In the wake of the Top Gear row, the Left-wing BBC has shown its true metropolitan elitist, lefty-liberal, Islington dinner party, Guardianista colours by being patronising and insulting to the working class.
A BBC boss has insulted nearly half the country by dismissing them using marketing jargon.
Creative director Alan Yentob was trying to rebut the allegation that the corporation caters only for the left-wing ‘metropolitan elite’.
The executive, who earns around £330,000 a year, insisted that the BBC appeals to all sorts of audiences because it airs programmes that ‘reach out to… C2s [and] DEs’,
C2 and DE are terms used by marketing professionals to describe the working classes – more than 47 per cent of the UK population.
Mr Yentob’s extraordinary declaration on Newsnight on Wednesday was an attempt to prove what an inclusive organisation the BBC is, amid concern that a huge swathe of its audience will stop tuning in now Jeremy Clarkson has been axed from Top Gear.
However, his comments backfired as viewers used social media to accuse him of arrogance and sounding so ‘out of touch’ they thought it was a spoof.
Meanwhile, Top Gear's James May has said that he might leave television altogether and become a teacher.
The BBC, and the British Establishment as a whole, really is a Left-wing cesspit and it needs clearing out.
I'm voting Ukip on 7th May to try and get it cleaned out.
How patronising! BBC boss Alan Yentob says: We DO make shows for the working classes
Alan Yentob was appearing on Newsnight over Jeremy Clarkson row
Denied BBC was elitist as programmes attract audiences that are 'C2, Ds'
Twitter users said use of the terms showed that Yentob was elitist
Terms are used in marketing to describe working class consumers
By
Katherine Rushton For The Daily Mail
27 March 2015
Daily Mail
A BBC boss has insulted nearly half the country by dismissing them using marketing jargon.
Creative director Alan Yentob was trying to rebut the allegation that the corporation caters only for the ‘metropolitan elite’.
The executive, who earns around £330,000 a year, insisted that the BBC appeals to all sorts of audiences because it airs programmes that ‘reach out to… C2s [and] DEs’,
BBC creative director Alan Yentob has been mocked for using marketing speak to deny that the broadcaster was elitist describing working class people as 'C2s' and 'Ds' as he defended Jeremy Clarkson's sacking
Mr Yentob's comments quickly attracted the attention of social media users, who criticised the way he had described viewers
Robert MacDonald, tweeted: 'Did Alan Yentob really just say 'lots of our programmes reach out to C2 Ds' (in rejecting BBC is for 'metropolitan elite')?'
C2 and DE are terms used by marketing professionals to describe the working classes – more than 47 per cent of the UK population.
Mr Yentob’s extraordinary declaration on Newsnight on Wednesday was an attempt to prove what an inclusive organisation the BBC is, amid concern that a huge swathe of its audience will stop tuning in now Jeremy Clarkson has been axed from Top Gear.
However, his comments backfired as viewers used social media to accuse him of arrogance and sounding so ‘out of touch’ they thought it was a spoof.
They accused Mr Yentob of using obscure jargon that only the metropolitan elite would understand, in a way that suggested that working class viewers are a niche audience.
John Hemming, Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley, accused Mr Yentob of ‘arrogance’ which only confirmed his status as part of the metropolitan elite.
He said: ‘In essence, he’s admitting that the BBC doesn’t do much for the working classes, and he is doing that in a way that is not making it easy for many people to understand.’
Mr Yentob – who earns more than £180,000 a year as creative director as well as an estimated £150,000 fee for editing and presenting the BBC arts series Imagine – made the remarks as he attempted to explain the decision to fire Clarkson.
Mr Yentob was appearing on Newsnight to defend the sacking of Jeremy Clarkson, whose contract is not being renewed after he attacked Top Gear producer Oisin Tymon
Twitter user Sacred Antinous wrote: 'Yentob describes all those who aren't 'metropolitan elite' as C2DEs. Our licence fee is so well spent on this man of the people #newsnight'
The terms C2s and Ds are marketing terms to describe working class people
Presenter Emily Maitlis asked if getting rid of the Top Gear host would make it harder for the BBC to reach ‘a demographic... increasingly disregarded’ by a corporation which ‘plays largely to the metropolitan elite’.
Apparently unaware of the irony, Mr Yentob responded: ‘I don’t know that I would buy that, actually, about the metropolitan elite.
'There are quite a lot of programmes which reach out to audiences which are C2s, DEs, which aren’t the metropolitan elite.’
The terms are part of the Approximated Social Grade, which defines social groups by occupation. AB (22 per cent of the UK) broadly covers higher and intermediate managerial.
C1 (31 per cent) is supervisory, clerical and junior managerial. C2 (21 per cent) is skilled manual while DE (26 per cent) is semi-skilled and unskilled, plus the unemployed.
Others questioned whether the BBC really were keen to make programmes that appealed to all audiences
Toby Wood said: 'Only metropolitan elite luvvies speak like Alan Yentob on @BBCNewsnight - he's in more opaque bubble than Westminster politicians #Clarkson'
A BBC spokesman said: ‘There’s nothing elitist about making programmes and services used by 97 per cent of people every week, and that’s the point Alan made.’
Mr Yentob admitted that axing Clarkson marked ‘a bad day’ for the BBC.
But he said director general Lord Hall felt he had no choice after the Top Gear star’s unprovoked physical and verbal attack on his producer.
However, he refused to rule out Clarkson returning to the BBC.
Clarkson attacked Mr Tymon (pictured) leaving him in such a state that he later took himself to A&E
The BBC has said that Top Gear will continue without Clarkson, who had hosted it since 1988, but there are doubts as to whether co-presenters Richard Hammond and James May will return. Rumours abound that ITV and Sky are now after Clarkson
Arrogant, smug and sneering: JANET STREET-PORTER, who spent years as a senior BBC boss, excoriates the incestuous luvvie clique who run it
By
Janet Street-Porter For The Daily Mail
27 March 2015
Daily Mail
Alan Yentob, the 'creative director' of the BBC, has never worked anywhere but the BBC - where else would you find such a narrow gene pool at the top?
Proof that the people who run the BBC live in a precious world of their own was supplied this week when Alan Yentob — whose title at the corporation is ‘creative director’ — told Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis that ‘there are quite a lot of programmes which reach out to audiences which are C2s, DEs, which aren’t the metropolitan elite’.
In other words, he seemed to be saying that Jeremy Clarkson may have been sacked by the BBC ‘but common people will still find something to watch’.
How simply outrageous! And how very, very kind of the BBC to make a few programmes ‘reaching out’ to the non-metropolitan elite (as if they live on Mars) — those downmarket low-earners who live in places outside London and the South-East.
Anyone listening might have thought Yentob was talking about a vanishing tribe or a special needs group, instead of those millions of ordinary people who (unlike him and his pals, with their trendy artworks and minimalist designer sofas) live in normal homes and want to watch decent TV programmes.
People who live in small houses and flats, who don’t drink Terroir Series Malbec wine from Argentina and eat tapas.
People who don’t holiday in Tuscany or rent nice houses in Devon and Cornwall. But people who manage to be happy, despite living outside sought-after Islington and Notting Hill postcodes, where most of our political leaders, media chiefs and the chattering classes seem to reside.
In his hamfisted way, by talking about social classes ‘C2s, DEs’, Yentob was referring to the large majority of Britons — the kind of people the BBC top brass and most politicians tend not to mix with on a daily basis, unless they are partaking in a rare public meeting.
With Clarkson heading off into the sunset, taking his millions of male and female fans with him — probably to a new home at ITV, who must be ecstatic — what evidence exists, apart from Yentob’s patronising remark about the lower social classes, that the BBC has any idea how to engage with these millions of licence fee-payers?
Having spent nearly a decade working as a top executive at the BBC, I can vouch that it’s run by a bunch of smug, self-satisfied, over-educated types (nearly all graduates of the same universities) who communicate in an opaque language and conform to a very limited set of beliefs.
These Polenta People (as I like to think of them, since they enjoy eating the fancy Italian cornmeal) embody Left-wing Hampstead talking to trendy, Left-leaning Barnes. Everyone else seems to be excluded.
They make simple — and arrogant — assumptions about what viewers and listeners will enjoy, based on their own narrow experiences.
'The real disaster for the BBC was that the Clarkson episode had exposed its management as dangerously out of touch with a huge section of the people who fund them'
Alan Yentob — whom I love dearly, despite his failings — has never worked anywhere else apart from the BBC, starting as a trainee in 1968.
Is there any other billion-pound business with such a narrow gene pool at the top?
In typical corporate-speak, BBC executives talk of ‘delivery’ and ‘accountability’, and worry about ‘programme reach’.
But outside work they inhabit an incestuous world, cocooned away from this target audience.
They congregate at weekends, swapping in-jokes over bottles of Waitrose wine at kitchen suppers (that epitome of the chattering-class meal).
Their best pals inevitably write for The Guardian and they share the same set of leftish, liberal and politically correct values.
They loathe people such as Clarkson — a rare beacon of political incorrectness — which makes it even more remarkable that he lasted so long at the BBC.
Just how inward-looking BBC bosses have become was illustrated this week with the fallout from the Top Gear debacle.
The story of Clarkson’s sacking was the lead item on the 5pm news on Radio 4, ahead of the plane crash in the Alps in which 150 people died.
How predictable that, in the rarefied atmosphere of the BBC, a millionaire TV host is deemed more newsworthy than a major aviation disaster.
As part of a PR damage-limitation exercise after the BBC had sacked one of its most popular presenters, Yentob popped up on several programmes, from Steve Hewlett’s Media Show to Radio 4’s PM and BBC2’s Newsnight, talking about his ‘pal’ Clarkson and what a shame the whole story was.
Their best pals inevitably write for The Guardian and they share the same set of leftish, liberal and politically correct values
Surely, if this BBC nabob had been more honest, he would have admitted the real disaster for the BBC was that the Clarkson episode had exposed its management as dangerously out of touch with a huge section of the people who fund them: licence fee-payers on lower incomes.
For anyone on the minimum wage, paying the annual TV licence represents a far higher proportion of their weekly budget than it does for someone living in a nice flat in Primrose Hill or Notting Hill.
The truth is that the BBC has increasingly, over the years, represented the metropolitan elite (and become blander in the process).
However, Top Gear was a rare example of a format which appealed to the sort of audience the BBC cannot afford to lose — viewers who are switching away from BBC1 and watching more programmes on Sky and Channel 5.
The tragedy is that it is not only BBC top brass who live in this out-of-touch bubble. The same applies to our political leaders.
David Cameron, with his well-heeled pals in the Cotswolds (who, ironically, include Clarkson), knows no more about white van man and ordinary women than his nemesis, Ed ‘Two Kitchens’ Miliband, who lives in a £2 million home in London.
They might talk about ‘hard-working men and women’ — political code for ‘C2s, DEs’ — but they don’t know any.
No wonder a survey of voters this week found that the three attributes they thought best described Cameron were ‘out of touch’, ‘smug’ and ‘arrogant’. Miliband was ‘weird’, while Nick Clegg was also ‘out of touch’.
Yentob has been widely derided since using 'C2, DEs' to describe BBC viewers on lower incomes while being interviewed on Newsnight about the potential end of top Gear
What’s more, there is an unhealthy nexus between politicians and influential figures at the BBC and in other parts of the media.
For example, there was Ed Richards, a quintessential New Labour man who was an adviser to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown before becoming, for 11 years, the head of the media watchdog Ofcom.
Let’s not forget former Labour minister James Purnell, the BBC’s so-called head of strategy who was alleged to have been behind an odious smear against Clarkson in which he was compared to serial paedophile Jimmy Savile. Purnell strenuously denied being involved.
Then there is Ian Katz, who left The Guardian to run Newsnight. Not far away in Islington lives Tom Baldwin (married to an heiress, living in a very posh house), who quit The Times to work for Ed Miliband as his spin doctor.
They are typical of the metropolitan crew who claim to know about social deprivation and the working class but don’t have a clue how real people live.
The BBC is packed full of programmes that educate us with a small ‘e’ but manage to slightly patronise us at the same time
When I worked at the BBC, I was the only person in management without a university degree. I was also the only one with an Estuary accent — and things have changed very little since then.
This week, a new quiz started on BBC4 which sums up the problem. Called The Quizeum, it’s chaired by Mr Smug, Griff Rhys Jones, and broadcast from a different museum each week.
I watched the first episode. There wasn’t a studio audience to give the show any life. As one critic observed, ‘perhaps no one wanted to come’.
With all the will in the world, I can’t imagine any Darrens from Doncaster tuning in to such a programme.
Nor would they find much in common with the horribly precious historian Lucy Worsley (queen of the simper) who presents programmes about royal palaces.
The BBC is packed full of programmes that educate us with a small ‘e’ but manage to slightly patronise us at the same time.
There’s Michael Portillo and his train journeys. Clare Balding walking around Britain. Stephen Fry presenting everything from quiz shows to documentaries.
The BBC should reflect the diversity and richness of British culture — not just the tastes of those who read The Guardian, drive eco-friendly cars, despise Clarkson and make their own sourdough bread.
The Quizeum
BBC4's new gameshow, The Quizeum, in which two teams of history and culture experts are quizzed on their knowledge inside a museum, has already been branded "elitist" despite only one episode of it being aired so far, with critics saying the show will appeal to hardly anybody outside the left-wing metropolitan elite of London and the South East of England. But what do you think?
Quiz show in which Griff Rhys Jones visits museums around the UK with two teams of expert panellists made up of historians, scientists and cultural scholars.
At Britain's oldest public museum, the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford, being put to the test by Griff are Lars Tharp, Professor Kate Williams, Dr Janina Ramirez and Dr Michael Scott. The two teams pit their knowledgeable wits against each other in a series of rounds informed by the amazing contents of the museum.
Watch it Here:
BBC iPlayer - The Quizeum - Episode 1
