BBC TAKES 'PETER PRINCIPLE' TO THE LIMIT.

I've just been watching the third part of Andrew Marr's 'History of the World' recorded last Sunday. A more pompous and ludicrous programme is hard to imagine.

 

Marr is a former BBC political broadcaster who has moved on to grander things; these days he presents programmes such as 'Start the Week', an unashamed piece of advertising from an organisation which is not actually allowed to advertise and which is an increasingly awful load of rubbish.

 

What Marr's qualifications are for presenting a world history are unknown; that his presentation is a mish-mash of semi-mythical stories with little historical basis seems to be obvious. The programme was interspersed with some supposed true accounts but these also seem to be dubious; an account of the affair between Casesar and Cleopatra was presented as recorded by Plutarch who was not born until almost 100 years after their deaths. The death of a woman named Perpetua was recounted according to an account of a supposed eye-witness although this person was not named and whether or not it was truly an eye-witness account was not challenged. This was no history but a piece of romanticized nonsense. The rest seemed mostly to be a repeat of an assortment of well known facts with nothing new being added. We jumped from India to China to Rome to Arabia with barely a pause for breath; how this was any sort of coherent history escapes me.

 

Why does the BBC persist with producing such rubbish ? Programmes about history should be presented by historians, in the same way as programmes about nature are presented by biologists and natural historians. Marr is acceptable, just, as a political commentator, but as a presenter of programmes such as this latest effort he simply doesn't have the wherewithal. Sadly the BBC seems to have a current policy of promoting newsreaders and commentators to greater things without actually bothering to assess their suitability for the more exalted roles. Humphreys, Bruce, Vine and others now including Marr and the egregious Balding, are everywhere and do nothing but convince me that they are well beyond their areas of expertise and ability.

 

If ever there was a perfect example of the operation of the 'Peter Principle' this is it.