Why does the BBC care so much more about diversity than complaints over sex and violence?

The BBC has always prided itself on fairness. Even-handed neutrality is required of reporters and political commentators.

That’s why the term ‘Reithian values’ has become a byword for the finest public service broadcasting, because the first director-general, John Reith, believed the BBC’s role was to ‘inform, educate and entertain’.

Please note, he did not intend the great institution — which we all pay for and therefore have a stake in — to be an agent of change, still less revolution. Social engineering has never been a part of its charter.

So what are those of us who care deeply about the BBC to make of the bizarre propaganda (disguised as idealism) uttered by the BBC’s Head of Diversity, Tunde Ogungbesan?

A survey of BBC staff has revealed that 417 of them are transgender — with 11 per cent identifying broadly as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

This compares with only 2 per cent in the UK population as a whole. But it’s not enough for Mr Ogungbesan.

Tunde Ogungbesan (pictured) says he does not regard the BBC as diverse enough, claiming more lesbians are needed

He says he does not regard the BBC as diverse enough, claiming more lesbians are needed — presumably to make up one of the absurd quotas that seem to rule modern life. (Do they actually hire on talent alone, or do you have to tick the right sexual box to get a job these days?)

Mr Ogungbesan says that —like a wannabe on the X Factor talent show — the BBC is on a ‘journey’, presumably to knock the traditional and therefore unprogressive opinions of most viewers into shape.

According to the Head of Diversity: ‘Our goal is to create a culture where everyone feels they can bring their best work and begin to change the thought processes and ways people behave and broadcast their programmes.’

So we get the message loud and clear that he is very interested in promoting the interests of gay and trans people on screen and off.

Presumably that also means that if a transsexual viewer, for example, wrote to say that coverage of a trans issue had offended them, the BBC would take it deadly seriously.

But what if a viewer writes with a serious, but not-at-all fashionable, concern about sex, violence or bad language before the watershed?

Well, I’ll tell you a story which I believe represents a classic example of how the national broadcaster can view the legitimate concerns of licence-payers. 

A while ago, I was talking to my excellent optician, Mike Killpartrick, whose business has been in the centre of Bath for decades.

He told me how he was driven to distraction when he attempted to complain to the BBC about an explicit rape storyline in EastEnders — which he judged to be typical of the ‘persistent and pernicious adult material’ we have all been forced to take for granted in programming.

A survey of BBC staff has revealed that 417 of them are transgender — with 11 per cent identifying broadly as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender

He wrote to the Complaints Department — and three weeks later received a bland, faintly patronising reply, telling him that his letter had been passed to ‘Audience Feedback Report’, where it would be seen by ‘senior managers and the EastEnders production team’.

Waiting for a further response, Mr Killpartrick wrote to his MP, saying that as a grandfather he was really worried about this stuff.

Hearing nothing from the BBC, he wrote again, only to receive yet another reply fobbing him off.

Undaunted, this persistent man wrote again (now three months after his first letter), and was told he had to contact ‘Stage 2 of the complaints unit, the BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit’. He did so. More letters followed — which I have seen — with this responsible viewer being dismissed with a veneer of politeness at every stage.

After another apparatchik (‘the Complaints Adviser’) dealt with him, he was finally informed — six months after his first letter — that his complaint would not be upheld.

He got no joy from the media watchdog Ofcom either — even though the question (which he went on to pose to the Secretary for Culture, Media and Sport) was simple: ‘Should storylines involving sex, violence, rape and ‘rough but consensual foreplay’ [a quote from the programme] be broadcast before the watershed?’

To date, nobody has given Mike Killpartrick a satisfactory answer. In my view, he was treated with contempt.

Eventually he gave up on the issue — how long can you spend hammering on a closed door?

Like so many viewers, he’s concluded that the BBC does not wish to listen to people like him — because it is run by people who believe that bad language and sex are a valid part of real life, that only puritans are bothered about it, and complaining is as stupid and irrelevant today as Mary Whitehouse’s concerns were in the Seventies.

Now, make no mistake, this little story has everything to do with the ‘journey’ Tunde Ogungbesan says the BBC is on.

But why is our national broadcaster obsessed with social and sexual quotas when there is apparently so little weight given to the representation of those who feel alienated by very modern mores and simply want to be heard?

What about the ‘thought processes’ of the people who hate screaming violence in storylines of soaps, who detest foul language and vicious (but oh-so ‘right-on’) prejudice in the scripts of Left-wing comedians, and are seriously disturbed by the way sex permeates so much that is on our screens?

The fact is the traditional values of Middle England are all-but ignored while the ultra-modern obsessions of the liberal elite are slavishly indulged. Fashionable ideas discussed in London by BBC executives and their friends are dished out to the rest of us, whether we like it or not.

The Government says the BBC should make us aware of ‘different cultures and alternative viewpoints, through content that reflects the lives of other people and other communities within the UK’.

That’s all well and good, but Mike Killpartrick and I might ask: what about our community?

Think about the figures again. The BBC has 417 transgender staff, and 11 per cent LGBT staff — and yet still seems to go out of its way to recruit more.

Why on earth has the BBC — thanks to its Charter renewal — been given a target of having eight per cent of its staff LGBT (a level which this survey suggests it has already reached) when the official LGBT population of Britain is much lower? 

This agenda seems to be consuming the entire British Broadcasting Corporation and driving its desire to change ‘thought processes’ and to shape its programmes accordingly.

Yet those who question politically correct fashions and the social engineering agenda of people such as the BBC’s Head of Diversity are sneered at and dismissed.

Is this fair? Is this neutral? Of course not.

Please pay attention to us, too! Because the world we wish our children and grandchildren to inherit is being changed irrevocably by those with a rather different mindset to the silent majority — who just happen to pay the wages of the activists at the BBC.

The ‘journey’ of people such as Mr Ogungbesan has no map, and leads we know not where.

 

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