The BBC’s new direction

I am becoming terribly worried about the people of Sunderland with regard to how they will cope in this coming winter. The greatly increased fuel bills will affect all parts of the country, of course – but none more so than the Mackems who, I suspect, will largely die as a consequence. Their particular problem was highlighted by the local Labour MP, Bridget Phillipson, on BBC2’s Politics Live hosted by the excellent Jo Coburn. Ms Phillipson said people in her constituency opened their doors to her wearing their coats and possibly mufflers, because they were trying to reduce their energy bills. The temperature up here has not dropped below about 21°C for the past two months, but these Mackems are apparently already close to hypothermia. So how will they cope when December descends?

I live about 30 miles away and have been dressed in nothing more than a T-shirt since June and our central heating went off at the end of March. Perhaps the people of Houghton and Sunderland South are actually cold-blooded creatures and would be better served by basking on rocks during the daylight hours, rather than hiding inside their dark, freezing homes. Or maybe the taxpayer should provide them with a giant vivarium. An alternative explanation is that as soon as these people see Phillipson approaching they quickly throw a coat on in an attempt to convince her that they are just on their way out to meet a friend, or go to the betting shop, and do not have time to engage with her myopic and supercilious analyses of political issues.

Politics Live is one of the current affairs programmes that the BBC does well: it is intelligent, even-handed and free from the Chicken Little hysteria which affects many political discussion shows. Newsnight, remarkably, is another – which is not something one has been able to say for a very long time. In its previous incarnation, as a kind of broadcasted Hampstead Garden Suburb slip page of the Guardian, it lost an unfathomable number of viewers. Down from nigh on one million at the turn of the previous decade to well below 300,000 (indeed 200,000, according to an insider) before its awful editor Esme Wren and its chief presenter Emily Maitlis departed.

The production team during those years seemed to consist in the main of not terribly bright adolescent children, and the programme revelled in a fashionable north-London loathing for the Tories and knew very well which side of the culture war it was on. With contributors such as the egotistical leftie Lewis Goodall and, for a while, the genuinely whacko Trot Paul Mason, it made not the slightest attempt to appear neutral, and warnings wrung out of the BBC were paid no heed.

Confronted with shows consisting of four angry women, including Maitlis, all agreeing with each other about how beastly right-wing people are, the viewers got the hell out: Newsnight become the perfect example of that cliché, go woke, go broke. Had it been in the private sector Wren and Maitlis would have been given the heave-ho years before – but instead it existed in a bubble of rather smug self-approval. In the end the only people left watching were those 200,000 who spend most of their day shrieking abuse on Twitter. Now, under a new editor and with Kirsty Wark and Mark Urban presenting, it is once again sharp and imaginative and at last possessed of a modicum of balance. It will be interesting to see if the viewers return.

The departee Maitlis (and indeed Lewis Knowall) are now doing some sort of podcast. In a valedictory address she alleged that the BBC was controlled by an evil, secret cabal of Tories – by which one assumes she meant that Robbie Gibb is on the BBC board. It is a testament to Emily’s journalistic prowess that she was able to unearth virtually the only Conservative involved with the BBC. But for Emily and those 200,000 twittering viewers, even one Tory is too many. The liberal middle-class left runs about every institution in the country but when just one right-winger is appointed to any public body, the leftie toys are flung out of the pram and the dummy is spat out on to the Mexican granite floor tiles.

Still, as one BBC institution, Newsnight, heads in the right direction, plenty of others are determined to commit hara-kiri – and none more so than the previously much-loved A Question of Sport. Two years ago the BBC announced that Sue Barker, the presenter for 24 years, was ‘standing down’ because they intended to take the show in a ‘new direction’. Well, they certainly have. Remarkably, Barker was told by the BBC to sign a statement saying that she was leaving ‘for the good of the show’ – but to her immense credit she told them to get stuffed. The presenter pronounced herself ‘insulted’, as well she might.

I found this out from her newly published autobiography where she also makes it pretty clear that Cliff Richard never actually gave her one, as I had long suspected. Anyway, that is beside the point I suppose. The BBC attempted to make it look as if Barker had made the decision herself – in other words, it engaged in precisely the same sort of deceit that it deployed when it tried to stop people singing jingoistic songs at the Last Night of the Proms in 2020. Back then they attempted to blame the conductor.

So, that ‘new direction’? A Question of Sport, when presented by Barker and with Phil Tufnell and Matt Dawson as team captains, pulled in between four and five million viewers. With Paddy McGuinness presenting and the team captains Sam Quek and Ugo Monye, the ratings have fallen to… 850,000. Awesome – even Esme Wren must envy that. The BBC seemingly does not care what its audience wants and is forever pandering to da kidz. Da good news is da kidz hate it too.