Sally Magnusson has been pimping her wares on BBC1 to the UK’s pre-schoolers and the many other children who were off school last week. Britain’s Streets of Vice ran at 9.15am, immediately after the BBC’s lamentable Breakfast programme, on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday last week, with programmes entitled: Sex in the City, Smack Alley, Behind Closed Doors and Sex Lives & Videotape.
While the programmes were interesting, Magnusson’s annoying wheedling- whining style notwithstanding, it’s appalling to show such strong adult topics, language and imagery at 9.15 in the morning. We learned first hand from a prostitute and her ‘maid’ how good the money is – the prostitute had earned over £500 from ‘serving’ upwards of twenty-five ‘clients’ (some of whom we saw) that day. We visited ‘Smack Alley’, a named street for buying drugs in Derby. We saw a man injecting heroin into his groin. We met Matty, “one of Britain’s top gay porn stars”. We saw gay porn stars playing Twister. We met the ‘oversized’ 59-year old Dominatrix Francesca, Momma Fran, who “has recently embarked on a new career as a porn idol”. We met the staff and were given a guided tour of the facilities of a Hull brothel. We heard a woman moaning “give it to me”. And on and on.
This was on BBC1 – the first channel that appears on most British television sets – at 9.15am in the morning, over four days, when many pre-schoolers and children missing school due to illness are at home and watching (“Mummy, what does group sex mean?”). Worse, with the bad weather last week, schools across the country were closed, with their children at home when these programmes were shown. In one of the programmes we met Marsha, who “is trying to shield her three-year-old daughter Faye from the realities of living in a red light district”. Would that we could shield all of the nation’s children from the sordid realities of the underworld that the BBC brought into their living rooms last week.
The series was commissioned by Alison Sharman, Controller, Daytime. According to her official BBC biography “her ambitions for Daytime are to continue to bring credit to the whole of the BBC through imaginative and unique programming”. Oh dear. Writing at BBC News Online, Sharman claims that “challenging the perceptions of daytime television has been one of my most important focuses”. In The Independent (where else?) Sharman, writing about Britain’s Streets of Vice, says:
Far from being in any way titillating, these insightful and often painfully sad films take us – via modern lightweight digital video camera technology – not to another familiar chat-show encounter, but directly into the world of the sex industry. The series looks at its workers, the health issues involved, the industry’s connection with drug use and the impact on the police working in the front line.
She goes on:
Regardless of the sensitive and careful manner in which these films have been made, the audience will find them challenging. A series like this is not about ratings, it is about raising public awareness in a responsible and non-exploitative fashion. Given the predominantly market-led broadcasting economy, this is the challenging role that falls, happily, to the BBC and its tradition of excellent factual programming. The BBC remains the market leader throughout the day, with BBC1 daytime reaching an average of 16 million people each week…
Sharman boasts about the huge size of the BBC1 daytime audience, the audience that she took “directly into the world of the sex industry”, yet ignores the many children in that audience, while having the cheek to say that this wouldn’t happen on a ‘market-led’ channel – you bet it wouldn’t – which advertiser or commercially accountable broadcaster would want to be associated with exposing the nation’s youngest children to the sordid details of sex, drugs and porn on the margins of society?
Well Miss Sharman, in spite of what you think, you do have a market. It is us, the BBC’s telly-taxpaying viewers, who are your market – it is us by whom you should be led and to whom you should be accountable. The fact that we are compelled, by the threat of eventual imprisonment, to pay the BBC’s tellytax obviously hasn’t escaped your notice – otherwise you might actually be responsive and responsible to your market, the telly-taxpayers and their families.
This dreadful, dreadful scheduling choice is yet another example of the arrogant, ‘challenging’, BBC in action, doing as it pleases, as it thinks best, subverting the nation’s youngest children, unaccountable as ever to its captive telly-taxpaying customers. Worst of all, Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport, has sentenced our nation to another ten years of the BBC’s unaccountable, subversive arrogance. She has missed probably one of the best opportunities most politicians could ever have to make Britain a better, happier and more cohesive society, by making the BBC accountable and responsible to the nation, to the people who pay for it. Another ten years. What a calamity.
To add your voice to the hundreds of decent telly-taxpayers who have already complained to the BBC telephone them on 08700 100 222. Make sure they log your complaint and give you a case or complaint number. You can also use the BBC’s Online Complaints form to log your complaint. BBC Complaints have published a standard fob-off statement about Britain’s Streets of Vice. BBC Newswatch has a similar response. Don’t ignore it. Don’t be fobbed off. Make sure they hear you!