More A Way Of Life… Look, this is just between you and me

This Queen Thing

While away and sitting watching the TV as the lovely Cornish rain came down, we all (and I should clarify that The Mrs and I were accompanied by a friend on this holiday) became increasingly annoyed by the whole fiasco around the BBC's appalling misrepresentation of the Queen. (I should clarify, in the absence of sarcasm tags, that we don't actually think the Corporation has anything to apologise for.)

Let's look at the sequence of events: Peter Fincham shows a bunch of print journos some trailer footage for a number of upcoming programmes. It includes some clips of the Queen doco, including two which are actually in a different order than they appear in the full programme. Programme makers do this all the time - look at the trailer at the end of any episode of Doctor Who; I guarantee there's not a straight linear presentation of the clips in every instance. The print journos then go out and splash the shocking behaviour of the Queen all over their front pages, and the next thing that happens is that the BBC is pushed into an apology.

Now, I could be wrong, but I haven't seen any evidence that the BBC produced a Press Pack that said "See shocking scenes of Her Maj in a bit of a huff! Gasp as she storms out of a photo session like a C-List celeb with delusions of significance!" What I have seen is a lot of newspapers leaping to conclusions and then blaming the Beeb for their own lack of journalistic rigor.

The blame for any offence caused in this whole piece of non-news seems to lie squarely at the doorstep of the print hacks and their editors as far as I can see, and I think the Beeb should be ashamed of having rolled over about the whole affair.