Notebook
There is plenty of trouble at the BBC over the decision to reduce still further its coverage of current affairs on television. Newsday disappeared last year from BBC-2 (now known at Lime Grove as 'BBC Blue' after the recent success of the Friday night 'minority interest' films); and Tonight is to be replaced in the autumn by a nightly Parkinson show. This plan was hatched a Year ago by Mr Billy Cotton, the bandleader's son and head of BBC-1; the Journalists, worried at the continuing trend towards frivolity, asked for, and were given, written assurances by the management that 'consultations' would be held over the manner and extent of the changes. But the months past and no such consultations took Place. Then the managing-director of BBC Television, Mr Alasdair Milne, apparently decided that the changes could be implemented perfectly well without listening to tiresome suggestions from interested journalists. This point he made two weeks ago in what has been described by one BBC journalist as 'the single most Shocking letter in terms of manage menttrade union relations that I have ever seen'. At a meeting of the Lime Grove branch of the National Union of Journalists it was decided to ask the governors of the BBC to Consider the management's decision, and this they did, together with Messrs Mibe, Cotton and Wenham, the head of BBC-2. Mr Milne said later that it was the worst three and a half hours he had spent in his Managerial career at the BBC. The management in effect climbed down and, as a result, consultations for the future are assured. There will be a new BBC-1 weekly news programme in September and a programme, similar to Tonight, every night on 8. BC-2. But the fears of current affairs Journalists have not really been allayed thF weekly programme is likely to be transmitted at three o'clock on Sunday afternoons (it might as well be three o'clock in the morning), and the nightly BBC-2 progrkaMme may not start before about 11 p.m. I this will not prove to be so, as I find that, like our distinguished television critic, R..ichard Ingrams, fatigue usually makes it aifficult for me to watch television after 10.30.
The general election this week in Spain has ar.gely been a contest between two men, the Prime minister Adolfo Suarez and the Socialist leader Felipe Gonzalez, who to illany Spaniards look rather more like bullfighters than politicians. In the bad old dtlYs of Franco politicians were a different — and different-looking — lot; it was the faces Manolete and Arruza (in the Forties) or Ordollez and Dominguin (in the Fifties) that were seen on posters and in the newspapers. To-day bullfighting has sadly lost much of its former popularity, and there are no two outstanding matadors in Spain vying to be acknowledged as numero uno. Instead it is the two handsome political toreros, Suarez and Gonzalez, who have been holding the country's attention. And yet, as Raymond Carr wrote from Madrid in last week's Spectator, there was a general lack of interest in this election. Perhaps one reason is that many Spaniards still have difficulty in seeing the two men — Suarez is 46 and Gonzalez 37 — as serious politicians. No wonder that the election photographs of Gonzalez had some grey hair painted round his temples.
When a law is invoked for the first time in 50 years to secure a criminal conviction, and the case proceeds up to the House of Lords in order that the offence may be properly defined, you can be pretty sure that it will not be, and that the law at the end of the day will be rather less satisfactory than it was at the beginning. So it is with the crime of blasphemous libel, which was disinterred by Mrs Mary Whitehouse for the successful prosecution of Gay News, and given a very confused redefinition by five Law Lords last week. The most worrying thing about the majority judgment is that it establishes the offence as one of strict liability, for which no mens rea — criminal intent — has to be proved. Now that is a very serious matter. For there has been an increasing tendency in recent years to move away from strict liability for criminal offences. Both Lord Edmund-Davies and Lord Diplock, in remarkably persuasive dissenting judgments, were of the opinion that, in order to convict, it must be necessary to show that the editor of Gay News, Mr Denis Lemon, intended to offend or insult Christians by publishing a poem about Christ and a homosexual centurion which, according to the charge, 'vilified Christ in his life arrd in his crucifixion:. Never mind that it was a disgusting poem which was deeply offensive to most people. 'To treat as irrelevant the state of mind of a person charged with blasphemy', as Lord Edmund-Davies said, 'would be to take a backward step in the evolution of a humane code'. But three other Law Lords took that step and held that all that had to be proved was the intention to publish the words which the jury found to be blasphemous. And so.the Gay News appeal was dismissed. Criminal libel — which includes seditious, defamatory, obscene and blasphemous libel — had its origins in the Star Chamber; it was to discourage any form of criticism of the established Church and State that the offences were introduced when, in seventeenth-century England, 'to reproach the Christian religion is to speak in subversion of the law.' Hardly an appropriate law in twentieth-century England, one might think. Indeed, criminal libel no longer serves any useful purpose and should be abolished. (There is no such offence in Scotland, which has an altogether superior system of criminal justice). If it was right to prosecute Gay News at all — for what was described in the indictment as 'an obscene poem' — then proceedings should have been taken under the Obscene Publications Act. For all its shortcomings that Act does at least provide for some sort of defence which was not available to the publishers of Gay News in the blasphemy case.
It was not revealed, during the long discussion with the Prime Minister on Panorama on Monday night, that a strike very nearly prevented the programme from being filmed at Downing Street. Until Monday afternoon the outside-broadcast riggers were refusing to go there, but they relented just in time. While listening to Mr Callaghan talk about inflation rates and future co-operation with the TUC — he said at one point that 'the unions are moving towards an incomes policy' — I was constantly reminded of the 'doublethink' of 1984. In that book Orwell described the Party member who 'knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of "doublethink" he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated.' Mr Callaghan's answers continued in the same vein when he denied that it had been a mistake to declare support for the Shah of Iran only a week or two before he was replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini. 'We are friends of the country', he said.
Simon Courtauld
Previous page
