This is the Left, folks... and you'd better take them
seriously. With each technological advancement... Owellian society is becoming
more fact than fiction.
* * *
George Orwell devised the word ‘unperson’ to describe
someone who had so offended official thought, he or she was vaporised — not
just liquidated but wiped from the record for eternity.
That way the unperson couldn’t set a bad example.
All memory of the impertinence would be forgotten,
Comrades!
Orwell was satirising Stalin’s Russia, where such
practices were all too common.
When a Politburo member called Nikolai Yezhov, People’s
Commissar for Water Transport, fell out of favour with Joseph Stalin in 1940,
he was not just killed.
A photograph of him beside Stalin in happier days was
doctored to remove all trace of the unfortunate Yezhov. It was as though he had
never existed.
And he was not the only one.
Though the circumstances are less dramatic, I am at
present feeling a few twinges of solidarity with Yezhov.
Earlier this year, I made a jaunty little Radio 4
programme called What’s The Point Of The Met Office?
Last week, after a bizarre and focused lobbying campaign
from environmental activists, the programme was removed from the BBC’s iPlayer
playback facility.
To adapt Orwell, What’s The Point Of The Met Office?
became an un-programme.
One moment it was there, available to licence fee-payers
to hear at their convenience. The next? Ker-whack! It disappeared as surely as
one of those Islamist-owned oil derricks in Syria snotted by an RAF Paveway
missile. Ladies and gentlemen, the Left had struck. I had been censored,
expunged, deleted or ‘dealt with’, as RAF types put it.
The experience was baffling rather than upsetting. The
programme had only ever been intended as a light summer diversion, yet it was
mistaken for some sort of attack on the Establishment’s global warming theory.
I am writing about it now simply because the media story
in which I have unwittingly found myself reflects a worrying rise of
intolerance in our public life, and because the response of BBC executives and
the BBC Trust, the governing body responsible for acting in the interests of
licence fee-payers, has been so astonishingly over the top.
It is as though the RAF used one of those missiles to
‘deal with’ an innocent old bloke selling hummus by the side of the road in
Raqqa.
The rumpus, ignited by a few eco-activists and fuelled by
a mad BBC bureaucracy, has demonstrated the sort of foot-stamping insistence on
orthodoxy not seen during peacetime since Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth in the
17th century.
It has been most peculiar and most un-British — and
absurdly comical.
The offending broadcast was one half-hour programme in my
seventh series of What’s The Point Of...?
In the established style of these summer shows, it took a
chatty, personal look at a British institution.
In past programmes, for example, we have looked at the
Royal Warrant (the system by which firms are officially recognised for
supplying royal households), the Tate Gallery and the National Trust.
The tone of the continuity announcer’s introduction
before a What’s The Point Of...? usually prepares listeners for a quirky
affair.
In these programmes I try to reflect both admiration for
the institution under analysis and any grumbles that may exist about it.
The shows are not particularly lucrative for me but they
are fun to make. If they are amusing, that is thanks chiefly to the creative
flair of my producers at the BBC’s Ethics and Religion department in
Manchester.
What’s The Point Of The Met Office? looked at the history
of weather-forecasting in Britain, going back to the days when the Victorians
set out to reduce the number of shipping disasters by predicting conditions off
our coasts.
We interviewed an archivist, various amateur weather
buffs and people whose livelihoods could be affected by bad weather.
The show began with a fruity clip from the Royal Three
Counties Showground in Worcestershire, where a farmer with a wonderful rustic
burr ruminated on old rural superstitions about the weather. We chatted to
Jeremy Corbyn’s charming meteorologist brother, Piers — an expert on sunspots
and one of the most untidy men I’ve met. He argued that the ‘purpose latched’
onto the Met Office was ‘to promote and defend and propagate the man-made
climate change theory’.
We also talked to John Kettley, who told us about
fan-mail he used to receive from women viewers when he was a BBC weather
forecaster. Oh, and we spoke to some Westminster voices: a man from the
Taxpayers’ Alliance who had his doubts about the Met Office being owned by the
State (as it is), and three MPs.
One of these MPs said how marvellous the Met Office’s
shipping forecast was.
Two of them were critical of the Met Office lobbying
politicians on climate change. We ended with a long talk with a Met Office
spokeswoman, who eloquently defended her employer.
On a specific criticism about some climate change
forecast which had proved wrong, she accepted that the senior Tory MP, Peter
Lilley, who had been behind it maybe had a point.
Afterwards, off I pottered on my summer holiday — only to
be contacted, in the middle of Greece, by my BBC colleagues in Manchester, who explained
that the Green lobby was on the warpath.
One or two environmental activists were stirring up the
Twittersphere about our show, as was the BBC’s environmental analyst, Roger
Harrabin. The BBC was panicking.
I was accused of having shown disrespect to climate
change. Mr Lilley had cracked a joke: ‘They [the Met Office] come before the
Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change . . . and tell us they need even
more money for even bigger computers so they can be even more precisely wrong
in future.’ I chuckled. I had ‘not reflected prevailing scientific opinion’
about global warming.
Radio 4’s Feedback programme (its ‘forum for comments,
queries, criticisms and congratulations’) gave me a biffing. I’m afraid I never
heard it — I was in some sun-kissed taverna at the time, knocking back goodish
white — but was told it was ‘pretty savage’. Hey ho.
As a sketchwriter and theatre reviewer, I can hardly
complain about criticism. Feedback presenter Roger Bolton has never been one of
my fans.
Meanwhile, the BBC top brass held meetings about my
allegedly scandalous programme.
Apparently we should have done more to explain the
science of climate change. There was a danger that listeners were ‘misled’ by
my interviews with Mr Lilley and Labour MP Graham Stringer, who argued that the
Met Office were ‘excellent’ at short-term forecasts but ‘very poor’ at climate
and medium-term predictions.
I was on the naughty step. That was the last I thought of
the matter until last month, when I received a long document from the BBC Trust
— a draft of an official inquiry into my misdeeds, complete with a conclusion
that there had been a ‘serious’ breach of BBC rules on impartiality in my
programme. I was given a few hours to offer any comments before the finding was
likely to be made public.
The report, which must have cost thousands of pounds to
prepare (rather more than was spent on our programme, I’d wager), included news
that from the outset of the production process it had been agreed that we would
never touch on climate change.
Er, hang on, chaps. No one ever told me that. Why on
earth would independent journalists accept such a stricture? Why should climate
change be given such special protection?
The weird thing is, I don’t consider myself a climate
change sceptic. Like, I suspect, the majority of the population, I don’t know
what to think about global warming. I approve of action to reduce environmental
waste and to increase renewable energy supplies, but do I think Man is to blame
for the changing climate? I don’t know. I interviewed sceptics because they had
something interesting to say.
You will have to take my word for all this because the
BBC has now removed What’s The Point Of The Met Office? from the airwaves.
It must not be allowed to pollute public opinion, even
though I don’t think any Radio 4 listener would have been remotely misled by it
in the first place.
History shows that censorship is rarely effective in the
long term. Books such as Lolita (Nabokov’s depiction of an older professor’s
lust), Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Satanic Verses — all once the subject of
attempted bans — went on to become bestsellers.
Officialdom is seldom more mockable than when it seeks to
suppress.
The BBC should know this, having been subjected to
foolish attempts by Margaret Thatcher’s Government to stop Sinn Fein
politicians’ voices being heard in the Eighties.
This is a BBC — a Corporation worth defending, in my
view, despite this ridiculous show-trial I have been through — that exists to
be frank and fearless, to stand up to dictatorial forces, to divert and
entertain while at the same time standing apart from Whitehall.
Using such a heavy steamroller to crush the life out of
my no-doubt imperfect but innocent little programme is the behaviour not of a
bastion of British liberalism, but an insidious and worrying threat to two very
British qualities: common sense and freedom of expression.
