Auntie Beeb

Monkeys at the zoo

Auntie Beeb, Racism
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Owen Hatherley on what the BBC’s reducing of the experience of the “white working class” to having a bee in one’s bonnet about immigrants means:

This middle-class reductiveness (pioneered in Michael Collins’ sentimentalist The Likes of Us) is something that I find particularly infuriating, as it constantly declares that the white working class that make up most of my family – mostly politically active, with an autodidact or two amongst them, committed to working class solidarity and education – don’t exist, never did exist. Similarly, the history of the East End has to be rewritten in a way that ensures that the Great Dock Strike, Cable Street, decades as one of the few places in Britain where ‘Communist’ wasn’t a pejorative, are all secondary to a Sun reading bestiary. All particularly grotesque in an area that has seen the mass social cleansing that is gentrification expel working class inhabitants, black or white, off to the peripheries.

That is perhaps the core appeal of this whole white season: watching monkeys at the zoo slinging poo, only in this case the monkeys wear flat caps or hoodies and hurl racial abuse. Both the vicarious thrill of being racist by proxie and the moral superiority of knowing that you aren’t like those people, as if the readership of the Daily “welfare cheat bogus asylum seekers bearing aids force drop in house prices” Mail isn’t largely middle class. The racism and bigotry of a large part of the English bourgeoisie projected on the working classes.

The real plight of the working classes and its causes is not investigated. Asians riot and whites vote BNP and that’s just the way it is, and that misjudged racial visionary Enoch Powell saw it would be this way. Ignored remains the virtual destruction of Britain’s industries from 1950 onwards, the hollowing out of the unions, the abandonment of the working class –white or otherwise– by all political parties, the development of a two tier health system, a two tier eductation system, a two tier…

If only the BBC had taken a real look at what has happened to the working classes in the forty years since Powell, instead of falling into the same old easy middle class cliches, instead of looking at monkeys at the zoo.

BBC2’s White season: the trailer

Auntie Beeb, Racism
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Below’s the trailer I described earlier. Now am I right or wrong to see this as something that could’ve ended with the words “I’m Nick Griffin and I approve this message” as new to me blog The Soul of Man under Capitalism puts it.

Chris Bertram over at Crooked Timber meanwhile looks at the Decentist response to this series:

Given their leftist background, most “decents” have promoted either a class-based solidarity or an abstract universalism of citizenship in opposition to multiculturalism (which their blogs incessantly attack). But these pieces suggest something new. One possibility is that they are being drawn to the promotion of “my culture too!”, a resentment-driven demand for recognition within a multicultural system; another is that they are pushing the ethnos in the demos. Maybe they haven’t worked it out themselves yet. Either way, it gives me the creeps.

BNP or BBC?

Auntie Beeb, Life under Capitalism, Racism
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Imagine the following trailer: the face of a white, bald man somewhere in his forties is shown in close up while Billy Bragg’s interpretation of Jerusalem plays. A hand moves in view and starts writing on the man’s skin in black paint, in a clearly non-western looking script. A second hand follows and writes in another script. More hands follows, until the man’s whole face is covered in black paint. He then closes his eyes and the text appears below: “is Britain’s white working class becoming invisible?” All hands shown look Black or Asian.

sounds like a BNP ad? You would think so, but if you’ve been watching the BBC this weekend you must’ve seen it come past, as a trailer for their coming season of programmes devoted to “the white working class”. According to the press release the BBC have put out about this, these programmes are meant to examine “why some sections of this community feel increasingly marginalised yoday” and why it is that “some white working class people to say they feel under siege and as if their very sense of self is being brought into question“.

Because until now the working class has largely featured on BBC2 as gormless chavs who need to be taught how to feed their children properly, it’s not hard to feel skeptical about the intentions behind this. The BBC has rarely cared about the working classes, white or otherwise, staunch bastion of middle class priviledge that it is. Why suddenly discover them now and sell this with images and a narrative that play straight into BNP scaremongering? A white man’s face that disappears under a layer of black paint; how obvious can you get?

This season could’ve been worthwhile if the BBC had made it working class season rather than white season because the issues it presents are issues that concern the whole working class, not just the white part of it. Britain in the last thirty years has been forcibly shifted from a manufacturing to a services orientated economy and that’s the reason the “white working class” feels “increasingly marginalised today”, because the jobs their fathers and grandfathers had for life have disappeared. It’s the economy, stupid.

Of course the programmes themselves may very well be much better than the trailer makes them out to be; the BBC has a long tradition of making shit trailers for good shows. These programmes might just examine the economic background to the plight of the English working class, -white, black, Asian and other–. For the moment however whatever the BBC thinks it’s doing, it’s mostly providing ammunition to the BNP and other bigots, as a Google search on “BBC white working class” makes clear. The first hit is to the St*rmfr*nt hate site.

The last word is for Theloonyfromcatford commenting on a similar article in the Guardian lamenting the loss of “white working class identity”:

I’m a white,working class man.

The idea that I’ve become invisible, maligned and need a hug/season of programmes from ex public schoolboys in order to feel better about myself is absurd.

Yes, the man who owns the local shop has brown skin. Yes,my work colleagues include Polish girls and black blokes.

So what?

The Tudors

Auntie Beeb
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If there’s one thing the BBC just cannot do, it’s making trailers for their tv shows that do not fill you with a brightly burning hatred for the show in question after the second time you’ve seen the trailer. Doesn’t matter whether the programme itself is good or not, because the trailers are so annoying and they’re shown so often (even thirty seconds before the show in question comes on) that you cannot help but loathe it. And when the trailers are promoting something that is going to be awful, the trailers are even worse. Such was the case for The Tudors, BBC2’s latest mock-historical costumes ‘n sex drama. You knew it was going to be bad because the trailer showed all sort of dark! dramatic! scenery chewing, interspersed with pseudoporn, and the lead actor did that stupid “talking normally THEN SHOUTING bit” that bad tv actors thinks shows tension, but instead just makes them look like a berk.

We’ve watched the series a bit since it came on because we always catch it switching from Have I got News for You on BBC1 to Q.I. on BBC2, because we keep forgetting there’s half an hour inbetween them. While watching it, S— remarked that it seemed made for the American market because a) dumbed down, b) overdramatic and c) lots of filler that could be cut for commercials. Well, surprise surprise, it turned out she was right, Daily Mail tells us. This being the Mail, there’s plenty of sexy photos of it inbetween telling us how sexed up and awful it is:

Modern radiators, Tarmac driveways, concrete bollards and Victorian carriages have all made appearances in the tenpart series set in the 16th century.

Made by Showtime, a U.S. production company, The Tudors appeared on American screens before being bought by BBC2. Henry VIII is played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers of Bend It Like Beckham fame.

Last night, Leanda de Lisle, a Tudor biographer, said: “Overall the series is badly written with an extremely cheap feel to it.

“It is hugely disappointing. With inaccuracies in almost every sentence, the BBC is dumbing down the Tudor period.”

She said the anachronisms would be acceptable only if the drama “rang true” – and this hadn’t been the case.

She added: “The characters talk in completely unnatural ways, addressing their own family members as “Anne Boleyn” or “Mary Boleyn” so that we, the stupid audience, understand who they’re supposed to be.

“Henry VIII was exceedingly powerful, both politically and physically, but Rhys Meyers is pretty, rather than macho and thus completely unconvincing.”

The Tudors is only the worst recent example of the BBC’s recent tendency to sex up and dumb down its historical dramas, either to attract more viewers or to be able to sell it on to the American market. Any educative values still presents in these shows is watered down to homeopathic levels in the process, losing much of the justification for them. These series are supposed to teach some history in an enjoyable manner, but unless you’ve got a fetish for “medieval” costume cosplay, you’ll neither enjoy The Tudors nor learn anything from it.

Balanced News

Auntie Beeb, Climate change, Manufacturing Consent
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There’s a good report up on Medialens of how something that looks at first sight to be a balanced newsreport, on further investigation,isn’t. No prizes if you guessed this might have something to do with climate change, and in particular, that High Court judge and his supposed finding of “nine errors” in Al gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The BBC did their usual piece on this, by interviewing the involved parties, but they let themselves been snookered as they never looked into how the complainant, Stuart Dimmock, a lorry driver and school governor could afford to bring his complaint all the way to the High Court. If they had, they would’ve found that he was sponsored by the climate change skeptic New Party, itself sponsored by Scottish millionaire Robert Durward. By not reporting this in their interviews with Dimmock, the BBC therefore provided a clearly false picture of this court case while still adhering to the doctrine of “balance”.

This is only one example of a widespread practise, not just at the BBC but in all news media, where instead of journalists trying to determine the truth behind the surface story, only the claims and counterclaims of the involved parties are reported. This is not necessarily a bad thing; in politics especially it is often hard to objectively determine the truth of a story, or the story is about the conflicting interpretations of government and opposition for a given incident. It’s then that a summation of claim and counterclaim is justified, but not when relevant facts are left out of the story.

But even when this sort of reporting is justified, a story can be balanced and still be unfair. An example of this was on display in a news item I heard last night on the Radio 4 six oçlock news bulletin. The story was about the Scottish government’s opposition against a replacement for the UK’s current Trident based nuclear deterrent. since the Trident submarines are based in Faslane in Scotland, making the country therefore a nuclear target, it’s clearly a legitimate concern of the Scottish governement, even though technically it falls outside their jurisdiction.

On the BBC news however this was framed with a soundbyte from Wendy Alexander, the leader of the Labour opposition in the Scottish Parliament, who said she didn’t want English politicians speaking for Scotland on matters like healthcare and therefore Scottish politicians should not speak out about English or British matters either. This was immediately followed by a question from the BBC reporter to the Scottish National Pary’s spokesperson on whether the SNP did not go too far in its opposition to Trident replacement. With that, even though both sides, Labour and SNP, got their say, the bias of the story was clearly in favour of Labour; but you wouldn’t know that it was biased unless you paid close attention.

It’s a borderline dishonest way of reporting on stories, and it’s far more common than you think. Much of the reputation of a Jeremy Paxman or a John Humpries for being “tough”, it seems to me, is due to mock aggresive oneway questioning like this, where only the weaker party is attacked like this. The BBC may pride itself on being independent, but in important matters it will almost always take the side of the vested interests, the establishment.