Monthly Archives: July 2009

THAT NORWICH NORTH RESULT!

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OK, the result is in and Labour is out! Another humiliation for Brown and yet, and yet, can the Conservatives be happy? I mean the BBC have been emphasising how much effort Cameron out into this (Did no other Party bother then?) but do not despair. Nick Robinson has some guidance for us here. As we travel towards the end of days for Labour, it is going to be entertaining watching the BBC try and spin it for their socialist comrades. I enjoy the way BBC pundits keep repeating that this result – whilst bad for Brown – will not trigger any questions on his continued leadership! Great stuff. This was a particularly dire result for the BBC with the people of Norwich North also turning their backs on the Lib-Dems and even..gasp..the Greens! That’s the problem with the electorate – they just will not behave as the elite expect. Your comments on the coverage?

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Flights of fancy

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Given that the BBC reflects and inevitably creates public attitudes, and is obliged to be seen to be impartial, could someone at the BBC kindly explain your portrayal of M.E. news.

For example this web article concerning the removal of the word nakba from textbooks for state-educated Arab Israeli nine-year-olds.
Although worded to give a veneer of impartiality, the article conveys an unpleasant underlying message with an innocent smile, the lip-service of balance barely concealing prejudices that turn the truth inside out.

“The passage in question, which occurs in one textbook aimed at Arab children aged eight or nine, describes the 1948 war, which resulted in Israel’s creation,”

What? The war resulted in Israel’s creation? The other way round methinks.
Israel’s creation resulted in the war. The war waged by the Arabs against Israel’s creation. Because of it. See? Upside down.

Your message shines through thus:

Far-right Jews have callously stolen the truth from little children, forcing them to deny their catastrophe and pretend instead that it was a triumph for the Zionist oppressors. Hebrew text books deviously focus on the heroism of Israeli forces in 1948 and gloss over the mass exile of Palestinians.
Israelis are arrogant boasting manipulators who cover up the proof about Israel’s lies over their brutal ethnic cleansing of millions of Arabs in 1948.
More impending oppressive legislation is in the pipeline from the far-right.

Is that what you really think but were constrained from saying outright? You had to make an attempt, through gritted teeth, to sound even-handed?
A little transparency please. Make people who write articles and broadcast over the airwaves learn some history. Please.

Look at the list of KEY STORIES. It’s almost as though you think there is nothing positive to say about Israel. Almost as if you fall into the category of what they call ‘ready made thinking about Jews.’

“Oh no,” you reply. “It’s not Jews we hate, it’s Israel.”

Well in that case why do you publicise Breaking the Silence and not this?
The amnesty International report about war crimes and not this?
And why don’t you mention the equal number of Jews, (not millions as you state in your article but an estimated 750,000) that were displaced from Arab countries in 1948, or reflect on the good fortune of Arab Israelis who enjoy a state education in Israel with text books that don’t perpetuate hostility and deliberately inflame grievances and hatred.

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JEW HATING FRIDAY….

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Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor is an affable soul and I always wonder how he can keep his cool when provoked by some of the Anti-Israeli venom endemic in the UK media, including the BBC. Here’s him doing a great job when interviewed by posh Ed Stourton on Today this morning. Ed insists that Jerusalem is “occupied” land and was pushing the Pali/Obama line that Israel must not build within the boundaries of it’s own capital city. Throughout the interview, Prosor showed great restraint and I did enjoy his observation that Jerusalem was the capital city for the Jewish people back in the days when London was still a swamp. Stourton was outraged when Prosor pointed out that Jerusalem was never a capital for the Arab world. The BBC really DOES hate the Jewish people. Three cheers for Prosor and a loud raspberry for dhimmi Stourton.

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MARK EASTON – NARCOTICS WARRIOR

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Managed to catch the ubiquitous Mark Easton sharing his thoughts on the battle to control illegal narcotics here this morning. There was a bit of a consensus from Mark and Mike Trace, chairman of the “international drug policy consortium”. Can you guess what it was? Yes, that’s right – being tough on drug dealers and cracking down on their illegal networks just doesn’t work. We need to find more, erm, creative ways of “managing” this issue. Probably best to just legalise all drugs and let people get on with poisoning themselves and corrupting our kids, right?

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NEW TRICKS BUT SAME OLD AGENDA

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One of the few BBC programmes that I regularly enjoy is “New Tricks”. I think it’s a right laugh and I do enjoy the rather lovely Amanda Redman solving crime! HOWEVER, last night, in the run-in to the last Question Time liveblog, the New Tricks episode was all about a US secret rendition flight to Guantanamao Bay from England which had crashed on take-off killing innocent British citizens. The bad CIA had swooped on some of our finest Brits, you see, and were whizzing them off to be tortured. This agitprop was only off-set by the parallel plot that they MIGHT have been aliens of the close encounters of the third kind kind!! Now I am prepared to watch Amanda and the boys solve any crime BUT I do object to some blatant leftist anti-American propaganda spoiling an otherwise decent series. Perhaps this is the sort of left of centre thinking that Ben Stephenson is so anxious to see much more?

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QUESTION TIME LIVEBLOG!

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David Dimbleby will be joined in Norwich by Geoff Hoon MP, Baroness Warsi, Baroness Williams, Clive James and George Galloway MP. I hope YOU will be joining this – the last QT of the season. With the verminious Galloway being given more publicity by the BBC, the omnipresent Shirl the Pearl, the gormless Hoon, there should be plenty for US to talk about. Make sure you come along…!

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Some writers of BBC dramas speak out.

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In last week’s episode of the ground-breaking new drama “Left of Centre”, the Guardian published a lament about the state of BBC drama by veteran producer Tony Garnett. The BBC’s drama commissioning controller Ben Stephenson responded, using the word “passionate” four times and – controversially – saying that the BBC ought to promote “left of centre” thinking. (The Biased BBC specials dealing with this story are to be found below.) But his was not the only defence of the BBC. The Guardian also published “TV writers in support of BBC drama” in which

Along with Ben Stephenson’s blog, the BBC passed on the following comments from a selection of TV writers

Someone ought to fire the scriptwriter for this one. They were so exactly like you’d expect BBC writers to be that I began to wonder whether they weren’t parodies. Here’s Tony Jordan (EastEnders, Holby Blue, Hustle, Life On Mars) (Emphasis added by me in both excerpts):

Do I prostitute my vision for a fast buck or do I stop the process and put my beloved script back in the drawer and wait for its time to come? As I write this, my bottom drawer is bulging with scripts that saw the light of day briefly and came under sustained attack before being rescued from the brink of whoredom.

Why? Because I’m an artist, not a fucking arse licker.

During my time at EastEnders, I wrote almost two hundred episodes. My chest still bulges with pride at every single one of them, reaching out to an audience of 20 million-plus in its heyday still gives me a hard on.

Guardian commenter “acme” suggested Viagra. Equally stereotypical in a different mode was Billy Ivory (Common as Muck)*:

Because television has changed massively. There is no longer the solid block of white, middle-class, metropolitan, male viewers sitting in their droves, waiting to lap up a certain kind of programme once it is put before them. The TV demographic has changed and misty-eyed remembrance of times past is inadequate as TV tries to shake itself up to compete with the new media to capture the current audience for TV drama.

At the same time one has to acknowledge that there IS less cash around and the BBC is a public service broadcaster, which must cater for a broad church (not just that white, middle-class, male, heterosexual one … am I going on about that? Well, that’s because it’s such a critical point and one which MUST be considered in remembering the good old days of drama; who was the audience?) so of course it’s going to be hands on in how it develops its output. It can’t just chuck cash at it.

Finally, one has to be aware that the arts in this country have always been prey to the most awful snobbery. Remember the 1970s and the time when certain cinemas were called FILM THEATRES?

Why? Because the middle classes always want to claim the good art, the thoughtful art, the liberal art, for themselves.

That mention of “liberal” art is just the same sort of Freudian slip as Stephenson’s “left of centre” thinking.

*That’s a credit, not a comment.

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MARK EASTON – CRIME WARRIOR

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Continuing my occasional series on Mark Easton, I happened to catch him being interviewed on Eddie Mair’s PM programme on the topic of knife crime. In essence, Easton was taking the line that new statistics are far from compelling and that “knife crime” itself could include attacks with a broken bottle by drunk young men, bottom line being that it will take generations for any real trend to become discernible. On his blog, he is much more scathing of the stats than he was on-air but again he parrots the notion that change is long-term, indeed transgenerational. In fact, if you read his last sentence on his blog, he endorses this view that our police cannot hope to deal with knife crime in months or years but rather decades. That’s where the line is crossed. There are plenty of us who believe that knife crime COULD be dealt with much more vigorously if there was the will but Easton holds the contrary view. Why is there no one to voice an alternative to him?

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