Post by Teddy Bear on Jul 5, 2013 18:33:42 GMT
The so called comedians at the BBC are so used to thinking they are really funny because they fit the BBC left-wing mindset, they have no idea how they sound to those of us who know how ill thought out it really is.
The BBC’s left-wing bias is alive and well and living in Radio 4 comedy
Marcus Brigstocke's Radio 4 series isn’t satire, it’s a text-book example of the kind of noxious lefty bias the BBC has only just found itself culpable of.
By Dominic Cavendish
If the art of comedy is, as is so often claimed, timing, then perhaps Marcus Brigstocke allowed himself an extra special pat on the back for coinciding the second episode of his current Radio 4 series The Brig Society with the 65th anniversary of the NHS. The “big idea” behind the show, in case you haven’t yet been subjected to it, is that every week Marcus will find himself put in “charge of a thing” – it could be fashion, could be a prison or the railways. This week it was a hospital.
The object of the supposedly satirical exercise is that Brigstocke, 40, will go on a learning curve during the course of his in-at-the-deep-end experience (which isn’t in fact an “experience”, but a scripted performance conducted in front of a frightfully amenable and laugh-ready studio audience). Having anticipated that whatever his task involves “can’t be that difficult”, he will discover: “Oh - turns out it’s utterly difficult and complicated. Who knew?”
What Marcus is doing, you see, is affecting a layman ignorance (although the shot of him on the related BBC web-page shows him pulling a face so imbecilic as to look like the sort of thing that’s been banned in playgrounds). That ignorance will be over-turned by the evidence he “unearths”, and hey-presto a whole bevy of moronic assumptions will be trounced. It’s not his stupidity that’s the issue, of course, it’s the stupidity of other people.
If that sounds like a skewed reading of what he’s up to you only need to listen to Hospital to glean how patronising is its premise. In fact, the whole 30-minute episode succeeds in being not a winning, roundabout tribute to the glory of the NHS but a text-book example of the kind of noxious lefty bias the BBC has only this week found itself culpable of in the vexed area of immigration coverage.
The tone of sardonic, smug, self-righteous preachiness – usually kept in check on his happily contained sometimes pithily amusing turns on The Now Show – is there in earnest from the outset. “We’re all in this together,” posh-boy Brigstock sneers – “so said George Osborne to the rest of the people in his Jacuzzi full of champagne.”
Within three minutes, he has taken a pop at the Daily Mail for being, one infers, racist – before revealing “they’ve put me in charge of a hospital”. It’s going to be OK, he reveals, even though he’s got rid of those pointless manager folk. “As long as no one else in the UK gets ill for the next four years we should be ready to be either shut down or sold to a private firm, because if there’s one thing ill people like it’s competition on the open market. You ask any ill person and they’ll usually say. ‘I would love to get better, sure, but mostly I want to see privatised health providers benefiting from my illness.’ ”
Yup, that’s the level it works at – little short of a licence-fee funded attack on Coalition policy and an ill-disguised rant against anyone so rash as to want to reform the NHS, damning reports into and criticisms of which he studiously avoids. By laughable way of balance, he offers: “Perhaps private enterprise will prove hugely beneficial for the NHS... take some of the fat off it, nibbling away at the excess... slimming it down from within – like a tapeworm does.”
By the time Brigstocke had started conjecturing about a hospital run along the lines of a no-frills airline, I’d almost lost the will to live but on and on he droned, with all the subtlety of a first-time student union debater. “Anyone sensible enough to listen to UKIP, Migration Watch and a bloke called Terry down the pub already knows for certain that on a Wednesday afternoon in late 2013 at around 4.30 the entire populations of Bulgaria and Romania will arrive at a hospital near where you live” etc. “These are facts people and if you don’t believe me look in the Spectator.” Right-on there, Marcus.
Laying aside his bizarre attempt to wave away concerns about health tourism as only 0.15 per cent of the total NHS budget – “not such a big deal” – the moment when I began shrieking at the radio begging to be put out of my misery came with the sermon-like wrap-up. “You need to put back the administrators – and stop pissing about with the system… We have strong opinions on healthcare because it affects almost all of us,” he advised piously.
Oh, please, pass the sick-bag, nurse. This isn’t satire, it’s drivelling propaganda and the Beeb should have been ashamed to broadcast it.
Marcus Brigstocke's Radio 4 series isn’t satire, it’s a text-book example of the kind of noxious lefty bias the BBC has only just found itself culpable of.
By Dominic Cavendish
If the art of comedy is, as is so often claimed, timing, then perhaps Marcus Brigstocke allowed himself an extra special pat on the back for coinciding the second episode of his current Radio 4 series The Brig Society with the 65th anniversary of the NHS. The “big idea” behind the show, in case you haven’t yet been subjected to it, is that every week Marcus will find himself put in “charge of a thing” – it could be fashion, could be a prison or the railways. This week it was a hospital.
The object of the supposedly satirical exercise is that Brigstocke, 40, will go on a learning curve during the course of his in-at-the-deep-end experience (which isn’t in fact an “experience”, but a scripted performance conducted in front of a frightfully amenable and laugh-ready studio audience). Having anticipated that whatever his task involves “can’t be that difficult”, he will discover: “Oh - turns out it’s utterly difficult and complicated. Who knew?”
What Marcus is doing, you see, is affecting a layman ignorance (although the shot of him on the related BBC web-page shows him pulling a face so imbecilic as to look like the sort of thing that’s been banned in playgrounds). That ignorance will be over-turned by the evidence he “unearths”, and hey-presto a whole bevy of moronic assumptions will be trounced. It’s not his stupidity that’s the issue, of course, it’s the stupidity of other people.
If that sounds like a skewed reading of what he’s up to you only need to listen to Hospital to glean how patronising is its premise. In fact, the whole 30-minute episode succeeds in being not a winning, roundabout tribute to the glory of the NHS but a text-book example of the kind of noxious lefty bias the BBC has only this week found itself culpable of in the vexed area of immigration coverage.
The tone of sardonic, smug, self-righteous preachiness – usually kept in check on his happily contained sometimes pithily amusing turns on The Now Show – is there in earnest from the outset. “We’re all in this together,” posh-boy Brigstock sneers – “so said George Osborne to the rest of the people in his Jacuzzi full of champagne.”
Within three minutes, he has taken a pop at the Daily Mail for being, one infers, racist – before revealing “they’ve put me in charge of a hospital”. It’s going to be OK, he reveals, even though he’s got rid of those pointless manager folk. “As long as no one else in the UK gets ill for the next four years we should be ready to be either shut down or sold to a private firm, because if there’s one thing ill people like it’s competition on the open market. You ask any ill person and they’ll usually say. ‘I would love to get better, sure, but mostly I want to see privatised health providers benefiting from my illness.’ ”
Yup, that’s the level it works at – little short of a licence-fee funded attack on Coalition policy and an ill-disguised rant against anyone so rash as to want to reform the NHS, damning reports into and criticisms of which he studiously avoids. By laughable way of balance, he offers: “Perhaps private enterprise will prove hugely beneficial for the NHS... take some of the fat off it, nibbling away at the excess... slimming it down from within – like a tapeworm does.”
By the time Brigstocke had started conjecturing about a hospital run along the lines of a no-frills airline, I’d almost lost the will to live but on and on he droned, with all the subtlety of a first-time student union debater. “Anyone sensible enough to listen to UKIP, Migration Watch and a bloke called Terry down the pub already knows for certain that on a Wednesday afternoon in late 2013 at around 4.30 the entire populations of Bulgaria and Romania will arrive at a hospital near where you live” etc. “These are facts people and if you don’t believe me look in the Spectator.” Right-on there, Marcus.
Laying aside his bizarre attempt to wave away concerns about health tourism as only 0.15 per cent of the total NHS budget – “not such a big deal” – the moment when I began shrieking at the radio begging to be put out of my misery came with the sermon-like wrap-up. “You need to put back the administrators – and stop pissing about with the system… We have strong opinions on healthcare because it affects almost all of us,” he advised piously.
Oh, please, pass the sick-bag, nurse. This isn’t satire, it’s drivelling propaganda and the Beeb should have been ashamed to broadcast it.