I couldn't really give a toss about their engagement, apart from the fact that the BBC, in its capacity as Lickspittle Pursuivant, saw fit to slip in an unscheduled half-hour drivelfest on Tuesday night after Newsnight, thus delaying 'The Secret Life of the National Grid' (Part 2) and causing my timer-recording of that programme to end halfway through it!
McTodd was distinctly unimpressed and rendered the air several shades of blue...
Meanwhile, here is the complaint I emailed to the BBC using their online contact form - I might add that I have yet to receive a response:
Dear BBC
You unspeakable bastards.
I write in reference to your sickeningly obsequious extra programme (‘William and Kate – A Royal Engagement’) following yesterday evening's 'Newsnight', reporting – a word I use in the loosest possible sense of the term – the engagement of some heir to the throne to an upper middle-class woman of no objectively discernible distinction.
Thanks to this wanton act of sycophancy, my advance-timed recording of Part 2 of the excellent and informative documentary series 'The Secret Life of the National Grid' was utterly ruined, the recording having ended only halfway through the delayed broadcast.
I was not aware that the BBC still clung to the moribund social mores of the 1930s by insisting on treating everything the royal family does with a level of reverence not seen since the days of Lord Reith and the Abdication Crisis, or even Sir Alastair Burnett's famously toadying reportage. What next? Live coverage of the Queen blowing her nose next time she has a cold? In sharp contrast, the excerpt I saw recently of North Korean state television news coverage of the ascension of Kim Jong-il's son to heir-apparent of that troubled land was a model of decorum and proportion in comparison with this televisual farrago.
Having been a lifelong defender of the BBC license fee, an increasingly minority position in these days of market forces and economic despondency, I feel my loyalty to the Corporation's values sorely tested by this frankly disgusting and annoying last-minute lash-up of a programme and its insensitive, not to mention inept, scheduling.
Not only is the fact that it ruined my viewing of 'The Secret Life of the National Grid' – a prime example, incidentally, of the type of programming for which the license fee can be ably justified – in itself infuriating in the extreme, I am also disgusted at the fathomless cravenness of the Corporation in pandering to the type of braindead rightwing cretin who reads the 'Daily Mail' and whips out a Union Jack every time a royal is within forty miles of them.
To cap it all, what little I could bring myself to watch of this inadvertantly-recorded atrocity revealed a production of such rank sentimentality, ineptitude and servility as to utterly vitiate whatever kindly disposition I may have hitherto had towards the Corporation. The idea that you consider it fitting coverage of what is, by any objective criteria, a distinctly minor event by wheeling out rancid toadies such as Piers Morgan or sweaty oleaginous royalists such as Andrew Roberts – men of whom there should be a public warning preceding any television appearance they make – is a sad indictment of the risible editorial values that threaten to destroy the BBC and lose it the last vestiges of public support. Furthermore, any programme that features witless privately-educated wastrels who are happy to be referred to in public as 'Ollie' is deserving of nothing but boundless contempt.
Your behaviour with regard to this non-event has been in every sense shameful, incompetent and thoughtless. I trust that you will go some way to compensating for this egregious error of judgement by repeating 'The Secret Life of the National Grid' (Part 2) so that those of us who do not enjoy last-minute so-called 'documentaries' about the blonde descendants of inbred German robber barons and their tediously predictable upper middle-class fiancees may enjoy the scheduled programming.
Yours in utter disgust
McTodd
