The BBC is “warping modern Britain” by allowing a Left-wing, politically correct bias to infuse the storylines of drama series, a new report has said.
Some shows are described as being close to outright propaganda because of their criticisms of Brexit, the police, capitalism, the nuclear deterrent and government agencies.
The Campaign for Common Sense reviewed more than a year’s output of BBC drama and found that the corporation was presenting a version of the UK that few viewers would recognise.
As well as lecturing viewers on topics including climate change, the BBC indulges in its own form of social engineering by over-representing minorities, the report suggested.
One former culture secretary said the corporation was at risk of alienating viewers by “retreating into some minute view of the world” that bore no relation to the experience of licence fee payers.
It comes after a separate report accused the broadcaster of “rewriting history” by using documentaries to promote a woke agenda.
'More insidious' than biased news coverage The BBC is currently the subject of a mid-term review of its royal charter, ordered by former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, who warned that reforms might be needed to help it achieve greater impartiality.
In October last year Tim Davie, the BBC director-general, launched a 10-point plan to improve impartiality , promising that the BBC would regularly review its output to make sure shows are reflecting a range of viewpoints.
The report by the Campaign for Common Sense argued that Mr Davie still has a long way to go to make good on his promise.
Among the series examined in the report is Vigil, a detective drama set on board a Trident-armed submarine in which a Russian spy infiltrates the crew.
The Government and the security services cover up major incidents, and one anti-nuclear campaigner declares: “There’s no way our Government can claim that these weapons are safe and secure. It’s time to get the nukes out of Scotland.”
Feargal Dalton - a councillor for the SNP who is a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, despite serving on a Trident submarine during a career in the Royal Navy - acted as the drama’s senior script consultant . He has in the past described nuclear weapons as “despicable”.
In an episode of EastEnders, Brexit is likened to Covid by the character Sharon Watts, who throws a glass of water in someone’s face and says: “We’ve had Brexit and Covid, we don’t need you here.”
Conspiracy thriller The Trick pits heroic climate change scientists against climate sceptics, oil producers and the centre-Right. It features a monologue warning that humanity has “around 10” years to prevent climate collapse and endorsing the efforts of climate activists who “understand what needs to be done”.
Meanwhile Liverpool-based police drama The Responder , starring Martin Freeman, features a cast in which almost half of the police characters are black or Asian - despite the fact that Merseyside Police has just 0.5 per cent black officers and 0.4 per cent Asian officers.
Other dramas highlighted in the report include Rules of the Game, The Capture, Industry and Sherwood.
John Whittingdale, the former culture secretary , said: “There is a widespread problem, which includes drama, of highly political statements being made on BBC programmes which would be instantly regarded as unacceptable if they were made in news or current affairs programmes.
“Day after day it is a drip-drip, and in some ways it is more insidious than the effect that biased news coverage would have, because it is never questioned, people just accept it.
“The consolation for viewers is that there is now a large variety of drama available from other sources such as streaming services, but the BBC needs to be careful to maintain its broad appeal, because the more it retreats into some minute view of the world, the less relevant it will be to viewers.”
The Campaign for Common Sense, which champions free speech and tolerance, was founded by Mark Lehain, who went on to become an adviser to Nadhim Zahawi when he was education secretary.
A spokesman for the Campaign for Common Sense said: “Too often in BBC dramas you can see only one side of an argument presented. And it’s usually the side of a liberal, Left-wing, woke viewpoint that has more in common with the echo chambers of Twitter than the majority of licence fee payers who are forced to fund the BBC’s output.
“The BBC needs to understand that not everyone signs up to a world view where the bad guys are the police, Brexit, and Conservatives.”
A BBC spokesman said: “The BBC’s world-class, critically-acclaimed dramas are enjoyed by huge audiences, year in year out. We work with the very best creative talent who represent all corners of the UK and reflect different views and perspectives, while also providing brilliant entertainment and escapism.
“Cherry-picking a handful of examples in thousands of hours of output does not constitute analysis and is not a true representation of BBC content.”
Commentary: BBC must rise above the banal, dreary politics of woke By Gareth Roberts, former BBC scriptwriter
The Campaign for Common Sense report on BBC drama makes for grim reading - just as the grindingly miserable shows it reports on made even grimmer viewing.
It provides receipts to prove that the BBC has transformed from broadcaster to an HR department that happens to have some channels attached - less an auntie, more of a scolding polytechnic lecturer.
It is amusing to see the sheer volume of this stuff catalogued so meticulously - every sneery reference to Brexit, every cliched denunciation of British tradition, every painful shoehorning-in of the banal, dreary politics of woke. I know woke as a word to describe this has become low-status and déclassé, but we have as yet no alternative for the ideology that ate liberalism.
There is no fragility or sensitivity in these shows, which are aggressive and full-throated. The section on EastEnders comes as light relief, and that should tell us all something.
The modern world is often terrible, and police (The Responder) and clergymen (Inside Man) are often awful in real life, so depicting them as such in those shows can hardly be considered misleading. If you squinted very hard you might even think those two shows, both much smarter and better than the rest covered here, could be seen as a conservative critique of institutional decay.
What is really the point here is sins of omission. We see fictional bent coppers and dodgy vicars and nasty Tory MPs in BBC drama, but we never meet bent charity CEOs or dodgy environmentalists or nasty human rights lawyers. Upper middle-class people like us are good, the suffering helpless poor are victims - except when they answer back and become fascists - pre-Blair Britain was a grey cultural wasteland teetering on the verge of Nazism.
The report also highlights unrealistically high levels of ethnic casting, but this strikes me as an issue only because viewers are expected to believe simultaneously that ethnicity doesn’t really matter at all, and that it’s the most incredibly significant thing about a person.
It’s easy to castigate the BBC for its narrow output , and they do deserve it, but the big problem is much wider. The other broadcasters and the streamers all have exactly the same issue. I think this is partly down to a temperamental difference.
The very few Right of centre TV creatives I know are, like me, not interested in writing about things we are sure about, or dishing up stick people rather than characters.
The problem isn’t that writers express their opinions. There is nothing wrong with socially concerned drama written by blinkered progressives . There is something very wrong when socially concerned drama written by blinkered progressives is all that there is.
I can attest most of these people are amenable, think that woke just means being liberal and “nice”, that what they are saying is obvious, and that they have no familiarity with, or often even the sketchiest knowledge of opposing arguments.
It has become a cliché, but all this diversity leads to everyone becoming exactly the same.
The BBC has merely followed the herd of all the other Western elite institutions - it’s not their fault that the upper middle-class creative sector has gone globally barmy. However, the entire point of the BBC is that it is constituted to avoid such ovine behaviour. It should be aware of it and above it, and strive actively to widen the palate, provide for every view, not doing what everybody else is.
Reading through the report, my main takeaway is how this stuff fails on its own terms. To change the world, you have to change people’s minds - and that certainly isn’t happening with BBC drama, which is merely continual repetition of acceptable, high-status conformist opinions. To hammer in what must always be said and what must never be said, again and again.
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