See the BBC like to start the new year with THIS nasty little attack piece on Queen Victoria. After paragraph after paragraph of a hatchet job, it concludes on an upbeat tone “Perhaps Queen Victoria was not such a bad mother after all.” How generous.
THE REAL QUEEN VICTORIA…
Bookmark the permalink.
Somewhat ironically, I was watching a programme about the British Empire on PBS America the other day. Apart from some Americanisation it was perfectly acceptable.
PBS America is the British version of the USA’s public service broadcasting. People say that if we abolished the licence fee we would get a PBS style service instead, as if it were inferior.
Yet the programmes I have seen on PBS are reminiscent of the way the BBC used to be. Fact rich documentaries with no discernable agenda, uninterrupted interviews and little or no background music or fancy graphics.
http://www.pbsamerica.co.uk
Probably half the programming on PBS is what you used to get on the BBC. “Are You Being Served”, “Keeping Up Appearances”, Inspector Morse, various costume dramas, etc.
Agreed. American PBS has been one of the highlights of my Christmas-particularly enjoyed their ‘Jesus to Christ’ 4 part series.
Queen Victoria?
Hardly Cherie Blair now is it?
The way many of our youth are dumbed down by celeb culture, they’d think Queen Victoria is still alive and married to King David, whilst living at Beckingham Palace !
If there’s no Hitler or slavery angle, the kids are all at sea.
Happy new year to all.
In his splendid 2001 book “Re-Inventing the Victorians” Matthew Sweet set about reassessing “Victorian Values”. They did not, for example, put skirts around piano legs. That is a myth.
Sweet argues that our twenty-first century smugness about how far we have evolved is misplaced. The Victorians were less racist than we are, less religious, less violent, and less intolerant. Far from being an outcast, Oscar Wilde was a fairly typical Victorian man; the love that dared not speak its name was declared itself fairly openly. In 1868 the first international cricket match was played between an English team and an Australian team composed entirely of aborigines.
Now all this is a terrible challenge to the left’s view that we have “progressed” to a higher state. This higher state can be called the “Radio 4 sensibility”.
How the media (of all shades) loves a good old Royal knockabout history telling us that our ancestors were scum bags after all and that we should pat ourselves on the back for being better people. On reviewing this new book by Jane Ridley, even the Daily Mail lecherously leaps on the sexuality of Queen Victoria like a Sun journalist taking a bite out of a page 3 girl: “So needy was Victoria for Albert’s love that she had little affection to spare for her second child.” I assume “needy” implies they were at it like rabbits.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2186847/Queen-Victoria-Letters-released-Palace-reveal-Edward-VII-driven-life-debauchery.html
For the publishing trade this is all good stuff – and money in the bank. For Ms Ridley it’s a chance of a TV series. For the tabloids it’s more mindless Kardashian style fodder. And for the BBC and its lefty cohorts it is proof that, after all, members of the monarchy are just a bunch of losers. Not like us, they ponder, as they flick with effortless superiority through the Guardian, for WE the salt of the earth.
(NB It’s January 1st, 2013. Please allow me a moment of cynical reflection)
Good post
The Victorians are often chided for the state of the society they inherited, not the one they bequeathed.
Arranged marriage(aha!). Cousins marrying (aha!). No painting done of them arguing? Why ever not!
Is this stupid bint paid for such tosh? 5 minutes with Wiki would produce a better article.
Spot the MO, compare and contrast.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20743952
The dignity of Royal Wotton Bassett is denigrated by a useful idiot `comedian ` who participates to promote his career.
Can you image the solemnity and dignity being scripted for the Nelson Mandela death rapture experience. The last minutes purchase of the first class flights to JoBurg for the entire news organisation? The supply of fresh onions, readied for peeling on air? Eddie, Jim, Jeremy and Gavin in a room with a `coach`, rehearsing so that hey can blub on cue at the climax of the rapture?
Yes, just imagine if Denis Thatcher had run an organisation that murdered a child. It would be mentioned every day. Yet Winnie and her Supporters Club have been washed down the black hole of the BBCs collectivised memory.
@hothandsdave
I hadn’t seen the Royal Wootton Bassett tribute so I took a couple of minutes to watch it.
I thought Al Murray handled the material sensitively and seemed to approach the subject with more of an understanding than I’d anticipated. This intrigued me because I only know him as the Pub Landlord, and not very well at that, so I set out to find out a little more about him.
What I found was that he comes from a military family that goes back at least four generations, he has a first degree in modern history, and he’s made a ten-part documentary for the Discovery Channel on the 7th Armoured Division’s advance to Berlin. In Episode 1 he re-enacts a beach landing and in Episode 5 he takes part in the 60th anniversary parachute jump on Arnhem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Murray's_Road_to_Berlin
So far from the lazy stereotype that you chose, he seems quite a good choice as the presenter of the Wootton Bassett tribute.
Do you seriously think that the BBC will send oh-so-sensitive Tess Daley to the Nelson Mandela death rapture experience to tell the world’s terrible loss with intriguing sensitivity and understanding?
The author Jane Ridley is a very eminent historian and has been backed as a possible biographer of the queen. She is also Nicholas Ridley’s daughter.
If this is a hatchet job, it would not appear to come from a left wing perspective.
Ha, next you’ll be telling us that her thesis was about Leadership and Management in the Conservative Party…oh.
My answer, so what? The post by DV was about the BBC article (maybe paraphrased? Maybe edited?) Anyway, it begins with the famous stealth quotes and a strawman!
Queen Victoria: The real story of her ‘domestic bliss’…hmmm, so, domestic bliss, let’s knock that strawman down.
It’s not entirely clear, but the article seems to have been penned by Ridley.
This is borne of a work of historical scholarship, not a “hatchet job”.
I think the clue to who wrote the article is contained within lines 2 and 3 of the piece: “……………………….. but the reality was very different, writes historian Jane Ridley”.
She also penned a similar piece for the Daily Mail:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2186847/Queen-Victoria-Letters-released-Palace-reveal-Edward-VII-driven-life-debauchery.html.
To paraphrase David the DM also published this “nasty little attack piece on Queen Victoria”:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2106204/Victorias-secret-According-tantalising-new-evidence-Queen-Victoria-married-Scottish-groom-bore-secret-daughter-spirited-America.html
Far be it for me to suggest that the esteemed Mr Vance may be seeing bias where none exists – but then again?
And the BBC run articles on every history book reviewed by every news paper , not just the ones that support their liberal orthodoxy?
A sad day when the Daily Mail has more intellectual integrity than the BBC.
Probably the first time I have ever seen “Daily Mail” and “intellectual integrity” in the same sentence.
Yep, the truth hurts doesn’t it?
Yes but your using the BBC’s dictionary of new-speak. you know the one where an pretentious aga-saga becomes “a work of historical scholarship”
“I think the clue to who wrote the article is contained within lines 2 and 3 of the piece: “……………………….. but the reality was very different, writes historian Jane Ridley”.” Yes, yes Albaman but the way it is reprodcued chimes with serveral differnt authors and the programme tonight (or at least part 1) tends to suggest it is an article made up of snippets of several of the historian talking heads on the programme.
And may I remind you (as others have done repeatedly) the Daily Mail can be as biased and nasty as it likes; this however is a Biased BBC blog.
Apparently one of Queen Victoria’s daughters was that ‘rarest of things, an intelligent royal’. Hmmm