The good and the bad

These are difficult times for the BBC. The fine for the Blue Peter phone-in fraud was, in its way, as big a shock as the famous vandalising of its garden. The silly Crowngate affair in which what they claimed was the Queen staging an angry walk-out turned out to be her staging an angry walk-in. And some ratings have been very poor. The drama True, Dare, Kiss broadcast last week got a miserable 3.2 million viewers, one of the smallest ever Thursday peak-time audiences on BBC1. Over on BBC2, Alastair Campbell’s diaries rose from 1.3 million viewers on Wednesday to a hardly impressive 1.5. It all implies a nervous institution that doesn’t know where to turn: first Campbell uses exaggeration, misinformation and bluster to get the chairman and the director-general dismissed, then he receives a reported £300,000 for the right to broadcast his diary. And what is their reward for this weird and perverse loyalty? Scarcely more than 2 per cent of the population even bothers to watch.