One of the great corruptions of modern culture has been mass entertainment. The BBC should never have touched it. Entertainment necessarily plays on the emotions and cannot be dispassionate yet it permeates everything the corporation does. Even BBC news is contaminated with what is in effect told-you-so entertainment for prigs.
Had the BBC eschewed entertainment from the beginning it would obviously be radically different from what it has become. Far fewer viewers but radically cheaper too. Austerely dispassionate would have been far better than constantly being talked down to from dubious middle class vantage points, or lied to by furtive politicians, creepy celebrities and totalitarian lunatics.
It could have been a national reference frame perhaps, a reliable resource where the knowns and unknowns are clarified...
Well one can dream. This is merely an ideal of course, but a worthwhile ideal for the national broadcaster would have been preferable to the fake ideal we ended up with.
Mass entertainment is corrupting. It sucks away the hours, usurps constructive possibilities, trivialises everything it touches, subverts genuine understanding, obscures the difference between trivial and non-trivial, fosters worthless celebrity culture, squanders resources, misinforms the susceptible, spins false narratives, generates unreal simplicity, distorts history, invents impossibilities, sanctions crude vulgarity, corrupts popular tastes, promotes superstition, limits understanding, misrepresents intelligence, misleads the attention, promotes unhealthy consensus, suppresses realistic debate, wastes the resources of the poor, corrupts family life, undermines motherhood and fatherhood, promotes false ideas of risk, damages self-reliance and corrodes any conception of personal honour.
Apart from that?
Mass entertainment is corrupting. It sucks away the hours, usurps constructive possibilities, trivialises everything it touches, subverts genuine understanding, obscures the difference between trivial and non-trivial, fosters worthless celebrity culture, squanders resources, misinforms the susceptible, spins false narratives, generates unreal simplicity, distorts history, invents impossibilities, sanctions crude vulgarity, corrupts popular tastes, promotes superstition, limits understanding, misrepresents intelligence, misleads the attention, promotes unhealthy consensus, suppresses realistic debate, wastes the resources of the poor, corrupts family life, undermines motherhood and fatherhood, promotes false ideas of risk, damages self-reliance and corrodes any conception of personal honour.
Apart from that?
4 comments:
I agree with pretty much all that. There's probably a book to be written on how demobbed entertainers, narcissists, refugees from declining music halls, and the theatreland gay mafia managed to infiltrate and take over the BBC.
I would like to see a unit for presenting the news, another one a bit like Snopes who rigourously check facts, and a few techies. License fee twenty quid at today's prices, and the Government could rent bandwidth to the entertainers and propagandists.
Unrelated, but where are you holidaying? You normally tell us...
As SV says, separate news (sans opinion) from other non-entertainment output.
Leave the funny stuff to other channels and reduce the subscription, no longer a licence fee, to £20
All the overpaid luvvies will have to find proper jobs, oh dear, never mind.
Does this mean that the BBC started to go downhill when it started the Light Programme in 1945? I would approve of a return to the days of the Home Service and the Third Programme (with its old cultural remit), extended to television. I do not see why a taxpayer funded organisation should pay for light entertainment. These days I find that ymYou Tube is better than most things you can find on the BBC,even for history and art. The Cocktails with the Curators channel from the Frick is very good, apart from the woke female curator who must be there purely as a diversity hire. Lindybeige and World War Two are outstanding. Infinitely better than what the BBC condescends to give us.
I didn't know until recently that BBC did not present news until the late 30s, when Richard Dimbleby became the first news correspondent. Perhaps he started the rot. And how curious how that surname recurs in BBC history...
Sam - I would like to see a unit for presenting the news too, although how it could be protected from corruption I don't know.
We are just back from Sidmouth, one of our favourite places. Beaches busy but not so much shops and cafes.
Ed - all those overpaid luvvies can't do much for the reputation of the BBC, but still it plods on.
Graeme - yes YouTube is better than most BBC output. I watch chess videos for example, something the BBC probably couldn't do anyway but even if it did there would have to be a chess celebrity or two babbling away all the time instead of sticking to the chess.
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