I can't think offhand of any other business that so loathes its own customers and paymasters as the BBC. Last night's documentary portrayed the English as backward simpletons, obsessed with status whereas foreigners were portrayed as hard working sophisticates. For example it showed a clip of seemingly affluent German shoppers and marvelled that in the early seventies Germany was so successful that most people had bank accounts. Well forgive me, but my parents had bank accounts too in the 60s and 70s. Yes, a postman and his school secretary wife in England with a bank account!
The BBC even managed to sneer at people in the early seventies for buying their own homes. Of course it was just a status symbol, because we are obsessed with class and status in this country aren't we? In reality all the people I know who have bought their own homes did so because rent is dead money and at the end of twenty five years, or whatever, you have nothing to show for it and pay rent until you die. But of course that doesn't fit with the BBC's small minded, patronising view of its funders.
The only time the presenter showed any kind of admiration was when it came to the miners' strike. Oh my, he entered the hall of the NUM HQ in Barnsley, walls draped with workers' banners, and talked in hushed tones, obviously in awe within this great cathedral of the working classes. Typifies the BBC nicely.
Of course holidays popped up and it explained how British people went to Benidorm because you could buy pie and chips, fish and chips and English beer. The British aren't interested in foreign culture you see, not like those broadminded and cultured Europeans. What the 'historian' making this simplistic tripe didn't mention, as the screen was filled with film of bars in Benidorm, was that for every British bar/restaurant you saw there was also a German bar/restaurant advertising German beer, bratwurst and schnitzel. But that doesn't fit with the BBC's lazy stereotype of us English primitives does it?
Yet again, I went to Spain with may parents as a little lad in 1968 and remember eating paella and other Spanish food but never a steak and kidney pie. Indeed we sampled Spanish culture in such an extreme way that we even went to a bullfight. Admittedly we left after the first bull was slaughtered, my mum and sister in tears. I'll be honest here, I now enjoy a bullfight but if I didn't I wouldn't campaign against bullfighting, it's not up to us foreigners to tell the Spanish what to do. Although I do hope they've stopped dropping donkeys from church towers.
I always laugh at the politically correct hatred of places like Benidorm. Personally I'm not a lover of pie and chips when I'm abroad, but I don't have a problem with people who prefer to go away for a holiday in the sun and prefer to eat and drink what they would at home. Each to his own in my view, but the politically correct seem to think those who don't like paella and calamare are cultural peasants.
Then comes the strange contradiction. The politically correct love places like Rusholme in Manchester and Brick Lane in London. They love Chinatown in Manchester and London. To be consistent surely the politically correct should be disgusted that all these immigrants come here and turn whole tracts of our cities into alien places. Surely they should start eating steak and kidney pie washed down with pints of bitter.
But I suppose as far as the politically correct, British loathing BBC is concerned it's anything to have a pop. This documentary was lazy, stereotypical and added nothing to any real debate about the cultural or political events of the early seventies. Oh for the day the BBC is got rid of.
