BBC The Hour

I posted a few disappointed comments on the first series of the BBC drama The Hour last year... It was a clever idea to use the history of the BBC to comment on the darker side of our island history - but the results were disappointing. I had high hopes for the second series - and the few reviews I read suggested that The Hour had upped its game. The first episode seemed to be plagued by the very same dramatic flaws that let down the last series. Having said that - and with the American series Homeland in quality free fall - I will be glued to the rest of the new series. As a nation, we have forgotten the upsurge of racism in the late 1950s and the recrudescence of the decrepit Oswald Mosley.
The main dramatic problem with The Hour focuses around Bel Rowley (Romola Garai). Generally, the script writer Abi Morgan tends to treat female characters unfairly. Lix Storm (Anna Chancellor) is a jerry built assembly of cliches as absurd as her name. I'm assuming that Morgan intends the relationship between the new character Randall Brown (Peter Capaldi), the Head of News. However, Brown is a kind of mumbling stage villain - whose humiliation of Bel at an editorial meeting feels dramatically arbitrary. Conflict in drama doesn't work surely if it is unmotivated. Worse, Morgan simply doesn't give Bel the character resources to fight back. This has little to do with Romola Garai - but everything to do with the writing of her character. We need a lot more evidence of her talent, skills, political nous etc. - which in the previous series and this first episode of the new series was well nigh non existent - for her to work as a character. Why does Brown get the better of her every time? Why does Bel herself not react to the competition from the ITV competitor? (Admittedly a nice story touch.) Are we meant to assume that Randall is just a sexist beast? Morgan's problem is that she offers Freddie Lyon (Ben Wishaw) the lion's share of journalistic genius. She can't simply copy it over to Bel. At the end of the first episode, we find Bel moping in her flat about Freddie who has unveiled a surprise French wife. 'Just like a woman...'?
Well, we should see how The Hour develops. Since this is a BBC drama, I for one am wondering how the story will find a way to include a picturesque stately home. That's an obligatory BBC drama ingredient isn't it?

BBC Tragedy?

According to The Observer, the resignation today of the BBC's Director General is a tragedy. Well, it is a tragedy for the best media corporation in the world but it is difficult to shed tears for someone who had demonstrated consistent and arrogant incompetence. George Entwistle will be well looked after by the BBC - his bosses needed him to fall on his sword. Entwistle is a small man with a small mind. Read this exchange from the fateful Today interview:
JH: When did you know that this film was being broadcast and when was it drawn to your attention that it was going to make extraordinarily serious allegations about a man whose identity would inevitably be uncovered – wrongly as we now know?

GE: The film was not drawn to my attention before transmission.

JH: At all? Nobody said anything to you at all?

GE: No. John but I need to explain that there are an awful lot of pieces of journalism going on around the BBC which do not get referred to the editor-in- chief. Not everything gets to the editor-in-chief.

Did he think that was a defence? or the only possible excuse? True to form, the then DG's excuses were laced with threats to other members of staff.

The key is, is it referred sufficiently far up the chain of command and in this case I think the right referrals were made – but of course, it's important to give Ken MacQuarry the chance to find out exactly what happened.

Listening to this interview was an excruciating, shaming experience. Reading it later made it all too clear that John Humphreys had torpedoed the 54 day Entwistle regime.

The right and the Murdoch orcs may think they have the advantage here. For the moment, perhaps they do. But the lessons of the Savile affair have very little to do with the usual complaints about the BBC: by which I mean that Aunty is a mouthpiece for red handed lefties. Those of us who have worked inside the Corporation know that this is nonsense.

Even the drama of the last few days conclusively proves that the BBC is not the fantasy organisation that the Right Minded like to imagine. The BBC Panorama on Savile launched a broadside at the mother ship. It was Today with its expert interrogator who shredded the DG's chances of survival. What other Corporation would show this kind of commitment to washing its own dirty linen in front of a global audience? The Murdoch and Dacre sponsored enemies of the BBC with their pathetic hand wringing about reds under Aunty's bed would simply not understand the core values that the BBC even in crisis unflinchingly stands by.

Nor does the ugly Savile business fit the rightist fantasies about the BBC. Savile was a rapacious working class Tory, who liked to cosy up to the ghastly Thatcher and the Royal Family. He was a kind of whacky establishment icon - who exploited the apparatus of charity for his own ends. It is perhaps unremarked that all his megalomaniacal self aggrandising schemes worked against the principles of our National Health Service - currently being eviscerated by the Coalition government.

There is a way that Savile shines a spotlight on BBC culture. He used the Corporation and other public bodies, it would now seem, to exploit vulnerable young women - the constituency so calamitously slandered by the former editor of Newsnight. Above all, Savile was a bully - who used his peculiar status to humiliate exploit his victims without fear of retribution in his lifetime. Like the old colonial service, which Aunty so closely resembles, the BBC is dominated by public school educated men and women who take bullying for granted. Execs are prefects; the rest of us fags. It can be authoritarian and cruel. That's why the eccentric former miner fitted right in. He was a bully among bullies. 

The BBC is 'in crisis'. We should hope that it emerges from this self made swamp a better, more reflective institution.