Under the radar

Evan Davis clearly has a great sense of humour. You can tell because on his Twitter profile it states: ‘These are only my views — the BBC has no views.’ Yeah, nice one, Evan. Very pert. Very dry.

In fact, of course, the BBC has a view on everything. Israelis? The Nazis taught them everything they know. Palestinians? The human equivalent of those darling little kittens with different-coloured eyes who tumble out of wicker baskets on charming calendars. Man Made Global Warming? A bigger threat than the Black Death, the 1918/19 Flu Pandemic, second world war, Ebola and Armageddon combined. Bankers? Like the SS Das Reich at Oradour, only without their milk of human kindness. Conservatives? Ditto. Businessmen? Like a sort of cross between Nosferatu, Dracula, and the Master from Salem’s Lot but with much longer, more vicious fangs, a greater capacity for blood and a tendency to prey on really sweet blond children while they’re at prayer.

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It’s the BBC’s position on business, capitalism generally, which had me so puzzled by Davis’s three-part series Made in Britain. How on earth, I Tweeted to him afterwards, did he manage to sneak under the BBC’s radar such an economically lucid and subversively pro-business thesis? And I wasn’t just angling for a Retweet to his 35,000-plus Twitter following. I meant it: what Davis had done was the equivalent of Soviet-era Pravda running a feature on why five-year plans for tractor production were a seriously bad idea and maybe we should think about free markets for a change…

I caught the final episode (which poured scorn on the old leftist canard about Margaret Thatcher having destroyed Britain’s ‘manufacturing base’ — as if somehow we’d all be so much better off if we still had an ailing shipbuilding industry) just after my ten-day jaunt to the Land of the Free, so I was in an especially anti-BBC mood.