SUMMARY: PBS "Masterpiece" has a new spin on an old story, with a six-hour serial version of “Les Miserables.” Unlike recent Broadway and film presentations, this one is not a musical, and its length offers the audience more time to connect to characters. Jeffrey Brown talks to stars Dominic West, David Oyelowo, and Lily Collins; and Executive Producer Rebecca Eaton, about the hero story's current relevance.
Peaky Blinders is a gangster family epic set in Birmingham, England, in 1919, just after the First World War. The story centers on the Peaky Blinders gang and their ambitious and highly dangerous boss Tommy Shelby (played by Cillian Murphy). The gang comes to the attention of Chief Inspector Chester Campbell (played by Sam Neill, Jurassic Park fame), a detective in the Royal Irish Constabulary sent over from Belfast (where he'd been sent to clean up the city of the IRA, gangs, and common criminals). Winston Churchill (played by Andy Nyman in series 1 and Richard McCabe in series 2) charged him with suppressing disorder and uprising in Birmingham and recover a stolen cache of arms meant to be shipped to Libya.
It was 2004, and the British Broadcasting Corporation was gripped by a crisis over journalistic standards that had led to Parliamentary hearings, public recrimination and the resignations of its two top officials. Vowing change, the corporation established elaborate bureaucratic procedures that placed more formal responsibility for delicate decisions in the hands not of individual managers, but of rigid hierarchies.
The corporation also appointed a deputy director general in charge of news operations; established a “journalism board” to monitor editorial policy; issued numerous new guidelines on journalistic procedures; and put an increasing emphasis on “compliance” — a system in which managers are required to file cumbersome forms flagging dozens of potential trouble spots, from bad language to “disturbing content” like exorcism or beheadings, in every program taped for broadcast.
More crises would follow — the history of the BBC can be measured out in crises — and with each new one, the management team under Mark Thompson, director general from 2004 through mid-September 2012, added more guidelines and put more emphasis on form-filling and safety checks in news and entertainment programs. An organization already known for its bureaucracy became even more unwieldy (the editorial guidelines are now 215 pages long).
But it is these very structures that seem to have failed the BBC in the most recent scandal, in which its news division first canceled a child abuse segment it should have broadcast, and later broadcast one it should have canceled. In the first instance, it appears that people overseeing the program were too cautious, so that top managers were left unaware of its existence; in the second, managers may have relied too much on rigid procedures at the expense of basic journalistic principles.
“They burned their fingers,” said Tim Luckhurst, a journalism professor at the University of Kent who worked at the BBC for 10 years. “They wanted systems that could take responsibility instead of people.”
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): Can you almost feel when the lights are going on, when people are saying, aha?
DR. HANS ROSLING, Professor of International Health: Yes, we have.
But it's also -- you have to check after a year if it's still there. And the old concept of the Western world and developing world is very strong. And it's also because it's sort of frightening. People think it's frightening with this Asia and Africa here.
No, these are customers. These are partners. And prosperity in the rest of the world means more peace. The U.S. armed forces doesn't have to make so many interventions in the world if we have less conflict. So it's sort of a new vision about the world we must have.
