BBC boss Tim Davie was 'consulted' during vile 'death to IDF' chant at festival
The BBC Director-General was personally consulted after Bob Vylan's controversial Glastonbury set, which featured a chant of "death, death to the IDF"
The Telegraph has reported that the BBC's top boss is now caught up in the row over the anti-Israel rap performance at this weekend's Glastonbury festival.
BBC Director-General Tim Davie, who was on-site visiting staff on Saturday, was swiftly informed when Bob Vylan blasted the stage with chants of "death, death to the IDF."
Acting quickly, he ruled out the band's set being available on-demand; nevertheless, it lingered on iPlayer's rewind feature for an extra five hours.
Despite not ordering the immediate pulling of the live feed, a BBC spokesperson conceded that the broadcaster now laments not doing so.
One BBC insider said: "Tim was there for a few hours to see the team. He was made aware during the time he was there of what had been said on stage. He intervened to make sure the performance was not made available on demand and he was very clear about that.", reports the Express.
Regarding the live transmission concerns, the source added, "Pulling the livestream brings certain technological challenges. With hindsight, we would have taken it down. He would have asked what the options were, but it isn't as straightforward as hitting a button and taking it down."
Following the outcry, the BBC was approached for comment.
Meanwhile, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy voiced serious concerns regarding Mr. Davie's stewardship in the light of the controversy.
Addressing Commons, she remarked: "When you have one editorial failure, it's something that must be gripped. When you have several, it becomes a problem of leadership."
MP Peter Prinsley sharply questioned: "The murder of hundreds of Jews at the Nova music festival in October 2023 sparked this war. The irony of broadcast anti-Semitism at Glastonbury here in the UK is not lost on any of us.
"So how are Jews, such as myself, in this country to be reassured about the editorial processes of the BBC? And who on Earth will be held accountable for this error?".
Ms Nandy insisted that accountability is "an extremely important point" and acknowledged that she has "something that I've impressed upon the BBC leadership."
The gravity of the situation
This controversy is the latest in a series of anti-Semitic criticisms levelled at the BBC. Previously, the corporation had to say sorry for producing a Gaza documentary with a concealed bias; the narrator was outed as the son of a Hamas leader, and the channel's coverage on Israel and Gaza has also drawn flak.
In the unfolding saga, Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel demanded Tim Davie's resignation if no staff are fired over the blunder, as she aired her concerns on The Telegraph's Daily T podcast. She stressed the need for an urgent probe into the BBC's delayed response to the offensive material.
At the stormy Glastonbury performance, Bob Vylan stirred the crowd into chanting "Free! Free!" which was then met with shouts of "Palestine!" from the attendees, only for the rapper to further provoke by adding: "death, death to the IDF."
Additionally, lead vocalist Pascal Robinson-Foster, widely known as Bobby Vylan, engaged in a heated rant about his dealings with a Jewish music industry executive.
After a controversial set during Glastonbury was accessible through BBC iPlayer's live stream hours post-performance, the BBC has issued an apology, branding the remarks "utterly unacceptable" and not fit for their airwaves.
"We welcome Glastonbury's condemnation of the performance," stated the broadcaster.
Apologising for the incident, the BBC slammed the comments as having "have no place on our airwaves", while expressing support for Glastonbury's denunciation of the act.
In discussion with the Daily T, Ms Haskel expressed her dismay: "Who's responsible for that? This is literally someone calling for violence, for ethnic cleansing, for the destruction and the annihilation of the only Jewish state in the world."
Highlighting the need for accountability, she demanded, "So if there's no one that will take responsibility, if no one will be fired over such an outrageous thing, then I think that Tim Davie should take responsibility because there has to be accountability for that."
When probed about BBC Director-General Tim Davie's future, she said, "If there's no one responsible for that, and if no one's going to be fired over such an outrageous thing, Tim Davie should take responsibility and resign."
Further, Ms Haskel called for an extensive review of the BBC's approach to reporting on the Middle East, insisting: "There should be an inquiry regarding the BBC coverage."
She continued to criticise the BBC's coverage and its handling of anti-Semitism in Britain, saying, "It was fully biased. Many mistakes were made. Not just in the coverage since Oct 7, but their coverage in the Middle East in general and also about how they address anti-Semitism in the UK. How is it possible that something like that has been normalised in the UK? I just don't get it."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Rhyl Journal
7 minutes ago
- Rhyl Journal
EastEnders fans slam jarring BBC couple who were not a match
Zack Hudson and Whitney Dean were a prominent couple on the show who planned to get married before Whitney discovered her partner's unfaithfulness. Things famously came to a head at their wedding ceremony when Britney revealed Zack had cheated on Whitney. A furious Whitney then attacked Lauren and Zack before storming out of the registry office, according to Digital Spy. Taking on the EastEnders official Reddit page, the original poster asked: "Did anyone actually like Zack and Whitney being together?" Fans of the BBC soap opera were quick to express their dislike of the relationship, with one user writing: "Always jarred a bit for me - the storylines about Peach, the fostering, Britney etc were good, but as a couple they felt a bit flung together. Which was probably the point IDK." Another agreed, penning: "Yeah, I felt the same. I wasn't keen on them as a couple (despite them both producing some good work together) and felt they weren't a match, either personality or chemistry-wise. "But this was by design and what they wanted to portray (given that Shona has known she was going for most - if not all - of that time)." One user said: "I did feel like their relationship came out of nowhere. I don't remember them interacting at all, and then she suddenly had a crush on him. "I didn't really like Zack until the Peach storyline, I think he supported her as best he could, and he seemed like he genuinely cared about her. "I think if Shona hadn't wanted to leave, they would have stayed together. They seemed like a solid couple before the Britney stuff, and I thought they were good together." Another fan added: "No, because I was annoyed that they didn't pair Zack and Sam together. All that build up and nothing, what a waste of time that was." Another echoed this dislike, writing: "Never. Zack was a playboy, and Whitney was a hypocrite with Lauren after she got with Joey while she was in rehab. "The dig at her being an addict just before her and Zack got together was uncalled for, too." However, one fan went against the grain, telling the OP: "Yes, I liked them together and was annoyed when he cheated with Lauren. "I'm hoping they don't put him and Lauren together. I don't know why, but I feel he could get with Zoe when she returns to the square"
South Wales Guardian
22 minutes ago
- South Wales Guardian
EastEnders fans slam jarring BBC couple who were not a match
Zack Hudson and Whitney Dean were a prominent couple on the show who planned to get married before Whitney discovered her partner's unfaithfulness. Things famously came to a head at their wedding ceremony when Britney revealed Zack had cheated on Whitney. A furious Whitney then attacked Lauren and Zack before storming out of the registry office, according to Digital Spy. Taking on the EastEnders official Reddit page, the original poster asked: "Did anyone actually like Zack and Whitney being together?" Fans of the BBC soap opera were quick to express their dislike of the relationship, with one user writing: "Always jarred a bit for me - the storylines about Peach, the fostering, Britney etc were good, but as a couple they felt a bit flung together. Which was probably the point IDK." Another agreed, penning: "Yeah, I felt the same. I wasn't keen on them as a couple (despite them both producing some good work together) and felt they weren't a match, either personality or chemistry-wise. "But this was by design and what they wanted to portray (given that Shona has known she was going for most - if not all - of that time)." One user said: "I did feel like their relationship came out of nowhere. I don't remember them interacting at all, and then she suddenly had a crush on him. "I didn't really like Zack until the Peach storyline, I think he supported her as best he could, and he seemed like he genuinely cared about her. "I think if Shona hadn't wanted to leave, they would have stayed together. They seemed like a solid couple before the Britney stuff, and I thought they were good together." Another fan added: "No, because I was annoyed that they didn't pair Zack and Sam together. All that build up and nothing, what a waste of time that was." Another echoed this dislike, writing: "Never. Zack was a playboy, and Whitney was a hypocrite with Lauren after she got with Joey while she was in rehab. "The dig at her being an addict just before her and Zack got together was uncalled for, too." However, one fan went against the grain, telling the OP: "Yes, I liked them together and was annoyed when he cheated with Lauren. "I'm hoping they don't put him and Lauren together. I don't know why, but I feel he could get with Zoe when she returns to the square"
Spectator
27 minutes ago
- Spectator
Adam Curtis can see your future
Adam Curtis used to make TikToks but doesn't want to talk about them. 'I did quite a lot of TikTok, privately,' he says, 'just under another name. They're probably out there somewhere…' His head rests in his hand and his elbow on the chair next to him, the two of us among pink flowers at the kitchen table in the Soho townhouse where he works. He looks at me and repeats: 'They're private.' For 30 years Curtis has been making documentaries for the BBC about how Britain became a sad place, or, in his own words: 'What happened after the Cold War, mixed in with a deeper sense of… I think melancholy. A sense we were once powerful.' Shifty is his new film. Outwardly the five episodes chart the breakdown of society's collective structures from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair. Really they are Curtis's attempt at tracing the origins of a strange emotion that he says has become general in Britain, a feeling that 'there is a big thing going on behind the surface'. 'I think there's something new going on inside people's heads and no one has got the language to describe it,' he tells me. It is this emotion, Curtis believes, that caused 'Leave' to win the Brexit referendum and explains Reform's popularity. He is describing a sort of revolutionary feeling, I think. If you go back and watch previous Curtis documentaries, flick between them, do an Adam Curtis to Adam Curtis, you realise that they mash together quite neatly, and that his work has a single ambition: to hold this anxious spirit to the sun, twirl it around in his hand and observe it from different angles. So Shifty is an origin story. Curtis says that during the 1980s and 1990s we privatised and financed our way into nasty self-centredness. People felt unmoored and politicians became unable to hold communities together. Curtis leaves it to the viewer to draw the easy line to today's politics. In one of the final scenes in the series, Peter Mandelson visits the Millennium Dome, which is then under construction. 'It's marvellous, absolutely marvellous,' he tells Tony Blair on a phone call. 'You'll think it's incredible, believe me. There's a zone with lots of emblems of Britain in it. I suddenly saw a photograph of a plate of toad-in-the-hole. I loved toad-in-the-hole when I was little!' The Blair government, and every government since, keeps giving us more toad-in-the-hole. Curtis's films are always about the past because he, like the politicians he describes, is unable to define the present. 'There are certain aspects of modern power that you cannot illustrate,' he says. 'And they make me cry, sometimes literally. I'm scrabbling for shots. I'll tell you what they are. They're computers. They govern our lives, but nothing happens. And that expands to things like HR because that's just men and women in glass offices doing keystrokes which will govern your life and destroy your life or whatever. But there's nothing there. Finance. I've gone mad sometimes looking for shots. The normal solution for a television journalist is to have a reporter gazing at a screen with the glow on their face musing to themselves. And I would not do that. You have to find another way.' 'This really gets me,' he continues. 'I feel like so much of the modern world is just not being recorded, got at.' I ask if he really cries about it. 'Out of frustration, yeah. Just like… 'Oh for fuck's sake! How do I illustrate this?' I can't do another shot of a server farm. I just can't.' Curtis says that as 'modern power' has become unillustratable, so has 'the self'. He says that in the BBC archive footage, somewhere in 1997 or 1998, people start to speak and carry themselves in unnatural ways when they know they are in front of a camera. This is before social media and reality television. He can't explain it. We also, obviously, spend a decreasing amount of time interacting with the physical world. 'Isn't that fascinating?' Curtis says. 'In the age where people are exposing themselves more and more and more and more, it's… [he's referring to 'the self'] not there.' I am aware that all of this talk of emotions and feelings and stories and the self sounds mysterious and perhaps overthought, but something in it is true when it comes from Curtis. 'You know that's not right, you know it from yourself,' he will say in conversation. Curtis used to narrate his documentaries, but doesn't anymore. His voice actually got deeper with every new series, until it vanished completely in his 2022 film Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone, which is about the end of the Soviet Union. In his films and in person Curtis does not make arguments, he summons moods. He also refuses to use the word 'vibe'. A still from TraumaZone (Adam Curtis / BBC) 'Dominic Cummings got in touch with me after my Russia thing,' Curtis says. 'He was in Russia during that time. I just found him very funny. I like his snark, and I like the fact that he realises that the bubble is not good. I respect him for that.' I ask whether politicians have asked him to help them portray their vision of the country to the population. He says he has been contacted by politicians, and that they 'are always after something', but that 'no one has ever asked me to help them.' People speculate about Curtis's own politics, and he makes it very clear to me that he is not a liberal. 'Never trust a liberal,' he says. 'The one thing the patrician liberals can't examine is themselves. They really cannot do it. I find it absolutely astonishing. After Brexit, they didn't examine their role in it. They did not examine any role they might have played.' Curtis says his views on politics are born out of north Kent, where he comes from. 'It's… What's the word… Independent,' he says. 'That's the polite way of putting it.' Can you explain that a little more, I ask. 'No,' he replies. Fair enough. 'I challenge anyone to say what my politics are,' he says later, 'because quite frankly I haven't got any. I'm a completely modern creature, like you I'm sure, and a lot of my friends. I react to events as they come along. You are aware that power is unequal and you shouldn't cry about that fact.' 'We might be living through a revolution, but we don't know it' We go to the study where Curtis edits. There is some Lana Del Rey merch, two monitors and a mess of hard-drives. (The townhouse is not his, by the way. It is owned by a bohemian lady. She lets him work here.) 'Every now and then, I wonder whether it's going to crash,' he says, nodding at the mess. 'Well, I mean, it does crash… But it's going to properly crash. And then I'm fucked.' He says that the hard part of his job is coming up with 'the idea and the stories'. It took him about nine months to come up with the introduction to Bitter Lake, which is the best sequence of any of his films, and ten minutes to make it. Curtis finds editing is easy and satisfying, and does it late at night. 'There's a whole tradition, and it goes so deep, of editors, probably because they're not really in control and they want their bit of control, they go: 'We've got to cut a frame off… here'. I know that no one notices that. What they really notice is whether it's drawing them in, whether they're going along with you for the ride.' Because he edits his documentaries himself, he costs the BBC very little. Shifty cost £17,500 to make. Curtis's next documentary might be about America, he says, but it could also be about 'living in a society where a lot of things look normal but actually behind them they're not.' We are currently, he says, 'in a sort of cosplay of everything. And behind it, there's this seething mass.' 'We might be living through a revolution, but we don't know it because it's happening already inside millions of people's heads. It'll suddenly burst through to us: 'OH MY FUCK!''
