Bulletproof?
How misbehaviour by on and offscreen talent is rarely nipped in the bud
Wilful ignorance/blindness continues to plague the TV industry.
Very rarely do you hear of errant 'talent' ejected from a project before rumours are too rampant to be battened down; the tipping point always appears to be far too late.
All the courses and awareness training appear for nought.
When a former Sky drama commissioner can rail against the unsavoury behaviour of Donald Trump and succeed in getting then DJT toady Piers Morgan booted from presenting the 2017 RTS awards (he “had failed to understand fully a social movement that values equality and diversity of voice in its broadest sense"), whilst in the same year commissioning Noel Clarke’s Bulletproof, accusations of hypocrisy are conceivably justified.
Or at the very least, a bewildering lack of due diligence or chronic incuriosity about the whispers surrounding one of the stars of Sky’s heavily publicised flagship drama.
As others have said, Clarke’s alleged misconduct was supposedly widely known (Variety was told recently that he was recognised in the industry as “a problematic figure to work with”) so one can only assume that questions may not have been asked or complaints raised at the time for fear of rocking the boat or causing a possibly lucrative long-running franchise to go off the rails.
Which of course it now has.
ITV's Director of Programmes Kevin Lygo has some form as an outlier of antediluvian ignorance in UK television, with his publicised attempts at humour/justification failing to stand the test of time in the context of Shipwrecked, Celebrity Big Brother, Love Island, Jeremy Kyle and other controversies.
Indeed, in 2019, Lygo even managed to piss off the staff at ITV itself with an email announcing the departures of daytime commissioning editors Jane Beacon and Clare Ely, in which he suggested the women were leaving to “sit on their respective pink sofas”.
Only on the day of transmission was the final episode of ITV’s Noel Clarke policier Viewpoint dropped - and promos were playing on the channel following the story having broken and been featured on The News at Ten.
Uncharitably, some might say that Kev could possibly go back to his former gig as a comedy writer (he began working for The Two Ronnies), but given the lukewarm reception accorded his BBC comedy Walter (2014), the phrase ‘don’t give up the day job’ springs to mind.
Whilst not on the same scale, some industry types believed that the boorish ‘End the Hunt’ antics of now outgoing BBC comedy chief Shane Allen at his Ch4 leaving do in 2012 smacked of someone with an inflated sense of his own importance.
And a fairly crap sense of humour.
Further back, also witness the Savile affair, when a Shane tribute show was inexplicably commissioned after the presenter’s unmourned death in October 2011.
Almost 10 years later, the trailer clip for Jim'll Fix It with Shane Richie is still on the BBC website.
Outstanding.
"I think it will be a great tribute to Jimmy to recreate his famous show as a Christmas treat for audiences” said then BBC One controller Danny Cohen at the time.
Even when I was a middle school pupil in the suburban London of the late 1970s rumours of the Fix It presenter’s supposed penchant for necrophilia were rife.
But somehow, senior BBC executives hadn't heard of them – or the other sordid stories; blinkers applied by a public-school education, I wonder? Or the usual lack of concern for matters not directly affecting themselves?
Bit of both, I suspect.
Even to the extent of not watching or having their collective attention drawn to one of the BBC’s own shows before Savile’s demise, 2000’s When Louis Met…Jimmy – let alone cottoned on to his commonly held feelings about his repellent character in the TV industry generally and more specifically in the BBC TV Centre (‘doughnut’) offices.
Possibly too busy strategizing the next step on the Corporation’s greasy pole…
The industry does have a code of omerta - what can change this?
Apparently not awareness/training courses, as I remember attending mandatory employee workshops at the BBC back in the 1990s, which didn't make a blind bit of difference to the behaviour of those senior executives above us mere mortals.
Since then, The Corporation has presumably cleaned out at least some of the host of oddballs, incompetents and budding sociopaths who occupied high-ranking management posts.
With any luck, a new, more expertly camouflaged bunch have not simply replaced the old. Back in the day, comparatively few people went to the BBC’s HR department to complain, possibly fearing that their careers would suffer if word got out. Again, hopefully, this reluctance has waned.
Harsh as it may be, it looks like a far more rigorous form of due diligence may be the route to pursue when hiring above-the-title talent, on and offscreen.
However, the opportunity for malicious rumour mongering from jealous rivals and genuine errors then increases exponentially.
Woe to those innocents caught up in a Claude Chabrol/Jim Thompson-esque* web of gossip engineered by those whose noses have been put out of joint.
But…senior execs are (well) paid to exercise their judgement, rather than emulate ostriches.
Well, one can hope.
In an industry where Andrew Marr can apparently trouser £5k for hosting a Zoom call with wealth management firm Brewin Dolphin from a meeting room in Broadcasting House (!) whilst sporting a BBC lanyard, one may understandably lack that particular virtue (hope).
