They deny it until they are blue in the face, but readers of this site know that behind the closed doors of the rats’ warren corridors of the the BBC, the boys and girls who work there are immersed in finding new and exciting ways of spreading lefty groupthink. Finally, 25 years on, we have a glimpse of that murky world, courtesy of today’s Sunday Times. The late John Nathan-Turner, then producer of Doctor Who (watched in those days by audiences of 16m), hired a cabal of lefty script-writers to find ways of discrediting Margaret Thatcher. One of them, Andrew Cartmel, was reportedly asked by Turner at his script-writing interview what he wanted to achieve by working for the programme. He got the job when he said, without missing a beat, “I’d like to overthrow the government”.
Mr Cartmel told the Sunday Times: “I was a young firebrand and I wanted to answer honestly. I was very angry about the social injustice in Britain under Thatcher and I’m delighted that came into the show.” So that’s how you get a BBC job! He and his fellow scriptwritersr plotted away between them to introduce anti-Thatcher themes, and weren’t too fussy about subtlety, introducing a villanous character called Rehctaht (Thatcher backwards).
The BBC’s reaction? Well of course, it’s not true. They were as unbiased then as they are now. As this shows.