NO BREAD, ALL FIVE-RING CIRCUS

I have been digging out some of the primary instruments that shaped the BBC and its remit to provide a service of news. The founding charter of 1926 charged the Corporation “to collect news of and information relating to current events in any part of the world and in any manner that may be thought fit”. There speaks the authentic voice of John Reith, consciously knowing best for all.

Nine years later, on the occasion of the first renewal of the charter, the Ullswater Report on the Control of Broadcast Content declared that “we think it right that the Corporation should refrain, as in the past, from broadcasting its own opinions by way of editorial comment upon current affairs … It is … of the utmost importance that the news distributed by the BBC should be a fair selection of items impartially presented”.

The then 80 year-old Viscount Ullswater would be astonished at the television news service that the BBC has been providing over the past ten days. Born 92 years after the noble peer, I am astonished by it too. For the bulletins are wholly partial and dominated by a single topic that may only by means of a liberal interpretation of the notion be deemed to be either news or current events.

London Olympics icon

Naturally enough, the fact of London hosting the Games of the XXX Olympiad provides a matter of legitimate public interest and broadcast attention. But the Olympics is not the sole event in the entire world this August. This sports festival is not even the only planned event of national, let alone international, significance. To tune into the BBC’s television news bulletins, you could be forgiven for wondering what meaning, if any, the BBC’s editors now attach to the term “news”.

I write as an incorrigible news junkie. If I am home – and at my age I usually am – I endeavour to listen to The World at One on Radio 4 and to watch the BBC1 bulletins at 6:00pm and 10:00pm. Unlike the great majority of my engagé friends, I do not tune in to the Today programme. Breakfast is for reading The Guardian and anyway I dislike hectoring interviewers (for the same reason I rarely watch Newsnight).

These unprepossessing things are evidently Olympic mascots

I have many bones to pick with the editorial policies of broadcast news, some of them no larger than the caudal skeleton of a minnow, some nearer the dimensions of the jaw-bone of a blue whale. These on-going protestations will have to await another occasion. But the wholesale surrender of the BBC’s news-gathering operation to the promotion of the Games is unprecedented in extent and in degeneracy.

Five days before the official opening of the Games, the BBC’s television news operation moved bag and baggage to the new Olympic park in Stratford East. The newsreader is perched for the duration in front of a panoramic view in a glass studio on the 22nd floor of Lund Point, a block owned by Newham Council, which plans to demolish the tower when it has completed evicting the tenants and leaseholders. In its first days, the temporary studio suffered from intrusive external noise and a malfunction of air-conditioning. Moreover, the weather forecasters, gratuitously obliged to stand on an adjacent exposed balcony, have perforce endured whatever the forecast weather has to throw at them.

Tower Bridge promotional

The bulletins at 6:00 and 10:00 are given over predominantly to updates on the events at the Olympics. No, that is not accurate – far from accurate. The bulletins are given over predominantly to updates on the progress of the home competitors, known for short as Team GB. There is no pretence to show any concern for the wider Games. Of course, there are reports about the organisation and husbandry of the extravaganza. But with rare exceptions – such as when someone as world-famous as Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps has been expected to achieve some new pinnacle of speed – the general drift of the updates is that a home competitor winning a bronze at shove-ha’penny is of greater import than some foreigner winning gold in a new record at a traditional, recognisable, track, field, water or road contest. The BBC is completely biased in favour of home progress, however obscure or peripheral.

Let’s shovel all the shit about cynicism, grumpiness and party-pooping out of the way. Working oneself up into an over-excited state about sport is not mandatory. The thing that you are doing is not somehow better or more worthwhile than any other thing just because you are doing it. For myself, I have never been drawn to watching grown women and men running or cycling round and round a track or firing at targets or steering boats between buoys or trying to knock a ball over a net. These things may well be more exhilarating to do than to watch, but I have never been attracted to doing them either.

I cannot be and should not be expected to manufacture enthusiasm where none exists, just because thousands of strivers from all over the world have come to contest these things in London. No doubt many people who have never bothered about javelin or parallel bars or synchronised swimming before have convinced themselves that these things are of sudden consequence, but the proportion of those new enthusiasts who will be following these arcane pursuits twelve months hence will be small, you can bet the house on it. Similarly, many people whose lives stop for Wimbledon every July have never watched five minutes of the French, American or Australian tennis majors. Being a kind of fair-weather fan – a home-event fan – is not really fandom at all. If you’re truly interested in, say, judo, you will want to see it at an elevated level whenever possible and – a crucial point, surely – you will want to see that cream of the sport whatever the nationality of the champions.

A London gold medal

What the BBC is furnishing and doing everything in its power to whip up is brutal, banal jingoism of the crudest, most indiscriminate kind. Whether such blanket emotion is truly finding an echo in the populace is difficult to judge. There’s no trick to scaring up vox pops of over-hyped Games visitors who anyway will be even more out of control about suddenly being invited onto the nation’s telly than they already might be about beach volleyball. And the constant repetition of the mantra “all eyes are on …” does not by itself raise the watching figures to 100 percent of the population.

I cheerfully admit to having viewed the opening ceremony, some of it anyway (it fell to me, during the central portion, to take the dogs round the field). There are two explanations: we had houseguests, and my partner and I are suckers for camp spectacle and indeed admirers of the previous works of Danny Boyle. The opening ceremony anyway only really has a glancing relationship with sport, until the various national teams start their endless parade. But even this unprecedented national celebration, shrewdly crafted and deftly executed as it certainly was, was only viewed by 27 million in Britain. The rest – a nearly two-to-one majority – had better or different things to do. They had lives to get on with. So don’t let the BBC’s propaganda that “the whole nation” is glued day and night to the broadcast get any traction. It’s a lie.

Of course, the BBC wants its Olympics coverage to be seen as a great corporate triumph. After all, it paid £60m for the exclusive home rights. And I am perfectly content for it to give over the entirety of both BBC1 and BBC3 – along with a host of on-line extras – to the coverage. I cannot even frame more than a token complaint at its dropping of the BBC Parliament channel for the duration. After all, the Palace of Westminster is presently deserted.

But to turn the news primarily into a potted version of what has already been broadcast to the devotees is not to be endured. A brief rundown of the major medals at the end of each bulletin, irrespective of the national origin of the winners, would be quite sufficient. Instead of that, we have the shaming spectacle of precious news time being consumed by pat-ball interviews with the parents of competitors, for crying out loud. That such family are proud and excited and will be celebrating when they get home is light years away from anything resembling news. And what I can promise is that, next February, Sophie Raworth will not be patronising the parents of British winners of Academy Awards, because of course the arts are not as important to the BBC as sports.

Raworth atop Lund Point

As it happens, tonight’s 6:00 bulletin was the most sensible since the Games began, though Nick Robinson couldn’t resist what I took to be a sport reference that I didn’t understand and George Alagiah had the nerve to refer to Olympic “hype” with a straight face. But important stories about the collapse of the coalition government’s Lords reform and the defection of Syria’s prime minister relegated Olympic tittle-tattle to eleven minutes into the bulletin.

Doubtless the Games will retake its place as the lead story before long. And the BBC should be ashamed of itself for cynically tearing up its historic undertaking to provide a fair selection of items impartially presented. Indeed. the politicians should be considering seriously whether the BBC deserves to have its charter renewed in 2016. Except of course that no one jostles to bask in the imaginary reflected glory of the Olympics as keenly as politicians.