“You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!” That was the Italian Job line the exculpatory memoirist Sarah Vine famously quoted to her poorly rendered husband, the gak Pogle Michael Gove, when they woke up on the morning after the Brexit referendum. Instead of just unsettling the political power balance as intended, the Pogle and his human killdozer, Boris Johnson, had accidentally won Brexit and condemned the country to an irreversible downward economic spiral of decreased prosperity, the loss of border control and international influence, and a series of self-justifying articles by Sarah Vine promoting her self-pitying memoirs about how all her clever Remain friends now hate her. Ooops! Dum-de-dum-de-dum.
I wonder if a similar thought crossed the mind of the double-agent BBC non-executive director Robbie Gibb, when he woke up in his metaphorical bed with his co-conspirator, the lobbyist Michael Prescott, last weekend. Ooops! Their attempt to blow the doors off the BBC by weaponising a previously dismissed anti-BBC report by History Reclaimed – yet another opaquely funded Tufton Street thinktank – and the bad editing of a Donald Trump speech, had been successful. (If only the BBC had just generated an AI video of Trump saying whatever they wanted him to, like Trump himself does.)
But Gibb’s and Prescott’s plotting has also resulted in the president’s first attempt to use spurious legal processes and Mafia-style protection-racket talk to reach beyond silencing American news services and into stifling comment abroad. And all this on the basis that the BBC has somehow caused reputational damage to the two-eared president who, let’s not forget, is a fraudster, bible mis-handler, pussy-grabber, inexpert tanning enthusiast and adjudicated sex offender.
Was that what they wanted? Trump is a golem which, once awakened by having a KFC Family Bucket tipped into its open mouth, cannot be controlled, and Gibb, Prescott and their co-conspirators at the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s worst newspaper, have let him loose on British media. Like a carrion crow, or me drunk in Doncaster city centre at 2am on a Tuesday night, Trump cares not upon what meat he feeds. One day, if we ever see the full extent of the Epstein files, or Trump’s misdeeds morph from the alleged to the actual so much that even the Daily Telegraph is obliged to censure him, he may even lash out at that august organ of truth and decency.
If Trump does win his case, the penniless BBC will be forced to cede control of its infrastructure and archives, including two John Peel sessions by the actor Kevin Eldon’s otherwise unrecorded punk band Virginia Doesn’t, to the president. We could face the very real threat of Trump getting to choose the next Dr Who. Trump’s time lord is unlikely to be black or transgender or even female, but Tommy Robinson must surely be in with a shot at the title.
Gibb, meanwhile, a kind of malevolent boiled egg, has waged a covert war against the BBC from within its walls since being appointed to the board in 2021 by the Conservative adviser Dougie Smith. (By night Smith ran Fever Parties, an exclusive service designed to connect upper-class swingers with other upper-class swingers, to allow them to have sex with high-end strangers without the risk of getting engine grease, chip fat or sawdust on their exclusive genitals. Think of it as the Tory party, but with edible strawberry flavoured lube. This experience will have served Smith well in working in Boris Johnson’s government, which was the definition of a clusterfuck. But that’s another story.)
Trump is a golem which, once awakened by having a KFC Family Bucket tipped into its open mouth, cannot be controlled
The odd couple have been friends since their Brideshead days in the Federation of Conservative Students. The society remains most famous for manufacturing stickers reading “Hang Nelson Mandela” in 1985, a year after the release of the Special AKA’s Free Nelson Mandela. Geddit? There is no suggestion that Gibb or Smith attached any of these stickers, for example, to their ties, unlike the former Conservative adviser David Hoile, who is now a public affairs consultant specialising in African affairs, though today his take on the continent’s major issues is presumably more nuanced.
Immediately before joining the horribly biased BBC, Gibb was instrumental in setting up GB News, which was fined £100,000 for breaching due impartiality rules last February. But fines don’t matter to GB News’s billionaire business backers, who have priced them in as a cheap way to continue spreading viral clips of largely uncensored rightwing propaganda. GB News even has a show hosted by Nigel Farage, a sitting MP, though apparently this is allowed as Nigel Farage’s Fist of Fun constitutes “entertainment” and not “news”, which is news for anyone who doesn’t find Farage entertaining. Did Boogie Down Productions’ lead rapper KRS-One coin the phrase “Edutainment” in 1990 only to see the concept degraded by Nigel Farage in this way?
Hopefully, Gibb will investigate the standards of his own channel as rigorously as he did the BBC, whose board he still, inexplicably, squats on, like a toad made of farts. Because when it comes to criticising anyone for broadcasting standards, Gibb not only doesn’t have a leg to stand on, but it’s not even possible for him to balance on whatever metaphorical bloodied stumps have been left by the metaphorical removal of his legs. Or on his metaphorical torso if he hasn’t even got any metaphorical stumps. Maybe if he was placed in a bucket of sand he could at least remain vertical.
In the meantime, even BBC director general Tory Tim Davie was not rightwing enough for the BBC’s critics, and he has had to go. You cannot appease these people. So do not try. But who will want the poisoned political chalice of replacing Davie, or the risk of personal threats from an unhinged American president, and from the kind of social media bottom-feeders easily whipped into a frenzy by Farage? A page of photographs of potential future BBC director generals in Monday’s Guardian just looked like a conference speaker leaflet you see left on a table in a Premier Inn at 1am after the vending machine has run out of canned wine and the attendees of the Mechanically Reclaimed Meat marketing meeting have all gone to bed.
But hey, I’ll do it! I actually applied for the job of Director General Of The BBC in 2020, last time it was available, but no one even acknowledged receipt of my application, let alone offered me an interview. As a Bafta award-winning television programme maker I understand how edits work, and a simple Akira Kurosawa-style wipe in the Trump speech, rather than a seamless cut, would have conveyed the idea that time had passed between the clips rather than cementing the idea that it hadn’t. And as an Olivier award-winning theatre maker I understand that Trump’s threats are largely theatrical.
Friends confident of my victory are already asking me how I would fund the BBC, and it is true that the licence fee presents ethical problems. I would suggest that it is scrapped and replaced by levies paid to the BBC by Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Paramount, Disney and Sky, which frequently appropriate talents nurtured by the BBC – such as Charlie Brooker, James Corden and Fleabag – and pay them fees it would be inappropriate for the BBC to offer. Streamers and commercial services don’t like to broadcast the kind of necessary news that no one necessarily wants to watch, and algorithmically generated programming decisions will never give rise to genuinely mould-breaking programming such as the BBC sometimes stumbles into, just near facsimiles of the already-proven. For once, let the parasites feed the host.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours until the end of next year, including two weeks at London’s Alexandra Palace in February. Stewart also appears with Harry Hill in a benefit for orangutans at Leicester Square theatre, London, on 24 November