WE report – of course – this week on the outstanding success of the Kneecap movie in scooping a Bafta at Sunday night’s glittering awards ceremony in London. Director Rich Peppiatt took the Outstanding Debut award in the latest of a host of awards that the rap trio and the movie have garnered recently.
The West Belfast lads and their film have divided opinion across the North – and beyond – but we deploy that term not in the sense of a snide insult or an exhausted cliché as it’s used elsewhere; rather we see it as a tribute to everyone involved in one of the most dynamic, exciting and talked-about films to have been produced in Ireland in recent decades.
Groundbreaking music is not to be heard in a carpeted hotel lift, and film at its best is not meant to reassure – it’s meant to discomfit and challenge. Kneecap, band and movie, have ticked all these artistic boxes and then some and we look forward to the talent behind them being recognised further in the future – yes, even those of us not likely to be in the audience at the hit movie or sold-out gig.
But of course, when talent blooms there’s always someone nearby with a pair of garden shears and with clanging inevitability the unionist morning daily The News Letter greeted news of Kneecap’s success with the sourness of month-old milk. That came as no surprise – angry and impotent railing against the quickening pace of change is that paper’s factory setting. But the same sentiment was on show elsewhere – and in this case not so easily ignored or swept aside.
BBCNI joined the News Letter in pointing out in its headline that Kneecap failed to pick up five of the six awards that it was nominated for. They joined the News Letter in inverting the simple truth that a nomination can never be a defeat regardless of the outcome – that it is in itself an honour and a privilege. And they joined the News Letter in deciding that for the first time in a headline about an awards show a winner is as notable – if not more so – for the awards it didn’t pick up as for those it did. Does the BBC report its own award wins in this way? Take a wild guess.
We are under no illusion that anyone at BBCNI’s Ormeau Avenue HQ cares a jot about what this paper thinks, or what the fans of Kneecap think, or what people appalled by the News Letter and BBCNI coverage think. The hapless Belfast branch of the Corporation has shown itself in dealing with a raft of controversies in recent years to be immune to criticism and saturated in arrogance.
But there’s something deeply, deeply wrong when the local arm of the broadcaster – paid for by us – finds itself making common and bitter cause with unionism’s most shrill and angry voice. There’s something deeply, deeply wrong when BBCNI see fit to devalue and deride a remarkable artistic achievement instead of celebrating it.
The disconnect is jarring
BBCNI is clearly impervious to outside voices, but it can never be impervious to the damage being wrought on its most precious asset – its credibility – by its own choices.
