan: At Midlands Today we are proud to cover our returning troops. If we can be we’re live when it happens, but otherwise it’s often the top story on MT.
Surely it would be too cynical to say it is because the victim is white and the attackers Asian.
Rob | 17.11.07 – 12:33 am | #
Yes, surely. And were they really simply “Asian”? As in Chinese, Hindus, Koreans?
Lurker: thanks for all that, it just illustrates what the BBC has become:
Welcome to the BBC. We tried our hand at Public service broadcasting and failed, at least with the ‘service’ bit. So we’ve decided to leave that to Channel 4 and concentrate on being sockpuppets for the IPCC… BTW thankyou for choosing to support us with you licence fee money.
Oh wait, it’s not a choice.
Prolonged piece on BBC News this morning about how Walkers Crisps are now printing information on their crisp packets about how much carbon is produced when each packet is made.
So important was this hot topic, that the Beeb took to the streets to canvas the views of the populace. Quite right too. I know it’s the topic that’s on eveyones mind at the moment…
Actually, the Beeb are slipping. They missed a chance to link this “news” with a propaganda piece on “how we’re turning into a nation of fatties” .
Tsk.
Here’s a quote from an agitated Hamas, worried that Abbas will make peace with Israel:
“We warn the whole region . . .against harming Al Aqsa, meddling with our basic rights, or tightening the siege” on Gaza, al-Haya told the crowd. “We warn of a huge explosion, in which Palestinians will blow up in all places . . . No seas or barbed wire will prevent that.”
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/international/middle_east/view.bg?articleid=1045262
Well, I suppose terrorists have no option but to threaten terror at the dreaded prospect of peace. Now we look forward to the BBC trumpeting that quote from the rooftops. After all, it really is serious news from the Middle East and gives an important insight into terrorist thinking.
Another day, another piece of BBC bias. The BBC hate America, mainly because the American public seem to keep voting (in BBC think) for nasty warmongering NeoCon Republicans rather than for nice peace loving Democrats. So any opportunity to denigrate anything American is often taken, last week we had the story that Gisele Bündchen “is…keen to avoid the US currency because of uncertainty over its strength”. Today the BBC report that “Foreign tourists to many of India’s most famous landmarks will no longer be able to pay the entrance fee in dollars..The ruling is aimed at safeguarding tourism revenues following the recent falls in the dollar” You can almost hear the glee…
There is this story that “in an apparent nod to the low value of the dollar, rapper Jay-Z’s new video Blue Magic features another currency. He is seen cruising the streets of New York in Bentleys and Rolls Royces (now owned by Germany’s Volkswagen and BMW) with a briefcase of 500 euro notes…” The glee is almost palpable.
The IPCC is predicting “abrupt and irreversible” climate change (“irreversible”, that’s a big word for a planet with a life of billions of years!)
That was a message I got from a recent BBC Horizon programme notionally about the Permian extinction, but made very much with one eye on the present.
We were told that the extinction occured because of 2 factors, volcanic eruptions causing warming which released the frozen methane from under the oceans.
The time scale (i.e. 10s of thousands of years) was there if one listened closely but the whole tale was narrated with the “abrupt and irreversible” message.
Are the political affiliations of Mark Steele ever stated when he appears on a program such as Any Questions? From what I remember, his membership of the Socialist Workers Party was omitted during the introduction.
How many people does the SWP represent? It seems to get a lot of its members onto the BBC quite frequently.
“I’m certainly not saying the police aren’t entitled to protect themselves, but since when did that extend to pre-emptive strikes before carrying our proper risk assessment?”
How do you that when you have a suspect you believe to be a suicide bomber who is not responding?
Do you sit next to him and ask him questions?
Stand off a few hundred yards and shout at him through a megaphone?.
Easy to be a armchair critic and come out with mindless platitudes like risk assesment etc.
Those officers have only few seconds in which to act and deal with a problem. It’s the likes of you who, from the safety of your armchair, criticise and condemn those who put their lives at risk.
Essex Boy:
“Do you sit next to him and ask him questions?
Stand off a few hundred yards and shout at him through a megaphone?.”
That’s exactly what lefties expect and by the looks of things, what they are achieving.
Now we hear that the police are having sit down meetings with violent gangs (of ethnic origin of course) and asking them nicely if they can stop being horrid and shooting people, because if they don’t the police will have to be jolly rotten and arrest them. And that may appear as being ‘racist’ to certain news outlets that control the mindset of our British police force.
Fluffy conciliatory policing is the sort of thing that makes BBC types glow with excitement. Unless they are of course car-jacked at the traffic lights in Chelsea by one of these horrid gang member types in which case they expect a response time of 2 minutes, tasers, batons, CS and half the calvary there to defend them.
The BBC is to put out this ‘Christmas’, ‘a “contemporary nativity play featuring Mary and Joseph as asylum seekers instructed to report to the nearest passport office’.
A Christian, vice-president of the Prayer Book Society, has complained that ‘ the BBC was indulging in “gimmickry” and was undermining the dignity of the nativity. He added: “This is not the sort of thing which Christmas needs. The story is loved and revered by Christians around the world. There is a dignity to it that will be lost. Adding political correctness of this sort is harmful and uncalled for.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/17/nativity117.xml
To show its political and religious impartiality, is the BBC planning to screen a modern-day drama about Eid, with a Muslim couple travelling by plane to Medina, which is hijacked by Islamic terrorists? Would the BBC screen such a programme, even if it had complaints (and threats) from certain Islamic religious figures?
George R:
“The BBC is to put out this ‘Christmas’, ‘a “contemporary nativity play featuring Mary and Joseph as asylum seekers instructed to report to the nearest passport office’.”
But looking at the publicity photo Mary is a pregnant chav and Joseph is black. Why would they be instructed to report to the nearest passport office? Surely they’d be directed to the nearest council office for handouts and then given emergency accomodation in a 4 star hotel. Without a barn.
Still at least with this theme, Jesus can now look forward to a life of collecting ASBOs instead of disciples.
Bryan: At Midlands Today we are proud to cover our returning troops. If we can be we’re live when it happens, but otherwise it’s often the top story on MT.
David Gregory (BBC) | 17.11.07 – 3:56 am
This is good to know. But surely the issue of returning troops is a national and not a regional one?
I don’t live in Britain and I’m not clued up on local or regional BBC output but the BBC’s national and international output as reflected on its website and on the World Service appear to have been hijacked by people with a distinct agenda. And it sure ain’t pro-British.
Have a look at George R’s comment at 1:31 pm. This is yet more evidence of the BBC’s anti-Christianity stance, something I have been pointing out on this site for quite some time. Who or what gives the BBC the right to foist its narrow, irreligious agenda on religious people who pay its salary? Or on anyone else for that matter? The obvious scorn the BBC has for Christianity even riles me and I’m not a Christian.
Leftoids generally despise Christianity, but every once in a while they find a use for it. So they trot out stuff like this “asylum-seeker” nativity show nonsense. But after the opportunity for exploitation passes, they always go back to bashing Christianity and Christians viciously and relentlessly. The same tactic was tried during the run-up to the Iraq war — when all of the sudden priests and bishops preaching against war were suddenly figures of grave and respectful authority for the left, when normally such people are held up to endless ridicule and scorn.
It never seems to occur to the leftoids that if they work like busy beavers to delegitimize Christianiy 24/7, their audience doesn’t automatically re-legitimize Christianity again in the few seasons when the left finds a use for it (i.e. sentimentality about asylum seekers, war).
To show its political and religious impartiality, is the BBC planning to screen a modern-day drama about Eid, with a Muslim couple travelling by plane to Medina, which is hijacked by Islamic terrorists? Would the BBC screen such a programme, even if it had complaints (and threats) from certain Islamic religious figures?
Or, better yet, a contemporary drama about a fifty-something man who falls in love with his best friend’s six-year-old daughter. . .
The thing that gets me about the BBC’s PC production of the Nativity is that it will be screened on giant screens around Liverpool. It makes it into a propaganda exercise – even if you don’t want to watch this tripe, it’s forced down your throat when you’re going about your Christmas shopping. And of course we have the ‘paranoid government minister’ who orders a crackdown on immigration while our poor heroes suffer. And if Christians protest, who cares?
All this ceasless Beeboid MMGW propaganda has finally gotten to me. After being treated to the main news story about it being “irreversible, defining moment in history, blah blah blah”, I was already primed and mumbling under my breath when a trailer for The Politics Show went into a “carbon footprint, eco-friendly” schtick. It was just too much and I just flipped and let loose a loud volley of pure Anglo-Saxonisms that had my wife concerned about my blood pressure.
And we’re paying for this endless barrage of uninformed and wilfully inaccurate propaganda? How the rest of the world must laugh at us…
And we’re paying for this endless barrage of uninformed and wilfully inaccurate propaganda? How the rest of the world must laugh at us…
Unfortunately, they don’t laugh about it. Al-Beeb still has a sterling reputation in much of the world. I’ve run across lots of US liberals who brag about how they only watch Al-Beeb or read it online.
“The BBC is to put out this ‘Christmas’, ‘a “contemporary nativity play featuring Mary and Joseph as asylum seekers instructed to report to the nearest passport office’.”
Of course, Mary and Joseph were not ‘asylum seekers’, they were forced to go to Bethlehem to register in the census. A more accurate contemporary analogy would be a couple caught up in the chaos of registration for NuLab’s proposed identity cards. Still plenty of scope for paranoid government ministers!
I notice the MMGW narrative has moved on a bit today.
According to Ban Ki-moon and the Beeb, it’s not just a prediction any more – we’re suffering the effects now!
WTF??
We spent the last three weeks of October freezing in the Med and now we’ve got the heating on early here.
Don’t any of these people ever go outside?
Since my attention has been turned to The Independent recently, I noticed this article on the BBC today:
http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article3169633.ece
The topic is the censuring of the BBC for allowing celebrities to swear during the Live Earth broadcast. I’m not interested in the complaints about the swearing, and there was no bias in allowing the vulgarians to do what they please on air, but I did find something interesting in the article.
Apparently the BBC had promised to do a time-delay in order to prevent just this kind of naughtiness. They obviously didn’t on the day, and the Editorial Standards committee busted them on it. The committee were not happy about the BBC’s response:
“In an initial apology to viewers published on its complaints website, the BBC described Live Earth as “a complex international transmission” and said “we could not technically introduce a short time delay”.
But the committee criticised that explanation as being at odds with the more detailed reasons that BBC management had given in a submission, which voiced concern that live events should be live and argued that to introduce a time delay to avoid the risk of swear words being broadcast was disproportionate.”
What follows is more BBC song and dance, but then comes the punchline:
The committee said it was “unacceptable for management to provide a response to audiences that was inaccurate in detail”.
Sound familiar to anyone?
Last night was another Hillary love fest on Matt Frei’s BBC News Propaganda America. Katty Kay was host, as Frei only works four days a week to keep costs down.
Katty had a discussion about the recent “debate” between the Democrat candidates for president. Hillary was apparently the hands down winner. She was strong, tough, showed what a great leader she is. Only one Democratic apparatchik was on hand for the discussion, and nobody else. Katty Kay helped the cause, no alternate viewpoint given. It’s Hillary all the way.
This shilling for Hillary has been going on since they started this news programme. Nobody else gets anything remotely like this amount of coverage – positive or negative. Nobody else gets panel discussions (like the one last month) about how brilliant it would be if they became president. And no, it’s not just because she’s the front runner and is deserving of the lion’s share of attention. No Republican candidate gets a whisper of the attention Hillary gets.
We were told in a previous panel discussion about how much the world loves Bill Clinton, and how the world’s hopes for the redemption of America are pinned on Hillary becoming president. This all adds up to be pure political propaganda, attempting to influence the electoral process of a sovereign nation. This is clearly a breech of the BBC Charter.
On Friday the World Service Radio broadcast a programme investigating where Saudi Arabian money goes. I listened to a few minutes before life intervened. I wanted to listen to the whole programme, possibly even give rare kudos to the Beeb for investigating such a touchy subject.
Generally BBC World Service programmes are archived on the Internet. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Disappeared. Never happened.
Could someone could post a link.
I do wonder where in the Charter the BBC can find a legitimate need to make that nativity play? That’s the kind of thing the lefties at Channel 4 have already been doing for a while.
Can we have a BBC piece about Mohammed and his 6 year old bride soon please? I’d also love to see a BBC piece about female circumcision? Puleeze.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctwo/noise/?programme=arrange_a_marriage
In a sort of Blind Date for the 00’s, the BBC are now broadcasting a programme to prove just how good arranged marriages are – in a format sure to please the modern audience, they plan to show a series where they have a ‘marriage fixer’ pair up contestants, vetting the would be suitors on class, earnings and ambition.
I’m sure this is a valid programme in a country where we don’t have a tradition of arranging marriages.
I give up. You win BBC – where do I sign the conversion to Islam forms?