Far more hilarious than jokes made by any of the
white blokes gurning out of the identikit posters for comedy at this year’s
Edinburgh fringe was the comment made by Danny Cohen – head of TV. The one
liner was made in relation to the sack of offal we know as Jeremy Clarkson.
“No one person is bigger than the BBC”.
Boy the testosterone must have been pumping when
he made that statement.
I bet the genuinely witty Tim Vine is wishing
he’d thought of that rather than his vacuum cleaner joke.
Despite a litany of offensive remarks that a 15
year old wouldn't stoop to, I see no sign of Clarkson being expunged from the TV
gravy train.
Yes he is popular but so is smoking and eating
crap.
The Clarkson illness is the same one that
allowed Saville to thrive. And no, before you get hysterical, I am not accusing
Mr. Offal of child abuse. I’m talking about the sycophancy that blinds people
to what is decent or not, what is genuinely worth air time and what should be
relegated to pay2view. It is a wilful blindness but it is a complete blindness.
The BBC has – since the influx of multiple channelling - hurtled itself ever
downward in the race to the bottom and we all know what’s waiting there.
The idea that no one is bigger than the BBC –
which I interpret to mean the BBC ideals – is so utterly laughable that it has
to be put in the same category as ‘rich people aren’t above the law’. Do we
need reminding that a certain formula 1 oldie recently dipped into his
small change and bought himself out of a court case for £60 million? Are the
gaols bursting at the seams with the bankers who wrecked the economy with their
criminal activities?
Claiming we are all equal in terms of expected
standards of behaviour – which is the flip side of Cohen’s comment - is like
saying the tax system is fair. Look around at who pays tax and the massively
profitable companies that don’t. Yet the press barons and politicians spend eye watering
amounts of time and effort vilifying those at the other end of the scale be
they migrants or the disabled or generally those on the lowest rungs of
society’s increasingly rickety ladder.
I have had good, bad, reasonable and indifferent
experiences with the BBC but -organisations /institutions – even countries that
become too large or powerful to be assailed from outside – that become too
established to be part of the general laws of society or moral equilibrium
destroy themselves from within.
Clarkson is just a manifestation of internal
rot.
This week’s recommended blog from the archives
is
26 Library Love