Why 2022 is the worst year for anniversaries

2022 is a big year for anniversaries: the Queen’s 70th anniversary, the BBC’s centenary and the 25th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana, to name a few. It’s also the worst year for anniversaries because the people in charge of celebrating them are obsessed with political correctness.

The Big Jubilee Read, a celebration of great books written during the first seventy years of the Queen’s reign, has already taken an almighty kicking from Private Eye, The Telegraph and Alex Larman in The Critic among others, because of the bizarre omissions (children’s classics including The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter books and His Dark Materials, famous writers from Doris Lessing, AS Byatt and Kingsley Amis to Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Harold Pinter) and the woke choices.

Now comes the BFI’s attempt to celebrate the BBC’s centenary with what they have called “100 BBC TV Gamechangers”. More political correctness. “The Chinese Detective” (notable for having the first British East Asian lead in a British television drama) but not “The Singing Detective”; Madhur Jaffrey’s “Indian Cookery” (one TV series) but not Fanny Cradock (24 TV series 1955-75); “Ballet Negres” (1946), “excerpts from the repertoire of Europe’s first Black dance company”, one of only two BBC programmes from the 1940s; but not “Muffin the Mule”, the first children’s programme to appear from the BBC’s then new television studios at Lime Grove, the first televised Olympics or the beginning of the BBC’s dedicated TV news service.

There’s a Scottish comedy show, “Chewin’ the Fat”, which the BFI contributor admits was “virtually unknown and unseen elsewhere in Britain”, but not “Fawlty Towers”, “League of Gentlemen” or “Little Britain”. Of course, there’s one ethnic minority which doesn’t feature in the BFI list. None of the great dramas by Jack Rosenthal, Stephen Poliakoff or Frederic Raphael about different aspects of Jewish life or history. Whenever you see woke lists, you always know there’s one group who will be missed out.

Then there are the bizarre choices and even more curious omissions. Jed Mercurio’s “Cardiac Arrest” but not “Line of Duty”; Peter Watkins’s “Threads”, about a nuclear attack made at the height of CND, but not “War Game” or his pioneering drama-documentary, “Culloden”; plenty of David Attenborough but no “Ascent of Man”, no Moon Landing, and no “Life Story”, Mick Jackson’s brilliant drama about the discovery of the structure of DNA with Jeff Goldblum, Tim Pigott-Smith, Juliet Stevenson and Alan Howard. There’s the BBC Proms but nothing by Christopher Nupen, Camberwick Green but nothing from Watch with Mother.

Of course, there are some outstandingly good choices: “Arena”, “Civilisation” and “Ways of Seeing” from the arts, “Life on Earth” and “Blue Planet”, some great children’s programmes from “The Sooty Show” and “Playschool” to “Blue Peter” and “Vision On” (but it’s worth noting that there’s only one children’s programme since “Teletubbies”), and great dramas, from “The Forsyte Saga” to “The Billy Trilogy” and “Boys from the Blackstuff”.

Each choice has a section called “How it changes TV”. Some of the choices were pioneering: from “Ways of Seeing” and “Arena” to “Pennies from Heaven” and “The Office”. They all radically changed the nature of arts programmes, drama and comedy. “Vision On” was designed specifically for children with hearing impairment and “Something Special” pioneered the use of Makaton.

Some of the most interesting choices didn’t change the form of TV at all, but did introduce different voices, especially since the 1970s: new Black and Asian comedy shows and dramas, including “The Lenny Henry Show” and “Goodness Gracious Me”, gay drama series like “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”. But arguably there are equally important firsts: the first well-known and much-loved Black children’s TV presenters like Floella Benjamin and Derek Griffiths on “Play School”; Cy Grant, the first black person to be featured regularly on television in the United Kingdom, mostly due to his appearances on the BBC current affairs show “Tonight”; Moira Stuart, the UK’s first female African-Caribbean television newsreader; and Diane-Louise Jordan, the first Black presenter on “Blue Peter” in the 1990s.

But many of the choices didn’t change TV at all. They may have been outstanding and/or popular, but how did “Strictly” (Come Dancing + mostly minor celebrities) “change TV”? Or Amy Jenkins’s overrated drama, “This Life”? “The Six Wives of Henry VIII” was hugely popular in the early 1970s, but like so many dramas of the time it remained confined to the studio, with huge, clunky old cameras; it now looks old-fashioned compared to Peter Kosminsky’s “Wolf Hall”.

Which brings us to technology. There is no room here for the first use of colour TV, the first satellite transmissions, the first use of lightweight cameras in TV drama and in news, the change from film to video.

There are other dramatic changes. If you look at the BBC’s timeline celebrating 100 years of the corporation, there are references to the 1951 General Election with “Truly comprehensive analysis and results for the first time”; the first BBC daily news TV programme in 1954; the first TV programme for deaf children in 1955, a forerunner to “Vision On”; Edward II with Ian McKellen in 1970, which showed the first same-sex kiss on British television; “Does He Take Sugar?”, a series which began in 1977 offering a new perspective on the lives of disabled people. These are all programmes which changed British television for the better, but they didn’t make the BFI list. The BFI seem more interested in ethnic minorities (no, not that one), transsexuals, feminists, left-wing drama and refugees. If only the BBC’s centenary had been twenty years ago.

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