The BBC, again

Posted by Pointman on June 4, 2021 · 11 Comments 

On more than one occasion I’ve been asked by the powers that be to look into some disturbing rumours about a company. It usually came down to one of three things, financial impropriety, moral turpitude or questionable activities which in clear speak mean respectively a hand in the till, abusing your position of authority to do things like adding a few otherwise unwilling pubic scalps to your belt or some sort of deranged insanity. A simple, clean, two day op, an in and outie with a nice dollop of dosh arriving in the food on the table bank account.

Arrive with one hour’s telephone notice on the day armed with a letter from the chairman of the board, the mouthpiece of whoever actually has the significant controlling interest in the company, which says all courtesy and cooperation will be extended to the holder of this letter or you can kiss your sweet bippie goodbye, though it’d always be couched in bland corporate speak. It gets presented to the head bozo.

Stripped of the verbiage, it means in the next half hour you’ll either be exiting the building holding a cardboard box of all your personal belongings and with a security man on either elbow or you’ll continue with your slow but steady progress up the greasy pole, but either way you don’t try and screw around with the investigation that’s going to be conducted by the Witchfinder General who’s suddenly been traumatically injected into your calm and relatively unchallenging performance linked bonus world.

The head bozo gets the message and also a list of people you want to interview today commencing at nine-thirty sharp. I did my prep yesterday, this is the second day when it gets used. That’d be in a half hour’s time from now. I need them all scooped up and in a waiting room together and I’ll also need an interview room. If you can’t manage that, your office will do nicely for the day.

Why are we still waiting around? Make it all happen, please. There’s a good man.

They all get rounded up and into one room to wait their turn. The clerical staff don’t know quite what’s going on, the middle management have a fairly good suspicion and the people I’m actually interested in know exactly why they’re in that room with the rest of them. The one thing they all know is they’ve just seen the head honcho of their little universe running around like a blue-assed fly at the behest of this stranger in their midst. Assorted career dissipation warning lights start rapidly blinking a violent and bloody red.

The clerks get done first and quickly. I’m only interested in document flows and who’s actually got sign off authority on things. The middle management are up next. They’re smart enough to know I’m looking for active facilitators rather than the WTF can I do about it ones on the sidelines. At the same time, they already know the golden rule of office politics – loyalty goes upwards, but when push comes to shove, it rarely comes downwards.

For those who’ve been on the receiving end of that hard lesson, this is one of those golden moments in a professional career – revenge time on supposed superiors that they actually despise. I recognise that feeling. They get the message from me that this is a no names, no pack drill conversation we’re having, so I start getting the meat on the bones of whatever has actually been going on in the place.

Once in a while, I’d bump into one who didn’t know the stark reality of the corporate loyalty rule. This is a wham-bam operation and I’ve no time for discussing the finer points of the employment legislation three-day course HR sent them on last year which made them into experts. If they think their freebie ambulance chasing lawyer working on a percentage of the unfair dismissal litigation take stands a chance against a corporate General Counsel department whose sole value to the business is knowing exactly how to deeply sink disgruntled ex-employees into a tar pit of ten years of civil court actions until they’re bankrupt, then they’re too stupid to be of any use to me.

They get the big showy security guard escort out of the building, and I make damn sure it’s via the waiting room. Pour encourager les autres. Every good meat pie needs time to cook down, but the occasional sharp prod with a fork doesn’t do any harm. I’m just tenderising the person or persons I’ve actually been asked to have a hard look at.

Eventually, they get their turn. The interview style changes just for them. No more folksy grammar Pointy who comes from the same blue collar roots as all us mates together, no more sympathetic middle manager you can talk to because he knows exactly how it feels to be fucked over by these chinless bastards, but Pointman’s much more enervating version of being interviewed by Teddy Bass.

They made their bones years ago being the terror of the typing pool, but they’re sitting across the desk from someone they get the impression has no problem doing terrible things. He’ll be out of this place and won’t even remember their name in twenty-four hours time, and their glittering career with all its decades long and carefully crafted plans will have done a sudden emergency spinout off the highway to success and into the ditch of oblivion.

They’re right. I never gave a damn about them or some tentative plea bargain deals. Not my area and I’ve no interest in their eventual fate. I got pulled in by people who became rich and stayed like it by never forgetting the two golden rules of investment. The first is never to lose capital, the second is to never, ever forget rule number one.

They’d paid me for a reconnaissance and they got a single sheet of paper. On it, nothing admissible, evidential or encumbered by poisoned trees or custody chains, but a pretty shrewd take on what was actually happening in the company they had a financial interest in. What they do with it is their business. Sometimes they’d rather not have even that sheet of paper, just a verbal report in person to the inner cabinet of the board.

Once they’d had their report and mulled it over, there’d usually be an off-site and very much off the record meeting over a lunch or in some businessman’s club.

They always had the same fundamental question they wanted my view on. Are we in a one rotten apple in the barrel situation, or is everything in the barrel rotten? Depending on what my perception of the situation was and their instincts, there’d either be some surgical strikes of various personnel in the company and new men parachuted in, or a total disinvestment order locked in for immediate execution right after the opening market bell the next morning.

That’s the way it works when a private sector company gets into difficulties, which range from profits plunging, bad rumours flying around or a significant decline of interest in the product or service they provide. It works but not when applied to government departments nor to quasi-state broadcasters like the BBC under no commercial pressure to compete. Whatever rubbish they produce doesn’t have to sell, because they’ll always be handed a budget to spend each year.

The symptoms are the same. Two hundred thousand households actively declining to pay a TV license fee every year. Fewer and fewer people watching it, never mind trusting it. A growing perception that it’s sleazy. Being consistently anti-Brexit when the vast majority want out. Predictably left-wing on every issue. Rampant racial, ethic and religious tokenism, to almost the complete marginalisation of white Christians, who happen to form the vast majority of Britain.

Tirelessly pushing a wokeness agenda in which nobody but themselves and the elite is interested. Employing scum or perverts like Martin Bashir or Jimmy Savile. Irritatingly comfortable on their own massive ego trip of being metropolitan elite and totally out of touch with the common people whose opinions they can barely conceal their contempt for.

Above all their “customers” are sick and tired of one sleazy scandal after another coming to light. The particular bad apples like Bashir or Savile will get thrown to the dogs. The smug assurance that it was just a blip stopped working long ago, because people know it won’t change the organisation and its attitudes by one iota. These scumbags and others like them have operated and thrived for decades within a BBC environment whose management knew exactly what was going on all along. Yet another management cover up. Not one of them has ever got fired or lost their fat pension over these scandals. The BBC will get away with it once again and not one of the facilitators will be punished.

If the BBC were a private sector company, my recon of the BBC would have those bullet points, and the answer to the supplementary question would have been you’re looking at a barrel of rotten apples. Cut your investment and walk away.

©Pointman

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Some direct questions for the BBC that it’ll never answer.

The BBC : Aunty Beeb or Mummy knows best?

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Filed under Article · Tagged with Bashir, BBC, Savile