Author Nick Hornby has written an essay praising the BBC as “one of our crowning achievements as a nation”, saying that its handling of the coronavirus pandemic should make it “untouchable” once the crisis has passed.
In an essay for Penguin, Hornby writes that the BBC, which has put together its biggest ever education programme to help parents during lockdown, is helping him “to live through and understand a crisis”.
“Before all this started, the BBC was under assault, apparently because of its independence. It was, is, being threatened with all sorts, including the loss of its lifeblood licence fee,” writes Hornby, the author of bestselling novels including High Fidelity and About a Boy. The Conservative government was reported in February to be looking at scrapping the licence fee in favour of a subscription model, but the BBC’s chairman warned that putting the broadcaster behind a paywall would undermine its ability to bring the country together.
Hornby compares the BBC’s coverage with the “mendacity and wilful stupidity” of Fox News in the US – “a popular TV news channel of the type that the government seems to want to see in the UK”.
The BBC, meanwhile, “has tried to inform and educate us while entertaining us, as its remit has always been,” writes Hornby. He praises Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis’s “blistering” editorial on 9 April, when the presenter spoke out about how lower paid frontline workers – “bus drivers and shelf stackers, nurses, care home workers, hospital staff and shopkeepers” – are more likely to catch the coronavirus, calling it “a health issue with huge ramifications for social welfare. And it’s a welfare issue with huge ramifications for public health.”
“Can you imagine hearing that on Fox News? Can you imagine a future in Britain where there is no platform for a TV presenter to speak like that?” writes Hornby. “Is there any liberal bias in there? Or is it simply a thoughtful person telling us the truth?”
Hornby admitted that most of the things he would like to see emerge from the crisis, from cleaner air to less traffic, won’t happen. “But heaven help the politicians who try to cut anything anywhere in the NHS. I would like to think that the BBC’s service, its calm intelligence and dedication to our health and our ability to cope with what 2020 has thrown at us, might make it similarly untouchable, and give those who wish it harm pause for thought,” he wrote.
The essay is part of a new series from Penguin’s authors responding to the Covid-19 crisis. Last week Philip Pullman laid out his belief that the UK government “should be arraigned on charges of conspiracy to murder” if it is found that for Brexit-related reasons MPs did not take part in the EU procurement scheme to buy PPE. Malorie Blackman, meanwhile, has written of how Covid-19 should lead us to a fairer society.
“After this pandemic is well and truly over we all have a choice,” wrote Blackman. “Do we go back to the societal system we had before, where individualism and ‘pulling up the ladder’ were applauded and lauded, or do we try to adopt a more caring, communal attitude, understanding that the fate of our neighbours is inexorably linked to our own?”