In the increasingly desperate battle for ratings, are producers resorting to publicity wheezes (trans. dirty tricks) to promote otherwise worthy documentaries?
Remember the Paul Watson Alzheimers saga? Now there’s a new contender. Martin Belam has gathered the evidence here. But it is an odd tale that began (bizarrely) on BBC arts prog Front Row, transferred to the Barbican, and finally made it into the Observer.
The story was this – documentary maker Tony Palmer was railing at a rejection letter from the BBC for his proposed film on the great Ralph Vaughan Williams (his 3rd symphony is a personal fave) which illustrated dumbing down at the corporation.
He approached the BBC last year with the idea of making a documentary about Vaughan Williams, whose best known symphonies* include The Lark Ascending and Fantasia on Greensleeves, in time for the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death.
The rejection letter to Palmer from the Beeb – from June 2006 – was a classic combo of corp speak and ignorance:
Having looked at our own activity via the lens of find, play and share, we came to the conclusion that a film about Mr Williams would not be appropriate at this time. This is essentially because we are…reconstructing the architecture of bbc.co.uk, and to do that, we need to maximise the routes to content.
We must establish the tools that allow shared behaviours, and so harness the power of the audience and our network to make our content more findable.
We have decided to take a radically new approach… and therefore free resources for projects of real ambition.
I’ll explain the italics in a moment or two. But the BBC denied sending the letter and Sam Leith presented their case in the Telegraph. So far, so unpredictably predictable, with a role reversal in Beeb-bashing.
Still, as Leith and then Belam noted:
last week, prior to transmission, [Palmer’s film] was released on DVD – tonypalmerdvd.com. How fortuitous for him that all that publicity over the mysterious BBC rejection letter should break at the very same time…
OK, so Palmer shouldn’t file his rejection letters for eighteen months – but it wasn’t the timing that aroused Belam’s suspicions.
It sounded to him awfully like a chunk of a speech he had sat through by BBC exec Simon Nelson, some three months ago. Don’t read all of it but here are the killer similarities:
So having looked at our own activity via the lens of find, play and share we came to these conclusions:
- It is essential that we re-construct the architecture of bbc.co.uk to increase findability and to do that we need to maximise the routes in to content
- We must establish the tools that allow share behaviours – and so harness the power of our audience and the network to make our content more findable
- We must take a radically new approach to our production processes to dramatically increase the number of programmes we support at little or no resource cost and thereby free resource for projects of real ambition…
Yes, Simon needs help writing speeches, but it is kind of unlikely that he would be plagiarising a year old rejection letter, doncha think?
Even Mary Riddell, whose by-line appeared on the report and who wrote an accompanying op-ed for the Observer, was unconvinced:
This letter has all the hallmarks of a hoax, but Palmer, with a considerable reputation to protect, swears it is genuine.
What a tangled web we weave…still, if Palmer actually posts the letter online, all will be made clear.
In the meantime, the Observer may be wondering why it ran the story at all…
*The Lark Ascending, In The Fen Country etc. are great orchestral works, but they are not what Vaughan Williams chose to describe as symphonies. Still, no question of dumbing down at the Observer.