Britain as money-laundering philanderers? The Salvation Army as a bunch of crooks bent on power? No, of course not.
So we complained. We wanted a little apology, that’s all, and a firm purpose of amendment: a three-second statement read at the graveyard of the news hour, perhaps, a flash of words — ‘Portrayal of Opus Dei unfair. Shall try harder next time’ — that would set the record a little straighter.
After all, a BBC guideline said that ‘the same standards of fairness which apply to factual programmes should generally be observed’, and even promised ‘to be accurate and to ensure that the drama does not unduly distort the known facts and thus become unfair’. Fiction, as every libel lawyer knows, is no defence.
Yet this was precisely the BBC’s defence over the next 18 months, as we laboured up the grievances ladder all the way to Ofcom, through ever more mysterious and circuitous routes. The programme’s producer was keen for us to know, in the first of what would be many informative letters on the Creative Process, that the programme ‘aims to tackle dark, disturbing, but hopefully fascinating subjects using fictional characters against non-fictional backdrops’. Great, we said, but what about portraying Opus Dei members as uniformly evil, and presenting as fact (Opus Dei murders Calvi) what had been disproved over and again? Isn’t the problem that your ‘non-fictional backdrop’ was defamatory and false?
But look, said the BBC, the characters’ membership of Opus Dei was ‘not necessarily contemporaneous with their misdeeds’ and see, there were other wicked characters who were not members of Opus Dei. But, we replied, unlike the other malefactors (the banks, for example, are called ‘BICF’ and ‘Levy Goldenthal’), Opus Dei is actually named. Why not call it, say, Civitas Dei, Opera Maleficium, Magnus Frater?
But in ‘highly stylised dramas such as Waking the Dead the likelihood that the audience would take it as a guide to the reality of those organisations is remote’, insisted the BBC. This sounded suspiciously like the Da Vinci Code defence, and it’s obviously untrue. An opinion poll in 2006 showed that readers of Dan Brown were four times more likely than non-readers to believe Opus Dei regularly murders people.
And the main point, surely, was that BBC guidelines state that fictional dramas have the same duty to fairness as non-fiction.
The Editorial Complaints Unit took that question ‘Very Seriously’. Yes, dramas have an obligation to fairness, to portray people and their organisations realistically, they explained; but that obligation was strongest in the case of a drama documentary and rather less strong in a ‘highly fictionalised format’ such as Waking the Dead, in which ‘unlikely conspiracies, guilty secrets and unexpected revelations are the order of the day’.
In April 2007 we took our four letters and the replies to the BBC Trust, the new body set up in the wake of the Hutton inquiry to deal with complaints and grievances. The Trust said it would get back to us soon — and it did, with an impressive 24-page bundle to which we were invited to add more documents. Although we threw in authoritative media reports debunking the Calvi accusations, in its judgment the Trust informed us that Opus Dei’s fraudulent bank deals and murders ‘was accurate in terms of media coverage’. The last was an entirely new justification, one to make a libel judge blanch: that if a newspaper somewhere has made an preposterous, defamatory allegation, it is fine to reproduce it as fact — at least in a drama using shaky camera techniques.
So we turned, eyes rolling when not cast heavenwards, to Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator. While the BBC had taken our complaint seriously and dealt with it swiftly, even if they were determined to see it off, Ofcom met our September 2007 submission with a magnum silentium unbroken until mid-December, when the complaint was thrown out as ‘frivolous’. We had ten days to appeal and did, pointing out the holes in their arguments and the violation of Ofcom’s own Rule 7.10 on fairness, which was just like the BBC’s.
Fair point, said Ofcom in February; we’ll look again. Another silentium. Then, last week, with all the furious arrogance of a Dan Brown villain, Ofcom threw out the complaint again.
‘Ofcom considered that there were a number of indicators given to viewers that the programme was a fictional drama and was intended to be viewed in that context,’ we were told. After 18 months and a pile of documents of Da Vinci Code length and tedium, with nowhere left to appeal, our questions still hang in the air. Why is it OK for the BBC to misrepresent an innocent religious organisation? And who Ofcoms Ofcom?
Mysterium magnum.
Jack Valero is a UK director of Opus Dei.
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