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by Nick Higham about an ITV documentary about the death of terminally-ill Malcolm Pointon. Here’s a transcript of Nick Higham’s report:

An ITV press statement implied the end of the film showed the point of Malcolm’s death. Newspaper coverage reflected that, so did interviews with Malcolm’s widow. One of those interviews, on Radio 4’s Today programme, prompted this email from a listener:

We then cut to a mock up of an email from Graham Pointon, with Higham reading:

“Malcolm was my brother and although I was not with him when he died… I know that Paul Watson was not there either, having left on the Monday before saying that he had enough material and would now leave the family in peace. Many of the papers are saying this film breaks the last TV taboo, but it is not true.”

I wonder what was said in the bit indicated by the ellipsis (…) – perhaps one of our resident Beeboids can help with that detail. Higham continues:

The Pointons were filmed several times. These pictures are from a BBC Panorama. Today, Malcolm’s widow said there’d been no intention to deceive.

Cut to Barbara Pointon, saying:

“I’m too honest to say that we faked the death, we didn’t. You saw Malcolm’s last semi-conscious moments”.

Malcolm’s widow said “there’d been no intention to deceive” did she Nick? It sounded to me like she said that Malcolm’s death was not faked – not that there was any deception, intentional or otherwise. Higham continues:

Last month, Michael Grade, ITV’s Chairman, promised a zero tolerance approach to programme makers who deliberately mislead. Today, he launched a formal inquiry into what happened.

Among other things, ITV’s inquiry will want to establish whether the programme itself is ambiguous about what it shows, why ITV’s publicity was misleading and why the programme makers didn’t come forward sooner to explain exactly what it was they’d filmed.

The film-maker Paul Watson blames ITV for the confusion, and says he’s being made a scapegoat.

Cut to Paul Watson, saying:

“I’m filming a dying process. What I’m not filming, and never claimed to have filmed, and others seem to have done on my behalf, is that you’re getting the last moments of a man’s dying gasp”.

Cut to that picture of the Queen arriving for the Annie Leibovitz photo shoot, with Higham enunciating that:

Of course, we’ve been here before, when the BBC’s documentary on the Queen was also accused of misleading viewers in pursuit of publicity.

But that of course is where you are wrong Nick! Perhaps ITV’s press people have hyped up the difference between Malcolm’s “last semi-conscious moments” and the occurence of his death, perhaps it is the press who have interpreted the film that way – but, and here’s the difference between this ITV documentary and the BBC’s faked footage – Malcolm’s death is true, it actually happened.

The story told by the ITV documentary (and let’s be realistic here, documentaries are a form of (hopefully) true story telling) is true – that is what happened, which is quite different from the BBC’s faked documentary footage – the Queen did NOT storm out of the photo shoot in the way that Peter Fincham, Controller of BBC1, said that she did.

There is a world of difference between these two situations – in one, press officers and press appear to have over-egged the pudding, to no great harm. In the other, the Controller of BBC1, no less, showed faked footage purporting to show the Queen storming out of a photo shoot, and then took until the next day to issue an apology once the damage to the Queen’s reputation had been done. You’ve only got to look at comments around the web to see that many people still believe that the story was that the Queen stormed out of a photo shoot, rather than the truth, that the BBC’s documentary makers had faked it!

It’s very convenient for the BBC (“we’re all just as bad”) that you failed to spot that difference and report it to your tellytax customers Nick.

of twenty-three South Koreans, with reporter Robin Denselow opening with:

Close-up footage of dumped body (that wouldn’t be shown in this detail if the victim was British):

“Another death in Afghanistan. The body a South Korean information technology worker who’d volunteered to join a Christian church group hoping to be involved in missionary and aid work was discovered yesterday morning.

Cut to Al-Jazeera film of frightened kidnap victims:

He was the second of the group of twenty-three kidnapped Koreans to be executed by the Taliban, who threatened further killings if their demands for the release of prisoners hadn’t been met by this morning.

Cut to intrusive footage of distraught and distressed Korean relatives:

The kidnapped group includes eighteen women and their plight has led to emotional scenes across South Korea”.

Note the word ‘executed’. In what sense, Robin, was the word ‘executed’ better than the word ‘murdered’ would have been in your report?

The man was kidnapped, held to ransom, shot dead and dumped in a ditch. It was a murder pure and simple. To describe it as an ‘execution’ is to give the murdering scum perpetrators an air of legitimacy that is entirely inappropriate and a disservice to humanity.

Please do feel free to post your reasoning in the comment box on this thread, or, if you prefer, by email to biasedbbc@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

P.S. Just for good measure, Denselow’s report was followed up by Jeremy Paxman interviewing well known Taliban kidnap expert and muslim convert Yvonne Ridley, complete with fetching headscarf, who added little to public knowledge other than to demonstrate that Polyfilla is a viable alternative to the niqab.

Strangely, Paxman introduced Ridley as “a British journalist who was captured and held by the Taliban for eleven days in 2001”, omitting to mention Ridley’s prominence in ‘Respect‘, the George Galloway/SWP front party. For some reason, I have a nagging feeling that were Ridley a member of a similarly extreme right-wing party that her affiliation would have merited a mention on Newsnight.

Five years of monitoring, recording and publicising the biases, inaccuracies, omissions, foibles, stupidity, waste and arrogance of the BBC, and, just occasionally, some of the BBC’s good points too.

There have been more than 2,100 blog posts from the Biased BBC team, over 83,000 comments from our readers, more than 350,000 views of our Youtube clips and nearly 2,000,000 visits to Biased BBC – not bad for a small team of bloggers with little free time and zero budget!

On behalf of all of us who write for Biased BBC, thank you for reading the blog, thank you for caring about the BBC, and thank you for making Biased BBC an ongoing blogging success.

Here’s to all of us, and here’s to the next five years of Biased BBC!
(Somehow, I doubt the BBC will become bias-free in that time).

, includes this item:

When Radio 4’s The Food Programme devotes itself to wine, as happened on 22 July, it hands the presenter’s chair to genial wine hack Andrew Jefford. In his latest programme Jefford worked in a startling number of plugs for Waitrose and its wines, while making no mention of any other supermarket or wine merchant.

What Jefford forgot to tell listeners is that he writes a monthly wine column for Waitrose Food Illustrated extolling the virtues of the supermarket’s plonk, and has another lucrative sideline running “tutored tastings” on behalf of the supermarket.

No doubt his bosses at Waitrose were delighted with the programme. But will his bosses at the already hyper-jittery BBC be quite so pleased when they learn the truth?

This is similar to another Private Eye item from two issues back, covered by Biased BBC, about the BBC and their paid ‘talking head’ Simon Fanshawe failing to disclose his interests during a prime-time programme he presented, discussed in some detail recently on the open comment thread below (start
here
and work you way down to
here).

Our resident Beeboid, John Reith, hasn’t been seen since, though I’m sure he’ll reappear when he thinks we’ve forgotten!

Please use this thread for BBC-related comments and analysis. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not (and never has been) an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or use as a chat forum. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

BBC Radio 2 DJ Jeremy Vine has decided to mark the occasion of the British Army leaving Northern Ireland by playing the racist hate song “Go on home British soldiers”, which not only wallows in the slaughter of the last four decades, but also delivers up these delighful lines to all Unionists still left in Northern Ireland:

“Throughout our history We were born to be free

So get out British bastards leave us be”

Lovely stuff for a nice sunny Tuesday afternoon!

Lightweight, offensive and facile as ever Jeremy… such a shame you’ve got a meal-ticket for life on the BBC gravy train.

There’s more on O’Neills own blog, A Pint of Unionist Lite, in Operation Banner: Thanks for a job well done. While you’re there, scroll down to the next post, The BBC and Britishness, for another take on that dodgy BBC poll from the other day.

Dave T posted this comment from a Canadian commenter on ARRSE (The ARmy Rumour Service):

I was watching the BBC World Service this morning and was dismayed by their coverage marking the end of Op Banner which focused on the account of a Sinn Fein spokesman who essentially portrayed the British Army as cold blooded murderers. In the clip I saw there were no other representatives interviewed nor ordinary NI citizens asked for their opinions.

Keep ’em peeled for more BBC revisionist coverage of this milestone.

a number of longer posts that are in the pipeline, you might very well enjoy the delicious Beeboid satire on offer at the Secret Blog of a TV Controller (aged 33 and 3/4) – it does for Shepherd’s Bush what The Thick of It (post the awful Chris Langham) does for Westminster – very funny, hits the mark and has an air of insider authority about it. For example:

The Trouble with Her Majesty

1. No sense of humour

    

2. Smells a bit

    

3. Not in touch with Da Kids (unlike me)

    

4. I can’t understand her when she speaks

    

5. Wears too much green

    

6. Does not like to polish off a bottle of Shiraz and do a couple of lines at Soho House on a friday night

    

7. Way too posh to ‘connect’ with my viewers.

I’m not in the office today but watching with glee to see Fincham take it in the neck for his Queen cock-up. I was reliably informed via the GossipBerry that Fincham and Stephen Lambert were seen sitting outside Fifi’s office looking like two chastened schoolboys. Then later storming down the corridor (like Batman and Robin on the way to a crisis in Gotham) and very loudly verbally kicking three streaks of living piss out of the head of promos.

Lambert could be heard shouting things like “share price drop” and “not when I was at f***ing Modern Times we didn’t!” whilst Fincham just stood there scowling and clenching his fists.

Brilliant. Heads are going to f***ing roll on this one!

See, this is the danger with celebrity access docs these days. The subjects are so ‘twitchy’ about how we represent them. Rewind five years ago and you could f*** anyone over without a problem. Even the Queen.

Sounds just like the Beeboids we know and love. I wonder who’s going to commission it…

The Today programme’s love affair with the counterculture continues. Sarah Montague interviews the widow of Neal Cassady (aka “Dean Moriarty”) on the 50th anniversary of Kerouac’s “On The Road“, the hippie handbook written in the Beat Age.

“It must have been quite a life to be part of this amazing gang” she gushed.

Carolyn Cassady seemed less starry-eyed.

“Well, it was hard for Neal to see Jack drinking himself to death, because his own (Cassady’s) father was a wino, and it was hard for Jack to see Neal killing himself with drugs.“

Even Neal Cassady was more in touch with reality.

“Twenty years of fast living–there’s just not much left, and my kids are all screwed up. Don’t do what I have done.”

I’m not sure if the impeccably middle class Ms Montague would have found the gang quite so amazing at close quarters.

Next week on the Today programme : “Why are levels of drug abuse and sexually transmitted infections rising ?“

, an article by John Simpson, as part of their ‘From our own correspondent’ series, reflecting on his feelings about the incidents he reports on in light of the recent birth of his son, Rafe. Simpson writes:

And to see the miracle of other people’s lives snuffed out wantonly on the streets of Baghdad or Kabul, or London for that matter, for some scarcely understood political or religious motive, seems to me nothing short of blasphemy.

I do not just loathe the stench of high explosive, I have come to loathe the attitudes of people who use high explosive for their own purposes: insurgents, terrorists, the intelligence services of a dozen countries, governments which target towns and cities and always have a ready apology when they kill the wrong people.

A laudable observation of what most decent and humane people just know innately, without requiring a revelatory experience – although I suppose we must remember that people at the BBC these days do seem to have issues when it comes to telling right from wrong. Curiously though, Simpson lumps together all users of high explosives as if they are equally loathesome, without stopping to note that there is a big difference between terrorists and insurgents, who tend to seek to maximise civilian casualties to further their cause, and responsible governments who go to great lengths to minimise civilian casualties to further their cause – even if on some occasions some of their representatives could try harder and be less glib when apologies are sadly necessary.

I hope I never did think that attacks on civilians – any civilians – were justified but now I know for certain they are not.

Again, this isn’t a sentiment that most people would have any doubt about, ever. Perhaps Simpson’s lack of certainty reflects the offensive BBC-think that insists that ‘terrorists’ are ‘militants’, because terrorist as a word has negative connotations, without of course stopping to remember that the reason why the word terrorist has negative connotations is precisely because of what terrorists do!

The fact is, my time reporting on violence and bombings in places like Baghdad and Kabul has shown me one essential thing: that the lives of the poor, the stupid, the old, the ugly, are no less precious to them and to the people around them, than the life of my little son Rafe is precious to me.

Another statement so obvious that it is remarkable solely because Mr. Simpson thinks it needs to be said. Still, we can but hope that Simpson’s revelations might better inform the BBC when it comes to distinguishing between right and wrong,
between terrorist and militant, when reporting and recording events around the world.

Please use this thread for BBC-related comments and analysis. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not (and never has been) an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or use as a chat forum. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.