The advertising bomb went off in 1970, producing tremors that spread all over the world.
Charlie Saatchi created, and the Family Planning Association ran, an ad showing a pregnant man, with the headline asking: “Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?”
The ad was so daring, so outrageous, so shocking that even advertising veterans couldn’t quite believe their eyes. When they finally caught their breath, they began to give Saatchi every accolade, every award the industry could bestow.
But why was the effect so powerful (despite the dubious grammar in the headline)? Why were people shocked? Why couldn’t they believe their eyes? Simple. Because their eyes had never seen a pregnant man, and their minds couldn’t even fathom one.
Tempora mutantur and all that. If the ad made people gasp in 1970, in 2025 it would only make them shrug. What’s the point? Of course, men can get pregnant, everyone knows that. Especially everyone who reads The Guardian and watches BBC News…
Hold on. Even BBC viewers may be frustrated if they expect its newsreaders always to talk about male pregnancy with deadpan insouciance. One such newsreader, Martine Croxall, let the woke side down.
Earlier this year Miss Croxall was reading an autocue script with her usual fluency. However, when she reached the phrase “pregnant people”, she rolled her eyes ever so slightly and corrected herself, saying “pregnant women” instead.
That was more than both her employer and some viewers could bear, as it were. Not that many viewers, mind you, because only 20 complaints were filed. But that was enough.
The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) upheld the objections yesterday, saying the newsreader had breached its rules on impartiality:
“The ECU considered the facial expression… laid it open to the interpretation that it indicated a particular viewpoint in the controversies currently surrounding trans identity, and the congratulatory messages Croxall later received on social media, together with the critical views expressed in the complaints to the BBC, tended to confirm that the impression of her having expressed a personal view was widely shared across the spectrum of opinion on the issue.”
Please read it again. Miss Croxall received not only 20 complaints but also “congratulatory messages”. The BBC didn’t say how many, but, five gets you hundreds, there had to be enough to reach the conclusion that her “personal view was widely shared across the spectrum of opinion on the issue”.
Miss Croxall thus went along with the overwhelming majority of viewers whose licence fees fund the BBC. That was a borderline criminal transgression, one so egregious that she was lucky to get away with a reprimand. Another such slip and she may hear from the Crown Prosecution Service.
This is a matter of principle that should be impervious to numbers. Still, some 657,000 perfectly binary women gave birth in the UK last year. How many non-binary sideshows did?
Seeking that information, I went to the official website of the Office for National Statistics, only to receive a polite, but otherwise unsatisfactory, reply:
“Thank you for your request. Unfortunately, we do not hold the information requested, as the birth certificate information we receive from the General Register Office (GRO) does not provide information on gender identity.”
So let’s just say only a few and leave it at that, but the issue is about ideology, not arithmetic. Miss Croxall would have been censured even if there had been not a single non-binary birth in the UK, ever. That’s what impartiality means.
Sorry for being so unsporting. Rebuking the BBC for Left-wing bias is like accusing Stalin of communism, Hitler of Nazism and Ed Miliband of eco zealotry. Doing so at any other time would be stating the bleeding obvious, which is a rhetorical sin.
But doing that this week is a whole different story. For the BBC has chosen to strike a blow for impartiality just as it’s embroiled in an embarrassing scandal.
Reporting on the January 2021 Capitol riot in Washington DC, editors at the Panorama news show doctored Donald Trump’s speech to make it sound as if he had called for insurrection. Technically, the task was a doddle. Just take a few words from the beginning of the speech, splice them with a few words from the end, and Don’s your uncle, never mind the context.
That’s like taking the words “the BBC” from one place in this article, the words “may hear from the Crown Prosecution Service” from another and come up with a suggestion that the Beeb is under criminal investigation. Oh well, come to think of it… No, forget it.
Hence, rather than saying what everyone knows anyway, that the BBC is a coven of woke witches and a hotbed of Left radicalism, I must instead compliment it for its blockbusting nuclear-strength cynicism. The BBC reasserting its commitment to impartiality at this time is like Donald Trump advocating elegant elocution or Rachel Reeves preaching fiscal responsibility.
I’m not going to join the chorus of demands that the BBC licence fee be abolished. The choir is already strong enough without my contribution. Let’s just say that a corporation which only ever runs appointment ads in The Guardian is unapologetically Left-wing and doesn’t care who knows it.
We’ve known for decades which side in the culture war the BBC not so much supports as spearheads. The Beeb has been able to get away with that so far, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t continue to do so in perpetuity. Obviously, the BBC can afford wokery without jeopardising its existence.
The monarchy can’t. When royal personages join the destructive cultural crusade, they betray their vital function of maintaining the diachronic continuity of the nation. In essence if not necessarily in form, the institution of our monarchy has been co-extensive with the nation itself, going back so far that not even an eagle eye can pinpoint the moment it began.
Thus the royals can’t play favourites: the past ought to be at least as important to them as the present and the future. When the royal family acts or speaks in ways that betray tradition, it stands in default of its mission, putting its continued existence in peril.
Thus, one has to lament that His Majesty overreacted when throwing his brother under the bus. The last time a royal prince was demoted to commoner, Cromwell was in charge, and the full implications of that precedent ought to make our royals wary.
What’s important isn’t just that the king overreacted, but also why he did so. Some censure of the prince bringing the monarchy in disrepute was called for, but the punishment meted out was so excessively severe largely for woke reasons. I just hope the king will be able (or willing) to block his brother’s extradition to the US.
Cultural warriors led by the BBC have downgraded the importance of some crimes, mainly those against property, and upgraded the significance of others, such as those of a sexual nature.
While in no way condoning amorous misdeeds, the hysteria following Andrew’s alleged hanky-panky with a 17-year-old girl was so out of proportion to the act itself that it was clearly motivated by ideological diktats. By pandering to woke shrieks, the royal family showed weakness, encouraging republicans to pounce.
Then just yesterday, HRH Prince William gave us the benefit of his climatological erudition. Speaking at the COP 30 UN Climate Summit, HRH opined that “We are edging dangerously close to the earth’s critical tipping points…thresholds beyond which the natural systems we depend on may begin to unravel”.
How does he know that? Has he studied the matter extensively? Never mind extensively – has HRH read a single scientific study on climate? I doubt that, and he couldn’t have read Ian Plimer’s seminal book Heaven and Earth.
Prof. Plimer, a renowned climatologist, provides reams of scientific data, with each bit referenced to dozens of sources, showing that the brouhaha about climate owes more to ideology than to science. Hence, in the very least, the issue must be treated as debatable.
And so it is, outside the ideological stormtroopers of the cultural war supported and personified by the BBC. The heir to the oldest and most significant throne in the West shouldn’t act as the dummy to woke ventriloquists if he doesn’t want that throne to totter more than it already does.
Both the monarchy and the BBC are key British institutions, albeit of different provenance, function and importance. We may or may not love them equally or at all, but we must all acknowledge their vital importance. When they go astray, pandering to subversive sensibilities, we are all in trouble – even those of us who may not recognise it.