She’s Lost Control

The Business segment of the breakfast BBC News is not where you expect to see subversion, but these days the revolution is everywhere.

7.15AM: The Editor is at the global business-leader lovefest in Davos. He’s showing a pre-taped interview with one of the world’s best dogsled team handlers – an instructive metaphor on how to build a world winning team. (If the dogs win they each get a massage with special oil, surely a motivator every department head should consider.) Suddenly, Jane’s Addiction burbles up in the soundtrack. Now TV has been using intros and bridges from popular music for years, grabbing anything that has a cinematic feel, but a 15 year old track by dissident drug addicts is not a natural choice for a business story.

Unfortunately it wasn’t ‘Been Caught Stealing’, the Addiction’s hymn to shoplifting. (That would have roused my inner anarchist!) But someone in the production team was using the intro to ‘Stop’ to make their own comment:

Gimme that!
Gimme that – your automobile,
Turn off that smokestack
And that goddamn radio
Hum… along with me…
Hum along with the TV

The Addiction’s immediate audience were the rebel tribes of tattooed and pierced dreadies who were never going to join a FTSE or NYSE 100 company. Today, they would be (and perhaps are) the people mounting anti-capitalism and globalisation protests.

Events like the mobile phone video of Saddam’s hanging are graphic reminders that control is being wrested from major media. This was a signal that it can also be taken from within. I doubt very many caught the implication. It may have been nothing but a personal comment from a member of the production team. But when Auntie has to be the voice of both fairness and the nation and justify the continuation of ever-increasing public license fees, it’s an uncomfortable reminder that Trojan Horses exist in more than just software.