It’s always best to take a sceptical view of the constant flow of BBC-bashing newspaper stories, which are often simply bogus outrage expressed for commercial gain. Even the war-on-woke, cod-ideological stuff – Clive Myrie INSISTS hamsters can breastfeed human robots – the bits that make you want to smear your face with greengage jam and weep for England, our England, with its meadows, its shadows, its curates made entirely from beef. Even these come from a hard, transactional place.
Basically, it’s the licence fee. The BBC is free at the point of delivery, but paid for by a national levy. The BBC is also a direct commercial competitor to every other form of legacy media, all of which are trying to find ways to survive and recoup revenue.
There is a logical financial incentive to attack this profit-sapping freesheet, which is then rolled over into the generally polarised and hysterical nature of all public discourse. It can make for some confusing moments, as it did this week when the great Jeff Powell of the Daily Mail announced that he was glad John Motson and Brian Moore are dead.
Jeff Powell is glad about this because the BBC has “gathered up her skirts and decided to hide behind them for most of next summer’s World Cup.” And yes, it is hard to untangle this at first glance.
The gathering up of skirts refers to an overwrought admission of public humiliation, specifically female humiliation, linked in its imagery to an act of inadvertent self-exposure. Hiding behind skirts means evading responsibility by leaning on someone else’s authority, specifically female, skirt-based authority, the worst kind of authority there is.
As a direct result, two dead commentators are revolving furiously in their graves like high-powered diamond-tipped mining drills, which is in itself potentially dangerous from a structural and geological perspective. And yes, this does undeniably sound bad. Maybe this entire tableau could even end up, as Powell concludes triumphantly, “the moment which confirmed the inevitable scrapping of the television licence fee”.
But it is still annoying to wade through this stuff to find the actual story, which is that the BBC may send a slimmed-down commentary team to next year’s Fifa World Cup, and possibly do some games off the TV, in order to save money at an overly complex tournament.
It’s annoying because, clearly, if the BBC had announced it was instead going to cover all 104 matches in person this would then be spun as a disgusting jolly, another orgy of three-star hotel shame. It’s annoying because the BBC is important. It should be regulated and critiqued.
And it’s annoying because the BBC does make genuine mistakes that deserve to be highlighted, in a less confusing way. As it did this week with news that BBC Sport will be screening the festive Battle of the Sexes-style tennis match between Aryna Sabalenka and Nick Kyrgios.
It is hard to express in simple terms how much I hate this event and wish it wasn’t happening. But here we go. Sabalenka is the current women’s singles No 1. Kyrgios is down in the 600s in the men’s and has played six proper matches in the last three years.
The match will be levelled up with some gimmickry. Sabalenka will have a 9% smaller court to defend, because some kind of science suggests women move 9% slower. Both will have only one serve to minimise Kyrgios’s power advantage. And the BBC will now be screening this abomination live from Dubai’s Coca-Cola Arena.
And basically, what, what, what? More to the point, why? And why now? The original 1973 Battle of the Sexes between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs was staged at a time when women were massively disadvantaged in sport. It can be seen as a necessary blunt instrument on the way towards greater equality, prefiguring the first great televised golden age of women’s tennis.
But there is tangible progress now towards an idea of men’s and women’s sport as equivalent, distinct codes. What is the point of sport? To inspire and entertain. To encourage people to be active. Obviously women and men deserve this equally. This is not some shootout to prove who is best. We have enough resources for everyone to get a go.
So why is this thing happening? It makes no sense as a basic event. Everyone already knows power wins at sport, powerful women, powerful men, powerful horses.
An under-14 boys’ cricket team will beat a professional women’s team, not because they have better skills or are more worthy. It means nothing and changes nothing. It’s deeply boring to pitch these things against one another. And if you do it will of course be hijacked instantly by bad actors with only divisive points to make.
This is the real point. No matter how you couch it, as jolly banter or some kind of science experiment, this event will be unavoidably toxic. Scroll the internet for a while and the gender stuff around it is already moronic and pre-weaponised. What we have here is a massive opportunity for women’s sport to be belittled, dismissed and gloated over by “incels” and career misogynists, to blow its own foot off with a single dog-whistle publicity stunt.
As retired Australian doubles grand slam winner Rennae Stubbs put it “What’s in this for women’s tennis? If Sabalenka wins, she beats a man who is unfit and has been a total irrelevance for a number of years. If Kyrgios wins, he and others of the same mind will claim it legitimises everything he’s already spewing out.”
This is another issue. Why Kyrgios, of all male tennis players? Kyrgios is an interesting, flawed, honest person. But he is also significant. He represents something in this world. There have been allegations of domestic violence, a subsequent charge of assault dismissed by a magistrate, accusations of sexist comments, and a need to publicly distance himself from, of all people, Andrew Tate.
In the publicity poster for the event Kyrgios is yelling, bristly, eyes crinkled, neck veins throbbing. He looks scary and toxic. Opposite him Sabalenka is clear-eyed, calm, focused. I hate this picture for its quiet cynicism. Why aren’t they both clear-eyed, or both yelling? Why is the staging here so obviously uncontrolled male versus female mildness?
And now, for what it’s worth, the BBC is promoting this thing, slipping it on as part of its mission to educate and inform, in a way that feels utterly jarring. What do you want from the BBC at this time of year? I want to watch a film where a lovable uncle has to fix Christmas. I want half an hour in a gleaming kitchen watching a comforting middle-aged woman or a scrawny-necked man who has been on the Ozempic make a thing with sprouts nobody is ever going to bother with (“and we simply pour over the shaved pancetta and Maltesers”).
I definitely don’t want to watch an event that opens up a direct channel between the dear old BBC and a world of toxic internet hatred. You know who else is spinning in his grave here? Lord Reith, and his patrician ideas of broadcasting as a force for education. The stuff about duty and striving to “imagine other ways of being”.
And yes this was often balls, even in the golden years. An intellectual called Hugh Townsley-Sandwich is discussing the glottal stop. A man who is basically hair, glasses and a brown asbestos shirt is explaining cold fusion. But if you wanted evidence the BBC is now drowning, caught between two shores, commercial and benevolent, public service and public pandering, well, it’s a pretty convincing tie-breaker.
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