|
Letter alleging ECU complaint avoidance and
bias
28 December 2005
Dear Mr Steel
Thank
you for your letter of 10 November, 2005.
There are a number of points in your letter that raise questions in
my mind as the purpose of your department which is described on the BBC website
as follows:
"If your complaint is about a specific programme, and you believe
it breached the BBC's editorial standards, you can ask the independent
Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU) to investigate. The unit examines such
complaints independently". I am not convinced your department met the above
description in addressing my second and third complaints.
1) With reference to your response about
political self-expression by the Dr Who office, you say that the ECU must refer
to viewing figures. I find this rather odd. Either it is right for the
programme to be used for self-expression or it is not. Does it follow that, had
the programme's ratings been lower, my complaint would then become valid? I see
no relevance of ratings to a complaint of this nature.
2) In a similar way, you say that the mail bag
does not have other letters making the same complaint and that, "There is
nothing in audience feedback to suggest viewers in large numbers would agree
with you that the series was used as a political vehicle…" This seems to
me to be an abdication of responsibility
on the ECU's part, since it is not viewers' job to keep watch over BBC staff or
programmes. You have received a complaint (mine) and you are obliged to
investigate.
3) Although
your letter provides quotes from the above [viewers] letters, you do not
provide the context in which they were written or explain their relevance to my
complaint. Reference to these letters appears to serve no purpose other than to
create an impression that you have a mailbag's worth of people disagreeing with
me, and that the programme was a success. My complaint does not concern whether
Dr Who was a success.
4)
With regards to the veracity of my complaint, your letter substitutes the term
"political" for "contemporary". This term is inaccurate; an example of a
contemporary reference is the London Eye. The Crystal Palace, by contrast, is
historical. Referring to weapons of mass destruction goes beyond contemporary
and is political. Your use of the word "contemporary" suggests a massaging of
my complaint into something that can be more easily fielded.
5) I acknowledge your
point about "creative freedom". However, you make no reference to the other
side of the equation which is "abuse of power". The purpose of the litter/park
analogy was to illustrate the distinction between distributing politics in
one's personal and professional capacities. You have taken the analogy out of
context and presented it as though I was saying that the show was "littered"
i.e. that I was saying that there was a frequent practice of making
political points. It is immaterial whether there is one political remark per
scene, per episode or per season; it is the act of using the programme as a
platform that is my complaint, as explained in the bullet points commencing on
page 3 of my 18 October letter.
6) You refer to awards that have been given to the
programme. This, together with your
earlier reference to ratings, suggests that the ECU is concerned with matters
such as which production office is the flavour of the month. This is not
consistent with the description of the ECU given on the BBC website, since any
Unit that is independent and investigative must act without bias. The Dr Who
Production Office is funded by the licence fee to make Dr Who, not Dr Who with
strings attached. That they produce a product is not justification for them
using that product for personal ends. At no point should the matter of awards
have entered your mind; that it has suggests that you have not acted
impartially and that the Dr Who Office is above independent scrutiny.
I see similar problems with your
response regarding my complaint about bad language.
7) Your first paragraph disregards the
distinction between "speech patterns" (accent, pronunciation, delivery) and bad
language (individual words that are coarse or unpleasant), thereby implying
that bad language was a cause of the programme's success. You are therefore
referring to something other than my complaint. You again refer to calls
praising the series but do not indicate the relevance of such calls to my
complaint. Unsubstantiated suggestions as to why the programme was successful
have dogged this correspondence since the first letter that I received from the
Information Unit in June 2005. Twice, the Information Unit sought to infer a
link between bad language and ratings and twice, when challenged, admitted it
had no evidence; in short, they were making it up. If the ECU has evidence that
bad language was the cause of the programmes success (or, conversely, that the
absence of these words would have caused the viewing figures to decline),
please produce it. If the ECU has no such evidence, please say so.
8) You make specific
reference to bad language in the second paragraph of this section and say that
research shows that viewers tolerate it.
Choosing "tolerance" as a benchmark means adopting a position that is further
from my complaint than need be, since there is a difference between "tolerate"
and "expect", and between "expect" and "want". Your choice [of benchmark]
suggests a predisposition to the Dr Who Office.
9) If the BBC/ECU has conducted research on
"tolerance", but not on whether people expected or wanted bad language in Dr
Who, then your research is incomplete and impartiality compels you to
acknowledge this. To present partial research as a complete or final picture is
misleading.
10) Even if
it is true that most viewers want to hear the words such as "bum" and
"bollocks" (and the research you cite falls short of establishing this), it
does not follow that viewers wish to hear them in every programme. I am
interested in the question of 'thresholds'. Since there is no prospect of bad
language receding on the BBC in the foreseeable future, I am obliged to make
choices before viewing. If someone asked me a year ago which programme would be
least likely to have bad language, I would have said Dr Who since there was no
precedent for it; it was not part of the Dr Who "wordscape". It now seems to me
that if bad language can be adopted in Dr Who, solely at the will of incoming
producers and writers, then I do not see how any other evening or even early
drama or comedy can be relied upon not to have bad language.
My complaint therefore arises (in part) because the treatment of Dr
Who breaks an important threshold, in that a programme with no history of bad
or unpleasant language is apparently considered due for it. You say, "Our
viewing of the programmes found these elements used very sparingly". The actual
quantity of bad language is not the basis of concern. It does not matter
whether the offending word occurs once, twice or even half a dozen times; the
point is that the language is there. It is present. It signifies
that the standards are set by writers, rather than writers working within a set
of standards. This is my point about "rotating" writers and producers spreading
bad language across different types of programme. It is not a question of
quantity. If the BBC is to persist in bad language and swearing, then I in
return want consistency and thresholds. This seems to me to be a very pertinent
point and the ECU has just blanked it.
11) I am less than impressed with the
ECU's response to the complaint about the phrase "*ucking about". I would have
thought the obvious way to investigate this is to contact the writer, actress
and sound person and put the two following questions: what was actually said;
and was the sound blunted deliberately? A mere replaying of the tape does not
constitute an investigation in any meaningful sense. That the Doctor states the
word "mucking" afterwards does not mean that the previous delivery was not
muffled intentionally. This was a case of where the ECU needed to establish
facts, yet did not.
A further problem is that there is ambiguity as to the precise
grounds on which the complaints have been rejected. For instance:
12) With regards to the politicisation of Dr Who, you say that
the programme was not used as a political vehicle; yet, elsewhere, you come
close to accepting that it was and your defence switches to saying that there
is nothing wrong with this.
13) Similarly, with regards to bad
language, you imply that it contributed to the programme's success; yet you
also say that these elements were used very sparingly. These are
contradictory positions.
I am entitled to appeal the ECU's findings but I do not see why
any such appeal should be distracted or diverted by what I regard as red
herrings or ambiguity. Therefore, it seems appropriate that the ECU has the
opportunity beforehand to address any suggestions of bias and
complaint-avoidance:
i) Are there any aspects of the ECU's findings that you would
like to clarify, add to, or revisit in the light of my above comments?
ii) I would also be grateful if the ECU could answer the
questions raised in my points 7 and 9. I look forward to hearing from
you. My compliments of the season.
Yours sincerely
|
The ECU
responded on 6 January 2006.
Go here to read a request for an extension to the Appeal
deadline.
|