Matthew Gould
There were many things to be annoyed about in the World Cup final: Argentinian shithousery; their usual grace in defeat; the string of cliches that Tom Cruise read out at the start; the inevitable cute song from all the world’s children. But the BBC’s smug, self-satisfied, tone-deaf, patronising promo enraged me more than all of this combined. Romesh Ranganathan spent two minutes and 40 seconds to ask, and then answer at extraordinary length, a variation on Monty Python’s famous question: ‘What has the BBC ever done for us?’
You couldn’t fault the production. It was beautifully made. A hundred celebrities, from Chris Martin to Pudsey Bear. There were Daleks and Mary Berry and Louis Theroux offering to turn off the BBC with a big switch. So why did it grate so much?
In part, it was the orgy of self-congratulation; the BBC telling us at length just how lucky we are to have it. ‘They introduced the nation to someone called Adele, they verify news thoroughly, and do it pretty well’, intoned Ranganathan. ‘They do a lot for British storytelling, it’s true.’ And if somehow we hadn’t quite got the message that the BBC is really, really great, at the end we had Strictly judge Anton du Beke holding up a score paddle with a ‘10’ on it. Because, as we all know, the BBC deserves a score of at least ten out of ten.
