For those not in the know, the BBC Singers are the UK’s sole professional chamber choir; perhaps lack of competition has enabled this ensemble to remain a revered fixture of the country’s Classical furniture for the best part of a century, but it also means people take notice when such unique BBC employees feel the brunt of their employer’s diminishing commitment to the highbrow. A couple of years ago, it was announced that the BBC Concert Orchestra would be dispatched to the wilds of the provinces as yet another token gesture in the ongoing (and increasingly tedious) operation to make the Beeb less ‘London-centric’; but this week an even more dispiriting sign of these BBC times came with the announcement that the BBC Singers are to be disbanded before the start of this year’s Proms, just a year before reaching their landmark 100th birthday; another penny-pinching body blow to the declining morale of these unsung old retainers was the announcement that salaries for members of the English BBC orchestras will be slashed by 20%.
Axing the BBC Singers was described in one newspaper article as an ‘act of vandalism’; BBC DG Tim Davie was the recipient of a joint letter penned by several Classical luminaries, declaring the intended cuts to be ‘irreversible and catastrophically damaging plans’; the BBC’s response reads: ‘Since 1922 we’ve been an integral part of the Classical music ecology in this country, and in order for us to continue to be a leading force in the industry, we need to modernise, make some necessary and difficult changes to the way we operate to ensure we are responding to audience needs and provide the best possible music to the widest possible audience.’ That statement just stops short of masking its meaning in Birt-speak buzzwords, but bearing in mind the self-destructive path the BBC seems determined to stick to, one wonders if their remaining ensembles will be restructured so that they will henceforth hire not on musical merit, but on box-ticking diversity/inclusivity grounds; perhaps ‘The BBC Rainbow Orchestra’ will eventually emerge from the ashes.
Naturally, the ominous spectre of the licence fee looms over every bumbling move the BBC makes these days as it struggles to justify its existence, and in the process has a habit of forgetting what made it special in the first place. The BBC’s nine musical ensembles may be a legacy of the old Reithian principles that regarded broadcasting as a moral mission to raise the artistic appreciation of the nation, and are viewed by some (especially within the BBC itself) as an anachronistic luxury; yet their continued presence in the face of the relentless dumbing-down that has characterised the Corporation in recent years has been something of a minor victory, particularly when compared to the fate of BBC4, a channel that for a good decade or more was the last remaining bastion of the Beeb’s once-peerless television output.
Now, rather than playing the long game of starving them out, the BBC has instead decided to disband its Singers in the same week as its somewhat kneejerk decision to hand a P45 to a grossly-overpaid star following the latest in a lengthy litany of gormless missives on social media. The fact the Beeb would have happily carried on paying Gary Lineker’s astronomical wages had his current comments on illegal immigrants not landed the Corporation in one more row with the Government that it could desperately do without says as much about its priorities as cutting the salaries of the BBC orchestras. Okay, so BBC TV’s football coverage commands far higher ratings than the listening figures for Radio 3; but we’re not talking about ITV or Channel 5, are we? Isn’t the BBC supposed to amount to more than merely chasing ratings?
Gary Lineker has been a bit of a repeat offender for quite some time; remembering I once wrote a post on here about his Twitter activities, I was surprised to learn when I tracked it down that it had been written as far back as December 2016; in a way, that shows just how long the BBC has tolerated his off-air utterances. As with Jeremy Clarkson before him, it seems the Beeb will allow the front-men of their most profitable franchises to get away with stretching the Corporation’s supposed ‘impartiality’ to breaking point for years until one incident too many provokes enough outraged headlines for a favourite son to be shown the door. I suppose the main difference between Lineker and Clarkson’s positions is that the latter was popular with that section of the viewing public the BBC disdains, whereas the former is a darling of all that the BBC bigwigs hold dear; one suspects they’d been keen to get rid of an embarrassment like Clarkson for years but didn’t dare, whilst losing Lineker was the last thing they wanted. However, unlike ‘Top Gear’ – which has failed to thrive since Clarkson’s departure – ‘Match of the Day’ will survive Gary Linker just as it survived David Coleman, Jimmy Hill and Des Lynam; viewers don’t tune in for the presenter or the pundits; they tune in to watch the games.
From all accounts, the entire commentary team of ‘Match of the Day’ have walked out in solidarity with Lineker; moreover, this Saturday’s edition will have neither presenter nor pundits as it seems Lineker’s sofa mafia have also downed tools and refused to work – although most of them, like Lineker himself, are essentially freelance anyway and routinely turn up on other broadcasters to cover matches the BBC hasn’t got the rights to anymore. Personally, I quite like the idea of ‘Match of the Day’ taking a ‘TOTP 2’ approach to coverage, with no host and no waffling ex-pros endlessly analysing what we’ve just seen. Who knows – it might work as a formula and we’ll be spared the inevitable Alex Scott inheriting the hot-seat. Anyway, as things stand, this move is not being officially regarded as permanent, though it’s hard to see a way back for Lineker with the BBC so terrified of offending a government that wants to take its own shears to the Beeb’s myriad tentacles.
The reactions to the comments that ultimately left the BBC with no choice but to give Gary Lineker the push mirror the polarisation of our times and highlight the dividing lines between those who applaud the compulsion of celebrities to virtue signal and those who deplore them doing so. One side praises Lineker and accuses the BBC of being spineless Tory lapdogs whilst the other claims the freedom the ex-footballer has had to make a mockery of BBC impartiality is symptomatic of the metropolitan Woke elite that forces its arrogant agenda down the throat of a viewing audience sick of being lectured to. Ironically, Piers Morgan, of all people, supported Lineker’s right to express his opinion (even if he disagreed with it) and argued it wasn’t a sackable offence, what with Lineker not being the host of a news programme. The culture wars do indeed occasionally throw up unlikely bedfellows.
It’s interesting that suspending a high-profile presenter of a popular programme provokes an across-the-board ‘everybody out’ attitude not just amongst BBC staff but at the equally PC Premier League, and provides further ammunition for social media soapboxes; it gives the impression that the BBC has been reduced to an ineffective supply teacher unable to exercise any authority over its unruly pupils. On the other hand, when it comes to a corner of the Corporation with a lower profile (albeit one with a far more distinguished history), the BBC can wield the axe unchallenged and protests are limited to the small albeit passionate circle of musicians directly affected. Perhaps these particular BBC employees don’t fit the profile the Beeb is keen to cultivate and consequently aren’t viewed as important – even if their gradual obliteration will do far more long-term damage to the Corporation’s dwindling reputation than the loss of Lineker ever will.
© The Editor
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Amazingly, it seems there are still people out there excitedly awaiting the unveiling of the festive schedules on the mainstream TV channels, as though the DVD box-set or streaming sites cease to exist on at midnight on 24 December, and for the duration of Christmas Day the only option for visual entertainment will be to watch the seasonal special of a BBC1 or ITV show nobody wants to watch the rest of the year. Even as far back as the late 80s, the one-time dominance of television to provide the masses with their yuletide viewing habits was being eroded by the gift-wrapped live comedy video, which would be shoved into the VCR instead of sitting through an over-familiar Bond movie or second-guessing which character would top themselves on the Xmas ‘Eastenders’. Television’s unchallenged power to monopolise leisure time on 25 December was broken long before the novelty of a Christmas Day terrestrial film premiere was rendered redundant by multiple means of seeing said movie months in advance of BBC1 getting hold of it. In a way, I suspect broadcasters are more aware of this than they let on, which is probably why they put so little effort into their Christmas output now than they used to; why waste time and money making festive telly people might want to watch when the people are planning their own personal schedules?
Many years ago I visited a museum housing the numerous inventions of Thomas Edison and heard with my own ears his 1878 recording of ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’ on a tinfoil sheet via phonograph cylinder, having been led to believe it was the first-ever recording of the human voice. I subsequently learnt of Edison’s protection racket that forced the embryonic moving picture industry to relocate from the East Coast to the West, and was pleased to discover this apparently unpleasant individual had been beaten to sound recording by the best part of 20 years. It is now officially acknowledged that the actual inaugural recording of the human voice took place in 1860 by a Frenchman, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. It’s worth putting his achievement into context by noting other events of 1860. This is the year that saw the publication of George Eliot’s ‘The Mill on the Floss’, Wilkie Collins’s ‘The Woman in White’, and the beginning of Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations’ as serialised in his magazine, ‘All the Year Round’; it was the year that Thomas Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce defended Darwin’s theories in one of the most famous Oxford University debates, with none other than Lewis Carroll (AKA Charles Dodgson) in attendance; and the further laying of future foundations took place with the first recognised football fixture, Sheffield FC versus Hallam FC, as well as the opening of the first-ever fish & chip shops.
Every innovation in television presentation eventually lapses into cliché – and the documentary genre is no exception. Perhaps because I’ve watched more documentaries than any other TV genre in the past 30-odd years I notice it more, but the tired tricks of the trade do niggle a little and you crave a more adventurous director to look for other ways of visually accompanying the narration. There’s the guaranteed aerial shot as the camera sweeps across the landscape – a trick made all the easier (not to say lazier) these days thanks to developments in drone technology; and, of course, there’s the shot of the presenter strolling down a crowded street, addressing a camera half-a-mile away as bemused members of the public stare at a stranger talking to themselves – although, having said that, we’re more inured to strangers having a conversation with the Invisible Man ever since earpieces and hands-free mobiles became widespread tools of annoyance. A history documentary sometimes resorts to the dreaded re-enactment of a significant historical moment by using unknown actors whose performances are usually guaranteed to secure their anonymity; and I recall around 20-25 years ago there was another documentary cliché that thankfully seems to have disappeared now, that of a past event under discussion being illustrated by fake, shaky Super-8 cine-film – and that technique was used over and over again.
I recently remarked to a friend that much of the 1960s architecture that once littered our cities now feels like a kind of collective hallucination, with so little of it surviving as evidence it ever existed. And I’m not just talking about the most severe of Brutalist blocks, either; some of the buildings of that era which strove to create a Modernist elegance have gone too. Take the BBC studios at Pebble Mill, Birmingham. A state-of-the-art, purpose-built broadcasting complex that was even home to the residents of Ambridge when it opened amidst something of a fanfare in 1971, Pebble Mill was the most prominent television centre outside of London for the best part of 30 years and also served as emergency backup for its Shepherds Bush senior; should anything unforeseen happen to curtail transmissions at TVC, all BBC output would switch to leafy, suburban Edgbaston. The actual Pebble Mill building, as with BBC Television Centre itself, was eventually a victim of the changing way programmes were made from the 90s onwards, with the farming out of production to independent companies negating the need for a sprawling, MGM-style HQ. When it was discovered the edifice was also plagued by so-called ‘concrete cancer’, the decision was made to vacate the building and Pebble Mill closed in 2004, with demolition coming the following year.
Sure, it’s not the end of the world; but it’s the end of something. The BBC’s decision to drop the classified football results from the long-running ‘Sports Report’ sounds like one of those crass decisions made by a new controller of the station in question (5 Live) who’s keen to make his mark and shake things up a bit. It’s a familiar pattern on BBC radio, like when the Radio 4 UK Theme was axed back in 2006. Commissioned in 1978 to open the station every morning after the handover from the World Service, the medley of traditional English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish melodies heralded the dawn of the day’s broadcasting and quickly became as much of a wireless institution as the theme tune to ‘The Archers’ or the sound of ‘Sailing By’ announcing the arrival of the Shipping Forecast. The man who wielded the axe for the UK Theme was the then-controller of Radio 4, Mark Damazer; many were suspicious this was an action motivated by embarrassment within the ivory corridors of Broadcasting House that such a popular piece of music didn’t reflect the way the BBC likes to think of the nation, though Damazer claimed what he described as ‘a pacy news briefing’ was what listeners wanted first thing on a morning. Well, perhaps it was what the BBC overlords felt they ought to want first thing on a morning. After all, they know what’s best for us.
It could be connected to the Commonwealth Games being staged in Birmingham or maybe it’s simply part of the BBC’s centenary celebrations; whatever the reason, the rare opportunity to see some episodes of the Corporation’s mid-70s series of single plays, ‘Second City Firsts’, has been a nice surprise for those who mourn BBC4’s descent into a repeat channel for shows that have been seen too many times before. This series, produced at the late lamented Pebble Mill studios in Brum, was a mouthpiece for voices without much in the way of a nationwide platform at the time, and perhaps it’s only the notoriously shabby treatment of the BBC’s archives in the 1970s that has prevented any of the instalments from receiving an outing since. Thankfully, the likes of the Kaleidoscope organisation are renowned for retrieving lost gems from private collections, and viewers this week were treated to a trio of ‘Second City Firsts’ that were an eye-opening breath of fresh air when it comes to vintage television.
Faced with an obstinate Government boasting a string of broken promises, the women in the vanguard of the fight for the right to vote resorted to desperate, headline-grabbing incidents in the early 1910s; everything from choreographed window-smashing to arson to bombings became key components in the Suffragette arsenal, yet the increasingly militant elements of this period specialising in spectacular stunts invariably encouraged some part-timers for whom the issue was a convenient cause to hang their dilettante ‘radicalism’ on. That’s not necessarily something unique, of course; all crusades tend to attract the amateur agitator and anarchist when legitimate democratic means stall. Take Mary Richardson, a twisted fire-starter whose commitment to one cause was swiftly supplanted by another; once her stint as a suburban guerrilla ended, she moved on to champagne socialism and then fascism, specifically Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, whose organisation she ended up fronting the female section of. But if Mary Richardson remains remembered for anything, it is an act of vandalism undertaken in the name of suffrage – that of defacing The Rokeby Venus by Velázquez in 1914 as it hung in the National Gallery.
As with the current shameless shower at Westminster, nothing really surprises where the BBC is concerned anymore. Often, it exceeds itself and reaches a point whereby satire is superseded and rendered redundant, such as the case of the weekly Woke lecture masquerading as ‘Doctor Who’; the anticipated outrage of casting of an actual man to succeed the world’s worst actress as the lead character was eased by the fact he’s both black and gay (two boxes ticked), not to mention a Transwoman of Colour as his sidekick; job done! One can almost picture the planning meeting – ‘Have we left anyone out?’ The cynical and counterproductive ‘positive discrimination’ approach of the Corporation’s relentless Diversity & Inclusivity agenda is perhaps one small reason why viewers have had enough. Even if the divisive issue of the licence fee is put to one side, this obstinate kamikaze mission of Beeb management and programme-makers merely underlines how those entrusted with salvaging the BBC’s dwindling reputation don’t really understand the reason why it acquired that reputation in the first place.
For anyone too young to recall what the Great British Sunday used to be like before John Major moved the goalposts and allowed the retail industry to extend its week from six days to seven, there’s still no better document than the 1958 episode of the radio incarnation of ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’ titled ‘Sunday Afternoon at Home’. The unique boredom once associated with the day of rest is absolutely nailed as Anthony Aloysius repeatedly yawns, routinely checks the clock, struggles to find things to occupy the endless hours stretching ahead, and suffers a stodgy Sunday lunch cooked by Hattie Jacques. ‘I thought my mother was a bad cook,’ says Hancock, ‘but at least her gravy used to move about.’ The nearest evocation in recent times of how Sundays once were came with the first lockdown, though even that didn’t entirely recapture the bleak, existential ambience conveyed in Hancock’s weary statement, ‘Oh, I do hate Sundays’; he delivers it in a miserable manner that provokes a laugh from the listener and the studio audience, underlining how so much English humour is derived from familiar situations with no apparent humour in them. Perhaps this is a key to Hancock’s enduring appeal and timeless relevance.
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