RED by James Hogan Quotes
Alien Virtual: I find TV too cumbersome and too crowded with 600 plus channels in the UK, at least the news channels have vastly improved in Britain thanks to Sky news, Al-Jazeera and an array of new formats on RT news. Without FOX we would never have had the Simpsons, American Dad and Family Guy and some may well see the cartoons as just brilliant current affair programmes! TV became too obsessed with Reality TV. Repeating the same format over and over again. I use and watch the internet: verified and unverified news. VICE news, The Young Turks, TheLipTV, AnotherClip and anyone's own face page amongst a myriad of others. Viewed through this angle it may be a mad world out there where 21st century broadcasting and communication is concerned but we will perhaps be spared the fate of George III and exchange total nonsense for enlightenment. What ever happened to TV?
Movie: RED by James Hogan
Jean Seaton: I'm really worried that the BBC has been stopped doing some things that would have been in our national interest. The most obvious of that would be supposing it had launched a public service search engine in about 2001, what a different world we would live in. Would we be under the monopoly of Google? No.
Movie: RED by James Hogan
Greg Dyke: There are always a few regrets, but by and large I think history has shown we were right. I think... I don't... it's very hard to meet anybody today who doesn't think that Blair and Co. didn't sex up the dossier, and didn't sex up the case for war, but you could have... could we have dealt with it differently? Yes. Would it have made much difference? Probably not. If Dr Kelly hadn't killed himself, the story would have just died like all stories die, in the end. It was only Dr Kelly's suicide, or alleged suicide, that changed the whole game, and really after that happened it was out of our control.
Movie: RED by James Hogan
Jean Seaton: Two gentlemen from the BBC arrived at my office door. I thought it might have something to do with the BBC but I didn't know... I mean, I knew that but I didn't know what and they asked me to do it, to write the book. And to say you could have knocked me over with a feather and picked me off the floor afterwards...
Movie: RED by James Hogan
Peter Bazalgette: In 1978, as a very, very junior researcher working on a regional news programme, I was told by a director who worked by him, in the bar, gossip level, oh, you know, Jimmy Savile, he likes little girls, you know. So, I was told that, I don't know, whatever that is, 35, 36 years ago. But, you know, you are told gossip and rumour all the time about people, particularly when they are celebrities. Whether anybody actually knew, specifically, what he did, I've no idea because I never worked with him.
Movie: RED by James Hogan
Adam Boulton: I interviewed Johnny Rotten yesterday and we reminded each other how, in 1978, he was banned from the BBC for saying that everyone knew Jimmy Savile was dodgy. I think there have been allegations against people. I actually see it the other way around which is that I think a lot of the reaction to the undoubted abuses of Jimmy Savile, which only emerged after his death and which I see are primarily a problem for the BBC, I have to say, that was the organisation which promoted Jimmy Savile and which protected him to a certain extent.
Movie: RED by James Hogan
Jean Seaton: Asa made 1,800 mistakes; nobody has ever complained of one of them, not one because I think they didn't... you know, I don't really want to dwell on that but, you know, Lord Asa Briggs on the Labour benches, a great historian, Vice Chancellor of Sussex, Worcester College, the Open University, a great radical historian but a great man. I'm just very evidently not a great woman; I'm just not. I'm a person who has done my best and I don't have any of those defences that make people kowtow to me. So I think that's not made it easy. And they've made a decision that they now won't do another volume of the history of the BBC until everybody is dead.
Movie: RED by James Hogan