The BBC is trapped in its own smug bubble

Its employees are all like-minded, and invariably deny any left-liberal bias — as does David Hendry, which devalues his otherwise well-researched history

From magazine issue: 29 January 2022

The BBC war correspondent Frank Gillard in early 1944 during a mock battle to rehearse coverage of the D-Day landings for radio. [Getty Images]

issue 29 January 2022

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Rod Liddle

The BBC is trapped in its own smug bubble
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An incalculable number of trees have been hewn down recently in order to provide paper for people writing lengthy, largely admiring books about the BBC. There have been at least five since Charlotte Higgins’s eloquent but slightly eccentric study This New Noise in 2018, including The War Against the BBC by Patrick Barwise and Peter York and The BBC: Myth of a Public Service by Tom Mills. I suppose it would be both cruel and facile to suggest that ending the licence fee might turn out to be the UK’s greatest contribution to reducing global warming.

David Hendy’s offering is subtitled ‘A People’s History’, but I have no idea what that means exactly. Luckily for Hendy, it was published in the week that the government announced a freezing of the licence fee, together with some vaguely baleful threats about what might happen to this anachronistic tax a few years down the line — thus placing the BBC once again at the centre of the national political debate.