Post by Teddy Bear on Mar 21, 2014 18:41:50 GMT
The BBC are launching a spoof documentary that is based on the world inside the BBC.
I've seen various articles about it in the last few days, and most seem to think it will be quite funny.
My thoughts, knowing the BBC will have considered very carefully the impact this programme is likely to have, is what's in it for them?
Seeing all of the various scandals that have come to light, especially over the last year, the BBC are aware the public will have a dim view of them, and there's no point trying to hide the fact. So I guess they think by making the public laugh about it then their failures might become acceptable. It's certainly as close to creativity as the BBC has come in a long time, even if it's a parody of themselves, but I doubt very much if they will show anywhere near the worst and the most ridiculous that really is their world.
Philip Johnston at the Telegraph also has an interesting perspective on it.
I've seen various articles about it in the last few days, and most seem to think it will be quite funny.
My thoughts, knowing the BBC will have considered very carefully the impact this programme is likely to have, is what's in it for them?
Seeing all of the various scandals that have come to light, especially over the last year, the BBC are aware the public will have a dim view of them, and there's no point trying to hide the fact. So I guess they think by making the public laugh about it then their failures might become acceptable. It's certainly as close to creativity as the BBC has come in a long time, even if it's a parody of themselves, but I doubt very much if they will show anywhere near the worst and the most ridiculous that really is their world.
Philip Johnston at the Telegraph also has an interesting perspective on it.
Is the laugh on us with the BBC's new satire?
The spoof documentary W1A invites us to congratulate the Corporation for its shortcomings
By Philip Johnston
You’ve got to hand it to the BBC: they can laugh at themselves. We know this because there is a new mockumentary devoted to doing precisely that. W1A, starring Hugh Bonneville as the Corporation’s new Head of Values (salary undisclosed, but presumably north of £200,000), is a spoof documentary that focuses on a small corner of this bureaucratic behemoth.
Bonneville plays Ian Fletcher, whom we last saw running the Olympic Deliverance team in the brilliant Twenty Twelve. But whereas with that particular satire, you felt the joke was on them, with W1A I have an uneasy feeling that it is the viewing public who are the butt of the gag.
Don’t get me wrong: I chuckled my way through most of the first episode. We followed Fletcher’s early days in the job, as he wondered what on earth he had got himself into. At one point he opened a door in Broadcasting House, looking for an empty office in which to have a meeting (he hasn’t even been given a desk), only to discover it was occupied by Salman Rushdie and Alan Yentob having an arm-wrestling contest. Why? Who knows? But it seemed emblematic of the surreal nature of the place, and added to Fletcher’s bemusement.
His companions at the BBC were an eclectic mix of the outrageously camp, rude, complacent and ineffectual. All were fluent in the corporate gobbledegook that is a substitute for saying anything coherent or comprehensible. I particularly liked “dropping pathfinding documents into the shared priorities folder”.
Like Twenty Twelve, this is just the sort of top-notch, genuinely funny production that makes me feel that my annual £145.50 licence fee is worth every penny. But then I thought: hang on a second. Is this the sort of nonsense that the real BBC is actually wasting my money on?
The place was stuffed full of people with supernumerary titles, non-jobs and bad attitudes, some of whom you would cheerfully have taken out and shot. Does it really require three execs to take out a potential presenter (in this case Carol Vorderman) for lunch to see whether she would be interested in hosting a new programme called Britain’s Tastiest Village? Another allegedly fictional offering was How Big is Your Dog – which I’m pretty sure they have already done on BBC Three.
The genius of great parody is that it looks and feels so true to life that you can almost imagine it’s real – think of classics of the genre such as This is Spinal Tap, The Office, or People Like Us (written by John Morton, the author of Twenty Twelve and W1A). But the problem with W1A is that unshakeable feeling that we are being taken for a ride. We are being invited to congratulate the Beeb for having the courage to admit to its own failings, when in truth, it risks irritating us all with its overweening self-regard.
One of the themes that will run through W1A is something that clearly consumes all the suits at Broadcasting House – the forthcoming renewal of the BBC charter in 2016. In many ways, the new comedy is part of the negotiations. Yes, it says, we do waste an awful lot of your money on administrative aggrandisement, but give us the credit for acknowledging our shortcomings, and for making such a good programme out of them.
Actually, insiders confirm that W1A could have been twice as cutting without getting anywhere near the reality. For instance, it was reported on Thursday that BBC executives have started redecorating two floors of their £1 billion London HQ just two years after it opened. New “branding, images and props” are to be introduced to give the sixth and seventh floors a “unique sense of identity”. Staff have been told that one of the two will be modelled on an “outside streetscape” to give it greater creativity.
The veteran broadcaster John Humphrys recently warned of the dangers inherent in the BBC’s decision to commission W1A. It was, he said, very funny – unless you are a BBC boss. “In which case you might, perhaps, worry that your critics will view it more as fact than fiction.”
Indeed so. But as the revamp of the new building demonstrates, the senior management appears impervious to satire, even when it is rammed down its throat. You can only wonder what is going through the mind of Lord Hall, the director-general, as he watches W1A. How is this going to play into the negotiations about the continuation of the licence fee if the viewers start to question where the money goes?
Yes, it is only a comedy – but one that relies for its humour on being a pretty accurate representation of what is actually going on. At the end of Wednesday’s episode, I found myself thinking of the catchphrase from another of the BBC’s recent comedies, Extras: are they having a laugh?
The spoof documentary W1A invites us to congratulate the Corporation for its shortcomings
By Philip Johnston
You’ve got to hand it to the BBC: they can laugh at themselves. We know this because there is a new mockumentary devoted to doing precisely that. W1A, starring Hugh Bonneville as the Corporation’s new Head of Values (salary undisclosed, but presumably north of £200,000), is a spoof documentary that focuses on a small corner of this bureaucratic behemoth.
Bonneville plays Ian Fletcher, whom we last saw running the Olympic Deliverance team in the brilliant Twenty Twelve. But whereas with that particular satire, you felt the joke was on them, with W1A I have an uneasy feeling that it is the viewing public who are the butt of the gag.
Don’t get me wrong: I chuckled my way through most of the first episode. We followed Fletcher’s early days in the job, as he wondered what on earth he had got himself into. At one point he opened a door in Broadcasting House, looking for an empty office in which to have a meeting (he hasn’t even been given a desk), only to discover it was occupied by Salman Rushdie and Alan Yentob having an arm-wrestling contest. Why? Who knows? But it seemed emblematic of the surreal nature of the place, and added to Fletcher’s bemusement.
His companions at the BBC were an eclectic mix of the outrageously camp, rude, complacent and ineffectual. All were fluent in the corporate gobbledegook that is a substitute for saying anything coherent or comprehensible. I particularly liked “dropping pathfinding documents into the shared priorities folder”.
Like Twenty Twelve, this is just the sort of top-notch, genuinely funny production that makes me feel that my annual £145.50 licence fee is worth every penny. But then I thought: hang on a second. Is this the sort of nonsense that the real BBC is actually wasting my money on?
The place was stuffed full of people with supernumerary titles, non-jobs and bad attitudes, some of whom you would cheerfully have taken out and shot. Does it really require three execs to take out a potential presenter (in this case Carol Vorderman) for lunch to see whether she would be interested in hosting a new programme called Britain’s Tastiest Village? Another allegedly fictional offering was How Big is Your Dog – which I’m pretty sure they have already done on BBC Three.
The genius of great parody is that it looks and feels so true to life that you can almost imagine it’s real – think of classics of the genre such as This is Spinal Tap, The Office, or People Like Us (written by John Morton, the author of Twenty Twelve and W1A). But the problem with W1A is that unshakeable feeling that we are being taken for a ride. We are being invited to congratulate the Beeb for having the courage to admit to its own failings, when in truth, it risks irritating us all with its overweening self-regard.
One of the themes that will run through W1A is something that clearly consumes all the suits at Broadcasting House – the forthcoming renewal of the BBC charter in 2016. In many ways, the new comedy is part of the negotiations. Yes, it says, we do waste an awful lot of your money on administrative aggrandisement, but give us the credit for acknowledging our shortcomings, and for making such a good programme out of them.
Actually, insiders confirm that W1A could have been twice as cutting without getting anywhere near the reality. For instance, it was reported on Thursday that BBC executives have started redecorating two floors of their £1 billion London HQ just two years after it opened. New “branding, images and props” are to be introduced to give the sixth and seventh floors a “unique sense of identity”. Staff have been told that one of the two will be modelled on an “outside streetscape” to give it greater creativity.
The veteran broadcaster John Humphrys recently warned of the dangers inherent in the BBC’s decision to commission W1A. It was, he said, very funny – unless you are a BBC boss. “In which case you might, perhaps, worry that your critics will view it more as fact than fiction.”
Indeed so. But as the revamp of the new building demonstrates, the senior management appears impervious to satire, even when it is rammed down its throat. You can only wonder what is going through the mind of Lord Hall, the director-general, as he watches W1A. How is this going to play into the negotiations about the continuation of the licence fee if the viewers start to question where the money goes?
Yes, it is only a comedy – but one that relies for its humour on being a pretty accurate representation of what is actually going on. At the end of Wednesday’s episode, I found myself thinking of the catchphrase from another of the BBC’s recent comedies, Extras: are they having a laugh?
