Meggies in Exile

The emergence, after a notable delay, of the thoughts of Gary Lineker on the hate marches, has made me reflect on the BBC, the British tv industry in general, and what the public don’t see. I worked on a few BBC shows, but my tv scripting career was mostly with ITV or with independent production companies. The soaps - when I was there, a long time ago, 90s to the early 00s - were staffed with pretty ordinary (in a good sense) people. In other areas, there was a general rumble of the usual pretend-left semi-posh cultural rubbish. I usually succeeded in ignoring it and in the words of script legend Terry Nation ‘take the money and fly like a thief’. But there were moments when this was hard, and Lineker reminded me of them. I’m not going to name names, and even if I did there’d be almost none that anyone would recognise. But I did hear an awful lot of things that would make your hair stand on end. And remember this was before the Age Of Stupid really kicked off c.2013. A lot of it was the usual pseudo-left bluff drivel that anyone who knows this class will be familiar with, yes. A thinly veiled loathing of anybody and anything not what they think is ‘left-wing’, and of the working class in general; an assumption that NGOs, activists, campaigning charities etc are always uncomplicatedly ‘good’; moral equivalence, at least when it suits them, etc. Their reaction to the Tories returning to power in 2010 and to the result of the EU Referendum in 2016 was exactly what you’d expect - a lot of hysterics, tears and melodrama. These people really, really hate their viewers. But. I also remember hearing how Israel ‘should be nuked’; 9/11 was ‘obviously an inside job by the Mossad’; the worst anti-Semitic rant I’ve ever heard in real life while I was standing there was from an actor (nobody famous) between takes on the set of a BBC show. There’s more, but that’s enough. I can only imagine how this has got worse in the years since, the last decade of ‘social justice activism’ and ‘anti-racism’, when the BBC fell over themselves to slur the Jewish targets of racial hatred, and now happily repeat Hamas propaganda like homegrown HawHaws. So Lineker isn’t like he is ‘out of a vacuum’, as it were.