Peter Cox writing in The Bookseller
Being a publicist today is one of the toughest and least-appreciated positions in publishing. I salute you, publicists – unsung heroes all.
However, it was not always thus. “This is the easiest job in the world!” trilled my publicist when my first book was published, back in 1986. “I just send out the press releases, then they interview you!” she bubbled.
And she was right. In that era, the media had a thirst for knowledge and controversy that only books could quench. An unknown author such as me could, if the book were big and noisy enough, grab the limelight, storm onto “Wogan” and his ten million viewers, and thence to the top of the paperback charts. That, dear reader, is how I entered this business.
How things have changed. Today’s author counts herself lucky to grab 1,000 viewers on some obscure satellite channel at 3 o’clock in the morning. The BBC’s commissioning editor for arts, Mark Bell, recently proclaimed in these pages that the BBC “is alive with books and new literature”. Mr. Bell no doubt leads a life of guileless aestheticism, and I have no desire whatsoever to trample on another man’s fond dreams, but dare I whisper ever so sweetly that now would be a good time to arise from his Ephesian slumber?
Few would seriously dispute that the BBC has been systematically dumbed down in recent years. Critics include the former controller of BBC2 Sir David Attenborough; John Tusa, onetime managing director of the BBC World Service; award-winning Panorama journalist John Ware… the list is depressingly long and luminous. Even the president of the Royal Horticultural Society has slammed them for dumbing down its gardening programmes! These people presumably know what they are talking about.
As the BBC has steadily atrophied into a thought-free zone, books – the messengers of ideas, controversy, passion and insight – are simply no longer relevant to its increasingly anodyne agenda. Books are dirty, subversive, infectious things: weapons of mass awakening. They are about as welcome in the BBC’s sterile ecosystem as MRSA is in a geriatric ward.
The BBC is run by highly intelligent people who produce deeply stupid programmes for “the rest of us”. Their cynically patronising attitude towards the audience is only exceeded by their craven attitude towards authority. I could cite Hutton; I could mention Mark Thompson’s self-flagellatory admission of a “massive bias to the left”. Thompson, of course, confuses bias with the courage to ask hard questions: boat-rocking questions that powerful people often find inconvenient
And that’s the problem. Books rock boats – and indeed, lives.
The BBC no longer does.
This column first appeared in The Bookseller on the 5th November 2010
Illustration by rubyblossom
