Some commentators claim this is yet another example of a once-proud Corporation succumbing to trickery and propaganda, Reithian ideals lost and so on. It’s a good story. It is also baloney.... Unlike many of its critics, I have actually been on a couple of Natural History Unit shoots....what I have seen is a team of professionals without a single dishonest bone in their bodies.
If you want to have a go at the BBC then take a look at the senseless, insane bureaucracy that still infests the corporation, the vampire squids in ‘Compliance’ and ‘Awareness’, the middle managers who manage the endless rafts of under-middle-managers, the cretinous decision to move the newsgathering hub from the nation’s capital to Manchester.
I'm on the side of Michael Hanlon and Mark Thompson in this, but feel the DG has been a tad too combative in his rebuttals. The unit is, after all, called the "Natural" History Unit; these are "documentaries"; the commentary was clever to the point of being cute; mother and baby were sprinkled with pretend snowflakes; and the explanatory piece on the website was hardly at point of sale. Much more elegant to say that what the viewer saw really happened, and the accompanying words might have been less opaque about where. Or, even better, have a little piece at the end of the show, as has become the custom in revealing how some of the excellent shots in the series were obtained.
- Don Anderson seems to be on the same lines as me, in this comment piece for the Belfast Telegraph. And reminds us that lobsters in an aquarium in Anglesey featured in a similar row in 2001.
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