Different Times is a mammoth compendium, attempting to provide a vertiginous range of snapshots of all of what was going on in British comedy, inevitably gravitating towards television, but there are also judicious references to the stage, radio and film mediums.
The book’s opening wisely focuses on the misuses of comedy by Boris Johnson, a man grotesquely ill-equipped to be a Prime Minister who governed in an inept and corrupt fashion from 2019-22. Stubbs’s thesis is that there has been a tendency for humour to be used to keep power relations squarely as they are, with certain forms of humour ‘sending things up, but keeping us down’. (p.8)
He quotes Billy Connolly at length from a 1970s TV appearance, such a vital perspective that I’ll quote it fully now: ‘The British people are not overtly racist, but given the opportunity they switch on to racism very quickly. You know, they listen to so many broadcasts on the radio about how desperate the situation is with Pakistanis and West Indians flooding into the country – a total lie – and then mohair-suited comedians pouring out racism to the extent that Black comedians are doing it, which I find desperately dangerous. I feel dirty. Comedians play a very important role in society; you should see things that the average guy in the street can’t see and point out the absurdity in something that’s just accepted.’ (pp.233-4)
Connolly wisely explains the responsibility of independent comic writers and performers to observe us, make us laugh at ourselves and steer us away from the baser values and actions. In a time when a Telegraph article (02/12/2023) claimed, notably, that ‘working class’ viewers see the BBC as being too PC, it is vital that British comedians are diverse truth tellers about Britain’s complex realities.
Now, such an ambitious volume can’t help but have its limitations. Several of the gazetteer capsule comments on specific programmes feel like they need deeper exploration – I Didn’t KnowYou Cared (1975-79) (p.165), Dave Allen at Large (1971-79) (p.165), A Bit of Fry and Laurie (1989-95) (pp.287-8), Rab C. Nesbitt (1988-2014) (p.299) and The Rag Trade (1961-78) (p.205). Furthermore, I feel that Northern comedians Robb Wilton and Frank Randle need more than three sentences between them, given their copious respective influences on Dad’s Army (1968-77), Manchester band The Fall and Gethin Price in Trevor Griffiths’s stage play Comedians (1975).
Such exclusions are clearly inevitable in any book aiming at a vast historical coverage like this. I’d personally have loved to see references to: Attention Scum (2001) and Early Doors (2003-04); the baroque force of Natasia Demetriou as a writer and performer; or, indeed, Him and Her (2010-13) and Mum (2016-19), Stefan Golaszewski’s tremendous duo of sitcoms infused with intelligence and awkwardness. These shows are like refined Ayckbourn and Esmonde and Larbey refracted through a contemporary Mass Observation lens, with an underlying deep warmth.
While Stubbs draws deft attention to Peter Terson’s Play for Today (PfT), The Fishing Party (1972) as a bridge between the wonderful Jane Freeman’s performances in that and in Last of the Summer Wine (1973-2010), he does not even mention Trevor Griffiths’s PfT version of Comedians (1979). This is a gap, as he touches on the vast significance of how comedy arises from and shapes the everyday, in terms of responding to and constructing norms of language and behaviour. This is one of PfT’s most searching dramas, about how what’s behind the jokes is important and who is being targeted, and pointing the way to the Alternative Comedy movement that Stubbs extols. This is an even greater omission given that Stubbs is yet another writer to quote David Nobbs’s brilliant writing of Jimmy’s paranoia in The Fall andRise of Reginald Perrin (1976-79), a litany which includes PfT at its epicentre (pp.188-9).
Stubbs claims that The Good Life (1975-78) shied away from race; it did not entirely. As, at the close of a series 2 episode, Tom and Barbara effectively mock Margo’s apparent, real racism, drawing it out from her when they claim people with an Asian name are moving in next door to her. Their ‘superior’ liberal stance in regarding this all as a source of uproarious merriment is, of course, just as crass as Margo’s reaction, and is a very telling moment concerning the paradoxes at the heart of 1970s comfort. This elision suggests the difficulty of taking on such a vast terrain within 400 pages, which Andrew Male adroitly demonstrated in Sight and Sound when giving far more detailed, fairer attention to ‘Allo ‘Allo! (1982-92) than Stubbs does here.
I feel that the sections on Peep Show (2003-15) and Ever Decreasing Circles (1984-89) needed exploration of the central relationships, having watched those both again relatively recently. In Dad’s Army, Sergeant Wilson’s lack of concentration and persistence with career paths seems to me to strongly foreshadow that of Paul Ryman in Edmonde and Larbey’s latter comedy.
These minor quibbles aside, Stubbs provides a heartening and well argued historical analysis. Stubbs persuasively claims, via Alexei Monroe, that, for all its evasions of the serious issues of the Second World War, Dad’s Army provides a far less apt path towards Brexit than Are You Being Served? (1972-85), with its episode ‘Camping In’ (04/04/1973) resonating with pinched nostalgic conservatism (p.176). By and large, Stubbs rightly extols the beloved trinity of Dad’s Army, Steptoe and Son (1962-74) and Fawlty Towers (1975-79), while being even more fulsome about Victoria Wood, Reeves and Mortimer and The Royle Family (1998-2012), wherein the family ‘say but don’t say, ‘Here we are, this is who we are. And we shall not be moved.” (p.319).
There are also brilliantly incisive evocations of language and performance: ‘Harold Steptoe’s wonderfully idiosyncratic accent is a comic exaggeration of this tendency, attempting to take flight like a clumsy fowl, in stark contrast to the unapologetic bog-coarseness of his old man’ (p.103). There’s a wonderful judicious section about Laurel and Hardy and also an evocative account of Ealing’s film comedy cycle (1948-55), with an especially vivid, memorable account of its musical underscores. Stubbs advocates for unique talents like Tommy Cooper, all childlike universality, and Les Dawson, especially a memorable passage on Dawson and Roy Barraclough’s Cissy and Ada sketches in Sez Les (1969-76) (p.153). He also points out how so many of the classic British sitcom characters are lads not men, epitomised by Clement and La Freaks sitcoms… (p.186).
There’s a superb vignette about Liz Smith (p.318) which captures some of the essence of a brilliant serio-comic performer who was strongly associated with the Play for Today tradition. Regularly, he alights on pearlers of the absurd, like in the film Carry on Cleo (1964), with the dialogue “Sinister, dexter, sinister, Dexter!” (as in left, right, left, right) (p.114). Stubbs unearths unusual, odd details; like Les Dawson’s novel of a socialist dystopia, A Time Before Genesis (1986) (!) or how the now fairly righteous socialist firebrand Charlotte Church blacked up as a male DJ in the cultural desert of 2006.
The book explicitly celebrates the 1980s Alternative Comedy revolution and how it subtly infused much 1990s comedy which was, on the face of it, far less political. He makes a compelling, cumulative case that the 1990s was a golden mean, reflecting its fairly benign geopolitical temperature, with an unprecedented diversity in the voices and perspectives in comedies like The Day Today, The Fast Show, Father Ted, Goodness Gracious Me and dinnerladies. This moment was replaced by an abyssal decline into crueller comedy in the Noughties, which totally lacked the intellectual precision and absurdism of Chris Morris’s work or the underlying jocularity of many of the aforementioned 1990s shows.
The heart of the book, which was neatly contained in a trailing Guardian article, concerns the move back towards a gentler, more humanistic form of comedy during the 2010s, much of it rooted in diverse places. Detectorists (2014- ) and ThisCountry (2017-20) are the emblems here, plus Derry Girls (2018-22), and Ghosts (2019-23); plus, the skilled dramedies Back to Life (2019-21), Don’t Forget the Driver (2019), In My Skin (2018-21) and The Outlaws (2021- ).
The Stubbs argument about the cruel turn of the 2000s – developing from Jason Okundaye’s 2020 article in Tribune – is compelling but needs a little fleshing out. However, Stubbs does well to draw the links with Reality TV as it developed, which engendered a desensitizing hardness which prepared people for and justified austerity, building on Phil Harrison’s fine book The Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain (2020). In a book rightly extolling the gentleness turn and Hylda Baker (pp.168-170), Different Times is perhaps surprisingly lenient on Russell Brand, an exemplar of the nasty Noughties and its string of lairy chancers who polluted culture well into the next decade: Dapper Laughs, anyone?
There’s an astute reference to how much TheOffice (2001-03) led the way towards the increased kindness in the 2010s, but oddly no mention of how this is affirmed by Brent’s redemptive actions near its end and his rejection of the toxic masculine Chris “Finchy” Finch. But these are minor gripes, given the broad historical truth that Stubbs is articulating. This book is a more mass market complement to strong academic books about British comedy from Andy Medhurst (2007) and Jürgen Kamm and Birgit Neumann eds. (2016).
The book’s only real limitations are due to its vaulting ambition: there are always going to be some omissions to disappoint everyone. It is, however, a powerfully argued book assessing the waxing and waning of different forms of British comedy over time, which argues boldly for the 1980s-90s era as offering a great improvement, while still paying loving homage to earlier eras. Above all, Stubbs asserts that what lies underneath the jokes matters, rather than simply eliciting laffs. However fitfully, we are making progress towards kindness over cruelty.
Paul Sng’s documentary about Tish Murtha (1956-2013) is a moving and informative film, shown on BBC4, which gives us an insight into a unique socially rooted and incisive documentarian photographer.
It can be watched here by UK people. I’d say it should be viewed before reading any further, really, as it’s an immersive and moving watch.
Murtha captured the world of West Newcastle upon Tyne: the aimlessness, free play and complexity of the human lives lived in intensely difficult circumstances. A simple, moralising buffoon from the London press like Rod Liddle has it that these places are marked by “anomie”. While Sng’s film makes no attempt to romanticise circumstances which, it is admitted, did lead some individuals in the community to turn to crime as a way out, we see desperation and love and tenderness and the mutual aid provided by people like Tish herself. It is also a counterblast against the simplifying cultural stereotypes of what working class people are like: Tish was into operatic arias and jazz music, not what was No. 1 in the charts, though neither should be denigrated in our long front of common culture.
As with the documentary Mind on the Run: The Basil Kirchin Story (2017) about Hull’s great jazz musician, we starkly get the sense of an intensely creative person being let down by an indifferent “welfare” state, which has become anything but. Thatcher, Blair, Cameron et al just cattle prodding people into work however unsuitable. The YOP, the grotesque appropriation of the “New Deal”, the familiar bleak cruelty of the 2010-15 Coalition era use of the system as seen in I, DanielBlake: none of this fitted to the individual.
Why don’t we as a society give people enough money to get by and encourage them to do what they are personally best suited to do in life? It’s even more grotesque in the case of Tish, as she gave us a unique portrayal from the inside of a community, and, as is mentioned here, her photographs tell us: these people existed, and were let down on so many levels.
It reminds me of the Boy in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot when he asks Vladimir: “What am I to tell Mr. Godot, Sir?” To which Vladimir replies: “Tell him . . . (he hesitates) . . . tell him you saw me and that . . . (he hesitates) . . . that you saw me.”
Tish Murtha’s photography and text indicates how there wasn’t just malign neglect, but also active harm. The workfare-anticipating YOP, a sop to resentful people a bit higher up in the social pecking order from cynical right-wing ideologues above them, exposed people to insecure, degrading labour simply to get their pittance of dole money. This process, with the metrical motive to get them off the official jobless statistics, also subjected them in some cases, as we learn here, to cruel bullying from the bosses who were basically benefiting from a cheap reserve army of labour.
Notably, the South Shields-born, but Elswick, Newcastle-bred and rooted Tish says that she does not see herself as a ‘community photographer’. This is true, she is simply a great photographer, whose work’s power came from being part of the tribe she was documenting: this specificity and innate empathy ultimately gives her work deep universality and sets it apart from the anthropological, or even touristic, gaze of a Martin Parr. Parr, a fine photographer, is also a here today gone tomorrow Orwellian middle-class figure going into places for a short time and then leaving, having advanced his own reputation.
The documentary sensitively reveals how Tish’s hardness, self-reliance and uncompromising nature in part developed from growing up in a home with a violent father. As a wise comment on Twitter has it, if there was the opposite of a “nepo babies” upbringing, this was it. While sharing a deep bond with many in her family, she had to be a driving force in getting her work done, though it was very work in which her subjects were willing participants, to whom she gave copies of the photographs. But when in need, there wasn’t any paternal or maternal welfare state to provide any nurturing or even a decent enough safety net.
Tish is the sort of left-wing bolshy voice we are sorely in need of today. No, everything’s not great. If things are wrong, we shouldn’t blandly submit, but stand up for what we believe in. Her juvenile jazz band photos are likely to elicit simple nostalgia from many people today, but this film gives us Tish’s urgent words, more powerful for being from within the North East community, castigating the underlying militarism and control being exerted on several levels through this cultural practice. She was so intelligent and passionate that she realised that speaking out and raising hackles is at times entirely necessary to being able to live with yourself and do good. Also, Tish gives a chastening rebuke in a letter to the behaviour of certain people within the Side Gallery milieu, for taking a patronising view of working class culture and for undermining her work.
To relate this film to my specialist subject, Plays for Today which came to mind most include One Bummer New Day (1978), Andy McSmith’s intricate missive on newsroom power and priorities, set in Newcastle and reflecting on poverty in, yes, Elswick. In addition, David Edgar’s Destiny and Jim Allen’s The Spongers, both from earlier in the same year, reveal a similarly forensic lens trained on what the people were thinking. The link is especially clear as Tish did some similarly critical and searing, but also respectful, photography of people’s celebrations of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. This was before Thatcherism proper, but under Callaghan there was still a debilitating – or consoling – underlying patriotism which deeply infused working class communities. Lest it be forgotten, Dennis Potter was pro-monarchy and wrote a highly positive account of the TV coverage of the Jubilee, which gives another perspective beyond the vile racism of certain, understandably unpublished, Philip Larkin poems.
This film includes testimony damning of our societal and capitalist organisation in how simply having an Elswick address meant that people had job applications turned down. This is an equivalent situation that the Irish social realist TV drama A Week in the Life of Martin Cluxton (RTE, 1971) observed that affected people from certain housing estates in Dublin; highly relevant given the Murtha family’s Irish ancestry. This film assumes extra emotional power in how it shows Ella, Tish’s daughter, investigating her mother’s life and meeting the people who knew in different places and times.
Important here, above all, is that we do get to hear from a particular Geordie tribe, unfiltered and not “explained” by middle class sociologists or indeed right-wing hacks like Rod Liddle (a bad political actor – and man – who cynically appropriates social democracy). I once heard, in a former workplace, the sort of vapid dismissal and pigeonholing of Northern writing and culture, as clearly identified by Andrew McMillan, when Barry Hines’s From a Kestrel to aKnave (1968) was mockingly put down. There’s a middle-class sneer and duplicity in how certain Arts funding bodies, dispensing subsidies, give to certain types of approved curators and not to others who might just have voices they deem too abrasive, like Tish’s.
Tish, in words, work and actions more than demonstrated that she was a humanist. I don’t think people who see Art works as just fuel for subjective pleasure and as being mere products are remotely humanist. Are there creative industries? Yes, if they foreground the human labour involved. No, if we are simply caring about products, ‘content’, the bottom line and venerating the dogma of “productivity”.
Is this another case of the licence fee being justified by one programme? Well, yes, but this was partially crowdfunded, such is the BBC’s Tory-abetted financial woes, in a time when the Corporation’s news and current affairs output has been largely subject to a (subtler) Orban-esque media capture. Anyone thinking of themselves as progressive, “Labour”, socialist or human might want to watch this and see whether they are happy with our society and politics in the last 45 years.
Will we listen to Tish’s cautionary words from 1980?
There are barbaric and reactionary forces in our society, who will not be slow to make political capital from an embittered youth. Unemployed, bored, embittered and angry young men and women are fuel for the fire.
The future of society rests on whether we do. While I’m sure that, with her upbringing, Angela Rayner might get it, recent praise for Thatcher’s ‘meaningful change’ from Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer suggests that it’s unlikely that we’re going to get anything significantly different from the next government than what we’ve had from Thatcher to Sunak.
I have just had a piece published here that makes the case for the BBC as a honest broker and guardian of pluralism, able to cut across binary divides of left/right, Leave/Remain, Labour/Tory and provide a public sphere for all. A subscription model – which is currently unfeasible, as it even its supporters admit – would destroy opportunities for intra-cultural communication and understanding in the UK.
Within the constraints of that piece, there was no space to include crucial additional arguments about the regions and nations of the UK and the reforms that the BBC is crying out for in terms of how it is governed. So, here they are, among other no doubt Utopian ramblings!
BBC PURPOSES #1: a political honest broker?
Firstly, what is the licence fee? Author of a Dictionary of Journalism, Tony Harcup (2014) defines it as the means ‘to fund the BBC as an independent entity’ and as a ‘mechanism to provide public funding for the main public service broadcaster without drawing on direct taxation or coming under the direct control of the government of the day.’
Much of the political left feels, erroneously, that it the BBC is directly controlled by the government of the day. However, its present animus is at least partly well-grounded: the BBC did little to challenge lies spread by the right-wing press, uncritically relaying untruths in how it reported the events of 9 December 2019 when Matt Hancock was reported as being “punched” by punched by a Labour protester who did not such thing. Tweets were deleted, but the memory remains, to paraphrase Metallica featuring Patti Smith… The BBC remains shackled by its own dependence on the government to renew the licence fee every ten years.
While it seems true that BBC may have not fully understood Brexit (1) and has displayed unconscious ‘Remain’ bias, claims that the BBC is biased towards the “liberal-left” do not bear close examination. For every Adam Curtis or Jonathan Meades documentary, there have been several David Starkey documentaries or cantankerous guest-spots and more than several hundred hours of John Humphrys… (2) The MoralMaze and Question Time panel composition repeatedly overemphasises right-wing commentators.
It takes chutzpah for the Cummingsite Tories to vandalise a BBC which has granted Brexit spokespeople significantly more airtime than the Green Party; a recent count gives Farage a total of nine more Question Time appearances than Greens’ Caroline Lucas MP, who has been repeatedly elected to the House of Commons since 2010. The BBC has done immeasurably more to popularise science than Cummings’s rambling blog missives. His boss Johnson should be grateful to the Corporation for how it popularised his performed “loveable buffoon” persona via no fewer than seven Have I Got News for You (BBC1) appearances.
As the likes of Steven Barnett and Andrew Curry (1994) and Tom Mills (2016) have documented, the Director-Generals Michael Checkland and John Birt remodelled the previous pluralistic, ‘One Nation’ paternalism of the BBC into a more market-driven, business-fixated neoliberal institution. It had a populist obsession with programmes’ headline ratings in place of their impacts. However, it remains a public institution which contains within it the potential to be fairer to those of all political views in Britain, whether nationalist, internationalist, left-wing, right-wing or liberal. Or even green, heaven forbid we fail to listen to a global scientific consensus.
Should we see any merits in a putative subscription model? Well, to reconcile differing levels of public commitment to the BBC, we might consider a system of levy payments for ‘public media’ after the recent German model. To try to accommodate the pro-subscription perspectives, maybe an element of gradation in payment could be considered, in addition to some reductions and inceases depending on council tax banding. For instance, BBC “partisans” could pay £35 a month, to get all BBC output and access to more archival material, encompassing iPlayer, BritBox, BBC Sounds and the incredible Box of Broadcasts, only available currently to University card holders. Then, BBC “objectors” could opt to pay £3.50 a month to get the basic channels: BBC1 and BBC2. BBC “fence-sitters” could keep paying the current £12 monthly rate to maintain access to iPlayer, all radio and TV channels and the unwieldy BBC Sounds.
I will leave whether this would work out financially to the BBC’s (understandably many) accountants – but it seems to me that it might be the only model that could feasibly accommodate an element of ‘choice’ but which might financially enable the BBC to maintain its current level of services and role as the national broadcaster. Even this reform would be made impractical by the fact that most homes have Freeview, and this model would require the sort of consistent broadband access across the UK which does not exist and is unlikely to for a long time. Ironic, considering how Labour was planning free universal broadband!
Better, surely, to maintain a straightforward, universally accessible utility. While certain rabid BBC critics may often shout the loudest, they just expose themselves as aggressive, cultural wreckers. The more intelligent of them may call themselves “sovereign consumers” but in their cussed individuality they seem not to grasp the concept and reality of the ‘public’, and thus do not appreciate a national broadcaster which can cater to myriad audiences. The whole of the public should be the BBC’s masters, not Tony Hall or successor, and certainly not Boris Johnson.
BBC PURPOSES #2: Education and Programming
Furthermore, the BBC also has a vastly important role in the field of education. I propose wider public access to existing services like Learning on Screen. The BBC should have a greater role in the classroom from secondary level upwards; why not, when it has produced not just BBC Bitesize but programming as responsible and challenging as The Ascent of Man (BBC2, 1973), Muslims Like Us (BBC2, 2016), its Open University output since the early 1970s and BBC Bristol’s Natural History Unit’s programmes with David Attenborough?
The last decade has seen big-hitting dramas like Line of Duty (2012- ) and Call the Midwife (2012- ), comedies of the calibre of Peter Kay’s Car Share (2015-18), Detectorists (2014-17) and Mum (2016-19); as well as the masterly, currently under-publicised anthology series Inside No. 9 (2014- ). Outstanding documentaries have included Liza Williams’s probing, corrective-to-history The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story (2019), and one that Dominic Cummings might learn from: Eugenics: Science’s Greatest Scandal (2019).
But, it is critical to get away from my own preferences – to see things not just from in terms of “me”, but the wider “we“. Clearly, others deeply value programmes that aren’t my cup of tea like Mrs Brown’s Boys, The One Show or Countryfile. I don’t begrudge them their pleasures. I will however assert that it is time that EastEnders be replaced with a soap opera that tackles social issues like Julia Smith’s creation used to, but also inject some much-needed humour? What about basing it in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a place more culturally aligned with Glasgow than London? The great Tyneside writer Tom Hadaway had a similar idea of a soap set around Newcastle’s Central Station in the 1990s, but his idea was regrettably not realized, as James Leggott (2016) has detailed.
Yes, it is vital to protect the BBC in Joan Bakewell and Nicholas Garnham (1970)’s characterisation of it as a pluralist church. So far, so Peter Hitchens. It is just as important that it be licensed to be in a composite of a Weimar cabaret venue and a national theatre: in which any ideas can be vigorously and sometimes irreverently contested. Still further, not quite so Peter Hitchens!
We need to learn from Jonathan Coe and Chris Morris’s wisecomments on the licensed fool nature of satire these days: it currently serves the right in politics for politicians as a whole to be denigrated. Satire that does not take into account fundamental truths about power is toothless and banal. Of course, all Chris Morrises and Peter Cooks need their Ken Dodds or Les Dawsons and, unfortunately, neither the BBC nor ITV has not done enough to sustain these national traditions of dissident satire and music hall.
All of us benefit when in drama and comedy all different ideologies are rigorously scrutinised and dramatised – an example from my PhD study would be Robin Chapman’s Play for Today – ‘Come the Revolution’ (broadcast 1 week before ‘Abigail’s Party’ in late October 1977). Play for Today has been lazily stereotyped by Dominic Sandbrook as constituting ‘left-wing propaganda’. Yet, Chapman’s play is a complex dissection of a small, left-wing company akin to Portable Theatre being infiltrated and taken over by a doctrinaire Workers’ Revolution Party-like hard left sect. To me, the play signifies that left-wing people should develop the legacy of Theatre Workshop and be cautionary about an agitprop theatre that is a means of power accumulation for sects. It is brilliantly written and has magnificent performances from Vivian Pickles and Kenneth Colley as a pair of smooth, culturally influential sectarians. I sense it is not the only PFT that, in the wake of the IMF and Winter of Discontent “crises”, anatomised the left…
BBC PURPOSES #3: SERVING A DIVERSITY OF NEEDS?
Some on the political right want to destroy broadcasting for all minority interests other than their own. What would they have to say if the political left aimed to end The Last Night of the Proms, Antiques Roadshow, Songs of Praise, Royal family coverage and Test Match Special? I am only enamoured of the last of these, but can see that other people deeply value the others and they share the same country (, so I respect their traditional pleasures. More intelligent and emotionally sensitive Conservatives realise they should permit programmes and stations that younger or more left-wing people value. Football fans, regardless of their team allegiance, can surely agree that 5Live provides immeasurably richer coverage than Talk Sport?
Rather than the government – ironically led by an unelected bureaucrat – taking an axe to a century of accumulated wisdom, triumphs and failures, what about taking away the government’s power to renew or abolish the Royal Charter every ten years? What about placing the BBC on a permanent footing so that it is truly – and not quasi – autonomous from political interference? In addition, we should enact the Media Reform Coalition’s recent proposals that the BBC Board of Governors be comprised of 50% from those elected by staff and 50% from those elected by licence fee payers. It is surely better to democratise the BBC BOG rather than having most of them appointed directly by politicians in government or their appointees. It is about time that the Corporation’s Governors became a corpus reflective of the country at large, and not in the debt of government. It is encouraging that Rebecca Long-Bailey has endorsed these proposals: I await with interest what the other Labour leadership candidates have to say…
When the UK frays, the BBC gets caught in the crossfire; as with the Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014 when it came under heavy fire from the ‘Yes’ campaign for its perceived pro-Unionist coverage; a coverage inevitable given the ‘British’ third of the BBC’s name. The BBC is incredibly vulnerable now to claims that it just represents the two main national ‘capitals’: London and environs and the Unionist but ‘Remain’ voting stronghold of Edinburgh. It needs to show it cares just as much about the people of Belfast and Basingstoke, Glasgow and Liverpool.
OUR BBC’S FUTURE: SOME MODEST PROPOSALS
As Tom Hazeldine rightly argued in the New Left Review in 2017, much of the northern and midlands Brexit vote was down to resentment that investment and economic resources have been concentrated around London and the South East. Most northern and midlands towns and cities have proportionately lost out due to the Cameron-May governments’ economic policies of austerity. There is also much-documented English resentment at Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales having a degree of devolved autonomy and at the Barnett Formula. Now, the drive is rightly on for the BBC to broadcast more from and in the voices of the regions. We need to consign the sort of attacks that Steph McGovern received from those inside and outside the BBC who objected to her fine Teesside accent firmly in the past.
2027 is when the real battle over the Licence Fee will be won and lost; surely, democratic political parties must advocate a reformed, democratised BBC to consign Dominic Cummings’s elitist idea of a neutered, subscription-only BBC to the dustbin of history.
(1) Who has, though?! It could be argued that the government has a questionable grasp of the economic aspects of a No Deal Brexit, just as FBPE-rs have a doubtful grasp of the plurality of Brexiters’ positions: there are indeed thousands of personal private Brexits living in people’s minds across the country… The Yaxley-Lennon minority will be entirely unsavoury, but most will just be a quiet patriotism that does not necessarily want to Other minority groups. I want to hear from British Asian Leavers in Luton, Bradford or Slough, just like I’d want to hear from Remainers in the Brexit central of Lincolnshire… The media has had a role in creating prevalent visions of what ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’ are like, based on partial readings of electoral geography; this is regrettable and yet another reason for improved public service broadcasting.
(2) In The Conversation blog piece, I link to John Humphrys without highlighting how he is now being paid to purvey his right-wing, traditionalist views within the pages of the Daily Mail.
(3) Some might say, like Guy Shrubsole, that they don’t share enough…
May's Britain... 