”Was any of the licence fee used to produce something purely designed to demean us?”, the elderly BBC journalist Andrew Neil tweeted, regarding last week’s nine-minute European-themed compilation of the delightful children’s series Horrible Histories. In these arse-tip times, the multiple-Bafta-award-winning success is “unpatriotic”, while pouring cider on a smouldering EU flag is the tits.
But Horrible Histories, more than any other human endeavour, fulfils the Reithian remit to “inform, educate and entertain”. In the very British tradition of the music hall, Monty Python and 1066 and All That, the show brings the past irreverently to life for generations of future historians, many too distressed by Neil’s gibbous presence to learn from his informative broadcasts. And yet, long ago, I had heard Neil’s words before.
“Was any of the licence fee used to produce something purely designed to demean us?” journalist and former adviser to Paddy Ashdown Miranda Green asked, as we looked, sickened, into a backstage Westminster workspace. It was 27 February 2014. We were among that week’s This Week guests. And we witnessed the foulest of finishing touches, added to a horrible project, shrouded in terrible secrecy – the weekly reboot of Andrew Neil’s hair.
The atrocity Green and I saw enacted that night felt like a calculated insult to our species. And though Green and I have often been in the same room since, most recently at the premiere of Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, she never acknowledges me, afraid of reliving our experience.
Seven years ago, Neil was just journalism’s clammy Christmas uncle, then unstained by the inelegant small-hours cyber-frothing for which he is now famed. But would even Neil’s cannibalistic countryman Sawney Bean nestle into Michael Portillo’s fluffed cushions had he seen the eyesore Green and I saw? For the horrid contents of Bean’s sick mountain nook were as nothing compared to the gore-strewn phantasmagoria of Neil’s obscene powder room.
As Michael Portillo emptied a bin of stunned bats on to the floor, disgusted BBC beauticians presented the dazed mammals to the light, seeking the most taut scrotum. Neil, sat in shadow in a wicker bath chair and a silken robe, cried out: “That’s it! Stretch them! Stretch those bloody bats’ scrotums, girls, like your lives depend on it.” Portillo choked the chosen bat and tightened its scrotum over a nameless and putrid woodland fungus, sculpted to be the size and shape of Neil’s head. Then he slung the unwanted bat parts into the corridor, where they stank. Another guest, Pat Kane, of pop group the Kane Gang, walked by unaware, suspiciously sniffing the air. Years later, I learned online that he attributed the stench to me.
Donning an enormous chef’s hat, Portillo grated tiny shavings of fennel on to the bat scrotum, which were then tweezer-teased to attention. Then this week’s This Week hairpiece was nailed to Neil’s needy nut. Green and I knew we had seen something which, if we valued our careers, we should contrive to forget.
But fennel-hair Neil isn’t alone in criticising Horrible Histories. The show’s supposed “lack of patriotism” is now another useful skirmish in both the inevitable dismantling of public broadcasting and a wider culture war; a culture war deliberately coordinated to mop up the last pockets of bedraggled resistance to a far-right coup; a far-right coup that appears to be an intentional result of Brexit; a result that may in fact have been Brexit’s real raisin of being all along, for those who worked hardest to deliver it. Indeed, the photograph tweeted out by P Staines (the online influencer Guido Fawkes) of last week’s guest list of client-commentators, at what was genuinely called the Brexit Battalion Media Corps celebration dinner, tells you all you need to know. Google it. It was always a stitch-up.
If you were lucky enough to be seated for parsnip soup with Tony Parsons, baked rack of venison with inaccurate Allison Pearson, hot raspberry ripple with realist Rod Liddle and finally a Stinking Bishop with Father Alexander Sherbrooke, you would surely feel like you had been present at Brexit Britain’s equivalent of the storied Algonquin Round Table.
Except that instead of dropping Dorothy Parker wit-bombs, diners were saying things like: “In that case presumably I can choose to identify as a 17-year-old Swedish au pair!” or: “I like my women like I like my bananas, firm and fresh, not old and past their sell-by date.” Did the once-salvageable Dan Hodges wonder how the journey of his life led him to this infernal banquet of the damned, a Florence fresco of doomed sinners sharing shit-flavoured stew with impossibly long spoons, while being stuffed into the devil’s anus, or twitching Tim Montgomerie, as it is also known?
Of course, the Horrible Histories non-story, turning on an axis of anger about a silly song featuring Queen Victoria from 11 years ago, and introduced by an uppity coloured feller who should know his place, was deliberately weaponised to bully the BBC into toeing the government line, an ongoing attempt to eliminate the last vestiges of scrutiny.
Will any of the Cumming-trombones at BBC News attempt to square the current prime minister’s condemnation of “juvenile anti-Americanism” with the fact that, when London mayor, the same man called Donald Trump a person of “quite stupefying ignorance that makes him, frankly, unfit to hold the office of president of the United States”? Was any of the licence fee spent on not asking him about this? Thought not. As you were, lickspittle collaborators.
On Monday night, however, journalists collectively, even the compliant Kuenssberg whose electoral fealty Cumming will yet forget, stood firm against Conservative attempts to exclude critical correspondents from briefings. For now. But first they came for the black satirist; then they came for the policeman from Hot Fuzz doing a silly William the Conqueror dance; then they came for the Hanoverian kings singing a funny boy band song; and then they will come for you.
