The BBC has commissioned a Tory drama - what's going on?

By Nigel Jones for the Daily Mail

Published: 08:51 GMT, 24 August 2012 | Updated: 09:20 GMT, 24 August 2012

www.inulpoker.com | Agen Poker Terpercaya | Poker dan Domino Online Indonesia Terpercaya | Poker dan Domino Terbaik |

No bias? BBC Director-General Mark Thompson insists its left-leaning stance is a thing of the past

As I wrote earlier this week, in the context of the George Orwell statue they refuse to put up, the BBC is a very weird organisation. It is almost exactly two years since the now outgoing Director-General, Mark Thompson, admitted on 1st September 2010 that the Corporation had had a 'massive Left-wing bias', with a particular animus against Mrs Thatcher.

He rather spoiled his Mea Culpa in the next breath, however, by unconvincingly claiming that such a bias was a thing of the past and that during his watch the Beeb had miraculously become and would remain a by-word for impartiality.

It has not exactly turned out like that. The national broadcaster, particularly in its news and current affairs programmes, continues to display a remorseless left-wing bias, tediously hammering out the Orwellian big lie  that the economic recession is all the fault of the wicked Tories, and that the 13 years of Labour mis-government were a golden age of peace and plenty.

BBC programmes - particularly TV's Newsnight and Question Time and Radio 4's Today and Any Questions - and the gnarled old warhorses who present them, Naughtie and Humphreys, Paxman and Wark, the Dimblebys - scarcely bother to conceal their left-wing sympathies and their hatred and contempt for conservatives.

As for the generation who will succeed them, especially the economic 'experts' Robert Peston, Stephanie Flanders, Evan Davis and Paul Mason... Well, we can all make an informed guess as to which way they vote, can't we?

Since the departure to Sky of the redoubtable Jeff Randall, the only regular BBC presenter I can think of representing the right-of-centre half of the nation is Andrew Neil, a token Tory, allowed out only for brief periods during the daytime and late at night.

It's a moot point whether this inexorable leftwards slide has happened accidentally - a sort of lazy dumbing down similar to the process which has infected school examinations - or whether its a deliberate plan by Marxist mandarins on their 'long march through the institutions' to take control of the commanding heights of our culture.

Whichever, the end effect is the same: the major taxpayer-funded source of news, comment, information and entertainment in our country is firmly in the hands of the Left, and no-one, least of all the current Government, is doing anything about it.

Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister did make an attempt to dam the red tide by appointing a conservative BBC chairman, Marmaduke Hussey, but she was spitting in the wind. David Cameron, for his part, has given the job to old Chris Patten, the sort of man Orwell called 'a shiny bottomed bureaucrat', who, though a nominal Tory, is really a CINO ('Conservative in name only'). His proud tripod of political achievements consists of speeding the EU takeover of his country as a Brussels Commissioner, emasculating the Royal Ulster Constabulary on behalf of Tony Blair, and handing over Hong Kong to Communist China when he was the colony's last Governor after the good burghers of Bath - where he was MP - had slung him out on his ear.

Nor is the corporation's one-eyed Leftism confined to current affairs coverage. BBC dramas are infected with the same cultural mindset. Its dramatist of choice is the Labour lickspittle Sir David Hare (who got his knighthood from Blair), and the storylines of such popular series as the spy drama 'Spooks' invariably seemed to feature wacky far-right cults as villains rather than the actual Islamist terrorists whom MI5 has to fight in the real world.

But even Homer nods, and very, very occasionally the BBC machinery slips far enough to let a non-Leftist piece of quality work through the net. This seems to have happened big time with 'Parades End', the major five-part drama series opening this weekend on BBC2, based on the four-novel sequence written in the 1920s by Ford Madox Ford.

The series' central character, Christopher Tietjens, (played by Old Harrovian heartthrob Benedict Cumberbatch), is introduced as 'the last Tory' and he is very far from the Beeb's usual mould of hero. Tietjens is an aristocratic country squire and a respectable civil servant who bravely serves king and country in the trenches of the First World War. In the trailer promoting the series he splutters 'I stand for chastity and monogamy!' - hardly the values with which one associates our own dear BBC. So what is the Corporation doing devoting so much prime time and money to a sympathetic portrayal of a representative of a class and country it abhors?

Parade's End: Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall star as Christopher Tietjens and his wife Sylvia

Well, apart from the fact that the novels tell a moving story -  an English 'War & Peace' hailed by novelists Anthony Burgess and Graham Greene as the finest English fiction of the 20th century - one clue may lie in the series' adaptor, Sir Tom Stoppard, a theatrical knight of rather more talent than David Hare. Czech-born Stoppard has never been a kneejerk Leftist - (perhaps that explains why we have recently seen so little of his work on the BBC) - because he saw the grim reality of socialism in his native land - and with his support of the courageous anti-Communist Charter 77 movement, played a part in bringing the foul system crashing down.

Ford, despite or because of being largely German (his real name was Ford Hermann Hueffer) and spending most of his life in France with a succession of wives and mistresses, was an English patriot of the old school who volunteered for the trenches when he was well over 40.

Tietjens, with his upright morality constantly warring with his sensuous nature, was an idealised version of his creator. Interestingly and paradoxically,  though a traditionalist Tory in politics, Ford was an uber-moderniser in his work, and Parade's End, with its inner monologues and impressionistic time shifts, is a model of the modernistic movement which revolutionised literature and the Arts in the early 20th century.

I suspect, however, that the BBC overlooked Ford's political incorrectness because Parade's End - like The Forsyte Saga from BBC Drama's glory days - is a great work in which the repressed sexuality of the Edwardian era is all the more powerful when it finally bursts out of its trousers and corsets. Good old rumpy-pumpy combined with real literary merit sounds like a winning TV formula. It would be nice if it heralds a rediscovery of other forgotten masterpieces of English literature, but I'm not waiting up.

For the BBC giveth with one hand, and taketh away with the other. And depressingly, this same weekend which sees the launch of  the blip that is 'Parade's End' also sees the corporation continuing with its bad old ways elsewhere. This Monday,  Radio Four will be running 'The F-Word' - a programme about the EU's drive towards a unified superstate. (The 'F-Word being 'Federalism'). Even without having heard it, I strongly suspect that the programme will conclude - in the teeth of the reality of the Euro Crisis - that Federalism is a great idea whose time has come.

I suppose that the BBC has got to justify the millions that it receives in subsidies from the pernicious EU somehow: I just wish they wouldn't take us all for fools and pretend to an impartiality they are institutionally incapable of practicing.

var rcShoutCache = '{}'; window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({flush:true});

www.inulpoker.com | Agen Poker Terpercaya | Poker dan Domino Online Indonesia Terpercaya | Poker dan Domino Terbaik |