Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

I'm very glad the BBC has made this.
But it distresses me that in 2014, after a team of us had spent months developing a very similar series, it was instantly dismissed by a BBC channel controller, with three words:
"Monbiot? Fuck off!"

It's easy to forget that, until a couple of years ago, the BBC was fiercely hostile to any but the most muted and anodyne discussion of environmental issues. Senior bosses remain hostile to those who challenge the status quo. Yet our survival depends on doing so.

It wasn't until Greta broke through that the BBC twigged that one of the reasons it had lost so many young people was its disgraceful neglect - actually, not just neglect but active dismissal - of the only issue that ultimately counts: the survival of our life support systems.

It has a lot of catching up to do, and it's beginning to do it. But we should never forget that for 30 years - 30 crucial, irreplaceable years - the BBC suppressed almost all meaningful discussion of the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced.

As @frannyarmstrong says, ultimately the BBC had one job: to inform us about the existential catastrophe we face. And it completely blew it.

Layered on top of their ignorance and hatred towards environmental issues was the sheer bloody rudeness of the channel controllers. Dismissive, imperious, sweary, kissing up, kicking down, routinely abusing their inordinate powers.

https://twitter.com/suzumibaci/status/1448897473750224915

The way channel controllers treated film makers was fundamentally abusive. (Has it changed?). I've heard from so many producers who were treated like dirt, and had to take it, as their livelihoods were at stake.
I hope more people start blowing the whistle on it.

It's an issue across the creative industries: massive, storming egos granting themselves "artistic licence" to grind people's faces in the dirt. But it becomes especially toxic when those egos are affronted by proposals that challenge power.