Fearful about impartiality and the future of the TV licence, the corporation’s dramas have become markedly uncontentiousDavid Hare is a playwright and screenwriterGiven that the
BBC has to endure a daily barrage of envy from less popular competitors, you would think by now it would have become more expert at defending itself.
Private Eye reported that during the summer more than 2,000 articles had been devoted to the means by which Martin Bashir got an interview with Diana, Princess of Wales in 1995. Was the public interested? Not very. When a former Conservative political candidate, Tim Davie, was made director general of the BBC in 2020, much of Fleet Street couldn’t trouble itself to say a single word. But when Jess Brammar was mooted as executive editor of news, after supposedly making some disparaging remarks about
Brexit on
Social Media, outrage fired up the presses for weeks. If you support public broadcasting and care about its survival, the BBC’s failure to articulately challenge the obvious hypocrisy of its critics was far more ominous than the one-sided ravings of the critics themselves.
David Hare is a playwright and screenwriter