Is it too Late to Save the Tarnished Soul of the BBC?

When you are approaching the end of your life, it’s better to try to cleanse your soul than to embrace the darkness!

The BBC was created almost a century ago, with a mission to inform, educate and entertain. At that point, far fewer people stayed on at school beyond the age of 14 than attend university today. And access to information about the world was limited — not least because literacy levels were poor.

Though the public broadcaster was pompous and snobby from the start — and has been ever since (look into the resistance BBC radio had to playing popular music, even in the 1960s) — there clearly was a gap in public awareness, which the BBC helped start to fill.

Nature documentaries, science programming and news and debate programmes were among the valuable broadcasted items over the century that met the mission to educate and inform.

But life has moved on. Brits are significantly better educated, travelled and worldly than they were in those peculiar early days, when a stream of pompous, privately educated figures with clipped voices would talk down to the masses. Life has moved on, the public has evolved but — tragically — BBC news, debate and current affairs programmes are delivered by pretty much the same sort of people who patronised the masses in the early days.

A decade ago I wrote an article in which I compared the Tory-era BBC to a bogus signer who marred Nelson Mandela’s memorial service by waving his arms around in an incoherent manner, which would have been no use to the deaf.

Since the Tories slithered (with the help of the LibDems) into power, in 2010, some extraordinary screw-ups by the BBC have been exposed, which the Tories exploited to exert greater and greater control over the organisation, which is meant to be a public broadcaster and NOT a state broadcaster (there is a big difference — or should be).

One thing that happened is the BBC’s golden goose and harboured child abuser Jimmy Savile died. Despite the fact that people within the BBC knew of allegations against Savile for many years — and the broadcaster even spiked (buried / cancelled) a Newsnight exposé on him, the BBC decided…