THE
BRITISH Broadcasting Corporation has flipped its lid. After weeks
of scrupulous impartiality throughout the general election campaign
- extending to even fiction programmes - it has seemingly sought
to let off steam through the medium of a new programme called Brasstacks.
This programme - billed in the Radio Times
as 'a new concept in broadcasting - is an insult to the public intelligence
and professional journalism. If the hitherto much-respected BBC
has any sensitivity left it will review the senior staff appointments
on Brasstacks.
Broadcast at peak viewing time on BBC2 on Tuesday
May 8, the first edition ran under the title 'It shouldn't happen
to a pig'. A Radio Times front cover drummed up viewers with
an appealing picture of a pig. Underneath, imitating the style and
format of the Government health warning on cigarette advertisements,
the following appeared: 'HEALTH WARNING: MEAT AND POULTRY MAY SERIOUSLY
AFFECT YOUR HEALTH': So before the nation's television sets were
even plugged in, the programme reeked of bias more strongly than
freshly agitated pig slurry.
The programme - purporting to 'take the lid off
Britain's factory farms ... animals that have to be given regular
doses of hormones and antibiotics ... the risk of transmitting disease
to the consumer ... just some by-products of intensive livestock
farming' - opened with a film which was largely accurate and fair.
This showed farms, abattoirs, vets at work, public health officers
at work, scene setting stuff. The programme producers, however,
obliviously anxious to keep emotions in a whipped up state, superimposed
the most sinister weird music on the film. Every-day scenes thus
appeared dangerous and brutal.
Then followed an appalling discussion session
between a studio panel of farming representatives and a former
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president
of the British Veterinary Association and a curious and totally
unrepresentative assembly of 'country folk' seated on straw bales
on a Kent organic farm.
The presenter, Eric Robson, did the absolute minimum
to prevent the studio panel tearing him apart. He would put a loaded
point to them and then, barely listening to what they replied, swing
round to a screen showing the 'country folk' shivering down in Kent.
Whereupon a trendy biochemist would make a comment like: 'Meat is
prepared in lavatories and should therefore be treated like a lump
of dung.
It was scarcely surprising, then, that one of
the studio panellists, Mr Charles Jarvis, chairman of the British
Farm Produce Council, should write to a daily newspaper saying:
'I have just taken part in a nightmare.' He went on: 'My nightmare
started with the film and the realisation that we had been set up,
without preview, to answer what came over as a deliberately loaded
attack with no time to do so properly; to have to sit and watch
the savaging of a first-class industry in which so many people work
most devotedly with unselfish and ill-rewarded dedication; to have
to quell one's anger and try to offer something quick and sensible
when the subject called for quiet and thoughtful debate.'
We know that the BBC's own professional agricultural
producers and reporters were angered and shamed by Brasstacks. Such
programmes can only make their jobs more difficult. This was highlighted
in the BBC TV's Sunday Farming programme on May 13. A panel
of sane, rational men and women made minced-meat of the scare talk
on Brasstacks in five minutes flat. Unfortunately, as one of them
pointed out, Farming preaches to the converted.
It makes us shudder to think what conclusions
the average Brasstacks viewer came to.
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