Colourful Characters

Up until my early 20s if you'd asked me about the things that make me proud to be British I would have named the BBC fairly close to the top of any such list.

Habitually I date the rude awakening to December 21, 1989, the day after the US invasion of Panama, when I witnessed a news report* which suggested to me that the Beeb might not actually be any more reliable that those shortwave broadcasts from Radio Moscow that I'd listened to regularly for a lark as a teenager.

Nowadays I have concluded that there could well even be something worse about Aunty, as the manipulative dishonesty is seemingly far less self-aware. And sometimes I have no solid clue as to WHY they choose to shamelessly push a particular agenda, such as Bush's back then, and Hamas's today, and on some levels I am not sure they do either. (Vladimir Posner knew exactly what he was up to.)

I'd had a clear inkling of what goes on a year or so earlier, if truth be told (the very thing the BBC seems to shy away from).

Producers decided to hold a televised debate hosted by Janet Street Porter and picked my college as the venue. The topic was the defunct newspaper known as The Sunday Sport, then considered the dregs of vulgarian reportage and so ripe for a going over by the Corporation.

I suppose the idea on paper was to see how a group of young, potentially high-minded Cambridge undergrads would respond to the views aired, but in practice that was not what was broadcast. The BBC had invited a small group of 'colourful' characters who were not members of Girton and whose questions to the panel were largely the only ones that were shown in the final edit.

The entire exercise was essentially a bait for the tabloids, and they duly responded, unfairly lambasting the attitudes and intelligence of Girtonians, unaware of the ruse.

Perhaps the eventual fallout turned out to be that the BBC packed itself with these very same 'colourful characters'?

* Not a matter of 'slant'. A Panamanian in the ruins of his home was asked a question by the reporter who then live translated it in a wholly dishonest manner. I had only just become bilingual and I cannot begin to tell you how much this shocked me.