Gerald Warner: time to hang Auntie and her bloomers out to dry

Published on Saturday 1 November 2008 18:51

LAST week the cesspit that is the BBC finally overflowed. The Barrow Boys' Corporation has provoked a cathartic moment: things will never be the same for it again.

It is no longer about Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand and the gutter culture they epitomise; it is about the whole alien, degenerate, politically biased leviathan that long ago parted company with Britain, but continues to exact Danegeld from the nation it despises.

For decades, the BBC has pumped poison into our society. Taking a cockney lout with a mind and mouth like a sewer and proclaiming him Britain's flagship broadcaster was the culmination of the corporation's anarchic assault on standards. Awarding him 18m of licence-payers' money aggravated the offence. "Pushing the boundaries" and "cutting-edge" broadcasting are the buzzwords at the BBC.

Last week those responsible took a bow. First came Lesley Douglas, "controller" of the rabidly uncontrolled Radio 2, now hyped as a martyr, but in fact the individual responsible for inflicting Ross and Brand upon us. Then we had Mark Thompson, Catholic moralist and BBC director-general. In a lecture to the Theos think tank he agonised over "materialism, celebrity culture, hedonism, the celebration of greed or cruelty, the use of foul or abusive language, an absence of clear moral benchmarks". It sounded like a trailer for the Ross and Brand performance just 48 hours later.

So, the stern moralist condemned their behaviour – and refused to sack Ross. Sepulchres do not come any more whited than that. The chastening effect such strict disciplinary action was having on the moral nihilists in the corporation's "comedy" department became evident when Emily Maitlis, on Thursday's Newsnight, confronted Thompson with an obscene "joke" about the Queen that had been broadcast on Mock The Week the previous evening. She failed to elicit a coherent response.

Finally came our own champion, Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, with a remit to defend decency and the public interest. He declared severely that Ross's conduct had been "absolutely unacceptable". The sanctions he proposed to take were to endorse Thompson's decision to keep Ross on the payroll and award him 16.6m of licence-fee money. "The BBC mustn't stop taking risks," insisted Lyons.

The BBC is not intended to take risks: it claims to be a public service broadcaster. If it wants to take risks, let it go independent, support itself from adverts and drop its pretensions. Public service broadcasting? EastEnders… Beautiful People… Jerry Springer? There is nothing more grotesque than the BBC, after serving up trash and pornography for hours, assuming its mask of Reithian gravitas to promote its own pseudo-morality: lies about "manmade" global warming, pro-EU propaganda and po-faced deference towards minorities that enjoy politically correct privileged status.

The BBC's political bias is axiomatic. In Andrew Marr's words, the BBC "is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias." Remember James Naughtie's slip on the Today programme on March 2, 2005, when he asked: "If we (sic] win the election, does Gordon Brown remain Chancellor?"

Many young people last week expressed bafflement at what was wrong with baiting a 78-year-old man and telling him, in four-letter language, degrading sexual information about his granddaughter. They belong to the generation that invented "happy slapping". They are now the BBC's constituency: the audience for an underclass channel.

Last week was a turning point. There is a growing public determination that the licence fee must go. If large numbers elect not to pay, it will be unenforceable. Meanwhile, the Tories must draw up a blueprint for a new television age. The licence fee has to be abolished: by what right does the BBC act as gatekeeper to 196 other television channels? The BBC's own research has shown that, if the licence fee were ended, 58% of viewers (14 million households) would opt out of all BBC television.

The most realistic option is to sell it off, which would bring in large amounts of much-needed money in the wake of a recession. One possibility might be, at the digital switchover, to compel the BBC to encrypt its broadcasts so that people could subscribe – on the model of opting-in to trade union subscriptions rather than blanket extortion. The whole issue needs to be examined in detail and policy evolved. One thing is certain: Auntie BBC, the foul-mouthed, incontinent old harridan of Shepherd's Bush, is on her deathbed.