The BBC is “under threat, politically,” the novelist Ian McEwan has said, as he compared sections of the Conservative party to the populist right in Hungary.
The author of Amsterdam, On Chesil Beach and Atonement recently collaborated with the BBC Symphony Orchestra for an evening of words and music at the Barbican. The event came as the BBC’s classical music performing groups faced “catastrophic” cuts, and the corporation’s high-profile presenters including Gary Lineker clashed with the government over its policies.
“I am very worried for the BBC,” McEwan said in an interview with the Radio Times. “It’s under threat, politically. Generally, there’s a playbook for the populist right and there are three or four targets: the civil service, the judiciary and independent broadcasters.
“You see it in Hungary, and we have our homegrown version of that – maybe a little milder. It’s become a very powerful impetus on a large and influential section of the Conservative party, that somehow the BBC is a head-banging, leftist, pointy-headed sanctuary for all their political enemies and has got to be taken down. It’s just too bad.”
McEwan, 74, who broke through in the 1970s as part of a notorious gang of writers that included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie, also addressed the eradication of male desire in literature, and recalled recently hearing a young male novelist say he could no longer write about the subject.
“I thought: god, that’s terrible. Because that’s the desire of half the world, and it’s a subject just as much as female desire is, or a thousand other things. It needs to be handled. Whether it’s done well or badly, let readers decide.”
While he welcomed the “opening up” of publishing to under-represented voices, he said these should be in addition to what was already being published, “not replacement or subtraction. Let’s keep the field as wide and open as possible.”
If he were a writer in his 20s today, he said, he “wouldn’t bother writing a novel” and would “go straight to writing screenplays”.
Having adapted On Chesil Beach and The Children Act as films, he cited The Bridge, Breaking Bad and Call My Agent! among TV shows he admired. “There’s a lot of junk and mediocrity, but the good ones have all the thrill and compelling qualities of a serial Dickens novel,” he said.
In the same issue of the Radio Times, the veteran radio DJ Ken Bruce said he was not given the credit he deserved at the BBC and criticised the handling of his departure from Radio 2 after more than three decades.
Bruce, 72, whose new show on Greatest Hits Radio began on Monday, said: “One of the reasons I went is because, having done the show for quite a long time, and with it being the highest-rated programme in Europe for four years, I thought: what’s to achieve? What’s left?”
But there were frustrations too, he added, including times when he felt he was not “really noticed by either the BBC itself or some listeners” – such as when he was not included in any BBC promotional materials about its presenters.
“So I thought: I’m going to make these people appreciate me. And having done that to my satisfaction, I felt it was time to give myself a little challenge, try something different, rather than become stale and wait for the axe.”
Bruce said he was disappointed when Radio 2 asked him to step down before his contract had fully expired. “I thought that after 45 years I could be trusted to do the right thing for the next few weeks. But obviously it’s up to them. It’s their choice.”
