BBC’s royal cock-up causes predictable tabloid outrage

The Times today claims that there have been “calls for an inquiry” into how the BBC managed to promote a forthcoming programme on the back of false claims that the Queen got stroppy and walked out of a photo shoot in a huff. Strangely, the tabloid doesn’t say where these “calls” are coming from – surely its own reporters aren’t just making this stuff up?

Production company RDF Media, which the BBC is wholeheartedly blaming for the foul-up, also makes Wife Swap, Faking It and race-hate reality show Shipwrecked. It seems to have viewed the Queen as ripe for manipulation in the style of any of these shows. I’m wondering whether the papers would have been so outraged if the victim of this ABONIMABLE EDITING CRIME had been a reality TV contestant rather than a very rich woman who lives in a palace.

Isn’t this kind of selective editing taken for granted in Big Brother, as well as many in RDF’s typical ouevre, where ex-contestants claim the manipulation of edited footage is rampant? (Perhaps someone should explain this to Rupert Murdoch’s sweet-but-naive newspaper editors who genuinely seem to have no idea how television programmes are made.)

OK, so there’s no excuse for what the BBC/RDF did but it’s obvious that regardless of the technicalities, The Times, like everyone else, wants someone’s head on a plate and won’t rest until it’s served up with a celeriac jus. And I’m not sure whether BBC1 controller Peter Fincham’s round of TV interviews - starting with a hesitant turn on last night’s Newsnight and continuing this morning - have done enough to save his skin.

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