“I’m happy to announce I’m proud of the BBC“, says Mitch Benn, who has made a small fortune over the years on the back of the telly tax.
So happy he’s even made a video about his “beleaguered meal ticket Beeb” – which you can apparently get from iTunes from November 1st; although to be fair you’d need to be a brain damaged lemur on crack to want to.
It looks like his Beeboid friends have already been busy in the YouTube comments. Why not head over there and provide some fair and impartial balance?
And he’s actually made T-shirts to go along with it. Really. For £15 each.
This has got to be a wind-up [checks diary for early Aprilness]….hasn’t it?
A doff of the fedora to the free-to-air GrumpyOldTwat.
Toni Arthur, Brian Cant, Mr Benn, Hancock, Yes Minister, The Goon Show…can you see what the problem is yet?
They are all famous from the past, when the BBC was actually good. I can’t be @arsed going through the list but it looks like at least 50 per cent of the programming here is no longer made, a significant proportion of them stopped production at least twenty years ago.
I thought exactly the same when I watched the thing earlier today. Virtually ALL the GOOD stuff was way in the past – going back to Bronowski’s Ascent of Man, which must have been 40 years ago – in the days when David Attenborough was a gifted and bold controller of the new BBC2.
Virtually all the more recent stuff is either infunny trash or leftie rubbish.
Benn and his ilk are poncing on a very faded reputation of the BBC.
“Virtually ALL the GOOD stuff was way in the past – going back to Bronowski’s Ascent of Man”
Bronowski is still a delight to watch. But I think perhaps you are forgetting that it was so iconic at the time because there was nothing else. There were only 3 channels. BBC2 only came on in the afternoon and then nothing but horse racing till tea time. BBC1 was schools’ progammes or Welch for most of the day. Evenings were dominated by tedious song, dance, smug chat and “sale of the century” quiz shows. And everything closed down at midnight.
Yes there where some diamonds, but they stood out amongst a mountain of dross.
The only difference now is that the dross and the diamonds have been stretched out to fill 50 channels. But just look at a weeks worth of programmes on BBC4 and there is no comparison to the paltry offerings of 40 years ago.
That is rubbish. I got back from holiday at the weekend, used BBC iPlayer to scan what had been on in the past week. There were only a handful of programmes across 4 BBC TV channels that I bothered to watch – and a couple of those were repeats. The idea that BBC3 and BBC4 are somehow “highbrow” is an absolute lie – and you know it.
Toni Arthur, Brian Cant, Mr Benn, Hancock, Yes Minister, The Goon Show…can you see what the problem is yet?
That was so long ago it was in the last century!
“Toni Arthur, Brian Cant, Mr Benn…”
Have you considered that perhaps it’s not the quality of programmes that has changed but you.
Then – you where young, optimistic and everything was new.
Now – You’re old, cynical, and “seen it all before” 😉
He’s entitled to his views.
However, I don’t like his inclusion of young children in his video. They can’t realise the damage the BBC does to our nation with its vast outpouring of dumbed down trash.
Prorammes like Kenneth Clark’s ‘Civilisation’
The assumptions behind the programme, commencing with the first episode that Europe(and England) escaped by collapse of the Roman World ‘By the skin of our teeth’ to develop a unique and vibrant civilisation would not be possible now in this age of deconstructionist cynicism.
The producers of this BBC legacy, that generation, has long gone.
The current callow bunch really ought to think twice before seeking to clothe themselves in the mantle of the greats.
Part of my ‘rage’ against the current bunch is how technocratically mediocre and non-creative they really are.
I re-watched “Civilisation” not long ago, and even though I quite enjoy a good old fashioned lecture; it did send me off wondering into Sleepyland more than once. IMHO there have been many better and more informative documentaries on the same themes made since.
What’s notable about Clarke’s first episode is the way he dismisses every other civilisation other than the West in aproximately one sentence; “all that other Eastern stuff is a bit shit in comparison, so no point talking about it”.
That’s not history; it’s vanity, and it’s a vanity never far from the surface in subsequent programmes. It was subtitled “A Personal View” so there’s nothing wrong with that. But it means it’s not quite the definitive history it could have been; and probably not quite so wonderful as you remember it…
Fine. It was in B/W and nothing like it had ever been done before.
The dismissiveness of other cultures, while a sin, in today’s cultural relativist terms, was to point out what was ‘unique’ in the isolated Western culture which produced a social and intellectual ferment which other cultures failed to match.
It was not a compare and contrast exercise and therefore a ‘meanwhile in…..’ was not germane.
The lack of slick aerial shots or other ‘mannerist’ developments would not impress a visually excited modern audience but, in the context of its time, it was groundbreaking.
Sure it had elitist overtones. The comfort zone of the upper middle class still found it difficult to connect with the mass.
In essence ,it was an essay concerning a phenomenon of a culture that out of the wreck of the Roman world, emerged out of isolation and barbarity, and peering from the ruins of a former imperial Europe, created something in the course of 1500 years which has shaped the world, with all its contradictions, and given humanity a standard of political and cultural achievement which is impossible to deny except by the wilful politicising gainsayers.
India, China, Islam while intrinsically fascinating failed for reasons one can analyse, the concept of invidual freedom and responsibility which made Europe (and its cultural offshoots) unique in the history of the world.
Many things were better in the olden days. For example, compare Mitch Benn’s effort to the original, Subterranean Homesick Blues.
Benn’s ‘homage’ simply highlights his inferiority/inadequacy.
Benn’s tuneless rendition murders the melody – then massacres the graphics and desecrates the lyrics with consummate amateurishness.
Proud to be crap.
Bring back Tom Lehrer. Can anything around today remotely touch his wit musicality and satirical intelligence?
Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown.
“Ha, Nazi Schmazi,” says Wernher von Braun.
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical,
Say rather that he’s apolitical.
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.
Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
Or for Mitch Benn:
“Plagiarize,
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good lord made your eyes,
So don’t shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize –
Only be sure always to call it please ‘research’.”
More lyrics: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/t/tom_lehrer/#share
No Proms? No orchestras? No Radio 3? Philistine.
Sitcoms and cooking shows, Dr. Who, Top Gear, and other children’s programmes, spanning decades. This is also why the Tories can’t ever bring themselves to attack the BBC over its biased News division. This is always going to be the danger of having an official state broadcaster for generations.
Who the f*ck is Mitch Benn? I truly have never heard of him. Is it because I am a right wing foaming at the mouth baby eater? I will be posting on the youtube clip. I have read the current comments and it is obvious that the BBC employees have been told to post something. Nobody but the employees would be that fawning over the anti-British BC.
I don’t know who he is either. Perhaps someone will tell us.
Mitch Benn is a long running feature of B-BBC who has clashed directly with this site in the past. For background see either in the post or in the comments here, here, here, here, here, here, here, getting better when it starts to really heat up here and here, also here and finally getting a title role post of his own here.
Oh, I’ve just come across the following on another forum:
…Radio 4 musician/ comedian Mitch Benn from The Now Show…
…and his Wikipedia page too for those who might be interested.
Off topic but the ‘A Tangled Web’ blog is coming up as being suspended. What has happened?
I broke it trying to import 266 thousand comments from the old ATW. Move along now…
It’ll be back up when I’ve finished crawling to their hosting techs.
Already mentioned this in the open thread – spot the 2 black women enticed into frame to represent diversity, and the cameraman’s desperate attempt to make the most of their far from enthusiastic appearance.
😀
I wish that troll post was left up. The “I hope you all burn in hell” bit was very revealing.
I wonder if this mong feels proud of making money by robbing them via their TV tax, especially the low paid?
The very LAST thing on earth the beeboid comrades are concerned about are the low paid workers other than how they can be used and manipulated and filled with a PC rage and jealousy.
Another from the ex-10:10 PR guys who are also bringing us such gems as Helen Boaden and David Jordan’s ‘we are the best.. look, we say so’ blogs and bussed-in ‘I love the BBc’ trolls that now inhabit them.
Not sure what is in his genes, but having endured a few seconds of the ‘piece’, and the vid’s rip-off video concept, but if it really does go 5mins+ like this it really will need a special relationship with the ‘subject’ and its critically-pollarded supportive employees to get much airplay.
Bohemian Rhapsody it ain’t.
From Twitter yesterday:
@MASieghart Mary Ann Sieghart
Promote! #28 MITCH BENN – I’M PROUD OF THE BBC :: Trending videos on twitter! trendingtube.com/promote/p3q2iZ… via @AddThis
13 hours ago via Tweet Button Favorite Retweet Reply
notasheepagoat NotaSheep MaybeaGoat @MASieghart @AddThis After that tweet I have decided to stop following you. I am not proud of the BBC, their bias disgusts me. 12 hours ago
I have just done the same.
“From those wonderful people who brought you “Walking with Dinosaurs’ (but now have become them)”
Sad, really.
I loved ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’. I was really disappointed to discover that when the BBC brought it to the US via BBC Worldwide (joint venture with Discovery Communications), they decided to spend an additional $100,000 or so to re-record the narration with a lousy US actor instead of Kenneth Brannagh. As if we low-brow, parochial fools couldn’t understand his impenetrable regional accent. The attitude is endemic.
They chose the stilted tones of Avery Brooks instead, if you can believe that. Fortunately, I got an advanced copy with Brannagh.
It was a watershed moment for me in televisual education.
What the BBC… all broadcast… ‘should’ be about. Cutting edge, factual, entertaining. World class.
And unless I missed something, not an overpaid hypocrite in sight emoting or interpreting what happened in the pre-Cambrian to put it in ‘today’s context’.
‘Sistas, just doing it for themselves..’
Amazingly, in… the Graun:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/mediamonkeyblog/2010/oct/18/mitch-benn-proud-bbc
One presumes that,from the headline, they know who Mr. Benn is, and are none concerned if anyone outside the bubble does.
Sadly, comments were not enabled.
Of course, now this is up, the BBc can ‘report’ it.
Will they point out Benn’s conflict of interest? “I’m proud of the BBC shilling I collect for my appearances.”
I don’t think ‘conflict of interest’ appears, or is interpreted the same way chez Aunty as it might be in less… ‘unique’ organisations.
My God, that was basically incest.