CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: 30 years of The Moral Maze: the BBC show where conservatives are welcome  Fri Aug 28, 2020 11:03 am | |
| While the liberal left dominate Auntie, there is one safe space which treasures debate and perspective, writes Tim Stanley
Moral Maze turns 30 this week, and in this age of Woke it stands out on the Radio 4 schedules. Every Wednesday at 8pm, four panellists - sometimes including me - take a moral question and grill four nervous witnesses about it. Then we turn on each other.
The debate is intelligent, often pretentious, sometimes rude. “It’s a programme that says the unsayable,” explains its chair, Michael Buerk: “Ideas are tested to destruction and no apologies are made or corners cut… I don’t think it would be commissioned in the current climate”. He’s probably right. The history of the Maze tells us a lot about how much the BBC, and Britain, have changed.
It was created in 1990 by the Rev Ernie Rea of Radio 4’s religion department, with the goal of getting to the “moral heart” of the news cycle. Rea’s first choice for a host was Buerk; he won him over during a liquid lunch, and it proved brilliant casting. Buerk writes his own incisive scripts and keeps the academics grounded with withering charm. The last time I was on the show, he listed my qualifications for a debate on the future of agriculture thus: Tim Stanley is a “tweedy type in red trousers”.
“The BBC is full of the liberal left,” says Rea, “and laughingly they wanted us to get a panel that mirrored the sort of people you hear on radio all the time” - but Rea insisted upon balance, with strong conservative voices and a hint of “iconoclasm”. For the programme to work, he decided, “it had to make the headlines”. Given a prime morning slot just after the Today programme, that’s exactly what it did.
A secret of its success, says Janet Daley, an early panellist and a Sunday Telegraph columnist, was that it drew on a generation with unique historical experience. “I had been a veteran of the student revolution at Berkley... Roger Scruton was not only a considerable moral philosopher but had run a Samizdat network behind the Iron Curtain. Rabbi Hugo Gryn was a Holocaust survivor.” Its most powerful moment was a show broadcast after the BNP had won a council seat in 1993; producer David Coomes made the now almost unimaginable decision to invite on a representative of the BNP, who used his five minutes of fame to deny the Holocaust. Gryn asked him to “look me in the eyes” and tell him he didn’t see his brother and father being murdered at Auschwitz. On another edition, Gryn admitted that he and other prisoners had killed a sadistic Ukrainian guard.
The Rabbi had a sparring relationship with a then little-known historian called David Starkey; the “tension” between panellists, recalls Starkey, was another selling point. “You’re not half as nasty as you appear,” Gryn once told him on air. “And you’re not half as nice,” Starkey replied.
Recently Starkey was “cancelled” comments widely deemed to be racist and declared persona non grata (he was “very sorry”, Starkey said in a statement, for “the awful clumsiness” of his language, though he vehemently denied the charge of racism). In the current climate, it’s easy to forget, however, how much the media in the Nineties revelled in Starkey’s willingness not just to cross a line but pole vault over it. He remembers Maze as “intellectual tag wrestling” in which he gained the upper hand with historical knowledge, a grasp of the Bible that could rival a bishop and humour. “Radio 4 is usually boring beyond belief, especially the comedy. Moral Maze was actually very funny”. He developed a technique for summing up the deficiencies of a witness just as they were getting up to leave. At the end of a debate on the monarchy with George Austin, then archdeacon of York - a man used to deference - Starkey asked of the cleric, “Doesn’t his fatness, his smugness and his pomposity make you want to vomit?”
One newspaper crowned him “the rudest man in Britain”. Starkey joked that the title was “worth at least £100,000 a year” to his income, but when “smugness, fatness and pomposity” were later quoted in Austin’s obituary, he felt guilty. Sometimes, “you would wake up in the small hours and feel ashamed.”
Such contributions sealed Maze’s (unfair) reputation as a show for right-wingers and libertarians. But, it wasn’t cast that way. Conservatives, Daley points out, were simply novel; their arguments previously unaired: “I once said free markets have created mass prosperity on a scale that’s unprecedented in human history, and the witness who I was questioning was floored. No one had ever said that in his presence before.” Many listeners who I meet now think that Daley and Starkey are still on the show. They actually left a few years after it was relocated to an evening slot, in 1998, a scheduling mistake that cost it some of its impact and colour, though it remains stubbornly intellectual. “If you can’t keep up with the argument,” says Buerk, “there’s always Radio 2.”
“We used words like epistemological or neo-platonism,” says Daley, “We were absolutely uncompromising and listeners loved it because they were flattered.” Buerk calls this self-conscious cleverness a “self-defence” mechanism: using long words, I suspect, allows the panel to push an argument to its extremes and get away with it because the audience doesn’t entirely understand what’s being said. As for the feelings of the witness, it’s almost immaterial, says Claire Fox, who, before becoming a panellist in 2001, debuted as a witness in a discussion on free expression.
It was “terrifying... It was a small room and it was consciously designed to put you under pressure... You look around the table for encouragement and none occurs.” But “its intensity is its strength. If they tried to water that down, it would lose its power.” The importance of the Maze, she believes, is that it compels everyone, including the witness, to examine the moral dimensions of even the wonkiest or most intimate subjects. This intellectualism is also what gets it in trouble.
Because it addresses issues from first principles, Maze can alienate those who feel the emphasis should be put on personal experience. As the programme increasingly has to debate questions of identity, because that’s what makes the news, this raises the thorny question of who has the right to speak. Can racism be debated with academic detachment? Can a male-dominated panel discuss a female experience like abortion? In the past, you might get away with it. Understandably, not any more.
I’ve noticed that some listeners object not only to what is said on the Maze – about, say, Trans rights or the British Empire – but that we are debating the subject at all. There is still nothing the show won’t touch, but finding Left-wingers happy to talk in the terms that Maze prefers can be difficult. “We’re all worrying about how the curtains seen to be drawn on a lot of this,” says Buerk, “particularly with the Left regarding the expression of views that they don’t like” - and the BBC press office, he observes, “does pay quite a lot of account to what is going on on Twitter”. But he believes the show is far less combative than it was, the bosses still value it, and it will survive because “the BBC has parked it in a slot where it can’t do any harm.”
Maze is not about ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ a debate, it’s always been about debate itself – and when some people would rather society doesn't discuss certain issues at all, that’s why it remains not just entertaining but essential.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/life/30-years-moral-maze-bbc-show-conservatives-welcome/ |
|
