Ben Lowry: BBC NI is downgrading its July Twelfth output but pretending otherwise

Instead, I prepared for the late shift that day — and work on our Twelfth supplement — by watching BBC coverage, which struck me as good, but too short.

That weekend I wrote a short article about what I felt was the inadequate coverage, but recognising that republicans would say it was too much coverage, not too little.

But, I argued, the Twelfth is unmatched in Northern Ireland in terms of its colour and scale, and there should be at least four hours of live broadcast from venues across the Province, not 75 live minutes with a bit more at night.

In recent years the matter of Twelfth coverage has gone off the agenda, because of the responsible way in which the parade organisers scaled down their coverage in the Covid years in 2020 and 2021. Now the Twelfth is back, as is the matter of BBC coverage. And the coverage is being cut, not increased.

Of course the BBC is not saying that. It is saying that the coverage is in a way being enhanced. It is removing the live coverage and beefing up the highlights show.

I am not in the loyal orders myself, but over the years I have come to admire increasingly the spectacle and music of the parades, and also come to think more about 1690 and its significance in the emergence of western democracies.

The Twelfth is an occasion that is not on the scale that it was only a few decades ago. It is hardly surprising that an organisation like the Orange Order will find it hard to get the number of recruits that they once did when it is so different to the cultural attractions that appeal to many young people in the 21st century (although I bet that many observers wrongly foresaw the disappearance of the Order in the 1960s, with the explosion of pop music).

Yet there are still marches all over NI in which many thousands of people participate. The Belfast parade is still massive.

There are always people who seem to be upset by this, and willing to marginalise things that are British or things that unionists like.

The BBC devotes massive resources and many broadcasting hours to a wide range of things that happen in NI, including Irish language broadcasts and GAA.

That the Twelfth still attracts so many spectators and means so much to so many people, and that it happens only once a year, is a clear reason why the national broadcaster should have not only a live programme (from its perfect vantage point at BBC headquarters) and a full programme that night too. Now the corporation says it wants to extend the Twelfth coverage’s “reach, accessibility and appeal” (as said in its statement to The Nolan Show).

That sounds all very well. But what can it mean? After all, live coverage tried to make it ‘accessible’ to, for example, elderly people who could not get to the parade.

I suspect “extending its appeal” is code for what BBC NI has done to Last Night of the Proms. The local concert now has little connection to the Albert Hall extravaganza. The Belfast concert is denied the fun (and silliness) of a rousing Rule Britannia rendition, and instead gets Irish dancing and Danny Boy.

I fear BBC NI’s statement is also code for a start to ‘on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand’ Twelfth coverage. After all, this is what the BBC did around the centenary of NI. There was no celebration of NI reaching such a milestone. The big Belfast parade got pitiful coverage.

The BBC even cited its Spotlight Special on the centenary as proof of its coverage of the centenary — a programme that commissioned a survey which asked respondents whether things such as the NHS would make an all Ireland more acceptable (a leading question?).

That the BBC used a Tricolour for NI in a montage film during the Queen’s jubilee coverage (spotted first by our reporter Adam Kula) was, they say, a mistake. For such a large organisation, it was an unpardonable one. One journalist put it well: they wouldn’t have made a mistake that offended any ethnic minority group in the UK, yet they seemed not to understand the existence of one of four home nations.

Even if the BBC evening highlight coverage of the Twelfth is increased to an hour to compensate for the lack of live footage, will it be quietly downgraded to half an hour in a few years?

Then a few years after that cut again to a mere three minutes on the news — the amount of BBC NI coverage of the once-in-a-lifetime centenary parade, which attracted 125,000 people.

Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor

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