Post by Teddy Bear on Aug 15, 2007 19:27:24 GMT
While I was no fan of our Maggie, I'm sure my reasons for dsliking her are vastly different than any the BBC have displayed. In any event, to portray her as the BBC are planning to in an upcoming drama plain sucks. What's worse, the reasons they give to portray her this way, basically because "they don't know that she wasn't like that", is their excuse to vilify and demonize anybody and everybody they wish to. They use IGNORANCE to justify conscious and purposeful BIAS.
The BBC: A cauldron of hate for Margaret Thatcher
By STEPHEN GLOVER
Last updated at 23:03pm on 14th August 2007
Why does the BBC hate Margaret Thatcher so?
The questions might seem ridiculously naive.
Of course, the BBC hates Lady Thatcher because many of its senior employees are unreconstructed lefties who loathe everything they think she stands for.
And yet despite myself I can't help being shocked by the BBC's latest torpedo.
A writer called Tony Saint - I have never heard of him, but he might be famous - has produced a play, The Long Walk To Finchley, for the BBC about Margaret Thatcher's early life.
This might or might not be a sympathetic piece - not, would be my guess.
What is unusually offensive is that it depicts her using foulmouthed language.
She is shown as screaming 'f***ing establishment' at what she sees as a male conspiracy against her.
Lady Thatcher was rejected by several Tory constituency associations before being chosen for the (then) safe seat of Finchley, and this outburst is supposed to be her reaction to one such rejection.
It is offensive because everyone who knows Lady Thatcher will vouch for the fact that she does not use swearwords, let alone ones of this sort.
For a woman of her background and education, to have used such language in public in the early Fifties would have been unthinkable.
If there were one or two exceptions to this rule, Lady Thatcher was not one of them.
The defence entered by the programme makers is pathetic.
According to the production company, Great Meadow, the film is 'a personal interpretation of how she might have been, not a factual presentation of how she was'.
What rot! Lady Thatcher is an historical figure.
She is still alive.
Presumably The Long Walk To Finchley has some pretensions to verisimilitude.
The implication of what the spokesman is saying is that it is permissible to falsify facts about Lady Thatcher's life in order to sex up the drama in the hope of attracting viewers.
It is a defence as lame as it is disreputable.
The BBC's response is, if anything, even more laughable.
According to a spokesman: 'So little is known about Margaret Thatcher as a young woman straight out of Oxford that no one can say if this is right or wrong.
It is a dramatic interpretation taken from the bare bones of the facts.'
In fact, a great deal is known about the young Margaret Thatcher.
Biographies have been written about her. Journalists, sympathetic and unsympathetic, have combed through her early years.
There are people still alive who knew her then.
However, it would be a great fag to speak to any of them, or to read through the myriad sources.
How much easier to invent a version of the young Margaret Thatcher.
How much more convenient, if you are intending to depict her in unfavourable terms, to have her behave in a way that would have seemed vulgar, even brutish, by the standards of the early Fifties.
Imagine if the BBC were to treat the former Labour leader, and nonagenarian, Michael Foot in a similar manner.
I do not know whether he swore like a trooper in public when he was young. I doubt it.
In any event, there would be bedlam on the Left if a BBC film of the youthful Mr Foot had him screaming 'f***ing'.
In fact, it is unimaginable, since the BBC would never allow a Left-wing icon to be travestied.
Margaret Thatcher is different.
It does not matter that she is elderly and, as is no secret, not very well.
It is considered perfectly in order to rewrite and falsify aspects of her life. It does not matter if she did not swear - she should have done.
That is the level of the BBC's defence.
Last year, the Corporation ran a series written by the prolific Andrew Davies, based on Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Line Of Beauty.
Margaret Thatcher was shown dancing with a cocainesnorting gay called Nick Guest.
A good joke? I hardly think so.
The point the drama was apparently trying to make was that Lady Thatcher was responsible for - had, in some way, created - the ghastly and rapacious Tory family in whose house Nick was staying.
In another play called Coup, also shown by the BBC last year (it was about her admittedly versatile son, Mark), Lady Thatcher was shown as a whisky-soaked warmonger.
Perched on a sofa, she accosted every passing male to top up her glass of whisky.
Of course, politicians, living or dead, should not be beyond the satirist's pen.
There are doubtless many pertinent criticisms that could be made about her. By all means examine her on the solid ground of fact.
Much fuss was made about Tony Blair's portrayal in a recent Channel Four film as a potential war criminal over Iraq, but at least he was not re-invented as Lady Thatcher so often is.
And, one might add, he was Prime Minister at the time, not old and unwell.
What is objectionable is that the BBC - which as a publiclyfunded body is supposed to be neutral and even-handed - should be so relentless in portraying her in false and negative terms.
It has rarely, if ever, produced any drama in her favour.
When some 20 years ago the playwright Ian Curteis was commissioned to write a play about the Falklands War, in which he depicted Lady Thatcher in a generally sympathetic light, the BBC refused to screen it.
Baroness Thatcher: Deserves our respect as she enters her twilight years
If she had emerged as a bloody warmonger, a prime slot would doubtless have been found.
Lady Thatcher is hated by many in the BBC, and the hatred goes deep.
It is practically part of the Corporation's official remit. The loathing also extends to anyone who can be described as Thatcherite, which has become a term of abuse.
When it was reported over the weekend that the Thatcherite John Redwood was due to unveil Tory plans to cut £14 billion in red tape and bureaucracy, the BBC dug up a tenyear - old clip of Mr Redwood inanely mouthing the Welsh national anthem when he was Welsh Secretary.
The BBC's message was: this man is an idiot, so we need not take his proposals seriously.
Is this fair? Of course not.
I wonder whether there is anyone in the BBC who feels a tinge of shame that this once great institution should so abase itself and its standards.
It is very easy to understand the motivations of David Cameron, who is terrified of being labelled 'Thatcherite' or 'Right-wing' by the BBC, and whose first concern, before he opens his mouth, is how what he has to say will go down with the all-powerful Corporation.
The odd thing is that in its hatred of Lady Thatcher the BBC is unrepresentative.
At the end of his admirable recent series on modern Britain - shown, to its credit, by the BBC - Andrew Marr said that we are all Thatcher's children So we are.
So New Labour is. She has done more than any other person to shape the world we live in and, for all her mistakes, she can take more credit than anyone else for the extraordinary turnaround in our economic fortunes that began in the Eighties.
Some children, though, are never grateful. So it is with the BBC.
It is supposed to serve us all, and is funded by us all, but it reflects the views and prejudices of a relatively small and bitter sect.
Our national broadcaster will always demonise Margaret Thatcher and will never see any good in her - not as long as she lives and not, I would like to bet, when she comes to die.
By STEPHEN GLOVER
Last updated at 23:03pm on 14th August 2007
Why does the BBC hate Margaret Thatcher so?
The questions might seem ridiculously naive.
Of course, the BBC hates Lady Thatcher because many of its senior employees are unreconstructed lefties who loathe everything they think she stands for.
And yet despite myself I can't help being shocked by the BBC's latest torpedo.
A writer called Tony Saint - I have never heard of him, but he might be famous - has produced a play, The Long Walk To Finchley, for the BBC about Margaret Thatcher's early life.
This might or might not be a sympathetic piece - not, would be my guess.
What is unusually offensive is that it depicts her using foulmouthed language.
She is shown as screaming 'f***ing establishment' at what she sees as a male conspiracy against her.
Lady Thatcher was rejected by several Tory constituency associations before being chosen for the (then) safe seat of Finchley, and this outburst is supposed to be her reaction to one such rejection.
It is offensive because everyone who knows Lady Thatcher will vouch for the fact that she does not use swearwords, let alone ones of this sort.
For a woman of her background and education, to have used such language in public in the early Fifties would have been unthinkable.
If there were one or two exceptions to this rule, Lady Thatcher was not one of them.
The defence entered by the programme makers is pathetic.
According to the production company, Great Meadow, the film is 'a personal interpretation of how she might have been, not a factual presentation of how she was'.
What rot! Lady Thatcher is an historical figure.
She is still alive.
Presumably The Long Walk To Finchley has some pretensions to verisimilitude.
The implication of what the spokesman is saying is that it is permissible to falsify facts about Lady Thatcher's life in order to sex up the drama in the hope of attracting viewers.
It is a defence as lame as it is disreputable.
The BBC's response is, if anything, even more laughable.
According to a spokesman: 'So little is known about Margaret Thatcher as a young woman straight out of Oxford that no one can say if this is right or wrong.
It is a dramatic interpretation taken from the bare bones of the facts.'
In fact, a great deal is known about the young Margaret Thatcher.
Biographies have been written about her. Journalists, sympathetic and unsympathetic, have combed through her early years.
There are people still alive who knew her then.
However, it would be a great fag to speak to any of them, or to read through the myriad sources.
How much easier to invent a version of the young Margaret Thatcher.
How much more convenient, if you are intending to depict her in unfavourable terms, to have her behave in a way that would have seemed vulgar, even brutish, by the standards of the early Fifties.
Imagine if the BBC were to treat the former Labour leader, and nonagenarian, Michael Foot in a similar manner.
I do not know whether he swore like a trooper in public when he was young. I doubt it.
In any event, there would be bedlam on the Left if a BBC film of the youthful Mr Foot had him screaming 'f***ing'.
In fact, it is unimaginable, since the BBC would never allow a Left-wing icon to be travestied.
Margaret Thatcher is different.
It does not matter that she is elderly and, as is no secret, not very well.
It is considered perfectly in order to rewrite and falsify aspects of her life. It does not matter if she did not swear - she should have done.
That is the level of the BBC's defence.
Last year, the Corporation ran a series written by the prolific Andrew Davies, based on Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Line Of Beauty.
Margaret Thatcher was shown dancing with a cocainesnorting gay called Nick Guest.
A good joke? I hardly think so.
The point the drama was apparently trying to make was that Lady Thatcher was responsible for - had, in some way, created - the ghastly and rapacious Tory family in whose house Nick was staying.
In another play called Coup, also shown by the BBC last year (it was about her admittedly versatile son, Mark), Lady Thatcher was shown as a whisky-soaked warmonger.
Perched on a sofa, she accosted every passing male to top up her glass of whisky.
Of course, politicians, living or dead, should not be beyond the satirist's pen.
There are doubtless many pertinent criticisms that could be made about her. By all means examine her on the solid ground of fact.
Much fuss was made about Tony Blair's portrayal in a recent Channel Four film as a potential war criminal over Iraq, but at least he was not re-invented as Lady Thatcher so often is.
And, one might add, he was Prime Minister at the time, not old and unwell.
What is objectionable is that the BBC - which as a publiclyfunded body is supposed to be neutral and even-handed - should be so relentless in portraying her in false and negative terms.
It has rarely, if ever, produced any drama in her favour.
When some 20 years ago the playwright Ian Curteis was commissioned to write a play about the Falklands War, in which he depicted Lady Thatcher in a generally sympathetic light, the BBC refused to screen it.
Baroness Thatcher: Deserves our respect as she enters her twilight years
If she had emerged as a bloody warmonger, a prime slot would doubtless have been found.
Lady Thatcher is hated by many in the BBC, and the hatred goes deep.
It is practically part of the Corporation's official remit. The loathing also extends to anyone who can be described as Thatcherite, which has become a term of abuse.
When it was reported over the weekend that the Thatcherite John Redwood was due to unveil Tory plans to cut £14 billion in red tape and bureaucracy, the BBC dug up a tenyear - old clip of Mr Redwood inanely mouthing the Welsh national anthem when he was Welsh Secretary.
The BBC's message was: this man is an idiot, so we need not take his proposals seriously.
Is this fair? Of course not.
I wonder whether there is anyone in the BBC who feels a tinge of shame that this once great institution should so abase itself and its standards.
It is very easy to understand the motivations of David Cameron, who is terrified of being labelled 'Thatcherite' or 'Right-wing' by the BBC, and whose first concern, before he opens his mouth, is how what he has to say will go down with the all-powerful Corporation.
The odd thing is that in its hatred of Lady Thatcher the BBC is unrepresentative.
At the end of his admirable recent series on modern Britain - shown, to its credit, by the BBC - Andrew Marr said that we are all Thatcher's children So we are.
So New Labour is. She has done more than any other person to shape the world we live in and, for all her mistakes, she can take more credit than anyone else for the extraordinary turnaround in our economic fortunes that began in the Eighties.
Some children, though, are never grateful. So it is with the BBC.
It is supposed to serve us all, and is funded by us all, but it reflects the views and prejudices of a relatively small and bitter sect.
Our national broadcaster will always demonise Margaret Thatcher and will never see any good in her - not as long as she lives and not, I would like to bet, when she comes to die.
