From The Conservative Woman website, “The BBC’s 100 years of glory – by its hired historian”.
On skimming through I saw “The 2016 press release was rounded off with a quote … who declared grandly that the book would ‘capture the transforming power of the BBC broadcasting in Britain and the wider world’ [my emphasis]”. I decide it was worth a read.
Maybe you decide.
This piece from TCW is certainly standard-issue conservative: the usual canards about the beeb being a hotbed of ‘leftists’. (If only!) And there’s the usual rightist glossing over of the basic fact: that the beeb is the state-broadcaster for the English-raj class’s post-imperial ukstate entity, and always serves that purpose faithfully, whatever window-dressing such as the radical TV dramas of the '70s it may put out; always within the Chomskyan limits of staged ‘debate’ of course, which never allow the deepest, class-based critiques to get adequate air-time.
And which historically-literate commentator is going to defend seriously the idea that Churchill wasn’t a thug? Or that Thatcher wasn’t a strident neocon harpy? Only an obdurately-romantic tory…
Yeah, ritualised foaming at the mouth about disloyal lefties. A fairly standard tactic when wanting to pressure the Beeb into obedience but hardly necessary these days. I see that TCW have a whole BBC Watch section on their website. Lots of fluff about they don’t make 'em like they used to, penned by people who imagine The Navy Lark as the comedic cutting edge.
I read this a few years back, lame apologia for soft power that, in the opinion of the author, has erred only in having fallen into the wrong hands. Many pearl-clutching exhibits of exactly the sort of handwaving Keighley indulges in, framed as vicious attacks. The notion that both political wings accusing the BBC of bias only proves what a jolly good job it’s doing is already a trope that’s on its last legs. But the author, Tom Mills, had swallowed it whole.
My thoughts exactly except you put it better than I would. I only bothered to read it because of the one sentence that stuck out and well, I guess for an article found on The Conservative Woman, it’s about what one could expect.