Broadcasting
The making of a martyr
Paul Johnson
Since the Reagan victory the pacifist Left, with strong support from official Communism, have been making well-coordinated efforts to get the anti-nuclear crusade on the road again. Britain is a prime target because the Labour Party is now on the very brink of going unilateralist. But the hope is that this behind-the-scenes political take-over of the defence policy by the Bennites can be paralleled by a public 'non-political' movement with all the razzmatazz, the emotional and intellectual appeal of the old CND. A tall order, since CND was created not only by its times but by the collection of outsize personalities who led its annual trudges. Above all there was Bertrand Russell, a rather tarnished memory these days but in the Fifties a world figure, widely esteemed on the British Left as the greatest living Englishman.
In the search for another Bertie, the choice seems to have fallen, for want of another better, on E.P. Thompson, a historian of the Trouble-at-t'Mill school, whose gritstone epic, The Making of the English Working Class, first published in 1963, is much esteemed among social science students at Salford, Stirling and similar academies. More recently Thompson sprouted elegant greying locks and a charismatic expression, and shown himself an eager anti-nuclear campaigner. Efforts have been made to build him up for the Russell part, and he is persistently presented as an intellectual with a special appeal to young people. The latest ploy has been to get him the Dimbleby Lecture on the BBC. Of course television, and especially the BBC, is a prime target for the anti-nuclear lobby. They make continuing efforts to have The War Game shown. Last November they created a tremendous fuss when the BBC declined to transmit the Open University's third 'Open Lecture' called Towards the Final Abyss, given by a famous unilateralist, Professor Pentz. By getting Thompson's name onto the shortlist of those invited to submit ideas for the Dimbleby Lecture, the lobbly was on an all-win course. For the Dimbleby receives enormous publicity, usually quite out of proportion to the intrinsic interest of the text, and for Thompson actually to get the air-time would be a dazzling propaganda coup. On the other hand, if the scheme did not actually succeed — it was in fact stopped at Director-General and Board level — then a wonderful opportunity presented itself to raise the cry of 'suppression' and 'censorship', to turn Thompson into a martyr and, in the event, to secure as much publicity for what he planned to say as if he had actually said it. So it has turned out. 'Thompson Barred as Dimbleby Lecturer' was The Times's headline last Saturday. 'BBC Chief Blocks Thompson Lecture' echoed the Guardian. According to The Times, the invitation had actually been issued (the BBC has denied this) and was then 'vetoed' by the Supine Worm himself. It quoted Thompson, however, as making a more serious allegation: 'I think it has been stopped by political pressure at the highest level and that the issue should be of serious concern to BBC staff.'
That could only mean that William Whitelaw or (more plausibly) Margaret Thatcher had intervened, and that the BBC had yielded to the Government's wishes. The reference to 'BBC staff' was, I take it, an invitation to the union to step in and get the Corporation bosses to reconsider. However, the sting lay in the last paragraph of The Times report which stated that the lecture, being scheduled for November, 'would have fallen embarrassingly close to the Government's decision on whether to allow the BBC to raise its licence fee front £34 to £50' — the smear being that Trethowan had cravenly yielded to Government pressure in order to get the money. The BBC's story is that the early choices were Willy Brandt and Robert McNamara, with Edward Heath as a national pis-aller, rambling on about that imaginary universe where clichés and conferences endlessly proliferate and where the well-to-do meet in enormous comfort to discuss the starving. This testifies so accurately to the BBC's current bankruptcy of ideas that I believe it. However, Thompson himself has refused to accept the BBC explanation that no formal invitation had ever been made to him and that he had merely been asked to submit an outline. 'Public bodies in these circumstances,' he told the Observer, 'normally make face-saving statements which in plain English are of ten lies'. And the Observer, in a leader, took up The Times's smear: 'Is the BBC afraid of offending Mrs Thatcher just before the Government has to decide on the Corporation's request for a higher TV licence fee?' Of Thompson it wrote: 'his is a brilliant and civilised voice of non-conformity such as no healthy democracy can afford to be without', which suggests to me a certain lack of familiarity With the Professor's writings. What seems to have happened is that certain BBC people, at what I call the cowboy level, tried to rush the Thompson idea through the hierarchy. They didn't quite make it since, as we know, supine worms do occasionally turn. Frustrated, they decided to play it as a censorship scandal. Until recently they would have put the story in Private Eye. Nowadays, of course, they can use The Times. As a result we shall all be hearing a great deal about the lecture-that-never-was. The Times set the tone with a cringingly deferential profile of the guru on Monday. Thompson says that his putative lecture consists of 'saying something original about the break-up of the parameters of the Cold War in the past 30 years'. That word 'parameters' is the giveaway: it ought to have retired with Harold Wilson. Which, given the choice, would you prefer to hear: Heath on NorthSouth or Thompson on Cold War Parameters? Thanks to Agitprop, we seem condemned to get both.
Previous page
