During the world cup final, the BBC launched their new advert, a remake of the 1985 John Cleese licence fee ad, which in turned played on the immortal “What have the Romans ever done for us” scene from the 1979 film Life of Brian.
The advert itself is nostalgic and prettily made but oddly clunky, as if someone’s only brief was “awkward British man vibes”. It is however, unintentionally revealing.
The original, with its roots in Life of Brian, represented a BBC that no longer exists. In fact, increasingly, it has become the opposite. The institution sinks further almost daily into group think and dogma that undermines journalistic integrity, resulting in reporting that’s key feature seems to be fear and favour. This is the very group think and dogma that Life of Brian was the antithesis of. The result is at best a bit sad, and at worst a dramatic piece of accidental self-parody.
Life of Brian was a masterpiece of a specific kind of fearless British satire. It represented intellectual bravery. It mocked ideological tribalism and dogma; “Cast off the shoes! Follow the gourd!” and “the only people we hate more than the romans are the f***ing Judean people’s front – splitters” are timeless because we all know exactly the kinds of people they were poking fun at, and it wasn’t Christians.
The joke at the heart of “what have the romans ever done for us” was the fractious and tribal left wing and student union political discourse of the 1970’s. To use that specific joke as a backdrop to BBC excellence is a questionable choice, to say the least.
Life of Brian is, of course, a film about a proudly Jewish man in roman-occupied Judea:
“I’m not a Roman, mum! I’m a kike, a yid, a heebie, a hook-nose! I’m kosher, mum! I’m a Red Sea pedestrian, and proud of it!”
Judea, however, is a word the BBC tries not to use these days, in favour of the Jordanian term The West Bank, applied during the Jordanian occupation of Judea and Samaria between 1948 and 1967. They also continuously erase Jewish history in the region. Ironically, most of the BBC’s reporting from Israel and the Palestinian Territories in recent years gives us a powerful example of the ideological capture lowering standards at the national broadcaster.
What has the BBC done for us? Well, if you’re sitting comfortably, I’ll tell you.
The BBC infamously made a documentary starring the son of a Hamas official that was tantamount to a Hamas propaganda film, with licence fees payers’ money. That one you heard about, but did you know that they also used an October 7 atrocity denier to make a documentary about a maternity hospital in Bethlehem?
The reporting of the al Ahli hospital blast in October 2023 has also been roundly lambasted, after the BBC blamed Israel, based on Hamas claims, for the deaths of “hundreds” of people, after an Islamic Jihad rocket misfired and hit the hospital.
Did you also know however that the initial misreporting of that incident is still up, and that anyone googling the incident will find it, and as journalistic malpractice becomes the historic record Israel will remain accused of a massacre that never was.
An explosive CAMERA report revealed that BBC Arabic has:
given a platform to murderous terrorists, presented apologists for terror as independent ‘experts’, allowed extreme views to go unchallenged in interviews and echoed the language of Hamas. It has subjected Israeli guests to biased and hostile questioning, downplayed attacks on Israelis and failed to swiftly remove antisemitic comments posted online.
and:
BBC Arabic staff who posted in support of the barbaric rape, murder and kidnap of innocent men, women and children on 7 October 2023 continue to work for the organisation.
BBC coverage of the Middle East conflict consistently downplays the agency, responsibility and strategies of terrorists, appearing to view them as less capable and complex than Israelis. This infantilising, frankly orientalist view leads to them being recruited into the propaganda campaigns of organisations such as Hamas, and complicity in Human shield strategies which only work as long as the media plays along.
The accidental ironies continue as the final shot of the advert shows Louis Theroux posing with a huge switch, saying this could all not exist, if we want. The intended message was, pay your licence fee or lose the BBC, but Louis Theroux represents an internal problem which is much more of a threat to the BBC than people not fully appreciating Eastenders and Radio 2.
The erosion of journalistic standards at the BBC due to a commitment to specific narratives over objective facts is an existential threat not only to BBC credibility but to the institution itself. YouGov Polling found that only 44% of Britons think the BBC in general is trustworthy, down from 81% trust in BBC journalists to tell the truth in 2003. For an organisation whose central mission is truth, accuracy and impartiality those numbers are a doomsday clock.
Theroux himself has epitomised this issue, with his platforming of Pascal Robinson-Foster from Bob Vylan after he led a baying mob of middle-class progressives in a chant of “Death to the IDF” at the exclusive playground that is Glastonbury, and again with his documentary “The Settlers” which was roundly criticised with all the repeating patterns of BBC Middle East coverage. Freezing Israeli victimhood in time:
After invoking October 7 as his reason for making the film, Theroux barely mentions it again. – Anita Singh
Painting Palestinians as purely reactive:
Firstly, Theroux says that violence committed by settlers is often framed by them as a reaction to Palestinian violence, which he claims is “much less frequent” than the former. But this is false. Palestinian attacks against Israelis are far more common than the inverse. – The Telegraph
It is a principle of presenting programmes like this to have done at least a modicum of research on the subject, in this case the long history of Jews in Hebron, the 29 massacre etc not to mislead an audience to suppose they suddenly arrived in 1968! – Simon Schama
Erasure of modern political context:
“there is plenty of other context missing from Theroux’s 61-minute film too. The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine doesn’t even get a mention, the 1948 Jordanian invasion and occupation of Judea and Samaria is completely ignored and no context regarding the Six Day War is provided… Similarly, during his visit to Hebron Theroux makes no effort to explain the twenty-eight-year-old agreements between Israel and the PLO which are the context to the repeatedly filmed checkpoints and his puerile questions to the soldiers manning them.” – Hadar Sela at CAMERA
And the avoidance of any Palestinian that might say something self-incriminating:
Theroux managed to find plenty of reasonable Palestinians. Indeed, they are the only kind of Palestinians featured. If your only exposure to the conflict was this documentary, you might wonder how Israel ever provoked such a beatifically peaceful people to raise their voices let alone blow-up buses and gun down festival-goers. – Stephen Daisley
To use a man like Theroux whose work epitomises the self-cannibalism of BBC journalistic standards to wag a finger at licence fee payers demonstrates an alarming lack of self-awareness.
The advert that was intended as a tender and nostalgic pull at the British heart accidentally created a perfect microcosm of everything that’s currently going wrong at the BBC. A once well-respected, courageous institution that has lost its way, using Monty Python to scold the British public while it confidently allows the very zealotry John Cleese once mocked to hollow out its values. The result is a piece of self-satire not even Python could have scripted.