There has been widespread public criticism – and not just from the usual suspects in the fusty, traditionalist right-wing media – about the quality of the BBC’s coverage of the Queen’s diamond jubilee river flotilla, which aired on Sunday.

The Telegraph, twisting the knife, claims that the BBC’s reputation is “sunk” in the River Thames:

The Daily Mail sneers about the tasteless product placement during the broadcast:

The item that came in for most criticism featured Miss Cotton discussing a jubilee sick-bag with singer Paloma Faith.

After being asked by Miss Cotton whether she had had ‘a lovely jubilee weekend’, the singer seized the opportunity to plug her new album.

The pair then went on to discuss a number of bizarre items of jubilee memorabilia, including jelly moulds shaped like the Queen’s face; a high-visibility vest bearing the words ‘High Viz, Diamond Liz’; and, finally, a sick-bag bearing an image of the Queen.

Holding the bag, Miss Faith explained: ‘Then, if you’ve eaten too much, you can just vomit into a jubilee sick-bag.’

Miss Cotton replied: ‘Lovely, isn’t that just lovely? And you can choose your colour, red or blue, it’s up to you.’

The presenter, 30, last night congratulated herself and colleagues on ‘seven hours of spotless TV’.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2154222/Queens-Diamond-Jubilee-2012-BBC-sank-tide-wittering-inanity.html

Having personally sat through most of the Sunday coverage myself, I can only agree with these assessments.

Traditionally, Sky News has been (to my mind) the channel you turn to when there is breaking news and you want to see immediate, if somewhat shaky footage, shot from a helicopter and narrated by the reporter who is first on the scene, but is perhaps not fully briefed on the background of the story they are covering, while the BBC is the channel that you give an extra half hour for their reporter to turn up at the scene, but who then delivers a more nuanced and knowledgeable report when in situ.

This Jubilee weekend the situation was reversed, and I found myself giving up on the BBC’s lamentable, dumbed-down coverage in disgust, and switching over to Sky News so that I might actually learn something about what was taking place on the river, rather than have my intelligence insulted any further by the BBC’s callow, youthful and unknowledgeable presenters.

I suppose that my serious point would be that any large commercial broadcaster (Sky, ITV) can televise a large outdoor event and make it cheerful and perky. However, the BBC’s long history and deep institutional experience of broadcasting important national events – not to mention the fact that they are publicly funded by the television license fee – means that they are rightly held to a higher standard on such occasions. Certainly, in my view, the BBC should not merely replicate what is already readily available in the commercial media. But more importantly, like it or not, the BBC’s coverage of such events becomes the “coverage of record”. This is the footage that we will want to watch again when we ourselves are old, and the footage that future historians will study a century from now.

The BBC’s lamentable, frankly amateurish televised coverage of the Queen’s diamond jubilee celebrations has given those future historians an unintentionally revealing insight into what our pop culture, media and attention spans are apparently like in the second decade of the twenty-first century. But they will be sorely disappointed if they watch it with a view to learning anything at all about the British nation, British history or the monarchy – supposedly the reason for the broadcast in the first place.