Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: The real reason for all the white faces at the BBC
The mood is militantly anti-PC in the media, and the country at large
Monday, 5 March 2007
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Jonathan Ross notices and minds that most black folk in the BBC are silent suppliers of food, clean floors, functioning machines and cabs: "How many black people have they got working on proper shows there?" he asked. "You know the BBC still haven't come up to speed. I mean, they are trying, bless them."
His BBC paymasters may be regretting the £17m they gifted him for his whippy tongue. That deal was obscene. This is not envy, more a surge of revulsion at licence money being squandered on one person when there is so much that needs attention and expenditure. His comments therefore have a frisson for me, not that he has dared to nip the hands that spoil him, but that he can't see that he himself is a symbol of the offence he finds.
Where is the black Jonathan Ross, Catherine Tate, Graham Norton? How come Mr Ross himself has an all-white silly band playing the introductions to his guests? Perhaps he should talk to the cosmopolitan Jools Holland on how to live by what you speak. That said, his comments should make the BBC look at its distorted self.
Has there ever been a black presenter on Have I Got News for You? Every adventure and discovery programme into foreign parts, from Africa to China, has a white, male presenter. They are looking at replacements for David Attenborough: the line up is white including some hopefuls of posh Kenyan settler pedigree. Forget ever being able to see a British Palestinian Fergal Keane or an Asian Kirsty Wark. Big Chef programmes? White please, and male, Ainsley Harriot the only exception. We Asian and black Britons brought exciting food to this country, dammit, and now have to watch the appropriators sell it back to us, with imperial vanity. A black Top Gear presenter? Is this a joke or what? Are there any young, cocky black men who love cars?
Not now, not in a decade, or over two generations can I see the top chaps at the Beeb learning to imagine a black or Asian presenter of Desert Island Discs, Newsnight, Question Time or the Today programme, or as controllers of radio, or the final frontier: director general or chairman. By then I will be dead, and my descendants may well have given up the battle.
There are two important points to make here. Most of the rest of the media, the newspaper industry in particular, is considerably worse than the BBC. Channel 4 is marginally better, but not that much. And it would be churlish to deny real progress. Newsreaders come from all backgrounds on all channels; Sky News is particularly impressive. BBC TV drama is so diverse, one barely notices. This is as it should be. But the rest of the BBC is more "hideously white" than when Greg Dyke found when he took over.
I have been moaning about this for nearly 25 years. First we were denied entry because of direct and indirect discrimination. I believe the BBC did take this seriously and sought to do the right thing, at least on paper. Then came the anti-PC typhoon, coinciding with the collapse of the left in Britain under Blair. The corporation capitulated, with some relief. Media gatekeepers have never felt comfortable granting black and Asian citizens the same rights as white citizens to influence the politics and society of their country. A A Gill, Peter Hitchens, Polly Toynbee and Jackie Ashley can say stuff I cannot without being seen as impertinent or, worse, dangerous. Bitter? Well of course.
There's all to lose these days if you persist in claiming racial and gender equality rights in the BBC. You can be admitted as an "ethnic" (not too many at a time, though), if you know your place, are happy to be anti-PC and never complain about discrimination. Diane Abbott may be the sole exception to these rules. I have no reason to disbelieve insiders who tell me I am too difficult and politically correct to be invited on to Question Time, Newsnight and the sorts of slots open to my columnist peers listed above. I used to be, but now the mood is militantly anti-PC in both the media and the country at large. Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer, an intellectual who commands respect, got a Caribbean man with a beautiful voice to do the trailers. What racist flak he got for doing the right thing. Poor Mary FitzPatrick, the BBC diversity "tsar" - how they brief against her, her colleagues who relish their "freedom" to keep the corporation a place for chosen whites.
Rod Liddle, ex-editor of Today, the Bad Boy Made Rich, accuses the BBC of "interminable, shameless political correctness which will do for it in the end". He should sleep easier. Most of his old masters are as anti-PC as he is, and what Ross sees is the result. Once at least there was some institutional guilt over our exclusion. Now this is seen as a victory for common sense, and they aren't even bothering to try.
