The BBC Puppet Show: Queen Beeb
Marianna Jack-in-the-box Spring
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“The Box”
I am a child of the 1970s, dead-centre Generation X. To my parents’ generation, television was a new invention regarded by many with wary distrust. They didn’t have this hypnotic box in the corner of the room when they were children, and seeing their own kids sit transfixed for hours on end in front of the glowing screen made them instinctively uneasy. And so, for my generation, TV watching became a battle of wills – us kids stubbornly getting our daily fix versus the background annoyance of a frowning, harrumphing parent muttering… “what are you doing in here on a nice day like this? Cooped up in front of The Box - you’ll get square eyes!”
They always called it “The Box”.
Reluctant as I am to acknowledge it, I now realise they had a point. Little did I realise that our young minds were, in fact, prime Real Estate, and that there was hot competition for this valuable commodity.
Those who controlled “The Box” controlled The Future
Back in the 70s, the line-up of TV channels vying for our attention was a two-horse affair. There was the BBC and there was ITV.
BBC = British Broadcasting Corporation. ITV = Independent Television.
Children are naturally drawn to vivid, fun entertainment – cartoons, anarchic humour, kicking against the grown-ups – and ITV was the romp-away winner on that score.
Step forward the BBC Propaganda Machine.
Their message was simple, and it was aimed directly at our parents: The BBC is Wholesome and True. ITV is Trash. You Can Trust the BBC.
And they did trust the BBC. Our parents were hoodwinked into believing it was perfectly acceptable – indeed, beneficial – to allow their children to watch specially created after-school programmes broadcast by the BBC. But don’t let them watch ITV, it will rot their brains.
And so, mothers across the nation could have a guilt-free couple of hours peace each day, safe in the knowledge their kids’ minds were being nourished with a worthy BBC diet of educational fare and gentle animations: Playschool, Blue Peter, John Craven’s Newsround, Jackanory, Ivor the Engine, Mr Benn.
Public Information Films
Interspersed between the BBC Catnip-for-Kids parent-approved TV were sprinkled the government sponsored Public Information Films (PIF’s). These were short, punchy messages cleverly tailored to hook and hold the attention of children of all ages from infants to teenagers.
For the little’uns there was the strange and compelling cartoon “Charley Says” in which a wise cartoon cat called “Charley” delivers a cautionary message in meow language to his owner, a little boy, who translates for us.
“Charley Says never go anywhere with men or ladies you don’t know”
For older kids, there was the “Green Cross Code Man”, David Prowse, with his alarming habit of suddenly materialising in front of a 70s boy just as he is about to step off the pavement in front of a speeding car.
“Always use the Green Cross Code, because I won’t be there when you cross the road.”
But the one that wormed its way into my consciousness and took root, shaping my inner-world for decades, was The One About Rabies.
The Plotline: A little girl on holiday abroad (cue the cheesy background Parisian music) innocently pets a cute looking dog. Unbeknown to her and her parents, the dog is infected with Rabies. On return to Blighty, we see the consequences of her actions: she winces as she’s injected in the stomach by a sadistic-looking doctor, while the authoritative voice-over tells us:
“the treatment that tries to check the disease is long and painful, and it doesn’t always work. If the treatment fails and Rabies does develop… IT KILLS.”
But after all that build-up, the take-home message tails off and falls flat:
“Don’t let selfish sentimentality tempt you to smuggle any animal back into Britain”
Of all the PIF’s, this should’ve been the one I could safely ignore – the chances of finding myself on holiday abroad in the 70s were precisely zero, but if I ever did find myself in that situation, I felt pretty confident that I could resist the temptation to smuggle back a rabid dog.
And yet the British Government’s fixation with Rabies was such that they made a series of PIFs, aimed at adults as well as children, all hammering home the central message… RABIES MEANS DEATH.
And then, in 1983, just when it looked as though the government had finally got a grip and made the wise decision to drop the Rabid fear-porn, the BBC served up this little helping of seriously scary shit…
The Mad Death
To a 14 year old with a vivid imagination, this all-too-real dramatization with its hauntingly compelling title sequence, made an indelible impression, leaving me a-feared of all things “Virus” for the next three decades.
As a result, I paid obsessively close attention to each twist and turn of all the unfolding Public Health Dramas as the years passed by - and there were certainly plenty of them…
1970s – Rabies
1980s – AIDS
1988 - Salmonella
1990s – Mad Cow Disease/ CJD
2003 - SARS
2009 – Swine Flu
2014 - Ebola
Now, by 2014, I already knew a bit about Ebola – it had been billed years earlier as The Bleeding Death. Worse than rabies and super-contagious, just one touch from an infected person and you were guaranteed the grisliest of grisly death, writhing in agony and bleeding from every orifice. Up until 2014, there had been a few sporadic, quickly contained outbreaks in countries far, far away, but now it had established a foothold in West Africa and was beginning to spread.
“By July 2014, it had reached the capital cities of these three countries and in August 2014, WHO declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.”
And so, by the later months of 2014, I was all set to freak out as I followed every BBC News report, believing every word. Cases of Ebola were about to emerge like malignant toadstools in countries all around the world, inching ever closer to our shores. The nightmare I’d feared since the age of seven was about to unfold.
But then… nothing happened.
At the age of 45, I finally paused to reflect. Of all the big health scares I’d followed over the years, how many had impacted my life in any way? As I turned each one over in my mind, I realised the answer was… NONE. Not a single one. Not in any way at all. Nor had a single one affected any of my friends or family… not even a distant acquaintance.
That’s when I lost my fear of All Things Virus.
COVID-19: Lamest Virus-Scare Ever
By the time January 2020 came round, I was in a much healthier state of mind. On hearing of the Wuhan Zombie plague, aka “Coronavirus”, it only took a cursory skim of Wikipedia to find out that Coronavirus was first identified in the 1960s by scientists working at the UK’s Common Cold Unit. Having lived through scares about Rabies, AIDS, CJD and Ebola, surely no Gen-Xer would fall for the lamest fright-fest yet: The Common Cold…. or so I thought.
When I realised that each of my siblings, one-by-one, were starting to glaze over and fall under The Spell, I’d say to them… “they’ve been scaring us with this stuff for years and it never comes to anything… don’t you remember Rabies??”
But they didn’t remember Rabies. Whereas I’d been scared out of my skin by those 1970s PIF’s, for them it had barely registered. Whereas I’d heeded every phoney cry of “Wolf” yelled by the BBC for the past forty years, they’d heard none of them. As a consequence, in 2020, they were caught out by the swirling, rising waters of Covid Pandemic hysteria, and in that moment, the simple, ingrained message they’d absorbed in childhood became a steadying rock to cling on to: YOU CAN TRUST THE BBC.
Where did Marianna Spring from?
In March 2020, Marianna Spring was appointed the BBC's first specialist disinformation and social media reporter, which followed the establishment of similar roles at American news organisations such as CNN and NBC. In 2021, Spring began working as a reporter for the investigative current affairs programme Panorama, and was selected by Forbes magazine as one of their "30 Under 30" in the Media and Marketing category.
Born in 1996, Marianna Spring is not a Gen-Xer, she’s a young millennial. An odd choice for stabilising the BBC’s “trust” ship just as the pseudo-pandemic was gaining traction – who is she supposed to appeal to?
I can only conclude that she’s there to draw in a new generation, to target those her own age and younger in a new way with a very old message: IN TIMES OF UNCERTAINTY, YOU CAN TRUST THE BBC.
I don’t know if it’s working, but there’s one thing I do know: somehow or other, they got to them. Just look at how compliant they were, how submissive to authority, how willing to go along with all the nonsense diktats. It is 2024, and even now, every so often, I encounter lonely soul who is still clinging to their comfort blanket “face covering”… and it’s always a youngster.
Which leaves me with just one thought…
“There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.”