If the BBC wants to cater for the working classes it must stop treating them like the ‘scum of the earth’
I’VE heard a lot of snooty nonsense over the years from the tofferati who run Britain’s television industry.
But one line took my breath away.
At a drinks party — there is always a drinks do in TV land — I asked an executive how they were finding working for one of the less popular TV channels.
I wasn’t ready for their reply: “Oh it’s a lot of fun but, my God, the viewers . . . absolute scum of the earth!”
Wow. I nearly choked on my Peroni.
As it happens, the viewers they were talking about were not scum of the earth.
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Far from it.
They just happened to have had the temerity to be drawn from part of the population that mostly did not attend this arrogant executive’s Home Counties private school or Oxbridge college.
They had not been invited on to their BBC trainee scheme and they were not, like them, being paid a handsome six-figure sum each year.
Humourless crap
In short, they were . . . working class.
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Yuck, wash my mouth out!
TV has a problem with working-class people — and nowhere is this more stark than at the BBC.
So the latest intervention from its new chairman, Samir Shah, who took up his role on Monday, is to be welcomed.
Shah has demanded that the BBC recognise it is all of us who pay for it — so all of us must be catered for.
As he told staff: “We must be the home for showcasing the full range of British culture and talent, geographically of course, but also in terms of class and thought in all its diversity.”
Shah is a highly respected, Indian-born TV and radio producer who has both worked for and been a vocal critic of the BBC for many years.
But he has a big job on his hands in convincing the stubborn broadcaster to do as he says.
Just days before he was picked for the role in December, the corporation had been battered by a report from Ofcom which blasted it for letting down the working class by reducing them to stereotypes: Criminals, thickos, drunks and druggies.
As the report put it: “People we spoke to made it clear that they want the BBC to do better at authentically portraying their real lives.
“They feel the BBC can miss the nuanced everyday aspects of the lives of people from working-class backgrounds, and often reverts to stereotypical or ‘tokenist’ characterisations.”
In short, stop treating the working classes like the scum of the earth.
Yeah, but no buts!
You can see its disdain in much of its output, a smorgasbord of safe, woke, humourless crap that offends no one and entertains fewer and fewer as the less risk-averse streamers such as Netflix bite.
Michael McIntyre’s endless middle England mediocrity, Alexander Armstrong’s tee-hee titterings, Victoria Coren Mitchell’s smug parlour games.
High-concept crime dramas where everyone lives in homes plucked from Grand Designs and earns s**tloads in the City doing an incomprehensible job.
Non-stop cooking shows where people such as Gregg Wallace — one of the few working-class voices on the Beeb — drone on about poncey food most of us can’t afford.
Travel programmes fronted by micro-celebs flying off to far-flung places we will never go to.
A BBC Two which has become, at times, one long university lecture stuffed with celebrity “historians” wringing their hands about how we should all be ashamed of our “racist” past.
And hardly any comedy (apart from the crashingly safe Not Going Out, now in its 18th year).
The BBC’s contribution to representing the working class seems to be handing presenting roles to former footballer Bradley Walsh. “He’s working clarse, ain’t ’e?”
To pay for all this televisual tedium, the Beeb axes popular things like Question Of Sport, blaming “funding challenges”, despite audiences having enjoyed it continuously since 1968.
Top Gear, a stalwart since 1977, has also been put out to pasture “for the foreseeable future” because it’s just too tricky to bother with now.
Yes, I know one of its hosts, Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff, had a nasty accident, but so did Richard Hammond, and that didn’t kill it off.
I suspect executives are glad these shows are gone as they are all a bit low brow for them.
“Cars? All that noise and filth? No thanks.
“Sport? How dreadfully working men’s club!”
Because the real problem here is that BBC executives — and there are some excellent ones who really do get it — are in the main middle-class snobs who are either already wealthy or would like to be.
Villas in Tuscany
They are disproportionately from independent schools.
More than a FIFTH, 20 per cent, of the top jobs at the BBC are filled with people who were privately educated, figures from just two months ago revealed.
(The proportion of pupils across the country going to private schools is about seven per cent.)
They commission programmes from their friends in the industry, chums they have often known from the BBC trainee programme or whatever Oxbridge college they went to.
They socialise with each other at villas in Tuscany, aboard yachts in Cannes and in expensive private members’ clubs in London.
This is the culture Shah — himself an Oxbridge man, whose company, Juniper TV, continues to supply many programmes to the BBC — must address.
The elitist nature of the hierarchy is hard-wired and has changed little since its formation in 1922.
They are a different breed to the rest of us — and they like it that way.
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So it is all well and good telling them to make programmes for the working class.
But first they need to know who they actually are.
