MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
>> SUNDAY, JANUARY 23, 2011
I don't know Danny Cohen, the new Controller of BBC1, but I suspect that with his archetypal Oxbridge swagger, his highly-contrived casual BBC-Armani style and £250K daylight robbery taxpayer stipend, he's going to become more than a regular here. He fits the Sissons mould to a beyond-parody T, and at the same time today confirms that he is on a Marxist mission to ram his cod working class values down our throats. Of course, some would say that this is only what the BBC has been doing for decades, though writers like the great Jimmy Perry (quoted in the Mail item), never claimed (to my knowledge) that they were trying to change the world, but merely to observe it in all its comic unpredictability. God save us from BBC executives on a mission. The last one I recall was the chilling android himself, Blair acolyte and toady John Birt, who, you may recall, had an incomprehensible "Mission to Explain" that he enforced with vicious disregard for any normal values. That, in my book, is where the BBC rot really set in, though some would argue it was a lot earlier than that - including Anthony Jay (see his take on Cohen-style BBC values here), the writer of Yes, Minister, who, I suspect could tell Mr Cohen a thing or two about real comedy and what the BBC should actually be aiming to achieve. And 'Allo 'Allo writer Jeremy Lloyd delivers this sensible verdict here:
But you cannot write comedy through social engineering. Television is in enough trouble as it is without having to overcome prejudices about class.
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