Do you think you’re thick? Are you so completely incapable of having a single serious thought in your head that you switch off the TV the moment someone says something intelligent, knowledgeable or genuinely informative?
Come to think of it, are these sentences, y’know, just a little bit too complicated to handle?
No, I didn’t think so. But then, I don’t work for the BBC. So I’ve spent the past thirty years believing that if I write in clear, straightforward, grown-up English prose then readers of all ages, classes, genders and races will have no trouble understanding me. They may not agree. They may not be remotely interested. But they’ll get it.
Repercussions: BBC veteran Peter Sissons said the number of complaints was 'very serious' and bosses should have a 'serious rethink' about the presenting line-up ahead of the Olympics
The BBC, however, disagrees. In its prime it operated on the genuinely egalitarian principle that everyone, irrespective of background, deserved the best possible quality broadcasting. Generations grew up trusting the BBC to provide the most honest, reliable news; the finest drama; the funniest comedy; the most gripping sport and, on the great occasional that brought the nation together, the most elegant, appropriate and, yes, classy coverage.
Elite: BBC Director General Mark Thompson was educated at Oxford University, and is the highest paid employee of any public sector organisation in the UKBut then something changed. The BBC, like so much of the British establishment, lost its self-confidence and became infected by the same, unthinking, supposedly progressive intellectual viruses that gripped our educationists, public services and politicians. Uniquely in the world – for no other culture, from the most greedily capitalist to the most repressively communist has this problem – our pale-pink opinion formers decided that ‘elite’ was a dirty word.
Obsessed by class and privilege they made a fatal confusion between social elitism and the attainment of elite achievement. The SAS , for example, is an elite military unit because the men who serve in it are among the very finest soldiers in the world. A Harley Street surgeon; a soloist in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; a garden designer who wins a gold medal at Chelsea; a professor of astrophysics at Imperial College – all these are elite members of their respective professions. And in a sane world, all would be valued for their achievements.
But the BBC is gripped by the idea that if one person is elite, then a lot of other people, who are not elite are being harmed or discriminated against in some way. More than that, it is not right or fair to force the values of the elite onto ordinary people.
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I suppose there is some shred of reason in that argument. But there are two immediate flaws. The first is that the upper reaches of the BBC are populated almost exclusively by privately-educated products of Oxford and Camgridge – a essentially, the same kind of people who inhabit the front benches in the Commons, but wearing slightly trendier clothes. ‘Out of touch’ doesn’t begin to describe them – though ‘undeservingly elite’ just might.
Nearing the end: The flotilla sails under Tower Bridge as it nears the end of the pageant route Shambles: The broadcaster's Jubilee coverage had by Wednesday night prompted 2,425 complaints from viewers
The second problem is that they assume that so-called ‘ordinary people’ have no interest whatever in ‘elite’ concepts like, say, complicated information, serious history, moral debate, literature, classical music or opera. They work on the basis that the British population is stupid, crass, incurious and incapable of grasping anything that is not pitched at the level of a six year-old with attention deficit disorder.
That’s why so much of the Jubilee coverage was so appalling. The BBC didn’t think that you would be remotely interested in knowing where the boats in the flotilla had come from, or what their histories were, or who was sailing in them. All the months that people had spent preparing for this great moment, all the history represented in those boats, all the fascinating human stories that must have been going down the Thames on Sunday … In the minds of BBC management, you were far too moronic to be interested in any of that. All you wanted to see was one set of nitwitted z-listers wittering witlessly at another.
So what it amounts to is that the BBC’s idea of being ‘anti-elitist’ is having rich, highly educated, immensely privileged people treating their viewers like idiots.
And what could be more elitist than that?
