The commentary of course bigged-up the moral superiority of the denizens of the tip. They were black, poor, brave, hard-working, entrepreneurial and ex-colonials. (Kind of like those wonderful people of the Mumbai slum dump we watched a couple of months back.) What’s not to admire by us honky consumers? The show wouldn’t have been as interesting without one of these heroes being involved in a bit of grievous bodily harm, which had the double advantage of reminding us that this really isn’t Eden.

As much to the point, we watched one character (family man, wit) as he stepped up his recycling activity by burning the plastic coating off copper wires. Last I heard, that’s about the perfect way to generate lots of PCBs and dioxins. Willfully pumping those into the atmosphere is about the silliest thing one can do to it and if film-makers caught any Brit doing it, even if he was a gypsy or some other reserved minority, there’d be hell to pay. It was probably not terrifically good for the locals of Lagos, including the children whose future he was proudly safeguarding, according to him.

We also visited an informal Lagos slaughterhouse and butchery. Turned me up a bit, of course, but I do have a soft spot for abattoirs. I think it’s because I’m such a sqeamish wimp: I was pleased to have faced down my revulsion and sort of got into the horror of the thing. Besides, I feel it’s my duty to empathise with the people who get a living putting delicious things on my plate.

These are my scenes, no question. I have a strong affinity with the whole business of recycling (except its being fashionable with Greenistas). This very week I spent happy hours as white van man with a date with a series of dumps in southern England. Gorgeous. I even liked the Pole (maybe the Ukrainian, whatever), who – as the site’s security man – made me open up the van to prove I wasn’t a tradesman. He was crisp, commanding, unyielding. I crushed a tiny batsqueak of anti-immigrant resentment. How long he’s been here? How long before it’s him asking me for my papers? It was a small nastiness which I quashed quite easily, really. And anyway, at least he mistook me for a tradie.

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At prep school, my parents gave me Molesworth books and I loved them. They were, of course, ideal for a boy in the kind of school they satirised. I expect we were the books’ core market, and for all I know Searle’s appeal didn’t really extend beyond the middle class. Still, those were fluid times and I know that Rowland Emmett’s Festival of Britain fantasy machines – they were Searle-like in artistry – were popular across the board.

Anyway, my beef with the C4 item was a silly little remark from Nicholas Glass. He had been talking about Searle’s drawings from his Japanese prisoner of war camp and, later, from Eichmann’s Nuremburg trial. “But”, opined our arts savant, effortlessly conveying the width and strength of his own sensibility, “the British were more comfortable with the lighter stuff”. (I have busked for the last three or four words of that sentence, but have been true to the meaning.)

Mr Glass perhaps hadn’t considered that the generation who bought these books for their kids had been through the war and if they chose to delight in the brighter, lighter side of life it might be because they’d seen plenty of the dark side.

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Mad Men
West Wing
Frasier
The Sopranos
Six Feet Under
Spiral
Nurse Jackie (honourable inclusion)
30 Rock
Curb Your Enthusiam
The Thick Of It (season 1)
Wallander (Swedish)
Wallander (English)
Breaking Bad
Allie McBeal
Sex In the City
Damages
Huff
Dexter
Brothers and Sisters
Doc Martin

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Dunne had much more than his share of misery but in the end the best luck of all.  He’d made his life into a great story, and was very lucky in his biographers, the makers of the little biopic, After the Party, available on DVD and shown recently on BBC 4.

We learned of Dunne’s being star-struck, marrying a beautiful heiress, becoming a Hollywood insider, losing it all, gaining the skills of a novelist, losing his actress daughter to murder, meeting Tina Brown and becoming what he remained for many years, the celebrity chronicler of trials involving celebrities in Vanity Fair.

Kirsty de Garis and Timothy Jolley, the film’s directors, gavet him just the right amount of breathing space to tell his story, which would clearly be worth the attention of a novelist or film-maker.

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When I wrote “Scrap the BBC!”: Ten years to set broadcasters free, for the Social Affairs Unit, in 2007, I was pretty sure the logic and merits of my case were sound. But I didn’t think many people in authority agreed. Plenty of them would still say they love and will defend the BBC. However, more and more people seem to be making the arguments – and proposing the reforms – which will sink it and allow much more interesting things to happen.

The BBC is at bay
Like it or not, the BBC is about to change so radically that it’ll be unrecognisable. I have never seen it attacked on so many fronts by so many different sorts of people for so many strong reasons. For the first time, the BBC has smelled defeat.

Its enemies and the weakness of its response
Here’s a partial list. Ben Bradshaw, its government boss, dislikes its constitution and contemplates reducing its size. Ofcom contemplates dishing out the licence fee to its competitors. Its commercial rivals point to its immunity to recession. The right thinks it’s a socialist propagandist (that much is tripe). The Tricoteur Tendency point to its fat cats. Sky points to the dangers of its non-commercial “free” terrestrial challenge. Newspapers loathe its dominance of online news. The literate dislike its dumbing down. David Elstein proposes subscription as an alternative to the licence fee. Most impotant of all, the Tories seem to be manning-up to bash the BBC on many fronts.

The BBC will defend itself by saying it must maintain its ”offer” to all audiences in all media, or risk losing its claim to the compulsory licence fee. But its competitors and enemies will claim it only has a claim or right (limited in both cases) to do ”improving” Public Service Broadcasting. And PSB is an elitist product which (it is easy to argue) the middle class ought to buy for themselves (and give to poor people if they want to).

A big new problem scuppers the BBC
The business model for dissemination of serious news and opinion is under serious strain. People fear that locally first and nationally later some new way will have to be found to get people to pay for their news and comment. For the first time ever, the BBC is perceived as part of the problem and not a plausible part of the solution.  

The BBC is at bay
Rightly, the Corporation has in recent years feared that if it conceded any territory, it would lose all its ground. Now, it is prepared to contemplate being smaller rather than lose its unique USP. But really, it was right in the first place. Once the BBC loses its grip on its near-monopolies, its enemies will force it rapidly to shrink into a very small core business which would probably be privatised.

So what?
Let’s remember what we’d be losing. The BBC is a vast smug monolith bestriding most forms of broad- and narrow-casting in the UK. It is over-funded and over-controlled. It rules by terror: it manages to terrify millions of people into thinking it is indispensible and irreplaceable.

Truth is, there are zillions of ways for the affluent, literate, busy-body middle class to overcome such market failure as there may be in broadcasting. There is no problem of equity or access that can’t easily be overcome at small expense in cash and with minimal generosity.

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Media people make decent money and sums which can surely outmatch those of MPs, allowances and all. Jon Snow once acknowledged as much, telling the Independent in 1994:

I don’t think anybody could do a proper job in news and current affairs if they weren’t politically driven. But I’d never enter politics as an MP – I couldn’t take the salary cut.

Ha ha.

Compare that with the tone of his recent (12 May 2009) Snowmail (a daily teaser for his news show):

Nothing summarises the condition of the Conservative party and its expenses claims more acutely than the simply sensational interview conducted on behalf of us all by the BBC’s Ms Patel. It’s on our website.

If the Tory party’s changed, it certainly appears to have left some extraordinary and resilient objects of the past in its wake and left room for plenty more in its midst.

Moats, swimming pool costs, drain repairs beneath tennis courts, helipads… Even a two quid bill for mouse poison.

And whilst the claims of serving cabinet ministers were scandalous enough, this stuff suggests a Britain still mired in the mid-19th century. One feels Trollope would have been at home with all this.

In terms of trying to dig out of it, David Cameron has made a brave effort to rein his miscreants in, leaving Gordon Brown looking pretty leaden-footed.

But Mr Cameron, whilst paying back the money he charged for having his wisteria cut off his chimney, still thinks the taxpayer owes it to him to give him almost £20,000 in expenses last year, mostly for the maintenance of a mortgage on his second home.

How many of his voters can boast such a mortgage? And how many can boast further that they get the taxpayer to pay towards it? Gary Gibbon is on the case, and we’ll be talking to a senior Tory backbencher live.

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It was lazy of me, but I first came across Mr Rusbridger’s proposal by noticing Roy Greenslade’s deep scepticism about it. Mr Greenslade is suspicious of the idea that the state should be paying for news on the scale involved.

I’m inclined to suppose that the issue is that Mr Rusbridger (like Ofcom) wants to save specific institutions (local papers, say). I think the point is to stress that one should:

(a) subsidise as little as possible (and only for market failure);
(b) get people to subscribe to subsidy (keep the state out of it);
(c) apply “subsidiarity”: subsidise producers not processes.

That would imply that one might argue for a subsidy to local journalists but not to local papers and from voluntary not state sources. The papers could take the subsidised material, or it could go on websites, or to radio stations, or whatever. Once the material exists, outlets are secondary.

That’s the point of the digital age.

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Ofcom studiously avoids big change

It’s early days, but this week’s news suggests that Ofcom is stuck in the wearisome old game of keeping the existing players going. One can’t help feeling that Ed Richards and his cohorts are trying to keep as much of the BBC and Channel 4 institutional nexus alive as they can. An outsider (that would be me) is inclined to see this as the nomenclatura looking after itself.

How much bolder it would have been to reconsider the whole nature of “public” funding of broadcasting and how to dismantle rather than maintain the two state-owned broadcasters.

Answer: a new National Media Trust

Reuters Institute nearly puts its finger on it

The new Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report (What’s Happening To Our News) is not a great read but it does reinforce the idea that the web is a threat to serious journalism. I think the main point is that more and more people will consume news in an arena which can’t yet monetise their eyeballs. The news media has migrated to the web because it didn’t dare not do so, and long before it had any way of earning fresh money from the switch.

Answer: a new National Media Trust

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The two broadcast regulators are due to tell us what they think the future is for serious broadcasting: Ofcom delivers its Public Service Broadcasting review on 21 January and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport its Digital Britain report on 26 January.

Here’s my pitch.

I used to think that we needed a National Trust of the Airwaves to get broadcasting out of the state’s hands. That was one possibility I floated in “Scrap the BBC!”, written for the Social Affairs Unit in 2007. Now, I think I was too timid, as usual.

Actually, we need a National Media Trust which could fund any media, anywhere. This is especially necessary for serious journalism

The reason is that the platforms for journalism have problems across the board. Most obviously the BBC is hogging however many billions of “public” money (yours). Channel 4 is openly begging for a share of it. All the commercial channels fear for their advertising revenues and say it’s the good stuff will go first. Everyone is eyeing the web and testing it out in the face of a massive BBC presence.

That’s the electrics. Print is in a bad way, too. The recession hits their advertising and the availablility of suitable millionaires (the presses’ old standy). The quality press (especially the Telegraph) is dumbing down.

The broadcasters will huff and puff, but will have to shrink their output. That won’t matter much. There’s too much repetitive, formulaic stuff anyway.

The print media likewise will shrink: we will presumably lose titles. The world without the Independent (say) would not be a much worse place.

But the reason we need not mourn the demise of a few channels or titles is that we can imagine and institute much better ways of delivering media.

It’s important to remember that it is journalism that matters, not which platform or even employer it has.

The web and satellite and cable stand ready to broadcast any of the material which the public wants but which existing channels and printing presses don’t.

We should be thinking of funding reporters, commentators – or anything else we fancy – in quite different ways.

I imagine a National Media Trust funding particular aspects of the existing wire services, so they can cover issues and territories which are under-represented. The NMT could fund columnists or bloggers. It could fund micro-TV channels to do great interviews. (If Clive James can do it, so can others, with a wider agenda.)

The existing institutions and firms (and even the regulators) may well fight this proposal. They would wouldn’t they? They are stuffed with overpaid people who have made careers out of the existing system, and they might well not thrive in a leaner environment.

They are defending bailiwicks, not output.

It’s just an idea. But let’s imagine 10 million people subscribing £150 a year to ensure that the UK remains a world leader in information, debate and drama. I know, it’s only £1.5bn. But it would be a transformative £1.5bn.

Where would the money come from? Scrap the TV licence fee, and it’s right there – without the poor having to divvy up anything.

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Just to be clear. I am no expert. I read the broadsheets and take in grown-up television and listen to bits of Radio 4 and that’s about it.

Also to be clear, I am fairly sure that Israel has not been very clever in its use of the periods of relative peace in recent years. It seems reasonable to wonder why mildly good Palestinian behaviour was not rewarded by concessions designed to encourage this good stuff.

What’s more, there is clearly something to be said for Hamas and Hizbullah as “social actors“. That much seems sound in the case made by Jeremy Greenstock (The Today Programme, 12 January 2009, 8.34am) and William Sieghart (his colleague in Forward Thinking). But I get the feeling these two men are bending over backwards in their desire to be useful. They are the “soft cop” to Tony Blair’s “hard cop”.

I do have prejudices here. Obviously, the Palestinians have an enormously strong historic grievance. Equally, it seems clear that at least throughout my adulthood the Palestinians have been the victim of the liberal support which encourages victimhood, dissidence and violent resistance of the sort which characterised the IRA.

Of course it is not all clear the degree to which the zeitgeist drove Palestinian politics. And, in the post-Arafat world, modern Islamism is presumably an enormous and relatively fresh factor. But as outsiders discuss which side we support, these narratives matter a great deal, and quite possibly more than they do on the ground.

My fundamental belief is that Israel is capable of rational, decent politics and of rational, decent relations with the Palestinians. It is also, for all sorts of reasons, a very fierce enemy. One prods Israel at one’s peril.

Put this all together and I find myself strongly prejudiced in favour of Israel because I think that if it got what it is asking for, it could become an excellent neighbour instead of being a very stroppy one. In short, given sustained peace, Israeli’s moderates could much better control its hotheads and fundamentalists.

The IRA precedent is telling. It is important to see that the IRA has utterly failed in its core rhetorical mission: to force Irish unity. Everyone could have told them throughout the last forty years that this would be so. Everyone told the Republicans that their Northern Irish lives could readily be made pleasant after years of abuse, once they stopped the killing. The blood the IRA shed and caused to be shed was wasted, even in the terms of its own goals.

It is very, very unlikely that Israel will disappear. To that extent Hamas are wasting their breath and blood. If what really matters to Hamas is a civilised life for the citizens of Palestine, then they need to get a decent two-state solution. Now of course it doesn’t at all matter that Hamas have some redundant rhetoric, and they’re welcome to it. Political movements (the IRA, the Labour Party in the UK to name but two) cling to very large claims long after they’ve ceased to have relevance. To get a decent two-state solution, Hamas and others only have to stop physically wounding Israel; they could hang on to talking nonsense for quite a while longer .

You may say that Israel has been very foolish in enraging Hamas and the “Arab World” (that very diverse entity) with its recent assault or “war” on Gaza. Tactically and strategically and politically, Israel’s actions may indeed have been unwise. But they were fairly predictable. I have heard no argument which suggests that it would have been impossible for Hamas simply to have given up violence and instantly to see the risk of Israeli assault taken away. To that extent I think it is fair to say Hamas has willed this assault, and even the mistakes which Israeli may have made in conducting it.

In this, there are close IRA parallels. I strongly believe that the IRA leadership knew perfectly well the hell it was unleashing in the 1960s and they knew perfectly well the likely response of the British state. Terrorists thrive on their enemies’ cock-ups.

I have no idea the degree to which Palestinian leaders are played by Iran or Syria or anyone else. It seems likely that The Israel Project is accurate in its damning evidence. I incline to the view that much of the pain in Iraq and anywhere else in the Middle East stems from the rivalries between states, not merely the “popular movements” which are variously manipulated by governments.

I don’t say that Israel is being clever in its behaviour, but I do believe it is the party which is being provoked into violence, and probably on purpose. I believe that even supposing it sometimes fails its own high standards, its cause and much of its behaviour is righteous.

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