Filth

[fpb]

If the BBC were an organization with any respect for decency, Jonathan Ross would have been sacked on the spot, and Russell Brand blacklisted for life. Once upon a time, a man caught doing anything half as dishonourable would have been quietly approached by colleagues and left alone in a room with a tot of brandy and a loaded pistol.

Comments

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Ugh. Execrable. When I was young, I grew up on imported British television, and (with the ignorance afforded by youth and an ocean's worth of distance) used to admire the BBC a great deal. How far back does this decline go?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The BBC has always, within living memory, been "progressive". It embraced the Sixties with enthusiasm and helped strangle in the cradle the few weak attempts to establish a real British cultural conservative movement in the seventies (by Mary Whitehouse, whom they worked to demonize). But in all this, it was never too distant from the common feeling of the country. I think the first danger signal was the definite partisanship with which Margaret Thatcher was met; but then MT was a deeply polarizing figure who never met anything except proselytizing support or (my choice) profound hate. But really, since the Tory Blur won in 1997, it has been plain ruination. Blair carried on what had been the real trend of the Thatcher years - Thatcher was totally uninterested in cultural conservatism - by associating Politically Correct social positions with a wholly Thatcherite, "pro-business" policy. Looking back, it is clear that that policy did business as a whole no good at all; and that its loose credit policy and looser morals of uncontrolled and indeed pampered greed were the exact parallel of the PC world that devastated civil society in Britain and led to situations of absolutely unimaginable social collapse outside the fortresses of privilege from which the Blairs and the BBC barons sally out. One example is the rise of a murderous gang culture, which I commented on here: http://fpb.livejournal.com/250748.html. Another is the really unimaginable ignorance of basic sexual morals which led a woman with seven children from six different parents, living in the slums of a North English town, to call two of them "the twins" not because they are, but because they are the only ones of her brood who share a physical father. Such examples could be multiplied.