The last days of the Beeb (Part 996)

Here we go again. 34 years after Michael Leapman published his book The Last Days of the Beeb, the Corporation’s staff are cakking their drawers over the - wholly implausible -threat that a Conservative government will abolish the license fee and they will be handed brooms with which to sweep the streets. 

That sets the scene for the epic encounter with sometime burqa-wearing BBC foreign correspondent John Simpson in Saint Barnabas Church last week. Simpson moved to Oxford from Chelsea with “a kid” aged ten who attended the now defunct New College School. He has written two novels, working mainly in Oxford cafes.

He has made many friends in Oxford. His greatest dislike is being mistaken for David Attenborough – twenty years his senior. John Simpson enjoys his forays into Oxford college life, but would not want to be a college head, spending most of their time on aircraft, seeking money.

“I want the nice bits, the fun bits.”

When it comes to his BBC career John Simpson presents himself as something of a maverick cop, taking on the system. “The BBC today is timidity personified.”

He began his BBC career as a radio reporter, trying to buttonhole a furious Harold Wilson on Euston Station to ask if he was going to call an election. By his account Wilson reacted by punching him in the belly.

Worse was to follow. In Belfast in 1971, Simpson decided to attend an IRA funeral with a tape recorder hidden under his raincoat, having left his press credentials in his hotel. Why did this seem a good idea? He soon found himself talking to a group of concerned locals and his career might have come to an abrupt halt but for the intervention of a Sunday Times journalist.

Since then John Simpson has covered about forty wars. He has been injured and nearly killed ten times. He was bombed by the US in Iraq and his translator killed. The New York Times alleged and then retracted a claim that the Bush administration had a deliberate policy of killing journalists (Michael Kelly, etc.) 

But that can’t be true.

The irony is that John Simpson has often seemed ready to buy the regime-change narrative: the ‘Houthi rebels’ remain rebels after four years controlling the capital of Yemen, their opponents ‘the UN-backed government’ clinging to a small coastal enclave. He would no doubt dispute the ‘view from the Green Zone’, of giving too much credence to the rather pitiable puppet-governments the West has imposed (or not imposed) in Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Libya.

Or perhaps his reporting has drawn a contrast between the FCO-compliant rhetoric and the reality on the ground on the basis of ‘show don’t tell’.

We just don’t know.

In similar vein he seems less interested in courtiers’ gossip over whether Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, Osric or Jeremy Clarkson will be chosen to succeed Tony Hall as Director General of the BBC.

The BBC exists on many levels simultaneously. They don’t practise what they preach – and, boy, do they preach! You can’t have Simon Mayo without Jo Whiley. It’s the law! But Samira Ahmed can’t earn as much as Jeremy Vine. It custom and practice!

When it comes to ratings-chasing you can have three white men presenting a programme about cars, making jokes about slopes on bridges, while a committee somewhere is surely discussing ways of getting more hip-hop music onto Gardeners’ Question-Time. Meanwhile the senior management live in a world of their own and nobody knows what they do there.

BBC journalists try to spoon-feed their audience with Guardian-readerish opinions, but it doesn’t seem to do any good. They go on voting Conservative no matter how many programmes about Toni Morrison there are on Radio 4.

There is general failure to ‘call out’ absurd right-wing politicians such as Jo Swinson with her laughable claim of a one billion pound a week ‘Remain dividend’.

Don’t become part of the story. Well, that has gone by the board. Carrying our working-class roots with us in our Rolls-Royce – and not just Brillo-style ego-journalism.

Pale and stale and male he may be, but John Simpson would like to go back to the one place he was most happy, like Candide in Happy Valley, with the Jamiroquai Indians up the Amazon in 1992. Honestly! What is his problem?

Hasn’t he heard of Stacey Dooley?

23 January 2020