It must be ten years now since I risked life and limb to brave the Cresta Run, go fox hunting and be driven round a racetrack by Lord Brocket in a Ferrari for a Channel 4 documentary on the British Upper Class. In the heady few minutes following its first transmission I thought it would mark the beginning of a glorious TV career. But TV never happened for me and oftentimes since I’ve wondered why.
The short and obvious answer is that I’m crap — which may be true, but that never stopped a thousand and one other TV C-listers you could name. What I think it really boils down to is something far more insidious and pernicious: the institutional bias right across the board against almost anyone of a vaguely right-wing persuasion.
I say ‘almost’ for, yes, there are exceptions. Niall Ferguson is allowed leeway by dint of being able to look so fetching in a blue open-necked shirt; David Starkey is granted occasional licence, too, just so long as he accepts that he’s only really there to play the token conservative Widow Twankey; Andrew Neil survives by maintaining a devious inscrutability; and so on.
When, though, was the last time you saw Simon Heffer presenting a red-meat documentary on the scrounging underclass; or Allister Heath doing a brutal takedown of QE; or Paul ‘Guido Fawkes’ Staines investigating the tangled ‘green’ business interests of Tim Yeo MP and Lord Deben; or me, doing an exposé of Big Wind?
You didn’t and you likely never will.
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