The BBC have announced their new director general. What a title! It got us thinking, what do chin-stroking auteurs and masters of military strategy have in common? Total dedication to the cause.
Julius Caesar – He was loved by the masses, but after instituting a series of cuts to senior management, he became the recipient of more than a few cuts himself.
Attila the Hun – A fierce subscriber to the ‘take no prisoners’ school of institutional management, he swept into London from the east (Basildon), plundering talk show hosts from ITV and Channel 4 alike. Introduced a short-lived Red Button service for horse-racing tips.
Akira Kurosawa – His celebrated psychological thriller Rashomon, in which a murder is recounted in contradictory ways by different witnesses, was really just a rehash of his work on Question Time, where current affairs are described in contradictory ways by different pundits, and you want to murder them all.
Napoleon – Rose from a bumpy spell as Moscow Correspondent to the top job. Had a fractious relationship with successive Tory governments, and being a slightly chippy Corsican, found himself ill at ease in Hampstead drawing rooms.
Wes Anderson – Remember the BBC One ident of hippos swimming in a circle? If you watch closely, you’ll see Anderson directing them in the background. In a Victorian diving suit.
Alexander the Great – The young Macedonian founded and renamed dozens of cities across his vast but short-lived empire. To avoid accusations of regional bias, he set up a BBC media centre in each of them.
George Washington – Prior to masterminding the American Revolution, Washington embarked on a series of bruising broadcast battles with Sky. Rupert Murdoch got his own back on the country his rival founded by launching Fox News.
Quentin Tarantino – Had a long-running public spat with conservative activist Mary Whitehouse, during which he set the record for the most expletives in a published letter to The Times. Yet when the pair eventually met they got on famously, both agreeing that film and TV had been going downhill since the ’50s.
Oliver Cromwell – Reviled by many for his extensive cuts to Christmas programming. Media historians have partially rehabilitated his reputation by pointing out that his Irish campaigns, while genocidal, managed to delay the production of Mrs Brown’s Boys by several years.
Sofia Coppola – She paid Bill Murray many multiples of Gary Lineker’s salary, but given he wasn’t permanently on Twitter no one seemed to mind much.
Peter Jackson – After making a mint off of JRR Tolkein, the success seems to have gone to his head: he had to be physically dragged out of Broadcasting House after commissioning a 12-series, adaptation of L Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth.
Bong Joon-ho – Very keen on Upstairs Downstairs and Great Continental Railway Journeys.
Christopher Nolan – Masterminded a 2020 false flag operation to shore up the BBC’s viewership, in which he released a film so mind-bendingly pretentious it hastened the demise of cinemas around the world.
Hannibal Barca – His army crossing the Alps atop war elephants was a tactical triumph that went down in military history. Hannibal’s subsequent fondness for heli-skiing in the same area was brought up in every Defund the BBC campaign from 215 BC onwards.
Josh & Benny Safdie – The only remaining trace of their avant-garde tenure is the thumping techno that precedes the News at Ten every evening. That, and the nerve-shredding countdowns on Pointless.
Robert E Lee – While his appointment was initially seen as ‘one in the eye’ of the liberal BBC establishment, Lee’s Confederate credentials only got him so far. In 1863 he was denounced as a ‘SNOWFLAKE’ by the Daily Mail, after one week saw both the defeat of the Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg and the announcement of the first same-sex couple on Strictly Come Dancing.
Alfred Hitchcock – Nobody who’s sat in the audience of Mock the Week (renewed by Hitchcock for 1,000 episodes) could possibly doubt the master’s ability to create an atmosphere of tension and discomfort purely by the use of laughterless silence.
Woody Allen – REDACTED PENDING INTERNAL BBC INVESTIGATION.
