Smoking Gun For Foreign Office/BBC Propaganda 108

 in Uncategorized by

An incredible Smoking Gun! Big Talk’s Kenton Allen tweets “Now off to the Foreign Office for a historic read through”. The exposure of Mitchell & Webb’s Our Men as state sponsored propaganda for the alliance with Uzbekistan is thoroughly confirmed. That the BBC is a party to this kind of insidious propaganda is disgusting.

Phillip Challinor commented on Our Men that now we have invented state-controlled satire.

I have also now received a further denial, now in writing, from Big Talk that Our Men is based on Murder in Samarkand, where they repeat that “it is also significantly informed by a large amount of research carried out with a number of the FCO’s staff, many of whom are serving diplomatic officers”. They further claim again that it is not set in Uzbekistan, but in a fictional country, Tazbekistan. They do not respond to the fact that their instructions to cast told them to study Uzbek people’s actions and manners.

With thanks to Mary for tracking down Kenton Allen’s tweet

Allowed HTML - you can use: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

108 thoughts on “Smoking Gun For Foreign Office/BBC Propaganda”

1 2 3 4
  • Jingle Jangle

    If it wasn’t an insult to female genitalia, the FCO and BBC would be compared to a shower of the aforementioned.

    I suppose you should be glad the ambassador is not called Craig Maurie.

  • jonny 2 jons

    Thought Mitchell consumated his move to the dark side when he married Coren’s daughter. Hey ho.

  • crab

    I suppose Craig you might just be taking all this rather more seriously than the comedians are, having sat opposite a condemned father who confessed while having his children tortured in front of him, becoming aware of thousands of innocent people in the same situation, and being falsely prosecuted, forced out of your post and medically harmed (nearly assassinated) by someone, for reacting to the situation humanely.

    Its complete shite that you havent been at least consulted. If anyone on the team has any decency they will get in touch.

  • Mary

    What can we all do to help Craig in this? I hate feeling powerless against such revolting propaganda by these moral pygmies. It proves that there are enemies in the FCO if nothing else. Surely Craig or someone knows a lawyer who could step even if pro bono. The miscreants would not like the publicity and as Cpl Jones would say, ‘They don’t like it up ’em’.

    In the first place, I feel it is important to get on to Patten or the Commissioning Editor. The BBC commissioned the stuff.

    I would say responsibility lies at Shane Allen’s door firstly and then Patten’s representing the BBC Trust.
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/whos-who/tv/fiction/#comedy_1

    ShaneAllen&Assistant AT bbc.co.uk

  • Venceremos

    Time for you to write your own screen play adaptation of Murder in Samarkand Craig? Don’t let the BBC’s propaganda hog the screen. Film and TV are far more potent than books–they have huge audiences.

    Here is the perfect open source software for scriptwriting: https://www.celtx.com/index.html

    If not you, commission someone else?

  • craig Post author

    Venceremos

    Three full film scripts of Murder in Samarkand have already been written by very very heavyweight authors – David Hare, Michael Winterbottom and Don MacPherson. But nobody will finance such an anti-establishment true story – they would much rather do Zero Torture Thirty – or indeed Our Men. All three scripts were pitched to BBC Film, among many others, and turned down.

  • Venceremos

    Have you approached Ken Loach for advice?

    Allan Hart had a similar problem getting his book Zionism: the Real Enemy of the Jews published. He was very determined and even published it himself at great cost but eventually he succeeded and got it published in the US by Clarity Press.

    How about a stage play? Would that be cheaper to produce?

  • Venceremos

    From: http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/Creative-Collaboration-The-Open-Source-Filmmaking-Experiment-63533.html

    Once an expensive, difficult and inaccessible profession to break into, filmmaking has now opened up to the masses. With the digital revolution, anyone with a digital video camera and access to basic editing software can make a film.

    Along with this accessibility has come a new wave of collaborative, open source filmmaking, where writers, videographers, musicians and producers share their work on a film project — often entirely in the virtual realm. Sometimes these collaborators know each other, and sometimes they don’t.

  • craig Post author

    Venceremos,

    It costs about £30,000 for a decent book publication. it costs about 5 million dollars for a low budget feature film. There is an excellent stage adaptation, One Turbulent Ambassador, by a major playwright, Robin Soans, that has exactly the same problems.

    The BBC even refuses to give a second broadcast to the radio play, despite it being Hare/Tennant, already paid for, and the fact that the Saturday Play on Radio 4 quite frequently gets a second airing.

  • craig Post author

    Venceremos,

    I admire your invincible optimism, and yes anyone can make a film with a digital cam. But getting it distributed and broadcast to a mass audience is incredibly, incredibly difficult. I have spent five years of my life working on this with some of the very best people in the industry. Please realise it is a tad annoying for you to keep posting “But this internet article says its simple”.

  • Techno

    Craig, if this is true, it’s pretty scary. Unfortunately, these media types live in a world of their own, now more than ever before.

    You are correct. Making films is notoriously difficult. Any director will tell you that

    And to DomesticExtremist, I stopped paying my TV Licence about two years ago due to being generally unhappy with the BBC, but I specifically objected to the BBC producing “Homes Under the Hammer”, a TV show that promotes property speculation (if landlords want their own TV programmes they can pay for a specialist channel on Sky with their own money).

    Barely I day goes by when I don’t feel that it was a great decision. The £12 a month I save goes into my pension fund now instead of into some overpaid TV star’s.

  • lwtc247

    “That the BBC is a party to this kind of insidious propaganda is disgusting.” – but rather expected.

  • Mary

    A different TV production company, Dragonfly, part of Elisabeth Murdoch’s Shine TV, have upset a community of people in the North of England in the People Like Us programme shown on BBC Three.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-21506291#

    This outsourcing of production by the BBC follows the example of the privatisation of other public services. What was so wrong with the old style BBC where every employee produced popular programmes that we mostly wanted to watch and listen to? There certainly was not the massive top heavy and expensive management structure that has been created nor the lavish new buildings in London (not just Portland Place), Salford and elsewhere. What are they for? Little of the production is now inhouse.

    A behomoth was created by Birt and Thompson and by NuLabour and Ms Jowell who got rid of the Governors and created the Trust.

  • JimmyGiro

    If they broadcast this, and it is indeed an exercise of ‘sublimation’, to make light of evil so as to protect the image of our satanic State, then let’s hope it becomes the final nail in the BBC’s coffin.

  • Venceremos

    The Web is an alternative to the stranglehold of the establishment media distribution networks. Emerging film distribution models that utilise peer to peer streaming bypasses all of that crap and lowerd the barriers to entry into film distribution.

    Read this discussion of streaming, its limitations and the role of Bittorrent Live in solving them.

    http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/13/bittorrent-live/

  • lwtc247

    Mary, you are referring to the lesser evil as opposed to the greater evil of today. Still evil though.

    (I’m sure you’re familiar with Pilger’s critique of Aunties creation, meant as a State propaganda tool – of course, which amazingly the public pay for) But yeah, there were some good programs in the lesser evil days.

  • craig Post author

    Venceremos

    And what is the largest audeince any feature film has ever obtained using solely these alternative distribution models? Bugger all. I used to waste a lot of my time giving interviews to documentary makers who made films nobody ever saw. You go make the film and then tell me how many people saw it.

  • lwtc247

    Craig. A suggestion… Talk to John Pilger about it. I’m sure he’ll give you some good advice.

  • Herbie

    There were allegations of plagiarism made against the BBC over their comedy about the Olympics, Twenty Twelve.

    “BBC in plagiarism row over ‘Australian Olympics show copy claims'”

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/8381341/BBC-in-plagiarism-row-over-Australian-Olympics-show-copy-claims.html

    And here’s an account of the affair, written by one of the writers of an Australian treatment of similar material, Interestingly, the BBC had quite long negotiations with the Australian writers, who are very well known there.

    http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/45014.html

    There’s stuff about it all over the net.

    The bit where the BBC investigated themselves, before haughtily declaring themselves not guilty was some of the funniest work they’ve done in ages.

    The BBC complaints dept would certainly be one hell of a place to set a comedy. Now, no nicking.

  • Cryptonym

    I am fully up to speed now with this story. Webb is the lanky indefinably not-bad looking blond one, and Mitchell, is well, the other one, sitting on the toilet-pan, with his trousers round his ankles, in that thing that was one one christmas-time in the wee small hours on some obscure channel that never took off, Mitchell a sort of Bobby Ball, to Webb’s Tommy Cannon. As for going over to the dark side, he’d been writing the most unfunny pieces imaginable for the Guardian for at least a couple of years, with competition from that other chuckle brother, Armando Ianucci -each plumbing the depths, and both manifesting despair or some total breakdown; no-one dared comment on either’s weekly dismal failures for fear of pushing either of them over the edge completely. The real comedy at the time at the Graun came from Kevin McKenna, his defence of Michael Martin (and his wife) had tears of laughter rolling down many a cheek, the problem was McKenna was utterly serious, I think.

  • Ben Franklin -Machine Gun Preacher (unleaded version)

    I want Michael Palin and Eric Idle. That’s a funny pair.

  • Vronsky

    State-sponsored satire is not new.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_Smith

    Celtx scripting software: if it’s specifically radio drama in BBC ‘scene’ format you want to write, it’s easier to design your own template in Microsoft Word – Celtx is klunky and frustrating. I have such a Word template – get my email from Clark or Suhayl if you’re interested. Only thing it doesn’t do is complete character names when you type the first letter or two, but you can fake this with Word’s ‘autocorrect’ feature. You’ll get funny effects later when you’ve forgotten you did that ALEX: nd queer stuff turns up in your LISA: etters.

1 2 3 4

Comments are closed.