This is a guest post from Nick Booth of The Conservative Woman
Broadcasting trade papers are reporting that the BBC has brought in mandatory carbon footprint rules. All independent programme makers will now have to log the carbon footprint of their output, using a calculation tool pioneered during the production of Eastenders by BBC Studios.
So, if you’re an independent programme maker for the BBC, you have to square things with Albert.
One independent producer in the report complains about “yet more paperwork”, which will eat into the budget of companies that pay their staff peanuts.
However, she should rest assured that there will always be loopholes and exemptions. In contrast to the runners, the management of production companies are always obscenely well rewarded. The broadcasting industry, which has a polarised class system that’s the envy of the Third World, will continue to be full of rich white people who claim to be socialists.
Sustainability is an equally moveable moral feast. As with many directives some of the variables, listed here, are open to interpretation. ‘Source locally’, for example, could be interpreted to mean ‘only recruit your friends’.
Examine the explanation given by BBC sustainability manager Richard Smith, the father of Albert. Just as sustainability has three pillars, so is there a divine trinity of objectives in this exercise he says. That is, to understand the carbon impact of TV, raise awareness and engage people.
The key one is ‘engaging people’.
We all know the BBC is a people business. Which is another way of saying the right people. Only a select few good left-wing people are hired by our national broadcaster. It’s a closed society – the Poser Nostra – where recruits are only inducted if they are the type of person you’d like to go on a pussy hat march with or have at your dinner party.
However, since you cannot openly discriminate these days – good grief, has the weapon of political correctness fallen into the wrong hands? A subtler system is needed.
How? There’s a clue in the name. Albert. As in Albert Square, the fictional home of EastEnders. What did real Cockneys do to exclude outsiders? They devised their own language, rhyming slang. Just as diversity officers are really about division, so is there a hidden language agenda behind sustainability. It’s not about saving the planet. Much of the advice given is contradictory. One minute we’re all being instructed not to burn fossil fuels – and who could argue with that one? – but then we are told there are exceptions. Wood burning is good, for special secret reasons. So is diesel, despite the fact that it damages more children than a packet of Gary Lineker’s favourite crispy carcinogens.
These rulings don’t make any sense.
Common sense, surely, would tell you not to waste public money. An example given on the Albert website tells how the makers of Casualty saved £30,000 off the electricity bill. Which begs the question: what on earth were they doing before? It turns out they saved that money simply by not using needlessly powerful lights to burn public money. Imagine that! Whatever will they think of next? Not splurging on taxis? Not decamping to Brazil for a five second soundbite when that ‘expert’ could be interviews on Skype? If producers need to be told that, there’s something seriously wrong.
Still, will this new discipline lead to greater creativity and quality of output?
Could we expect an original storyline, perhaps, which dares to stray from politically correct orthodoxy and holds up a mirror to society as it really is? No, that would be too exhausting and energy intensive. It probably goes against other social engineering and activist policies. Better to recycle old prejudices from the usual ‘locally sourced’ members of the Condescentii.
I suspect we all love the BBC and want it preserved. We all remember what it was like and the Reithian values it once represented. These days, it’s about common purpose cliques who use their power to speak over the truth. I can see why people don’t think it’s sustainable and would gladly burn it down. But surely, we don’t want a bonfire of the insanities. Sorry, I slipped into sustainability slang there.
