mocktalk: Run me through your 1989 again Kate… and again

To 89-ners a cruel not cool lesson in gender-equal Britishness is Kate Adie’s BBC old mutton reporting as freedom’s lamb from Tiananmen Sq… 20 yrs on, now 30 yrs on … looking forward probably to 40 yrs on… if WW3 doesn’t get in the way.

Kate apparently can’t or wouldn’t re-evaluate her position with age nor learn the lingo, with time and ‘Mandarin’ fame on her hands. She sticks to English like a statesman… But then again they say you can’t teach an old news-dog new tricks so she’s proof in spades of the BBC’s institutionalised reflexes which disregard history moved on. Probably she can’t afford to ‘dig’ into what happened since (nor long before), for too many.

So on and again, with auntie’s power language of the ‘objective experienced observer’ never a second in doubt that hers is a conveniently impressionistic Western framing of the Tiananmen massacre, never a minute self-aware for the viewer there is historically bad blood between colonial England and China that taints her perspectives.

Any historical point regarding Tiananmen is but self-referential since Kate is not bothered at all to dispense with the very people who were literally body and soul part of it. She’s apparently the one left standing as excuse… always with a submissive cameraman and a ‘little Chinese helper’ in tow. They are there in many ways to prop Kate’s credentials and her past glories as international ‘freedom-of-speech champ’ because the camera makes it so and the BBC in London says so, and the little helper nods so.

One trait becomes clearer above others: you can take the gender out of reporting and call it ‘revolutionary’ but you can’t take the BBC’s old-mutton Englishness out of Adie’s reports… As relegated colonial leaders of men but potentially, leaders of opinion, the BBC drove its ‘freedom fighters’ to far far away lands in hope they would become history’s brokers.

Katie’s ‘selfish feminist ambitions’ apparently took the bait, and she was rewarded by London for her disregard of any internationalism or historical references in her reports, regardless of how far and wide she had travelled the world! The enabling difference in 89 being, only English and Western reporters had cameras, any other freedom fighters on the ground in the communist East and Far East including China, didn’t!

Part 2

During the revolutions that followed in Eastern Europe that year in 1989, we took in good faith and as supportive BBC’s reporting, from a broadcaster whose World Service was not looked upon as more than stuffed and lacking engagement with any real issues on the ground. Today we are in the middle of nowhere as 2nd class individuals or nationalities, even countries for making that ‘error’ thinking the West and the BBC supports change… So yes, we the 89-ners are guilty of trusting those that history proved to take self-interest and not internationalism at heart more than anything else. Deservedly, we’ve had to watch on a loop in a kind of personal hell, Kate’s gloating over her achievements, her elevation to priesthood, sainthood …that set her on the road to damehood.

Annoying it is how she cheated death by stumbling over others’ bodies in the way in and out of Tianamen. That in itself is the metaphor of our failings in 89-90 – we died, they marched on, over us. The actions of so many, in truth, deserved more than Kate Adie’s poster-face and a BBC camera to report on them.

So nice one Kate! Thank you for reporting on yourself from Tiananmen Sq… again. As it was revealed 20, 30 40? yrs on you can’t seem to be getting enough of yourself doing that, all in the interest of the public service broadcasting! One can already hear the politics of soon-to-be gender-neutral British establishment own the great impact Kate had on China, probably on the same par with Lawrence of Arabia’s.