I started watching the BBC’s Panorama hatchet job on…er…the BBC’s Panorama programme last night, where former reporter Martin Bashir was showed to have lied and presented forged documents in order to encourage Princess Diana to say some stuff on Panorama. Or something. The subject matter was easy enough to follow but for some reason I couldn’t sustain levels of interest sufficient to allow me to see how the programme ended. I know how the story ended, with Diana dying in a car driven by a drunk driver, being followed by the media. It was horrible. However, the pungent stench of hypocrisy in much of today’s media lies heavy in the air, as it joyfully begins to dance on what it hopes will be the coffin of the BBC.
Many of those attacking the BBC, with to be fair some justification were hardly innocent souls in the whole grisly affair, are the very same people who were constantly attacking Diana in the period before her death. Oh yes, I remember the nasty little digs about how she was on holiday after holiday in the summer of 1997, gallivanting around the Mediterranean on a rich playboy’s yacht when she should have been at home with her neglected sons. Then, when she died, she became, in the words of Tony Blair, ‘the people’s princess’ and the country went bonkers.
That the BBC fucked up in 1995 with Bashir’s sordid activities is beyond debate. And actually, it’s not the whole BBC that fucked up: it was the Panorama team and presumably a small number of managers who did some very bad things. It’s brilliant worldwide team of journalists, programme makers and its staff in general had literally nothing to do with it.
I don’t blame Prince William for being angry: I too would have been livid if it was my mum who had been tricked as Diana was and then later died in heartbreaking circumstances. I support his comments one hundred percent, but let’s put this into context: the people who were responsible for this almighty shit show are not at the BBC now. It’s like blaming the late Geoff Dunford, the former Bristol Rovers chairman who died in 2017, for the club’s relegation this year. The digs at the BBC have a greater meaning for the press.
Anyway, it’s all over now. The BBC bosses today, who had nothing to do with what happened 25 years ago, have said sorry and that should be that. If we want a debate as to whether there should actually be a licence-funded BBC at all, debate that somewhere else. Martin Bashir is clearly a wrong ‘un, but please don’t bullshit me by saying the forces of the press are models of honesty and decency. Quite the opposite if you ask me.
