Post by Teddy Bear on Jul 22, 2009 21:26:37 GMT
In an excellent article evolved from a recent comment by a BBC controller to 'foster left-of-center thinking', Stephen Glover of the Daily Mail details how this affects the quality of programming at the BBC
How our cultural elite rejects middle-class values and censors debate
By Stephen Glover
The BBC maintains the absurd myth that it is always politically neutral, but occasionally one of its senior employees writes or says something that lets the cat out of the bag.
In an article earlier this week in the BBC's in-house journal, otherwise known as The Guardian, the Corporation's controller of drama commissioning, Ben Stephenson, wrote: 'We need to foster peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, stubborn-mindedness, left-of-centre thinking.'
Left-of-centre thinking! Are you shocked? Even surprised? I confess I am not. Despite ritual denials, I had assumed that the minds behind the BBC's somewhat depleted drama output were sympathetic to Left-wing ideas rather than Right-wing ones. In a similar way, many of the people who run BBC news or current affairs programmes evidently have Left-wing leanings.
Imagine that you were a brilliant young playwright who had conceived a play about the destructive psychological effects which abortion can have on women. Mr Stephenson or his sidekicks would not clap you on the back. You would be shown the door, if you had ever been let through it.
The Right-wing authors who have written for the BBC over the past 30 years can be numbered on the fingers of one hand. John Osborne, who began as an anti-Establishment firebrand with Look Back In Anger and ended his days as a grumpy Tory, was given some airtime in his dotage.
Then there was Ian Curteis. His play about the Falklands War, which was sympathetic to Margaret Thatcher, was binned by the BBC, and finally shown after 15 years as a kind of historical curiosity. The decks would have been immediately cleared had he portrayed Lady Thatcher as a bloodthirsty warmonger.
Most of the BBC's culture programmes have a left-of-centre perspective. For example, the contributors invited to appear on BBC2's Newsnight Review almost invariably belong to the soft Left. The occasional Right-winger is allowed on, though he or she may feel obliged to fall in with the prevailing Left-wing consensus.
It would be silly to single out the BBC for blame. The Corporation merely reflects a general takeover of our culture by the Left. It is difficult to think of any leading novelist, poet or playwright who could be even vaguely described as Right-wing. Tom Stoppard? Ronald Harwood? Only at a pinch.
Art is more difficult to define in political terms. All that can be said is that the BBC tends to celebrate fashionable post-modern artists, many of whom have little ability other than the power to shock, while ignoring immensely gifted artists whose work is more traditional.
Over the past 30 or 40 years, the Left has captured the citadels of our culture. I don't mean the old formidable communist Left, which is dead and buried, but a trendy soft Left whose world view is promulgated by The Guardian and the BBC. This is the club which aspiring members of the cultural elite are required to join.
What is fascinating is that during most of the 20th century the Left did not exert a stranglehold over our culture. Three of the four writers who are generally seen as the fathers of modernism could reasonably be described as Right-wing, sometimes dangerously so. T. S. Eliot became a devout Anglican and small 'c' conservative. The poet W. B. Yeats flirted with Mussolini, while the American writer Ezra Pound became, I regret to say, a paid-up fascist.
Two of the greatest English poets of the last century, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin, ended their days on the Right. Auden, like Eliot, rejected the atheism of his youth, and embraced religion. Some of Larkin's political views were extremely Right-wing, and would probably lead to his being banned by the BBC were he around today.
Both Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, two of our finest mid-20th-century novelists, were firmly of the Right, though neither of them had much time for the Tory Party. Waugh famously said that 'the trouble with the Conservative Party is that it has not turned the clock back one second'.
Of course, I am not pretending that all the great writers of the 20th century were Right-wing. Far from it. The Bloomsbury group, whose members included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey, were the intellectuals forebears of the modern liberal-Left. Bernard Shaw was a socialist, as was H. G. Wells. Waugh's friend, the novelist Graham Greene, moved increasingly to the Left, and ended his days as a trenchant anti-American.
All I am saying is that throughout most of the 20th century there were Left-wing writers and Right-wing writers who argued and differed and were sometimes friends. There was a debate. There were choices. What we have now is a Left-wing literary monopoly, many of whose members apparently believe that it is impossible in the modern age to be a great writer and Right-wing.
You may say it is wrong to attach labels such as ' Right-wing' and 'Left-wing' to all authors. But every writer is in some sense political, even one as apparently removed from great events as Jane Austen. When Elizabeth Bennet lets fly at the odiously snobbish aristocrat Lady Catherine de Burgh in Pride And Prejudice, Austen is celebrating middle-class virtues of plain-speaking and honesty against ignorant aristocratic pretension. That is a political point.
To return to the BBC's Ben Stephenson, he doubtless sees himself as an iconoclast challenging the status quo. But in fact he is part of the status quo, conforming to the Leftist beliefs that predominate in the BBC. Courage lies in questioning the status quo. That is what artists are supposed to do. Members of our cultural consensus huddle within their ramparts, terrified of promoting ideas or thoughts they deem unacceptable.
Perennial themes in the Corporation's increasingly sparse drama are the evils of poverty, the excessive power of the State and the smugness of the bourgeoisie. I grant these can be rewarding, but there are many other important things going on in our society. Yet these would not be considered proper subjects for a BBC play.
The increasing power of the State could be examined not so much on account of its passion for surveillance as because of its apparent desire to end up by employing every worker in the country. The breakdown of the family, which partly explains the squalor, violence and human degradation visible in many of our towns, would be a fertile subject for drama. So might the social and cultural transformation brought about by uncontrolled immigration.
But the liberal-Left consensus, nourished by The Guardian and the BBC, believes in an ever-expanding public sector. It does not place much value on marriage. It is relaxed about mass immigration. So three subjects which concern many people are ruled out. They cannot even be addressed. It is equally hard to imagine a BBC play that grappled with the harmful effects of abortion, or showed religion in a sympathetic light.
We live in a cultural monopoly mediated by the BBC. Most writers believe more or less the same. Discordant voices are excluded, or at best muted. For much of the time a Leftist elite talks to itself in endless circles. All this helps to explain my feeling that we live in a narrow, boring, self-satisfied little country.
By Stephen Glover
The BBC maintains the absurd myth that it is always politically neutral, but occasionally one of its senior employees writes or says something that lets the cat out of the bag.
In an article earlier this week in the BBC's in-house journal, otherwise known as The Guardian, the Corporation's controller of drama commissioning, Ben Stephenson, wrote: 'We need to foster peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, stubborn-mindedness, left-of-centre thinking.'
Left-of-centre thinking! Are you shocked? Even surprised? I confess I am not. Despite ritual denials, I had assumed that the minds behind the BBC's somewhat depleted drama output were sympathetic to Left-wing ideas rather than Right-wing ones. In a similar way, many of the people who run BBC news or current affairs programmes evidently have Left-wing leanings.
Imagine that you were a brilliant young playwright who had conceived a play about the destructive psychological effects which abortion can have on women. Mr Stephenson or his sidekicks would not clap you on the back. You would be shown the door, if you had ever been let through it.
The Right-wing authors who have written for the BBC over the past 30 years can be numbered on the fingers of one hand. John Osborne, who began as an anti-Establishment firebrand with Look Back In Anger and ended his days as a grumpy Tory, was given some airtime in his dotage.
Then there was Ian Curteis. His play about the Falklands War, which was sympathetic to Margaret Thatcher, was binned by the BBC, and finally shown after 15 years as a kind of historical curiosity. The decks would have been immediately cleared had he portrayed Lady Thatcher as a bloodthirsty warmonger.
Most of the BBC's culture programmes have a left-of-centre perspective. For example, the contributors invited to appear on BBC2's Newsnight Review almost invariably belong to the soft Left. The occasional Right-winger is allowed on, though he or she may feel obliged to fall in with the prevailing Left-wing consensus.
It would be silly to single out the BBC for blame. The Corporation merely reflects a general takeover of our culture by the Left. It is difficult to think of any leading novelist, poet or playwright who could be even vaguely described as Right-wing. Tom Stoppard? Ronald Harwood? Only at a pinch.
Art is more difficult to define in political terms. All that can be said is that the BBC tends to celebrate fashionable post-modern artists, many of whom have little ability other than the power to shock, while ignoring immensely gifted artists whose work is more traditional.
Over the past 30 or 40 years, the Left has captured the citadels of our culture. I don't mean the old formidable communist Left, which is dead and buried, but a trendy soft Left whose world view is promulgated by The Guardian and the BBC. This is the club which aspiring members of the cultural elite are required to join.
What is fascinating is that during most of the 20th century the Left did not exert a stranglehold over our culture. Three of the four writers who are generally seen as the fathers of modernism could reasonably be described as Right-wing, sometimes dangerously so. T. S. Eliot became a devout Anglican and small 'c' conservative. The poet W. B. Yeats flirted with Mussolini, while the American writer Ezra Pound became, I regret to say, a paid-up fascist.
Two of the greatest English poets of the last century, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin, ended their days on the Right. Auden, like Eliot, rejected the atheism of his youth, and embraced religion. Some of Larkin's political views were extremely Right-wing, and would probably lead to his being banned by the BBC were he around today.
Both Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, two of our finest mid-20th-century novelists, were firmly of the Right, though neither of them had much time for the Tory Party. Waugh famously said that 'the trouble with the Conservative Party is that it has not turned the clock back one second'.
Of course, I am not pretending that all the great writers of the 20th century were Right-wing. Far from it. The Bloomsbury group, whose members included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey, were the intellectuals forebears of the modern liberal-Left. Bernard Shaw was a socialist, as was H. G. Wells. Waugh's friend, the novelist Graham Greene, moved increasingly to the Left, and ended his days as a trenchant anti-American.
All I am saying is that throughout most of the 20th century there were Left-wing writers and Right-wing writers who argued and differed and were sometimes friends. There was a debate. There were choices. What we have now is a Left-wing literary monopoly, many of whose members apparently believe that it is impossible in the modern age to be a great writer and Right-wing.
You may say it is wrong to attach labels such as ' Right-wing' and 'Left-wing' to all authors. But every writer is in some sense political, even one as apparently removed from great events as Jane Austen. When Elizabeth Bennet lets fly at the odiously snobbish aristocrat Lady Catherine de Burgh in Pride And Prejudice, Austen is celebrating middle-class virtues of plain-speaking and honesty against ignorant aristocratic pretension. That is a political point.
To return to the BBC's Ben Stephenson, he doubtless sees himself as an iconoclast challenging the status quo. But in fact he is part of the status quo, conforming to the Leftist beliefs that predominate in the BBC. Courage lies in questioning the status quo. That is what artists are supposed to do. Members of our cultural consensus huddle within their ramparts, terrified of promoting ideas or thoughts they deem unacceptable.
Perennial themes in the Corporation's increasingly sparse drama are the evils of poverty, the excessive power of the State and the smugness of the bourgeoisie. I grant these can be rewarding, but there are many other important things going on in our society. Yet these would not be considered proper subjects for a BBC play.
The increasing power of the State could be examined not so much on account of its passion for surveillance as because of its apparent desire to end up by employing every worker in the country. The breakdown of the family, which partly explains the squalor, violence and human degradation visible in many of our towns, would be a fertile subject for drama. So might the social and cultural transformation brought about by uncontrolled immigration.
But the liberal-Left consensus, nourished by The Guardian and the BBC, believes in an ever-expanding public sector. It does not place much value on marriage. It is relaxed about mass immigration. So three subjects which concern many people are ruled out. They cannot even be addressed. It is equally hard to imagine a BBC play that grappled with the harmful effects of abortion, or showed religion in a sympathetic light.
We live in a cultural monopoly mediated by the BBC. Most writers believe more or less the same. Discordant voices are excluded, or at best muted. For much of the time a Leftist elite talks to itself in endless circles. All this helps to explain my feeling that we live in a narrow, boring, self-satisfied little country.