BBC CONTINUES TO FALL APART.

What is it about politicians that makes them unable to be honest and forthright about just about anything ?

 

Today, an admittedly ex-politician though a very senior one, tried his damnedest to avoid answering questions about the disgusting behaviour of a former BBC presenter, Stuart Hall. We know, because he's admitted it, that Hall was a serial abuser of young girls in days gone by and it's now suggested, not unreasonably, that other BBC staff must have known what was going on; it's even been suggested that some may have helped to facilitate Hall's behaviour.

 

Under questioning from Jeremy Vine, not exactly a rotweiler at the job, Patten looked so uncomfortable that one has to wonder how he's ever held down a 'top job'. As chairman of the Beeb, his standard response was that the claims were appalling and and would be addressed by Dame Janet Smith's ongoing enquiry; Dame Janet is, apparently, reviewing the BBC's culture and practices following the Saville scandal.

 

Patten played the typical politician, saying nothing that could be used against him; he said nothing definite about anything, leaving everything to Dame Janet and her enquiry. This is what used to be referred to as 'kicking a problem into the long grass'; when Dame Janet's enquiry will eventually report is anyone's guess and to what extent it will have considered, or even been able to consider, the historic issues of abuse at the BBC is in the air.

 

The BBC is an organisation which was once the true envy of the world, being the one great broadcaster which spread news around the globe in an entirely apolitical way. Today it's an inward looking, left-leaning organisation which has been found to have fallen very short of any standards of decency over a protracted period. The manner in which it embraced the culture of the 1960s and 1970s has caused it to become a hotbed of the most shocking and disgusting excesses of those periods, with so many involved that the behaviour of a few was simply ignored by everyone else. Today, its one priority is to try to rescue itself from its failings and it will obfuscate and dissemble for all it's worth to that end.

 

Saville and Hall are almost certainly the tip of a very large iceberg. Remembering the way in which various presenters of programmes such as 'Top of the Pops' habitually surrounded themselves with hordes of young girls is, itself, worrying; that Hall was not connected with this programme suggests that the evil was spread much more widely, and independent television is unlikely to be innocent either.

 

How many more revelations will there be ?