Adam Curtis take! The BBC has a £3.6 bn budget but we are only allow one solitary archivist-auteur, as a treat. Why aren't they commissioning far more in the way of efforts to make sense of the present? And not just by solitary white men of a certain age.
It is telling after 2008 that the BBC made no effort to explain to people what the hell had happened through a landmark documentary series. Doing so would have made austerity a much harder sell, given that cutting to grow was always, as Curtis would say, a fantasy.
It would have been exhilarating to see someone who had predicted the financial collapse set out their reasoning, and present their proposals for reform. Instead we were stuck with the same old mystifications between 2010 and 2015.
There are so many interesting ideas floating about, so many interesting thinkers toiling away in relative obscurity. I've learned lots from Curtis but as he himself says he is a journalist. What's to stop the BBC commissioning from all of social science and beyond?
Here's an idea for free for my BBC followers. Why not commission Christine Desan to present a history of English money? Then make all your economics correspondents and editors watch it, so that they stop talking drivel about the subject.
BTW, here's Desan talking about 'money as a constitutional project' - it's a million times more interesting than @BBCRadio4's occasional efforts to tackle the subject. mronline.org/2021/01/01/mon…
And here's a Panorama-style documentary about the offshore system with 4 million views so far, made on a budget of £4,000. I would love to watch a BBC documentary about why they have never commissioned anything similar.
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