The BBC’s woes usually centre around its blatant bias, its denial of that bias and its inability to change. And it’s not the only example of how the BBC can damage its own reputation - to everyone’s disbelief, our taxpayer-funded broadcaster now has found itself at the centre of a massive fallout from a live event.
To recap the BAFTAs saga - they managed to successfully bleep out a number of things throughout the show, but they failed to edit John Davidson’s involuntary use of the ‘N word’ while Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo were presented an award. In doing so, they failed John, who suffers from Tourette’s.
In fact, he has publicly said that he was assured that any swearing would be bleeped out - plus, and get this - there was a two-hour delay with them airing the footage, which really makes you question the BBC’s competence here.
John’s biographical movie ‘I Swear’, which tells his lived experience with Tourette syndrome, was nominated for multiple BAFTAs. And the BBC have worked with John on four projects, so they would have been aware of the potential risks and mitigations needed to protect him.
Instead, we have even learnt from John that he was sitting next to a microphone! You really couldn’t make it up, especially as the coverage remained on IPlayer for 15 hours.
I have read of John’s deep anguish over what happened and the completely unjustified abuse he has faced since. I am dreadfully sorry and ashamed that our nation’s broadcaster allowed this to happen to him.
Now this isn’t the first time the BBC has got itself into a storm over editing or the lack of it - including the Trump saga and of course the Vylan's performance at Glastonbury last year.
So what is the latest response from the BBC … drum roll please … they have launched a full-blown investigation! Now I would rather they owned the mistake, tried to make it up to John by commissioning programming supporting his work in this space, and then adopted processes to stop this from ever happening again.
It doesn’t need a full-on investigation to recognise the scale of the cock up, check exactly what happened and accept that going forward they should be prepared for events by mitigating risks and making sure they react when needed.
BBC's heavy-handed response to the broadcast of a racist slur at the Baftas speaks volumes - Michelle Donelan | Getty Images
The fact that the Government has welcomed this approach again speaks volumes.
To me, this all speaks of how the institutions in our country have become review mad.
I saw this in government when Ministers wanted to do something, civil servants often suggested reviews or task forces as a way to placate, despite the cost and the fact that these layers of bureaucracy often didn’t lead to action and delivery.
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