So, to mark the BBC’s centenary year we have Days That Shook the BBC with David Dimbleby (BBC Two, 9pm), a three-part series about some of the key moments in the history of the BBC presented by a 50-year-plus veteran of the corporation (also the son of another and brother of a third), which at least makes the absence of a comma in the title less howlingly incorrect. Most of the key moments covered in at least the first instalment do have David D in the mix.
What I’m saying is, you might have your suspicions raised that this will not be the impeccably impartial look at the trickier bits of Auntie’s story you might hope for. Your bias antennae may be quivering. But stop! Relax. Banish your suspicions, for David assures us right at the start that: “I’m not here to speak for the BBC. My conclusions are my own.” Onward, then, to enjoy the hour, which is entitled “Independence”.
It turns out that the BBC always exists in tension with the government, which ultimately holds its purse strings and doesn’t like to be held up to scrutiny – particularly if it’s a Conservative government and it’s led by Margaret Thatcher. And particularly if the broadcaster is trying to cover Northern Ireland in a manner that acknowledges there is more than one side to the convoluted struggles; even if the incumbent prime minister does believe that mentioning that is a betrayal of Britain and the soldiers out there on the other island.
Roger Bolton – one of the many expected faces interviewed – notes that Thatcher never seemed to understand that “finding stuff out” is the fundamental function of journalism and instead preferred to cast the Belfast outpost’s work as supporting either democracy or terrorism. In the wake of the terrible Brighton bombing by the IRA, the BBC made the documentary Real Lives, a behind-the-scenes portrait of DUP member Gregory Campbell and leading member of Sinn Fein Martin McGuinness, widely understood to be high up in the IRA too. Dimbleby doesn’t question the wisdom of what seems to the casual observer to be a case of deliberately poking the bear. The slightly smug air that overlies the whole programme thickens during the subsequent coverage of the journalistic strikes that followed the BBC governors’ decision not to show Real Lives.
On we jog, through Dimbleby’s interview with the then leader of the opposition Harold Wilson, who took issue with a question our David asked about payment for his memoirs, and whose sensitivities, the governors agreed, should not be challenged by having the interview aired uncut. Then, on to the sacking of director general Alasdair Milne by the new government-appointed chairman Marmaduke Hussey (most of us are born knowing not to trust a man called Marmaduke, but it wasn’t until the surprise Milne departure that the BBC seems to have realised what it was up against). Then to the BBC’s relationship with the royal family.
The latter seems best described as “wholly servile” until the post-separation Diana scoop proved too much for everyone. Quite how tempting its procurement was and the “devious, underhand … obnoxious” ways, Dimbleby notes, it was done by Martin Bashir, with blind eyes apparently being turned elsewhere as necessary, has only recently become clear. The BBC lost to ITV the rights to broadcast the Queen’s Christmas speech on alternate years, which is possibly the most British sentence I have ever written.
As a result of strictures laid down after the revelations about the duplicity, Days That Shook the BBC couldn’t show any of the Diana interview. Would that the same could be said of the Maitlis/Andrew encounter, simply to save the viewer the incalculable agony of watching for a second time his claims of being unable to sweat due to trauma sustained in the Falklands war.
Interviewed by Dimbles about the experience, Maitlis is clearly champing at the bit to say all that she purged herself of in her recent MacTaggart lecture, about the many flaws she perceives in the current incarnation of the BBC (and whose comments were thereafter criticised by Dimbleby himself), but limited herself to a brusque “editorial independence is always at risk”.
Dimbleby concludes that an independent BBC is still vital to democracy. Next week, he looks at the issue of trust (in the wake of the Hutton report and the Savile debacle). After that, he spotlights his erstwhile employer’s relationship with the British public. I’m hoping he introduces his son at the end of it as the newest recruit to the firm. It would end the whole thing on exactly the right note of comedic despair.
