To survive in the war on terror you must live in fear and be very, very stupid
They've been trying to scare us all again, this time through the offices of the BBC — a somewhat cowed organisation which seems, these days, more than happy to do the bidding of the government. I don't think they can have succeeded, though, except with that tranche of the population which has the collective IQ of a crayfish. Everybody else will have seen Sunday night's drama and discussion Dirty War for what it was: the finest BBC comedy since Blackadder departed from our screens. They may not have meant it as high comedy, but high comedy is what it was — especially the discussion bit with a pert and perky Fiona Bruce telling us we were all going to die of cancer very soon.
A dumb, clunking, 90-minute 'drama' which was entirely devoid of drama, with dialogue drawn from a government information film, told us what would happen if mad Muslims detonated a dirty bomb at Liverpool Street station. Except, of course, they weren't portrayed as mad Muslims: they were portrayed as devout, troubled souls who had — as characters in the police force helpfully explained — very real grievances about the state of the world: Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and so on. What they were doing was less wicked than misguided. When one of the bombers was eventually caught, he got his head kicked in by an angry white police officer while a female Muslim police officer, wreathed in sanctimony, explained to him that his actions undoubtedly constituted a grave betrayal of Islam, which is a peaceable and inclusive religion. Allah would be mightily pissed off, she contended. By the time she'd finished speaking I felt like strapping the explosives on myself, except I was laughing too much. Throughout the show one veered from annoyance to helpless hilarity.
Anyway, the point of the exercise was to explain to us how desperately unprepared we are. And not just that: why we should be a lot more scared about the 'fanatics' than we are at the moment. It's going to happen, we were told, no question about it. It's a matter of when, not if.
There was a government minister full of good intentions but aghast at the lack of planning. Where are all the NBC suits? How quickly can we get the decontamination units in place? Every now and again the most banal or obvious points were rammed home, via a mallet to the head, to the crayfish audience sitting on its collective sofa.
It all portrayed a vision of the world which bore no relation to reality, a vision of the world as the government would like us to see it: heroic firemen, conscientious and understanding police officers, well meaning and likeable government ministers. responsible Muslims prepared to shop their fanatical brethren — and a dumb public oblivious to the threat and minded, irresponsibly, to ignore official advice. And an implacable, clever enemy which is waiting, en masse, in a Neasden bedsit to do us in.
The discussion afterwards was, as I say, better still. A panel of baleful experts took questions of the most supreme and staggering idiocy, via telephone from the crayfish at home and directly from crayfish in the audience. One woman was very scared. She explained that she lived only 'ten minutes' from Ringwood airport, near Manchester. And she had relatives who lived even nearer. What was she to do? She was a certain goner. Another woman just wanted information: if the dirty bomb goes off in the middle of the afternoon, should I pick my children up from school or leave them in the care of the authorities? A good question, the panel nodded its collective head and agreed. Probably best to leave them where they are. Angry Muslims rang up to ask why the BBC had chosen to depict the terrorists as Muslim, rather than, one presumes, Buddhist or Janist or Methodist or Rosicrucian.
I tried to get through to the hotline — 0208 749 5353 — with various facetious and childish inquiries of my own. Why don't we force all Muslims to undertake radiation tests with Geiger counters every morning, just to be sure? What provision has the government made for the protection of small pets — mice, gerbils, chinchilla, fancy rats and so on — in the event of a dirty bomb being detonated in central London? But they wouldn't put me on air. And the line was engaged for almost the entire evening: hell, there's a lot of crayfish out there.
Poor Fiona Bruce (who is really a good thing, believe me). Poor post-Hutton BBC. And poor licence-payer. The programme was resolutely stupid from start to finish and, more worryingly, it swallowed whole the very thesis the government wishes us to swallow — that we are all in danger, that we must wake up to the threat, that none of it is of the government's own making and we're all trying our best. That the British public is both ignorant and feckless. Oh, and that Islam is fine and dandy and to be respected. It's just a few extremists causing the trouble, you know.
Later in the week we discovered, through a leak to the Guardian newspaper, that this might well be the direction in which serious BBC current affairs is heading. Apparently, Panorama is to be revamped, with Fiona Bruce dragged in to do interviews of an emotive nature. The programme will be shorter and put up against Coronation Street, where one assumes it will either become relentlessly sensationalist or die an ugly death. An internal memo suggested that Panorama at the moment is too 'didactic'. Good grief. You wouldn't wish a serious news programme to be didactic, would you? BBC bosses have it inside their heads that they need to reach out to cretins, cretins who might not be able to cope with intelligent news and current affairs programmes, such as Michael Cockerill's excellent films, or the Today programme or Newsnight, or for that matter the once proud Panorama. Crayfish cretins encamped on the sofa waving their little pincers in blind and consuming panic — that's the target audience these days, it would appear. It is the same approach they attempted to take with politics: we have to make it relevant to crayfish. A year or so ago they got me to present one such programme — take politics away from Westminster and into people's homes. Thank the Lord, it flopped quicker than you could say Johnny Vaughan.
Another phrase for this sort of stuff is 'dumbed-down'.
I don't know which is the more worrying: a supine BBC prepared to play along with government propaganda, or a dumb BBC abrogating its responsibility to do serious investigative journalism regardless of the effects on the ratings. I suppose in a way they are one and the same thing.
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