The BBC, rightly in my opinion, comes under a lot of attack for the left-wing bias displayed in its current affairs programming (just take a look at any reporting about Israel). As I’ve mentioned before though I’m not against media bias, I’m just against bias when it’s publicly funded. That said, those who tar all BBC programming with the same brush would do well to watch the BBC’s new drama The Last Enemy.
I came across it last night when trying out the new BBC iPlayer and was genuinely surprised by the overtly political nature of the drama. Essentially the program centres on a surveilance society theme, and is set in the not-to-distant future where ID cards have become a reality and the database state (as No2ID describe it) has reached a point where a person’s entire life (second by second) can be monitored through a advanced database known as TIA (which the government is on the verge of approving).
The drama quite overtly offers itself up as a looking glass through which the future possible can be viewed and considered. But where one might expect the drama to place a positive slant on that future it in fact does the opposite; taking what can only be described as an incredibly negative view of such a future.
If The Last Enemy could speak it would say that ID cards are a threat to our way of life and the growth of the database state is to be stopped in its tracks before it’s too late.
If you haven’t seen it yet, I strongly suggest having a look.
February 25th, 2008 at 7:22 am
Wilfred Greatorex’s drama series “1990″, a similiarly plausible fiction (indeed in many ways rather more plausible, and prophetic of Blairism) got the BBC criticised in the 1970s as a “right-wing” attack on the then government.
February 25th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
We’re already got mobile phones, oyster cards and chip and pin - who needs ID Cards to be in a surveilance world - our every movements are already trackable.
February 25th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
I take it you didn’t watch State of Play then either…?
February 25th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Problem is, the LibDems are pretty left wing, and this program sounds like a LibDem wet dream.
February 26th, 2008 at 12:37 am
since when has opposition to ID cards been purely a right wing stance?
February 26th, 2008 at 9:32 am
Because opposition to ID cards is pro liberty (something the Left isn’t).
February 26th, 2008 at 9:37 am
But Lib Dems are
February 26th, 2008 at 9:47 am
What a wonderfully over-simplified definition of libertarianism. Oh well, if that’s what you believe, carry on…
February 26th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Because opposition to ID cards is pro liberty (something the Left isn’t).
Simplistic tosh.
February 26th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
My impression was that it was far more Lib Dem and a desperate attempt to make their half baked phoney Libertarianism exciting . It only appears right wing because of the position as it is with ID cards .
Wrong Greer
February 27th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I didn’t feel a non-left bias, to be honest.
I felt a writing team who had New Labour sympathies, but perhaps did not see the National Identity Register or ID cards in the same way as the current government does.
In all their scenes of political navel-gazing, the impression was given of a government that genuinely cared and felt in its heart that it was doing the right thing by introducing all this surveillance. That does not tally with the current government, who are pressing ahead with surveillance more out of the need for the state to have the monopoly on control of individuals and their identities and of the convenience of insuring for “what if…?” scenarios.
I got the feeling that the narrative was a simplification of “they’re doing it because they really do care and they want to protect us from all these nasty things, but we want to show you what happens when you use private companies to do things that the state should be doing instead. Oh, and as there has to be bad guys in the story, we might as well make them the traditional bastion of the right, the security services”.