ChrisH seems to have taken over the world:
EmersonV says in response to Dominic Sandbrook’s ‘Cold War Britain’:
Just finished watching bbc2 Cold War what a load of lefty crap.
Totally bias view , how the west was so bad and the East was just misunderstood and wouldn’t hurt a fly.
ChrisH replies:
Can`t say I agree.
It was pretty balanced to me….Sanbrooke was ironic, but pretty fair I`d say.
And I normally detest most BBC stuff.
Remarkable how a programme can get so many different takes on it (Perhaps different episodes…this Guardian take is for the first episiode)…for the Guardian, in the shape of stereotypical Guardianista, John Crace (more usually concerned with Cameron’s doings) comes up with a third interpretation:
Throughout this first part, the Soviets were depicted as the baddies. Which they were, of course, but Sandbrook rather glossed over the fact that the US and Britain were no angels in the cold war stand-off themselves.
Which is the complete reverse of what EmersonV says.
Crace then goes on to generate excuses for the Communist sympathisers in Britain…just a sign of the times and although recognising ‘Commies’ as ‘baddies’ seems rather put out that Communists are looked upon in such a light.
Naturally the Daily Mail gets a poke along the way:
It also felt rather simplistic of Sandbrook – shades of the Daily Mail’s The Man Who Hated Britain headline – to present every British communist sympathiser in the late 1940s and early 1950s as either deluded fools or traitors. Most of these people had become communists in the 1930s at precisely the time that so many others of the British establishment were advocating the appeasement of Hitler. Ending up on the right side of history can be as much a matter of timing as of morality.
Communist spies weren’t traitors or immoral, they were unlucky, it was just a case of bad timing…if Ed Miliband had been in power then they would have been heroes?
Crace ponders whether the BBC may have fixed their programme not to upset the Americans:
In the years before the Soviets acquired the atom bomb, there were plenty of hawks in the US who were pressing for a preemptive strike on the Soviets. But of this we heard nothing. I did wonder if the BBC had made its own preemptive deal with the US History Channel and had adjusted its content accordingly.
Perhaps we will have to watch all three episodes to get the overall drift of the programme.
I haven’t watched Sandbrook’s programme myself yet…but taking a quick look….it didn’t take long to find fault with the Guardian’s analysis….John Crace claiming:
‘It took Sandbrook the best part of 50 minutes of an hour’s programme to mention the threat of nuclear armageddon – surely one of the most defining features of the cold war – then maybe it was just another of his idiosyncrasies.’
Wonder which film Crace was watching……as 1 minute and 30 seconds in Sandbrook tells us that Britain was ‘living everyday in the shadow of armageddon’…backed up with a clip of a nuclear explosion.
ChrisH also scores with his complaint that the BBC are ramming Dr Who down our throats…an assessment Gillian Reynolds in the Telegraph agrees with:
The BBC’s self-promotion is driving me barmy
Gillian Reynolds’s week in radio was marred by the BBC’s constant self-congratulatory promotion of Doctor Who
Stand back. I am incandescent with rage, totally fed up with the BBC selling me itself. Children in Need I can just about understand. But Doctor Who? Good grief, it’s only a TV programme. Yes, yes, it’s probably the BBC’s biggest worldwide brand but does every network have to drench us in endless publicity for it? And another thing, why are promotions for programmes presented as if they are news on Radio 4’s Today? It happened again yesterday. This time I’ve had enough.
This of course is standard practice on the BBC…to trail a future programme in the News..often a Panorama, Horizon or Newsnight investigation (such as they are ) but other programmes frequently get a plug masquerading as news.
No advertising on the BBC is there? Not for Channel 4 or Sky programmes anyway.
I hate to be a grammar Nazi, but it’s ‘totally biased view’, not ‘totally bias view’.
Yep….EmersonV should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.
Typos happen, the labelling seen here as ” grammar Nazi” belongs in schoolboy debates, or more recently seen on lefty hate sites.
Some growing up is required.
Well don’t then ,spelling Stasi alliterates better.
All of which goes to show how difficult it is to define “bias”. But why should it be up to us to define it? We are not under a statutory duty to be unbiased. It is the BBC which has this duty and it should be up to it to demonstrate that it fulfils the obligation. Saying they think they have got it right isn’t good enough. It should produce a regular report showing what it has done to maintain impartiality, particularly regarding contentious areas.
It won’t, of course, because it can’t. There appears to be no procedure within the BBC (which is ironic, because normally they’re keen on Procedures to protect their butts) to systematically avoid bias, other than their gut feeling. It wouldn’t want to anyway, as that would get more people discussing whether they’re biased and they hate scrutiny. That is for other people only.
P.S. I like Dr Who. Does that make me a bad person here?
I also like Dr Who, although sometimes the plots try to be too clever and complicated. It’s probably because they are trying to save the whole world every story rather than just odd communities as they normally did in the old days.
As long as stuff like the Balen Report is hidden away from the British public then the BBC’s credibility is fundamentally f**ked!
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2222/bbc_continues_to_hide_over_balen_costs_and_implications
I dread watching some BBC documentaries about politics because I know they will stress me out: biased views will make me shout at the screen with a counter-argument only the family and neighbours will hear. Thanks for the heads-up on “Cold War Britain.”
I watched the second episode and, frankly, grew tired of the ‘shadow of the bomb’ rhetoric. What I’d have liked more would have been something about the phenomenal advances in technology during that era.
And yes, the Guardianista is being predictably infantile. (or perhaps politic given the number of pro-Soviets on that rag) Even if (rather dim) people had supported the CP during the late 1940s or during WWII, anyone who remained a supporter in the light of Stalin’s reign of terror was indeed a fifth columnist (Milliand senior included).
The programme was far too forgving of the Soviet position. The Russians held the whole of Eastern Europe in a vicious grip as anyone who visited the East during that era will recall.
The moral relativism of the ‘we were surrounded and scared by an aggressive West’ argument, (as advanced by Kruschev Jnr in the programme) is balderdash. These were totalitarian monsters, gripped by an evil ideology who really would have done to the rest of us what they had done to much of Europe had they not have been checked by overwhelming military strength.
Dominic Sanbrooke is a few years younger than me….so when he began to write and speak on the 70s or whatever; I was naturally suspicious…most of us have had bloody Siouxie and Theakstons views on our era, as if they were beeb Holy Writ.
Sanbrooke though as a rule has written well and fairly enough for me to reckon that he`s put the work in…and is as independent as the BBC etc will let him be. He may not have been there-but he writes better of the times than I can…and researches it better too.
Nice of you to mention me Alan…just a Tommy in the trench and waiting for the Red Adair call into some school that needs another point of view….very few of them left, but God is good.
Apparently my idiot musings and life pre-1998 is to be the object of a “truth recovery mechanism”-so -unlike poor Eichmann or Savile-there`s a hoped-for moratorium on all that Blair did to the UK and Northern Ireland before Year Zero.
Some Pops Larkin cipher of liberal consensus hopes so anyway…does this apply to TV Licenses then?…time-limited…then maybe a novelist can “raise the issue”?
The BBC clearly hope so…
Clearly
i watched the first episode, but as i didnt learn nothing or hear any new schools of thought, i never made the effort to watch the other episodes. So just the usual load of bollox from al beeb then.
bollox broadcasting corporation,sounds about right.british never has been.
Dr Who, are we watching the same program? Its garbage, the monsters aren’t scary, the special effects are basic, the sets look like reconstituted Blake -7 props and the Doctor in a homage good old non-threatening PC Left-wing ideals has a screwdriver as a weapon. The mind boggles. The popularity of the show is down to the amount of self advertising and self promotion it gets. But I was brought up on the original Dr Who and I had a huge collection of Daleks so I guess I’m spoilt.
I honestly believe that a majority of the public,especially those under the age of thirty, have been conditioned by constant and repetitious advertising and P.R. to respond in a Pavlovian way to any hyperbole they are subjected to. How else to explain the inexplicable popularity of leftie entertainers who describe themselves as “comedians” and past their sell by date programmes like Dr. Who?
For me Dr. Who is just a vehicle for the scriptwriters to push their left wing, right-on ideology. The propaganda in the stories is obvious and predictable. That’s why I stopped watching it halfway through David Tennant’s hammy stab at the character.
The funny thing about Doctor Who is that in the 60s it was about as neo-liberal as it could get. In fact the final story of that era saw the Doctor on trial for daring to intervene in places of turmoil, with his own race of “observe-only” time lords acting as peers and suggesting (in UN style) that the Doctor should be punished for such actions.
I am puzzled by accusations of bias about the Cold War Documentary as I thought that it was well balanced. Also he got in quite a digs at the liberal left intellectual elite who were ignored by the vast majority of the rest of the population. That is something rarely seen on BBC these days.
Also he made sure that everyone was in no doubt what the USSR and its ‘partners’ were really like , with millions of their own citizens executed or in labour camps. Again something often glossed over by the BBC.
In the past month I have heard several barbed shafts aimed at the liberal elite Guardian reading snobs, deliverd on BBC programmes by guests. Perhaps the liberal left establishment dominance is showing the first signs of weakening. BBC presenters will no doubt take several years to catch on to the shift that this may signal.
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