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4 hours ago
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Caroline Dinenage, the chair of the culture, media and sport committee, regretted at its opening meeting with the BBC chiefs Tim Davie (director general) and Samir Shah (chair) that their catch-up would be detained by a recent scandal. She indicated in her tone that the fault, if not theirs, definitely wasn’t hers, and she meant the documentary recently pulled from iPlayer, Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone.
Although the tone was pretty punchy throughout, they observed the fundamental courtesy of the committee, that you do all the boring stuff before you get to the interesting bit. So this account will not be chronological.
Background: the documentary described the assault on Gaza through the eyes of children, and featured one 14-year-old, Abdullah al-Yazouri, whose father is Dr Ayman al-Yazouri, a member of Hamas. Even that statement is contested, though – he’s the deputy agriculture minister in Gaza’s Hamas-run government, and Labour’s Rupa Huq likened the situation to Iraq where you had to be a member of the Ba’ath party even to be a doctor. So maybe the father is not a terrorist but a functionary, was her inference, and they’ve “thrown the baby out with the bathwater” in pulling the documentary.
The phrase was unfortunate, given that this programme was entirely babies and no bathwater. The Tory member Damian Hinds, though, felt that “on a precautionary principle” the documentary should never have been aired in the first place, given that Hamas is the administration in Gaza, and therefore the BBC must have had questions about Hamas’s involvement or cooperation that the production company wouldn’t have been able to answer satisfactorily. Labour’s Paul Waugh felt that the documentary should be recut with Abdullah redacted, because the testimony of the other children was valid. Labour’s James Frith thought the opposite, that we should see the documentary as it went out initially, or not at all, “or indeed, though the eyes of an Israeli child”.
It would take extraordinarily subtle minds, then, to satisfy this committee, which on the one hand wants the BBC, as the world’s leading public service broadcaster, to cover Gaza, yet on the other believes that any access to the strip must have come at the price of treating with terrorists. Those weren’t the minds we had, unfortunately. Davie was flustered by the question of which complaints he’d had from whom, repeating terms so broad – “different people”, “various organisations” – as to be meaningless.
“If you think we bow to lobbyists from either side, come spend a day with me,” he concluded, which was less weak than the stock BBC response (“We must be impartial because both sides are equally angry”) but only fractionally. Shah tried to bore the panel into submission with a long thought out loud about how children’s perspectives were valuable and that would have been a great way to cover Northern Ireland, now he came to think about it. That was never going to work; they’re a committee, it is not possible to bore them. Consequently, they had to leave this issue as they’d found it: a hot-button internal inquiry had found fault on both sides, the BBC’s and Hoyo’s, the production company’s. Davie and Shah would do a “deep dive” and report back.
The bulk of the meeting was taken up with charter renewal and funding. In an ideal world, Shah said, they’d figure out what a modern BBC was for first and then decide how to fund it, but since that’s not the world we’re in, the conversations would have to happen concurrently.
In practice, this means they mainly talk about money, although Labour’s Tom Rutland had some interesting questions about “mutualisation”, how the broadcaster could improve the public’s sense of ownership and involvement without getting overrun by the strident voices of activists. Davie talked about “a ladder of involvement – comment boards, all the way up to lots of ideas”, and pray God nobody tries to stand on that ladder, it doesn’t seem to have any rungs.
Waugh asked him about reorganising the licence fee along progressive lines, so that rich people pay more, and he replied: “It reminds me of one of those old-fashioned graphic equalisers, if I may.” Waugh, neutrally, went back for a better answer than that word salad and didn’t get one. “The issue is what’s acceptable, what’s the right balance? That ensures the licence fee or whatever emerges from it is good value?” I’m not saying anyone else would want his job, because this looked extremely painful. But it was peculiar to watch him perform it with so little intellectual elbow grease.
And peculiar, too, that it was Shah rather than Davie in whom Dinenage repeatedly mentioned her disappointment, specifically his reluctance “to opine … What we want from the chair of the BBC are some strong views.” Discussing criminal prosecutions for licence fee evasion, he said he was uncomfortable with it but decriminalising would cost two or three hundred million quid a year. Everyone piled in on him at that point, how extraordinary it was for him to bemoan prosecutions and yet have no intention of dropping them, as if he were a commentator rather than the chair.
At which point he did stand up for himself and say (in so many words) if you guys want to give us back the money we used to get for the World Service, or pay for the free licences for over-75s, then sure we can decriminalise. It was a little bright spot of trenchant and sequential thought, fired off in self-defence, reminding me of what a public speaking expert once said: “Everyone’s a great orator when they’re arguing with their boyfriend.”
