Failing the Public: The BBC, The War Game and Revisionist History
2007; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 42; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1177/0022009407081490
ISSN1461-7250
Autores Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
ResumoJames Chapman's recent essay in this journal (2006) offered a revisionist account of the censorship of Peter Watkins's 1965 drama-documentary The War Game. Watkins's film is a richly researched account of the likely consequences and aftermath of a limited nuclear strike on Britain. The BBC banned it from being broadcast for 20 years. Drawing on the BBC's own Written Archives Centre and files held by the National Archives, Chapman argues that the prevention of the film being broadcast on television was not the result of 'a political conspiracy..,. but demonstrates a rather more ad hoc process through which a range of institutional and cultural factors determined the BBC's decision'.' This is the first example of Chapman's extremely careful phrasing, which is designed to finesse his argument to conclusions that will strike many as seriously flawed.2 Chapman presents a stark choice: was The War Game a victim of political 'conspiracy' (a strong word designed to frighten us with images of smoke-filled rooms and cabals of anonymous manipulators of events) or was it censored (even Chapman agrees that it was censored) as the result of a diverse plurality of factors arranged with no strong pre-structuring of the outcome? We shall see that by any plausible account of what happened, The War Game was censored for politically motivated reasons, that it was not done in an open and transparent manner, that the state was intimately involved in the BBC's decision and that there was nothing 'ad hoc' about the process. I will come on to the methodological weaknesses of Chapman's essay shortly, but its broader political implications and why it deserves a robust response are very worrying in the present historical context. Chapman offers an essentially apologetic defence of a public broadcaster's unhealthily close ties to the state, aligning himself with the elitist abrogation of the public's right to the fullest range of debate, perspectives and information on such a life-and-death issue as war. I find this deference to media and state power alarming in the context of the so-called 'war on terror'. Rather than defending media and state collusion and media self-censorship, the public would be
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