I grew up in a BBC family in London. Now I work in the media studies department at NYU. So I know the kind of piece I’m expected to write here—self-deprecating about the US media landscape, wistful about the fading glories of the BBC, concluding with a call to change the BBC while defending it. And that was my first draft. But precisely because the BBC was so important to me, I can’t leave it at that.
After forty years of market-dominated governance from Labour and Tory alike, the role of the ‘left’ has become, as David Graeber has insightfully described, to defend bureaucracy. In the United States, it’s Social Security, Medicare and Roe vs. Wade. In the case of Britain, it’s the NHS and the BBC. As a political strategy, it’s not going so well. I watch the BBC programmes still aimed at people like me in the age of Ant and Dec with pleasure, but it’s time to think past always defending bureaucracies, even ones that make Dr Who.
What worries me is not just the renewed Thatcherism of the current government, much as I oppose all its works, but what I want to call Savile-ism, after the sexual predator who assaulted at least 117 people on BBC premises. Thatcherism saw itself as an attack on the London-based establishment, including the BBC. Savile was a friend and supporter of Mrs Thatcher and on the first page of his 1974 autobiography declared that he liked to ‘pee on the establishment’. The Thatcherite credo ‘there is no such thing as society’ enabled an odd crossover of celebrities and politicians to treat people as prey.
