The BBC is like Babylon

I love it, but it's a victim of post-imperialism, writes George Pitcher

I’m a great fan of the BBC. Generally speaking, I like and admire its journalists and its output and, occasionally, I take its and the licence-payer’s shilling.

I may be increasingly unusual in choosing to be woken by Radio 4’s Today, but love it for, rather than despite, its presenters’ impertinent and interruptive style with politicians.

Its radio drama is seductive. I lost the plot with The Archers (literally) at Covid, but I’ve had to pull into a lay-by when “Samantha has to go now…” on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, because I can’t see to drive through tears. Short radio drama series can be compulsive listening, such as Al Smith’s first-class Life Lines, featuring Sarah Ridgeway as an ambulance call handler. For faith, there’s Beyond Belief and Sunday.

As for TV, I’m showing my age – Repair Shop, Antiques Roadshow and Professor Alice Roberts’ archaeology in Digging for Britain. Ancient Top of the Pops repeats accompany Friday evening drinks.

Best-of-breed reporters

But back to the journalism. Say what you like, the BBC’s news output is the world’s benchmark. It has consistently hired best-of-breed reporters, particularly on the foreign stage. Whatever politicians of both the left or right claim, depending on their current circumstance, it is even-handed in its analysis.

Newsnight under Victoria Derbyshire is immeasurably improved by its slick, half-hour, after-dinner sofa format. It disassembles the pompous and hypocritical, from Trump apparatchiks to Jeremy Clarkson at a farmers’ demo, his stammering and panicky “classic BBC” now cheekily deployed in its own advertising.

Broadcasting House (Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c.1563)

But – and you’ll know the “but” was coming – there’s the dark side. There has been a litany of managerial let-downs, any of which could have put a more commercial enterprise out of business. Conservative governments have customarily been most prone to traducing the BBC, possibly because they think it should know its place, which is not so much below the salt as serving at their table.

Undermining credibility

So it’s quite the new thing for a Labour culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, further to undermine the credibility of its direct-general, Tim Davie, by listing its “catastrophic” failures on his watch. The BBC has just had to apologise (an occurrence now as regular as Gary Linker’s controversial tweets) for failing to discover, let alone disclose, that the 13-year-old narrator of documentary Gaza: How to survive a Warzone was the son of a Hamas official (though this is disputed).

A separate external review has also found that BBC bosses failed adequately to protect staff on MasterChef from presenter Gregg Wallace’s serial invasive behaviours and his colleague John Torode has been sacked over alleged racism. Further, the corporation has had to apologise this month for broadcasting antisemitic chants by the vile act Bob Vylan at Glastonbury.

Busted director-generals

It’s not all about Davie’s alleged shortcomings. As the BBC itself might put it, other busted director-generals are available. George Entwhistle resigned over a Newsnight crackpot report on a child-abuse scandal; Greg Dyke over Lord Hutton’s report into how the BBC reported the David Kelly suicide affair under the Blair government. Then there was the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand “prank”. Let’s not, please, lift the coffin lid on Jimmy Savile again. And so, one is forced to say, it goes on.

Is the BBC uniquely wicked and/or mismanaged? No. But it’s huge and visible. I have a theory that it’s a British institution which, like others, is a victim of its imperial past. It was nurtured in a post-Reith period, when being of the BBC was like carrying a British passport (“His/Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires…”). It not only believes in, it was a child of, its own propaganda.

Tower of Babel

That leads, inevitably in a post-imperial age, to hubris. It’s like Babylon, the metaphor rather than the great Mesopotamian city. The scriptural allegory from Genesis is that Babylon raised the great tower of Babel, to reach the sky and oversee a world that spoke its one, true language. In his wrath at their pride, God razed the tower and scattered its people, now unable to understand each other, for they’d come to form their own languages.

See how that works? The BBC has come to believe in itself, rather than its mission. And consequently, it has lost the ability to communicate, both internally and externally.

Jobs that end in tears

It’s not alone. The Church of England has the same post-imperial problem. So does any elected government after about a decade. The jobs of archbishops of Canterbury and prime ministers, as well as director-generals of the BBC, can only end in tears.

They should get together, these people. Work out accountable corporate structures that can work in the 21^st century. Create top leadership jobs that are possible to do, rather than appoint emperors who turn out to have no wardrobes.

The point surely is not that they are humiliated, but that they have to be humble. They need to demolish their towers, stop babbling at each other and learn to speak our common language again.

George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest

A version of this column appears on Seen & Unseen