The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is probably right when he says that the greed, superficiality, treachery and adultery depicted in ITV’s Footballers’ Wives is a depressingly accurate parable of modern Britain. But it is only part of a far wider malaise afflicting British broadcasting - and far from the most serious offender.
The more I watch British TV, especially after the 9pm watershed, the more I am struck by how what is meant to entertain, educate and inform is, in fact, a major contributor to the coarsening of our society.
The sort of programming once confined t
o the wee small hours of the satellite channels - I’m thinking of shows that specialise in yobbish and foul-mouthed behaviour such as Ibiza Uncovered and its numerous spin-offs - are now infecting the core schedules of the mainstream terrestrial networks.
The f-word is now ubiquitous in so much British television drama and comedy (even the c-word is creeping in) to an extent unimaginable even a few years ago. Channel 4’s No Angels is a prime example. Last week’s episode involved a foul-mouthed yob who was allowed full vent to his limited and almost wholly obscene vocabulary.
I appreciate that this is a gritty drama series designed to depict nurses in perhaps more accurate circumstances than is usual on TV and to that extent has a serious purpose. But the dramatic arts in British broadcasting are now over-dependent on bad language, crudity and explicit sex.
It is not just in drama or solely confined to post-watershed programmes. ITV’s Saturday morning children’s show, Ministry of Mayhem, boasts a farting competition. Even something as clever and sophisticated as BBC2’s Coupling cannot avoid the f-word - as if to leave it out would somehow diminish its streetwise credentials, even though its use doesn’t make the show any funnier.
I understand it is the job of broadcasters sometimes to depict society as it is rather than as it should be and that contemporary TV is to some extent a window on the yobbery, violence and crudity that has become a prevalent part of modern Britain. But British TV, including the commercial sector, is supposed to be suffused with public-service values and obligations. It has a duty to raise our standards and horizons, not simply wallow in our worst characteristics and basest behaviour.
Standards are higher on American networks, even though TV there is driven entirely by the commercial imperative. The US networks adhere to far tougher standards when it comes to bad language or explicit sex and violence.
True, well-made shows such as Sex and the City and the Sopranos have their fair share of all three. But in America they are shown on HBO, a pay-TV channel to which parents can control access. In Britain, they are broadcast on network TV, available to all at the press of a zapper, and do not seem out of place because of similar homegrown fare on the network schedules.
Perhaps America goes too far in the other direction: it recently went into a frenzy because Janet Jackson bared a breast on prime time. That is absurd. Nor do I call for Mary Whitehouse-style censorship. That would be illiberal, unworkable and carry the danger of repression.
But perhaps it is time for the metropolitan media elite which controls what is available on our major networks to take stock of what it is offering on too regular a basis and institute some self-discipline. We cannot hold broadcasters responsible for the coarsening of our culture or the crudity and yobbery that is the most unattractive feature of modern British life. But, like the red-top tabloids they affect to disdain, it is hard not to conclude they are a contributory factor.
I THINK I’ll pass on Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ - it sounds too relentlessly violent for those of us of a gentle disposition - but it’s certainly exposed the engrained anti-Christian attitudes of so much of our newspaper intelligentsia.
In America, there has been an interesting debate about whether or not the film is anti-Semitic. In Britain, it’s become another excuse for kicking Christianity. Will Self in the Evening Standard and Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times, to take just two examples from many, used their reviews of the film to have a go at Christians and their beliefs, much to the annoyance of many readers (if the papers’ letters columns are anything to go by).
It has long been the settled view from the Groucho Club and its satrapies that religion, in general, is pretty naff and Christianity, in particular, pretty insidious. Reviewing The Passion in the Sunday Times, Cosmo Landesman at least had the honesty to admit that "when it comes to The Passion, it’s not the anti-Semitism we object to; it’s the Christians and their certainties we can’t stand".
Interesting how our fearless commentariat reserves most of its ire and bile for Christianity rather than, say, Islam, which, as currently practised in many countries, could be seen as far more repressive and illiberal (especially for women).
But fashionable critics have long been free to attack Christianity with impunity. If Gibson’s film had been about Mohammed, you can be pretty sure that our brave secularist critics would have pulled their punches. Attacking Islam, after all, is not just politically incorrect - it risks a fatwa and having to walk everywhere, Rushdie-fashion, with four bodyguards.
THOSE who don’t want to know the winner should look away now because I’m about to reveal the winner of the Most Inaccurate Sven-Goran Eriksson Headline in Sunday Journalism. The shortlist is a long one because the England manager’s flirtation with Chelsea last weekend was a moving story and our anti-hero was not always the most accurate of sources on himself. So here goes.
Out of the running from the start are the Sunday Express ("Sven’s going to stay"), Sunday Mirror ("He decides to stick with England") and News of the World ("Sven to agree new FA deal"), because all three got it right. The Sunday Times ("FA fight Chelsea for Sven") and the Independent on Sunday ("Sven nears the exit door") are disqualified for hedging their bets.
The Mail on Sunday began strongly with its early editions predicting that he’d quit England for Chelsea but finished up with the neutral "Sven D-Day", which means it’s out too. The runner-up is the Observer with "Houllier in line for Sven’s job", which had the advantage of taking the story on, but only on the false assumption that there was a vacancy.
Our clear winner is the Sunday Telegraph with "Sven will quit England job this summer" emblazoned across its front page. The sports section was equally emphatic: "The England manager will quit after the European Championship". Not quite in the same class as the Chicago Tribune’s "Dewey Defeats Truman" on the day in 1948 that Truman was returned as US president, but close.
THE Government would have us believe that its latest series of embarrassments over immigration policy is all froth being whipped up by opportunistic Tories and a compliant media. In fact, the media, led by some superb Sunday Times scoops, has been instrumental in revealing several scandals about our immigration procedures which would otherwise never have come to light, and the Tories have been following in the media’s wake.
But for the media, we would never have known about the Sheffield immigration office’s policy of rubber-stamping applications; and when Home Office minister Beverley Hughes insisted that this process was "rare and untypical", it was the media that revealed that such fast-track schemes to clear backlogs were actually quite common and that she had approved several of them.
So next time you hear a politician complaining about media froth, the chances are it means some newspaper has exposed something else the powers-that-be would rather have kept secret.
THE March ABCs will make mixed reading in Fleet Street’s broadsheet (and "compact-size") offices. Trade estimates that reach me suggest only the Independent can afford a smile: with average sales of around 260,000, it is more than 16 per cent up on the same month last year, thanks to its tabloid strategy.
The Times cannot boast the same success with its tabloid experiment but things are looking up: with sales of around 660,000, it is at least marginally ahead of last year. The Telegraph’s headline figure, at around 920,000, will be marginally down (and without bulks and foreign would be well below 900,000). But the Guardian suffers most: at around 376,000, it will be almost nine per cent down on the year.
