I feel sorry for BBC

These words, I would have thought, were as likely to cross my lips as “Perhaps Hitler was on to something”. Yet here I am, defending the Corporation against slander.

Don’t get me wrong: the BBC violates its Charter not just every day but in practically every programme, including Match of the Day. That document commits Beeb to impartiality, which it delivers only when talking about two woke causes at the same time.

Most of its employees vote for the leftmost parties, and those few who don’t are typically technical personnel: cameramen, grips, technicians and so on. On-camera Beepers are consistently, impeccably and – which is worse – openly left-wing in everything they say, or rather preach.

Hence I am generally sympathetic to the idea of defunding the BBC by scrapping its annual licence fee. Definitely, let’s do it – but not for the wrong reasons.

These thoughts have been inspired by the mighty storm breaking out in the teacup of a single word. The offensive word was uttered by Sally Nugent, BBC Breakfast hostess.

The word was ‘infamous’, which Miss Nugent used in what many irate individuals and organisations saw as an offensive context. This is what she actually said: “Eighty years after 19 Lancaster bombers took part in the infamous Dambusters Raid, tonight a special anniversary flypast will take place over Lincolnshire.”

She was referring to Operation Chastise, a 1943 attack on German dams with so-called ‘bouncing bombs’. The attack breached two dams and destroyed two hydroelectric power stations, causing widespread flooding in the Ruhr valley. Some 1,600 civilians died, along with 53 RAF flyers.

Because of the large civilian losses, the raid isn’t without its critics. But the canonical consensus in Britain is that it was heroic, self-sacrificial and strategically justified. Hence calling it ‘infamous’ is like calling Nelson a libertine pirate or Wellington a Francophobe bandit.

Predictably, all hell broke loose, with the Defund the BBC Campaign leading the way. The BBC hastily issued an apology, saying it had been just a slip of the tongue, but Campaign director Rebecca Ryan would have none of it:

“If this awful error, which tarnished the memory of a heroic military operation that helped boost British morale during World War 2, was ‘a stumble’ it should have been immediately corrected on air.”

She concluded by succinctly stating the mission of her organisation: “The broadcaster must be cut loose and made to stand on its own feet financially.”

I second the sentiment, but not for this reason. In fact, I’d like to defend both the BBC and, chivalrously, Miss Nugent against this attack. However, if you feel my defence will be tantamount to damning with faint praise, who am I to argue?

I strongly suspect that all Miss Nugent knows about Operation Chastise comes from the 1955 film The Dam Busters, if that. I looked into her educational credentials and found no compelling reason to believe she is especially erudite.

Miss Nugent graduated from University of Huddersfield. Several websites claim she did so in 1971, which, considering that was the year she was born, strikes me as unlikely. Dismissing the possibility that this venerable institution issues degrees to neonates, one has to assume it’s a typo, and her real graduation year was 1991.

If that’s the case, then Huddersfield wasn’t a university at the time. It was still a polytechnic, only upgrading its status in 1992, following the Higher Education Act.

That was an exercise in egalitarian legerdemain, enabling the downtrodden to claim they have gone to university instead of a lowly polytechnic. Thus, if Britain had 22 universities in 1960, today she has 160 – supposedly. In reality, we still have 22, or even fewer, since upgrading the status of polytechnics has produced a growing inflation in the value of a university degree.

Why do I go into this in such detail? Because I believe the BBC’s apology that Miss Nugent made a slip of the tongue. She meant to say ‘famous’, which inadvertently came out as ‘infamous’.

It’s not only possible but likely that an alumna of Huddersfield ‘University’ may genuinely not know the difference between ‘famous’ and ‘infamous’. She may well think that ‘infamous’ is the more refined way of saying the same thing.

This is widespread: I’ve heard many people say ‘simplistic’ when they mean ‘simple’ or ‘risqué’ when they mean ‘risky’. This is what linguists call ‘genteelism’, a verbal attempt to sound more educated (or, in Britain, higher class) than one is.

This is a predictable outcome of egalitarian education: people feel entitled to the higher status they have done little to attain. Treating a university degree as a licence to kill the real meaning of words, they believe, along with Humpty Dumpty, that words mean what they want them to mean.

Thus they say ‘peruse’ instead of ‘scan’, ‘masterful’ instead of ‘masterly’, ‘disinterested’ instead of ‘uninterested’, ‘electrocuted’ instead of ‘got a shock’, ‘momentarily’ instead of ‘shortly’, ‘enormity’ instead of ‘immensity’, ‘refute’ instead of ‘deny’ – and these, along with many others, are the solecisms one hears regularly from all and sundry, including TV journalists.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to be snobbish here, rating people’s education on the basis of their CVs. In fact, I’ve seen total ignoramuses boasting Oxbridge degrees and highly educated people who have gone to lowly universities or none at all.

In fact, I believe that, when all is said and done, there is no education other than self-education. Someone who has spent a lifetime perusing (rather than scanning) by the yard books written by great stylists will know the difference between ‘famous’ and ‘infamous’.

Yet simple observation suggests that most people tend to devote their valuable time to pursuits promising a more immediate payoff. Thus English is being mangled so widely and consistently that one begins to suspect lifelong self-education isn’t in the forefront of most people’s minds.

In fact, many people hardly ever increase their erudition beyond the level they attained at school or university. That being the case, the better schools and universities they attend, the less likely they will be to say ‘infamous’ when they mean ‘famous’.

Miss Nugent’s excuse may or may not be truthful. Yet I for one find it perfectly plausible.

As to defunding the BBC, by all means let’s. But for all the right reasons.