The BBC has become obsessed with sex
By Peter Mullen, Spectator:
So Pope John Paul II had a mistress. That’s not quite what the BBC’sPanorama asserted, but they chucked around enough hint, innuendo and nudge, nudge to make us believe he had. And there was similar suggestiveness in a Today programme interview on Monday morning between John Humphrys and the liberal Catholic journalist Edward Stourton. Humphrys delighted in the whiff of salaciousness and wondered aloud whether Stourton’s discovery of hundreds of letters between the former Pope and the Polish-American philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka indicated that the pair were lovers. After much whetting of our licentious appetites, the BBC concluded that they were ‘More than friends but not quite lovers.’ They were certainly collaborators: Anna-Teresa helped John Paul in the 1970s – when he was still Cardinal Karol Wojtyla – with the writing of his book The Acting Person.
Of course the BBC has a reputation for throwing as much mud as possible at the Catholic Church: child abuse, kinky cardinals, sex and drugs in the Vatican and financial jiggery-pokery endemic – but the matter is much broader than that. Along with all the institutional structures of the modern, media age, the BBC has a frantic obsession with sex. This is bound to be the case, because we live in a culture – if that is not too dignified a word here – which lives by publicity. Bluntly, sex sells papers and it fills TV screens from Downton Abbeyto War and Peace. Nightly, the Corporation offers us fifty shades of sleaze. So naturally the first question the Beeb asks – also the last question it asks, and all the other questions in-between – is Were They At It?
I know it’s expecting a lot, but imagine for a minute, if you can, that we live in a sane world – a world in which the national broadcasting channel had other things on its mind than the twelve-month US presidential campaign, the mawkish and extensive coverage of the deaths of pop-stars and the tawdriness of the film and TV awards. It’s instructive, by the way, to notice that the annual presentations of tat to tat are called awards ceremonies. But that is exactly what they are: the pseudo-religious rites of our decadent and solipsistic consumerism. But please, if you can, suspend your disbelief for a second and imagine the modern world as a better place. Further, imagine the BBC as an intelligent, knowledgeable institution with an interest in matters a little higher than the bread and circuses of pop trash. If you can manage to imagine that, then ask yourself what sort of questions the guys and gals on Panorama might have asked…
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