For the greatest account of the BBC’s finest hour, one must turn to Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, Human Voices, written in 1980 and set 40 years earlier, at the corporation’s Portland Place wartime HQ. Flanked by sandbags and infused with a smell of cooking “from the deep hold that suggested more strongly than ever a cruise on the Queen Mary”, the organisation that Fitzgerald describes is at once noble and deeply eccentric. “Broadcasting House stood headed on a fixed course south,” she writes. “With the best engineers in the world, and a crew varying between the intensely respectable and barely sane, it looked ready to scorn any disaster.”
In other words, a formidable foe, one that in the spring of 1940, in the face of anticipated Nazi invasion, decided “without prompting, that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective”. I bring this up in respect to the gathering storm of Donald Trump versus the BBC, a fight triggered by the US president’s $10bn defamation lawsuit – $10bn! It’s a wonder he didn’t go for $10 gazillion – brought against the corporation at the end of last year in response to a poorly edited episode of Panorama. The BBC was at fault, editing together comments made by the US president at a rally on 6 January 2021 to give, as the corporation’s apology put it, “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”. But it is fighting the lawsuit.
This will have come as a surprise to the president, who in his own country has had great success frightening media companies into craven submission. This week, as news broke that the BBC has been cleared by a judge to serve legal papers on Trump’s children, while still seeking judicial intervention to force him to show up to his own deposition, the president must be wondering what’s going on. In August last year, Trump applied to the court to block the BBC from deposing Donald Trump Jr and Ivanka Trump, and yet … the corporation simply ignored him and ploughed on with its mission.
Well. Welcome to the British Broadcasting Company, Mr President, let me give you a little insight into what you’re up against. There is no institutional power in the world to rival the BBC’s ability to drone on, a constant background hum for the nation. We all, at some level, consist of an interior mix-tape made up of Melvyn Bragg saying, “Hello. In the 13th century …” and Libby Purves opening an episode of Midweek with, “all my guests this week are time travellers, in a way”. The US president simply has no idea of the effect on this country’s nervous system of the opening bars of EastEnders, or a BBC newsreader interrupting normal programming with the line, “This is BBC television from London.”
Nor will he have encountered that very particular BBC mindset, which, unlike the workforce at Google, doesn’t run on can-do energy and corporate good cheer, but rather on toxic gas released by an underpaid, overworked labour force, seething with resentment and, as Fitzgerald put it, “bitterly loyal” to its employers – which, as it happens, is a very high standard of loyalty indeed. You don’t get that at Fox News.
Or indeed at ABC News, which in December 2024, agreed to pay Trump $15m in an uncontested defamation suit. And while CNN, MS Now and Politico are all suing the White House for banning them, CBS rolled over like a dog, announcing it would be axing Stephen Colbert’s highly critical show days after settling another defamation suit with the president. Meanwhile the Federal Communications Commission, the regulatory body run by arch-conservative Brendan Carr, threatened to review the licences of misbehaving broadcasters. A day after the president called for Trump-mocking Jimmy Kimmel’s dismissal from his late night ABC show, Carr ordered an early licence review of all eight of Disney’s ABC television stations.
The BBC isn’t bound by these forces. There are financial pressures on it to settle, of course, but in public broadcasting money is never the be-all and end-all, and I would bet Trump has never come up against a force so stubborn, so irrational, so inexplicable to the American corporate or political mindset as his opponents at Langham Place. If the president prizes his own unpredictability as a key weapon in his arsenal, I’d like to introduce him to the people who brought us Noel’s House Party and Grandstand.
Yes, the BBC loves nothing more than to don a hair shirt and report on its own failings. Yes, it could do with relying a bit less on Clare Balding. And yes, the corporation is a lunatic in so many ways. But it’s our lunatic and if you come for it, you come for us all. In the BBC’s long history of standing up to tyranny, it has seen off bigger enemies than Trump. I would bet the Shipping Forecast it will come out victorious.
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