1 THE BBC ARE THE VIRUS
On 14th June 2021, in the aftermath of a huge anti-lockdown protest in London, a senior BBC reporter named Nick Watt was chased out of Whitehall, to taunts of ‘traitor’, ‘scum’, and ‘liar’.
‘Shame on you! Shame on you!’ chanted the protesters as Watt scooted like a frightened rabbit behind the police barricades blocking access to Downing Street.
The government and the BBC clutched their collective pearls in horror and fainted backwards onto a carefully-placed sofa.
‘Completely unacceptable behaviour!’ bleated the Corporation.
‘Disgraceful!’ tweeted Boris Johnson. ‘The media must be able to report the facts without fear or favour – they are the lifeblood of our democracy.’
Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, called the footage ‘appalling and distressing’, adding, ‘The safety of journalists is fundamental to our democracy.’
A spokesman for the ‘opposition’ Labour Party said, “It is shocking that a BBC lanyard makes someone a target like this.”
In the following days, a high-level meeting at the BBC is said to have taken place to discuss the problem — that the Corporation’s hold over a significant section of the British public appeared to have been broken.
What could be behind it? Where could this fury possibly have been coming from?
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The politicians should not really be surprised. Over the previous sixteen months the vast, sprawling apparatus of the coercively-funded, government-controlled British Broadcasting Corporation had acted as a megaphone for incessant fear-propaganda about an ‘emergency’ which had been used to seize dictatorial power and strip the British public of their livelihoods and fundamental rights.
A coalition of journalists, media and public relations professionals, Journalists Against Covid Censorship, drew up an effective summary of the failures of the ‘legacy media’ to provide citizens with impartial information when they needed it most. It’s a pretty extensive rap-sheet. In common with the rest of the legacy media in the UK, the BBC had published fear-inducing and sometimes inaccurate news coverage, without providing proper context for statistics on Covid-19 ‘cases’ and deaths; it had failed to provide a balanced account of the cost and impact of the lockdown policy, while undermining initiatives such as the Great Barrington Declaration that offered alternatives to the government’s Covid-19 mitigation policies. It suppressed coverage of alternative treatments such as ivermectin, fluvoxamine, hydroxychloroquine and EXO-CD24, and failed to enquire into the methodology of the PCR process, particularly its suitability as a diagnostic test and the thresholds at which the tests are run. It commissioned hit pieces targeting scientists who dissented from the dominant Covid-19 narrative, downplayed or ignored instances of adverse reactions to the Covid-19 vaccination, including death, failed to report on or condemn the routine censorship by tech giants of dissenting voices and opinions, and generally helped to foster a hostile environment for people who choose not to take the Covid-19 vaccine.
These are not trivial charges, and they apply most sharply to the BBC, as a public service broadcaster, whose performance during the pandemic amounts to an utter dereliction of duty and its weaponisation against objectivity and truth. The Corporation had revealed itself as a proto-totalitarian instrument of propaganda and censorship.
“What we are witnessing is a form of bio-terrorism,” declared Dr Peter McCollough in the US, an internationally recognised authority on the evaluation of medical evidence. In the UK, Dr Mike Yeadon, ex-Pfizer VP and Chief Research Scientist (respiratory), detailed eight thematic lies being propagated by the government and its BBC mouthpiece — every main aspect of the government’s corona-narrative, he has told us, is a conscious lie, inverting accepted medical and ethical practice and jettisoning known immunological and epidemiological principles.
In September 2020, a huge crowd packed Trafalgar Square chanting and singing — “We are the 99%!” “You can stick your poison vaccine up your arse!” and “Take down the BBC!”
The 2020 protests were quickly stifled by a second national lockdown over the winter, but came roaring back in April of 2021, rapidly growing into the biggest demonstrations the capital has ever seen. The BBC monkey covered its ears and eyes and pretended everything in the paralysed capital was normal. When it acknowledged them at all, it claimed that the marchers consisted of a tiny minority of ‘right-wing conspiracy theorists’. A few hundred of them, that’s all. A few thousand at most.
Lies don’t come much more brazen than that: footage of the crowds in Trafalgar Square, Pall Mall, Whitehall and Hyde Park on weekends in May clearly showed hundreds of thousands of people of all ages, ethnicities and walks of life; on June 12th, half a million by conservative estimates; on June 26th, central London was overwhelmed by a vast tide of people flooding in from all quarters of the kingdom, despite the extension of travel bans. It doesn’t look to me like ‘a few’ anything. It looks more like a cross-section of the entire British public. It looks like everyone.
2 MEMORY HOLE MALFUNCTION AT THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH
But anger against the BBC goes deeper than its role in spreading the government’s anti-scientific COVID-narrative. Shockingly, it seems that some people retain the faculty of memory and can recall things that happened before Year Zero of the Coviet Revolution. From September 2020 onwards, anti-lockdown protests and their aftermaths included subsidiary demonstrations outside Broadcasting House, the BBC’s headquarters in Portland Place in the West End of London — as well as at regional offices in other cities. These were not riots, but demonstrations of focused anger and disdain. The BBC did not report on them.
“Shame on you!” the protesters chanted, beneath the strange statue presiding over the main entrance to the original building.
“Take it down! Take it down!”
The statue is part of a series by Eric Gill, a British artist of considerable reputation when the building was opened in 1932 — a reputation posthumously destroyed when Fiona MacCarthy’s 1989 biography drew on Gill’s own diaries to reveal the sculptor’s serial incestuous pedophilia. Gill had journaled details not just of his extramarital affairs, but of his sexual abuse of two of his daughters and one of his sisters. Even his dog was not safe from his attentions.
This knowledge makes it impossible to look at Gill’s sculptures commissioned for Broadcasting House without another narrative emerging. The post-modernist insistence that an artist’s life-history has nothing to do with his work completely breaks down in a case like Eric Gill. The biographical information is, absolutely, a key to understanding these subversive artworks, which carry esoteric meanings on more than one level. (See part 3 below.)
Posterity may have quietly discarded the memory of Gill as an artist; but the crowds chanting outside the building remember certain things which the BBC — and the British establishment as a whole — would prefer us all to forget. For instance, they remember the names of some of those who used to stroll in beneath that statue, which presides over the main entrance like a tutelary deity.
Jimmy Savile, for one — that is, Sir James Savile, Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Knight Commander of the Pontifical Order of Saint Gregory the Great, disk-jockey, entertainer, philanthropist, charitable fund-raiser and volunteer, friend and confidant of the Royal Family, particularly Prince Charles; Savile wasn’t just knighted but given the keys (in some cases literally) to the kingdom’s dingier nooks and most vulnerable bodies.
When he died in 2011, his golden coffin had hardly been laid in the ground before victims started to come forward. As the scale of his predations began to emerge, so did the extent of the wilful institutional blindness from which Savile had benefitted over the course of nearly five decades, and the inability or unwillingness of British institutions to protect vulnerable people from this twisted pedophile, rapist, and necrophiliac.
When all this started coming out, I was aware of it, of course, even the BBC being forced to talk about it, but having got the gist of the story I didn’t follow up on it. Just too sordid, even for me. I knew about Dutroux, I’d read Cathy O’Brien, my world had already been shaken up in respect of the sordid sexual underbelly of Western establishments. But even when you’re being being shocked, you can still be utterly nauseated. So with Savile I took in the scope of it and gave the details a swerve. I’m sure many people felt the same at the time. We get the gist.
Of course, this means that while most people knew, like me, that some weird and distasteful things had gone on at the BBC and elsewhere, they might not necessarily be aware of various connections and parallels. The question no one wants to face is whether the grotesque phenomenon of Jimmy Savile was an aberration, not connected to anything or anyone else, or whether it was symptomatic of some deep parasitism which has woven itself into the institutions of the country. It can be traumatising to even know about this kind of stuff. And that, paradoxically, is one of the ways in which the extremity of the abuse protects the abuser; it’s so bad, you don’t want to let it into your mind. It’s like a shadow of the coping mechanism that comes into play in dissociative identity disorder, where the sealing of traumatic memories within amnesiac compartments evolves as a survival strategy for the abused, but simultaneously protects the abuser.
It’s not the first time a nation has been brought collectively to such a point. In the nineteen nineties, the people of Belgium underwent a rapid, forced awakening in the wake of the Dutroux case. They responded to its dismal horrors with a series of huge public demonstrations known as the White Marches to express solidarity and compassion for the victims. Marchers carried white balloons and wore white garments or face-paint. The colour was chosen to symbolise hope, but I can’t help other connotations occurring to me: shock; horror; rage. There’s an old English word which comes to mind: aghast, cognate with ghastly: deathly white or pallid.
Nothing like that happened in the UK at the time — but people haven’t forgotten. The anger goes deep.
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The BBC miscalculated badly when it suppressed an investigation into Savile by journalists on its own Newsnight programme, immediately after his death. It then added gross insult to injury by airing two Christmas tributes to their shell-suited jester over the holiday period. If the BBC establishment thought they could keep a lid on the festering allegations against Savile by suppressing their own journalists’ work, they were wrong. The former police officer turned investigative journalist, Mark Thomas-Williams, who had consulted on the Newsnight exposé, went instead to the BBC’s commercial rival, the Independent Television network, and presented the resulting documentary, The Other Side of Jimmy Savile, on 3rd October 2012. The Metropolitan Police had no alternative, now, but to reopen their own investigation. By 19th October they had two hundred witnesses and four hundred separate lines of inquiry involving fourteen police forces across the country, and were calling the scale of the allegations ‘unprecedented’ and the number of potential victims ‘staggering’.
The Director General, Mark Thompson, got himself out of the firing line (and the country) with impeccable timing, taking up his new appointment as CEO of the New York Times on 17th September 2012. Thompson denied knowing anything about Savile’s depravities or having been involved in the Newsnight decision which had, fortuitously or not, bought him the time he needed to make a swift exit.
Complaints against Savile had been made throughout his career, and the police had initiated and subsequently abandoned two investigations more than half a century apart, one at the beginning of his Sadean rampage and one towards the end of his life — in 1958 and 2009. That’s the one the Director of Public Prosecutions Kier Starmer declined to pursue. It’s not surprising; Savile had an intimate friendship with the heir to the throne; the DPP is head of the Crown Prosecution Service. Further investigations would quite possibly have exposed the Royal Family, and Starmer was not the man to risk stepping on the devil’s tail. Starmer remained in-post until 2013, and was knighted for his services to the Crown in 2014.
For decades the rumours were so rampant that interviewers periodically confronted Savile with questions about his predilection for under-aged girls on at least three occasions. In an interview in 1978, punk-rock singer John Lydon (Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols) dropped heavy hints about Savile being ‘into all kinds of seediness, that we all know about but are not allowed to talk about.’ It was comments like that that got Lydon banned from BBC Radio 1. The DJ Paul Gambaccini, who worked next door to Savile’s office at Radio 1 from 1973, later said he was aware of the rumours — including Savile’s necrophilia — saying:
“The expression which I came to associate with Savile’s sex partners was … the now politically incorrect ‘under-age subnormals’. He targeted the institutionalised, the hospitalised – and this was known. Why did Jimmy Savile go to hospitals? That’s where the patients were.”
Not just hospitals, but Approved Schools and mental institutions. Savile ‘volunteered’ at Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital, where he was given his own three-room apartment; there he befriended Peter Sutcliffe, the mass murderer known as the Yorkshire Ripper, often spending hours alone with him in his cell, drinking tea. Their friendship aroused suspicion among the staff; some wondered if the two had known each other in the past. It later emerged that in 1977 Savile had been considered a suspect in a ‘Ripper’ murder in Leeds, when a woman’s mutilated body was found just yards from his penthouse with its private elevator. West Yorkshire Police questioned Savile and went as far as to take an impression of his teeth, after being contacted by members of the public.
Do we know the depths of Savile’s depravity? Once again — as with Dutroux — a strong impression begins to form of a monster who had long been protected by bigger monsters — and why would those with the power to protect him do so unless they were protecting themselves? It was clear to any with eyes to see that this sickness went much higher in society than these depraved but relatively powerless individuals. ‘All the way to the top,’ in Jack Ruby’s words, only that’s not quite right: it doesn’t go to the top; it’s from the the top down.
Savile’s huge, ostentatious gravestone, a tasteless marble billboard advertising his status as a ‘philanthropist’ and popularity as an entertainer, stood for only nineteen days before it was taken down in shame by his family. His name is now synonymous with a psychopathic narcissism reminiscent of a fictional grotesque like The Joker. You only have to imagine this blonde demon strolling cockily into that building under Eric Gill’s sculpture to begin to understand this undercurrent of the anger of the protesters flocking to Portland Place.
Savile wasn’t the only one by any means. Once a comprehensive police investigation — code-named Operation Yewtree — started in earnest, eight entertainers, producers and DJs at the BBC were arrested for questioning. Two eventually went to jail — the presenter Stuart Hall (OBE) and the children’s entertainer Rolph Harris (CBE). Hall was charged in 2013 with multiple counts of rape and sexual assault of young girls and children, and eventually sentenced to 30 months in prison. Harris was arrested in 2013, tried in 2014 and sentenced to five years in prison. The ongoing operation eventually ensnared the pop star Gary Glitter, who was finally jailed after going on the run in South-East Asia. Later, another rapist and child-abuser was posthumously identified — and this name provides an overlap with the political world — in Sir Clement Freud, brother of Lucian, grandson of Sigmund and an institution-within-an-institution at the BBC — whose name even comes up in the sad story of little Madeleine McCann.
“This is the cry of the mothers,” sing protesters outside Broadcasting House, “the mothers who know…”
“Hey! Pedo! Leave those kids alone!”
“TAKE IT DOWN! TAKE IT DOWN!”
The statue?
Or the whole institution?
Either way I say yes. Its reputation is long gone in terms of journalistic and editorial integrity. It has revealed itself as an organ of pernicious state propaganda, perception management and social engineering.
George Orwell was right about the BBC. He worked there during the Second World War, and lampooned it in his futuristic horror-satire, Nineteen Eighty-Four, as ‘The Ministry of Truth’, where his protagonist Winston Smith’s desk-job is the continuous revision of the past, updating old newspapers and disposing of the evidence via his most important piece of equipment, the ‘Memory Hole’.
But we don’t forget.
3 IN PLAIN SIGHT
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Is it coincidence that a building adorned with pedophile sculptures should be found to house a nest of pedophiles?
First — are these ‘pedophile sculptures’? Or merely sculptures carved by a pedophile? Do they have a pedophilic subtext, or are we imagining it based on what the sculptor confided to his diaries? I believe that by examining at the sequence of sculptures we can quite easily establish that they do indeed contain a perverse sexual narrative as well as a more explicit allegory of broadcasting.
There appear to be five of them in series. In their titles, they allude to characters from the pen of the writer known as William Shakespeare; specifically, the music- and magic-soaked romance entitled The Tempest. Because of the visual and musical interludes, this is the shortest play-text Shakespeare ever wrote; it’s a charming entertainment for a daughter’s wedding, full of mystery and spectacle, incorporating a masque — a show-within-the show integrating acting, singing, and dancing with fantastical costumes and stage effects. The editors of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, known as the First Folio (1623), gave it pride of place at the front of the book, presumably because of the evocative theatre-metaphor it uses and its clearly autobiographical central character.
Behind its spectacular effects lies an intriguing allegorical structure of ideas, and although it is not one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays it has influenced many other writers, provoking literary allusions and variations as diverse as W H Auden’s Caliban on Setebos, T S Eliot’s The Wasteland, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, John Fowles’ novels The Collector and The Magus, and of course Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World — as well as numerous film-makers and artists.
The Tempest tells the story of Prospero, an exiled ruler who transforms himself into a powerful mage in order to regain his kingdom. With him, stranded on a deserted island, is his young daughter Miranda, who in Act V utters the words lifted by Huxley for the title of his satirical dystopia: ‘O brave, new world, that hath such people in it!’ Prospero’s only other company is a semi-human monster — Caliban — whom he found on the island, and Ariel, a daemon or elemental spirit whom he released from imprisonment inside a tree, in exchange for twelve years’ service.
As an immaterial spirit, Ariel’s power is not physical but psychological, spiritual, perceptual. He creates illusions; that is all he does. Even the terrible storm with which the play opens turns out to have been a mass hallucination. Ariel’s hypnotic power is dramatised in music, and Gill highlights this, the flute held by Ariel in the first piece recurring in all of the others. Through Ariel, Prospero can make people fall in love, fight each other or kill themselves. He can do what he likes to his enemies, whom he has caused to be ‘shipwrecked’ on the island in the illusory tempest. He can destroy them without ever revealing himself; but although his temperament has its brooding, vengeful side, he continues to grow spiritually during the action and ultimately — prompted by Ariel — foregoes the vengeance he is in a position to exact. The play ends happily, in marriage, the forgiveness of old feuds, the reunion of lost children, fathers, brothers and friends, and redemption of the self ‘when no man was his own’.
The sculpture which attracts most attention at Broadcasting House is ‘Ariel and Prospero’, because of its prominent position above the main entrance to the original building, on its South face. Gill portrays Ariel as a small, naked boy, though at the same time a colossus, his feet resting on the globe. With his hands lifted above his head, he leans back against the robed Magus who towers behind him, eyes closed, a beatific expression on his face. Not just the boy’s nakedness but Prospero’s posture and facial expression are somewhat ambiguous. The effect is subtle, and you might wonder if it’s all in your imagination — that is, until you consider this piece in the context of the whole series.
The question here is — why is Ariel shown as a naked child? He never takes the form of a child in the play, although he does have a childlike innocence about human nature which might perhaps lead to such a representation. His nakedness can be glibly justified in terms of classical traditions, as in the cherubs that adorn medieval and renaissance art. On the exoteric level, Gill in 1932 seems to be evoking the infancy of these magical new technologies, radio and television, which will one day ‘bestride the world’, to borrow another Shakespearean phrase. So this piece, in and of itself, has artistic justification, though according to the book I consulted, ‘Broadcasting House in the Nineteen Thirties’, Gill was forced to tone down aspects of the work he had completed for the building as a result of objections at the time. One of the alterations was to reduce the generous proportions of the phallus with which he had endowed his Ariel figure. Anecdotes recall his working on ladders dressed only in a long coat, and female employees being instructed not to look up as they entered or left the building.
There are four other pieces by Gill, located on the West, East and North fronts of the building. The book lists only four in total, but an online image-search reveals five pieces in all.
In Shakespeare’s play, magic is explicitly a metaphor for theatre, the explosive art-form of the English Renaissance, itself a revival and evolution of the theatre of ancient Greece, and Ariel commands the magical special effects that entrance the audience. It’s a simple step for Gill to stretch the metaphor to the new broadcast media, with Ariel representing the immaterial propagation of radio waves.
In the bas-relief on the West side of the building we see a visual embodiment of this technological metaphor, the angels’ folded wings echoing those of the heraldic eagles on the BBC’s coat of arms, the arrangement of their feathers evoking lines of force or radiating electromagnetic waves.
Two companion pieces go under the title ‘Ariel Between Wisdom and Gaiety’, obviously a reference to the BBC’s charter-obligation to inform and educate as well as entertain. The first of the pair is located above the bookshop windows at street level. I’m not sure of the location of the second; the book accords it pride of place above the concert hall entrance on the North side, but Wikipedia gives that place to the fifth and last piece in the series. In the first image it looks as if Wisdom’s right arm has been clumsily extended to take the hand away from where it would otherwise rest. Was this another of the alterations Gill was forced to make to “tone down” these rather blatant images?
Ariel’s face is turned towards Wisdom; in the second piece, towards Gaiety — who is holding Ariel’s flute in front of his mouth in a gesture reminiscent of the sign of silence. Wisdom’s left hand performs a similar gesture in front of her own lips. In her right hand, she holds an open book with the latin word OSCULTA — Listen! — inscribed across its pages.
The last two pieces in the series focus on the psychological power of music, dramatising its hypnotic effect. From my brief research I’m not sure where this fourth piece is located on the building or what its title is, but again it is a highly dubious visual image. Ariel, still naked, is now the largest figure in the tableau. On either side of him is a group of three figures, which seem to represent archetypal family groups of man, woman and child. Ariel is seated in the centre, playing his flute. All six of his listeners gaze at him, entranced. On each side, the child of the family is closest to him and reaches out a hand…
In the final relief, Ariel is fully grown, a physically powerful figure now, and he has finally put some clothes on. The most important thing in this image is that the adults have disappeared. In a superficially innocent, exuberant image, the two children are completely under the power of Ariel’s music, dancing on either side of him and bunching up their skirts in their hands. Ariel’s stance both complements and contrasts with that of the children — he is not dancing but conducting the dance, embodying focused purpose, not abandon.
So what are we looking at in this series of sculptures? A surface text relating to the BBC and a private subtext relating to Gill’s secret life? Or are text and subtext inextricably bound together in a more generalised psychopathic scenario?
In the surface text, a powerful new technology is shown even in its infancy bestriding the world. In its maturity we see it dissolving the family, making the adults disappear and isolating the children. The whole allegory is centred around music, just as the building is itself centred on an internal ‘tower’ of cantilevered studios using state-of-the-art architectural strategies to isolate them from the city ambience, traffic on the road and the rumble of underground trains, as well as sound from other studios. The BBC, of course, broadcasts not only music but spoken word and drama, but the music motif of the sculptures can be taken as symbolic of the hypnotic power of the new medium as a whole, not only its light entertainment wing. Even without the perverted subtext, the series reads like a parable of social engineering, the induction of a hypnoid trance that leaves its subjects isolated and vulnerable. The innocent surface text is not elaborated merely to veil a perverted subtext — the allegory is sinister on both levels.
The writer who used the pseudonym ‘Shakespeare’ in the last dozen years of his life, living in self-imposed exile from the court, wrote this play for a daughter’s wedding (he had three). For his characters to be turned into lintel guardians for a sanctum of pedophiliac culture is a gross mockery of great art. Prospero guards the honour of his young daughter fiercely, and everything he does, we understand by the end of the play, is motivated by his infinite care for her future. Look at her the wrong way, and the mage will paralyse you, hunt you with spirit dogs, terrify you with visions of hideous winged furies and drive you mad.
By contrast, Gill’s variation on the theme is characterised by a kind of sinister frivolity, which reminds me of something, I don’t know, maybe a cartoon villain in a blonde wig, chomping on a fat cigar… it seems to tell a story that only happened later. Jimmy Savile was five years old when the building was opened. His key to the castle would be music; children deprived of protection would be his prize. Before his time was over, the BBC would become notorious for reporting on an event before it happened. In his Broadcasting House sculptures, we might say that Eric Gill somehow achieved the same feat.
Like Savile, Gill seems to have enjoyed flirting with confession, lifting the mask teasingly, toying with exposure. The occult practice of hiding in plain sight gives the sociopathic artist a sexual thrill.
Perhaps it is true that what happens within a particular space depends on the kind of invocations that are made around and within it. Walk in under that statue mounted above the entrance like a tutelary deity, and you’ll find yourself in an art deco lobby. Here you will see a sixth piece by Gill, standing alone.
It’s called ‘The Sower’.
Get it?
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it — Gill’s foreshadowing of the growth of a sick culture which ate the institution out from inside, turning it into a leering parody of all it was supposed to stand for.
Or maybe it was there from the start.
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PS During cleaning and restoration work in 2006, a hidden coda to the series was discovered. Gill had carved a beautiful female face on Prospero’s back, where it could not be seen. The artist reportedly commented that no one would understand the true meaning of his work until the building fell down. He must have been referring to this hidden face, but what it represents and what clue it is intended to reveal are beyond me at this point.
Any ideas are welcome.