Every day seems to bring with it another Most Depressing Story In The World… Ever! debacle.
Here’s today’s gem, courtesy of The Times:
BBC news and current affairs must be made more accessible to… viewers under a new series of performance measures against which the corporation will be judged.
The introduction of a 90-second BBC One news bulletin at 8pm, presented by Kate Silverton, is seen as the model for attracting younger viewers who find the main bulletins too challenging.
But the BBC was told that it must maintain the “gold standard” of its news coverage and not “dumb down” its journalism in the battle for ratings…
The BBC published research which showed that “heartland” licence fee-payers, who tend to be older, are satisfied with news coverage. But “low-approvers”, often younger viewers, did not find the news “relevant and accessible”.
The flagship BBC bulletins have already been revamped…
Sir Michael [Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust] said that the BBC must maintain the “gold standard” but news and current affairs had to be meaningful for all audiences. The BBC was also urged not to use words such as “creative” and “challenging” to describe its programmes because they create confusion. Research found that viewers believe “ambitious” means “expensive”, “creative” is equated with “arty” and challenging requires “hard work”. Programmes should instead be described as “fresh”, “new” or “different”.
It beggars belief that anybody with a mental age of more than seven years old can possibly find BBC news bulletins (on BBC One, at least) “too challenging”. “Hard work” stories – genocide in Darfur, oppression in Tibet, meltdown in Kosovo – are nowhere to be seen: they can’t get a look in because of puff pieces for Panorama, Rory Cellan-Jones And His Amazing Computer Graphics Package and Alagiah pleading for viewers to send in camphone footage of people dying on the pavement.
The BBC’s Six o’clock News is now about as “challenging” as Newsround was in John Craven’s day. (As if to emphasise the point the Six padded itself out the other evening with a “report” by Newsround’s Overenunciater-in-Chief Lizo Mzimba about how fantastically brilliant J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter are.) There have always been “And finally…” stories about skateboarding ducks, but really…
For good or ill (and I’m generally an enthusiast) the BBC plays a vital role in shaping Britain and its culture; the fact that it now treats viewers of its main news bulletins with barely-concealed contempt for their intellectual capacity is profoundly depressing and will, in time, mean that vast swathes of Britons know as little about the world and how it works as the average American. How much contextualisation and analysis can you manage in 90 seconds? By definition, the bulletin’s structure means that only simple, straightforward stories can possibly feature, and in the briefest of details.
Hi, I’m Kate! The headlines tonight. Hundreds dead in Africa – no Brits, though. Lots of shouting in Parliament – boring! Some monks were shot in Burma – that’s bad, we’re sad. The FTSE fell, the pound rose, inflation’s up, house prices are down. Men, kick, football – goal! Paris Hilton ate a biscuit. And there’s a funny clip of a hamster on YouTube you really must see. It might rain tomorrow. Please don’t turn over - here’s Holby City!
On the plane to New York at the start of the year, the Minister and his wife sat in front of a long-serving and distinguished BBC news correspondent.
As we were waiting at the baggage carousel at JFK I asked him if he too felt dirty after he watched the Six and Ten nowadays. “They’re not the best, are they?” he said. “But I tend to keep my head down because I don’t want to come across too much like a grumpy, out-of-touch dinosaur.”
It’s another manifestation of the arrogant, society-wide lack of respect for maturity and experience that has today seen another career politician (who has only just turned 40 and been in the Commons less than three years) take over the leadership of the Liberal Democrats at the expense of a man in – shock – his mid-sixties.
The BBC correspondent is old enough to be Kate Silverton’s grandfather but has precisely the journalistic experience, credibility and authority (including reporting on pre-historic events such as the Vietnam War) that should mean he is using the most valuable of the BBC’s resources – time and money – to explain and contextualise serious and often-complicated news to a confused public, not someone like Ms. Silverton who, at the ripe old age of 37, is already onto her second career and can barely have left the confines of a television studio during her inexplicably speedy ascent through such heavyweight news programmes as the Tyne Tees local bulletin, The Wright Stuff, The Heaven and Earth Show and – ahem – Big Strong Boys to network newsreader spluttering out news in 90-second bursts between EastEnders and Andrew Davies’s latest brainless Bronte or Eyre adaptation.
Sorry to pick up on only the last sentence and to ignore the excellent meat of this piece, but I like to confine my responses, so far as possible, to things I take issue with, which is not much here.
I think Andrew Davies is an example of what makes the BBC great. The only problem is, there aren’t enough popular dramatists, so his work gets repetitive. It’s always about sex, for example. Pensioner-moistening, I call it. But it isn’t brainless. For example, Persuasion, starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds, is superb (though it was shown on BBC2 in 1995). He makes popular drama which does justice to the source material. Bleak House, for example, was for me some of the best television drama since Peter Flannery’s Our Friends in the North aired in 1996. Of course one can sometimes take or leave the source material (Mrs Julesallen is an Austen completionist and a member of the Jane Austen Society and reliably informs me that Elizabeth Gaskell, writer of the source materials for the recent Cranford (cramford – tried to do too much and was still all about sex) and also Wives and Daughters (dramatised a few years back) is considered to be…well a bit shit. But I applaud Andrew Davies – I just wish there were more like him, rather than always him. It’s like when ITV couldn’t make a TV series without either John Thaw or David Jason in it. Spread the love, people!
Persuasion was indeed excellent. Unfortunately it wasn’t a Davies screenplay.
I became a fan of Andrew Davies in 1986 with the unimpeachable A Very Peculiar Practice. I affirmed my appreciation with House Of Cards in 1990.
Middlemarch was good, Pride And Prejudice was very good, Emma was watchable and I liked the first series of Game On.
Since then (ie since he turned 60) I respectfully submit that Andrew Davies has – generally speaking – been in decline, has run out of ideas and is more or less just churning out variations on a theme of “racy” period adaptations for wont of inspiration. He can do it with his eyes shut: but that’s precisely the problem – no amount of stellar cast (Cranford was bursting at the scenes with talent) can disguise the fact that it’s adaptation by numbers.
“Brainless” was the wrong word – I’ll hold my hands up to that: “insipid”, “uninspired” and “soulless” would better do the job.
The Way We Live Now was only watchable because of the actors (Rob Brydon’s Ferdinand Alf was great), Tipping The Velvet was unmitigated shit, words defy me about his Doctor Zhivago and we should draw a respectful veil over Bridget Jones.
What Davies once did is an excellent example of what makes the BBC great: no comercial broadcaster would have made …Peculiar Practice. Its very brilliance is in its idiosyncratic lack of commerciality.
What Davies does now is symptomatic of a Corporation churning out formulaic fluff and dressing it in fancy clobber with an eye on selling it overseas and flogging DVDs to the six million punters guaranteed to tune in to look at the pretty dresses on a Sunday night.
Bleak House was the exception to prove the rule.
It saddens me to say it because for at least a decade he was the best writer on British telly, but I defy you to find anything else of genuine quality among Davies’s credits since well before 2000.