An Invitation the ABC Couldn’t Resist

The ABC climbed into bed last week with Britain’s most loopy climate cultists, called BAFTA-albert, the BAFTA bit standing for British Academy of Film and Television Arts. The agitprop arm is albert, with its lower-case “a” increasing the irritation factor. You can bet this new union will increase the ABC‘s bombardment of its rapidly-shrinking audience with net-zero memes. How? What? Perhaps like this: ABC Entertainment debuts a WA drama about rural romance in Wyalkatchem. From my imagined script:

Wealthy Perth widow (played by Nicole Kidman, pronouns she/her): “Cecil, don’t you find the reflections on the dam romantic?”

Hunky young Cecil (played by Chris Hemsworth, pronouns he/him): “Yes, I sure do. Especially when the moonlight glints on those turbine blades. That’s clean electricity helping to fix Australia’s emissions crisis.”

(Their lips touch)

Wealthy Perth widow, whimpering: And I hear you’re also sustainable in the cot.

Hunky young Cecil, breaking loose from their embrace: Look out! That’s a climate-fuelled cyclone approaching! etc.

To be clear, as politicians like to fib, the ABC-albert nexus is indirect. The ABC last October signed on to “Sustainable Screens Australia” or SSA, a new wing of the hard-left federal agency Screen Australia. On June 9, albert UK signed up SSA (including the heavyweight member ABC) to its revolutionary social goals.

BAFTA-albert aim is to “set the cultural agenda”. From their messianic video (emphasis added):

The UN says what is now required is rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society. What could be more exciting than the first-ever complete re-design of our society? Reformulating it to build equality, justice, opportunity and well-being into our future. We must ensure our money, electronics, clothing, holidays, infrastructure, energy and everything else works for the people and for the planet…We have never faced a challenge this large but we have never had a better opportunity to succeed. The screen industry with unrivalled ability to inspire, challenge and unify has an opportunity like no other. With changes in front of and behind the camera we can lead the world.

Ironically, BAFTA has promoted author David Wallace-Wells and his 2019 Uninhabitable Earth polemic, little suspecting that in late 2022 he would disavow his book as unduly sensational.[1]

A key BAFTA member is the BBC (check out the BBC’s “Twenty-eight Gate” conspiracy) along with ITN, ITV, Sky, Sony, Warner Bros, Netflix, BT Sport and UKTV. In Australia, SSA’s seed financiers include Screen Australia and Minderoo Pictures. Foundation members are ITV Studios Australia, Nine, Stan, Lingo Pictures, Lune Media and the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA). Signed up now are ABC, SBS, Netflix and Paramount ANZ, plus screen agencies Screen NSW, VicScreen, Screen Queensland and Screen Tasmania, production companies BBC Studios, CJZ, Dreamchaser, Film Art Media, Matchbox Pictures and Regen Studios, the Docklands Studios and Shark Island Foundation (which backs Damon Gameau’s naive climate indoctrination for schoolkids like 2040 and Regenerating Australia).

SSA’s executive director is Maree Cochrane, whose CV includes stints with the BBC and Victorian government and an “intimacy coordinator” role a year ago with Bronte films’ true-life romantic drama Take My Hand shot at Byron Bay. (For me, a must-see).[2]

Carys Taylor, an albert director, explains, “We’re thrilled to be supporting Sustainable Screens Australia in a creating a new vision for productions that puts the planet front and centre.”  But the ABC hardly needs albert’s urging to step up its climate-crisis misinformation  (the University of Alabama, Huntsville, satellite readings show no Australian warming for the past 11 years). A week ago the ABC’s managing director, David Anderson (pronouns he/him), told his troops he’d establish a dedicated climate, environment and energy reporting team that will “prioritise issues that are consistently rated as critical for the nation’s future, particularly by younger Australians.” This initiative probably pre-dated albert and will be additional to whatever else albert is flogging to its ABC bestie down-under.

The ABC’s prize effort to brainwash schoolkids is Fight for Planet A: Our Climate Challenge. The program “explores how we can all reduce our individual and collective carbon emissions. This three-part documentary aims to empower and motivate Australians to take action on climate change.” The farce was fronted by their so-called “comedian” Craig Reucassel – depicted in an ABC cartoon as borne aloft, improbably, by black bags of heavier-than-air CO2. Craig forgot to mention – as does albert – that China’s emissions growth is swamping anything and everything Australia does about emissions.

On the subliminal front, the ABC, taking its cue from Tim Flannery’s shameless Climate Council, pretends that every fire, heatwave or flood is fuelled by “global warming”, as if droughts and flooding rain are new to Australia. But when Sydney’s summer last year for the first time in 163 years didn’t reach 32degC, the ABC — surprise! surprise! — failed to report it at all!

I mentioned that the ABC’s new-found mentor, albert, is maximum loopy even among the globe’s hysterical activists. Here’s why. For three years albert obsessively scanned data bases of 400,000 screen sound-to-text captions (e.g. for the hard of hearing) to monitor how often climate stuff got mentioned. Then they compared the hit rate with mentions of things like “rhubarb” and “goldfish”. Why? Because, I suppose, (scratches head).

albert bemoans that in 2020, British viewers copped only 14,068 mentions of “climate change”, while terms like “climate justice” and “climate solution” had a disappointing 296 mentions. albert fretted that the climate memes were eclipsed by 14,836 mentions of “rats”, 14,327 mentions of “nonsense”, and in 2019, (I’m not making this up), almost as many mentions of poo (13,713). (p10). Again, I’m not making this up, but albert’s earnest, screen-friendly team compared 2018’s mentions of “climate change” (3125) with near-comparable mentions of “rhubarb” (3589), “zombies” (2488) and – wait for it – “urine” (a stream of 2000 mentions).

The word “sex” topped albert’s charts with 66,340 mentions. Who was it mis-spoke about “no sex please, we’re British”?

For albert, just mentioning climate to viewers is not good enough: it wants ABC and other Australian scripts and outlets to make viewers “take action”.

There are brilliant examples of broadcasters putting climate front and centre, like Sky News’ Daily Climate Show or Laura Tobin’s updates on Good Morning Britain, but there’s so much more to be done. The media has a huge power to influence, we need to be telling engaging stories about and accurately communicating not only the scale of the challenge but the exciting benefits of the solutions.

In Australia, households’ excitement comes when they get their power bills.

To slip climate messages in painlessly, albert urges that scripts be

“fun, humorous and witty …There is no single way to best tell the story of climate change, no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience, and none too dangerous to try.

A prime UK example of socialist climate-realism was an ITV show about ice-skaters Torvill and Dean aspiring to dance on Alaskan ice. “But with warming temperatures hampering their plan to find the most magnificent natural setting to skate their iconic Bolero, their mission ultimately becomes a beautiful and unique tribute to our fragile planet.” Never mind that Arctic ice has been stable for the past decade,[3] rather than disappearing by 2013 as forecast by Al Gore in 2009. BAFTA-albert says,

The production team — Wingspan — worked closely with the ITV social purpose team throughout the production process to maximise the programme’s impact and make sure there was a clear call to action for viewers at the end. And it worked. Over 28,000 users visited the itv.com/footprint site following the launch of Dancing on Thin Ice.

Another example followed about publicly owned UK Channel 4’s “Meet the Family” reality show designed to turn viewers into vegans eating climate-friendly dried grasshoppers for dinner:

It started conversations around the ethical and environmental impact of eating meat by asking families to welcome pigs, lambs, cow and chickens into their home as pets and then deciding whether to eat them or spare them. Nearly 40% of viewers then reported conscious efforts to eat less meat.

The albert agenda has two parts. The first is harmless but pointless – lowering CO2 emissions from making screen entertainment. Need it be said that if both the UK and Australian screen industries lowered their emissions all the way to zero, it would not make the slightest difference to global warming? For that matter, nor would it make any discernible difference to warming if both the UK and Australia sank beneath the waves and cut their total emissions to zero. This elementary maths is beyond the understanding of the ABC’s David Anderson and his taxpayer-funded team.

The second part of albert’s agenda is for the screen industry to indoctrinate the still-wary public about the impending supposed climate Armageddon. albert wants films and video-makers to provide a drum-beat of endorsement for the politicians’ net-zero emissions plans, a form of national hara-kiri benefitting mainly the energy-rich Chinese quest for world domination. Despite 40 years of anti-emissions agitprop costing billions, polls keep showing  public scepticism. Joe Public, for example, notices that the powerful and wealthy advocates of net zero criss-cross the globe in their hundreds of private jets, whether to the UN’s annual COP conferences or the World Economic Forum talk-and-influence fests at Davos.

albert also spruiks that climate earbashing will grow members’ ratings because kids are fired up about saving the planet. It quotes the World Economic Forum saying that kids rate warming – even in chilly Britain –  as more pressing than war or inequality. Moreover, 62% of young Britons lie awake in angst about global warming, it says. Hence albert’s snake-oil pitch to the screen producers goes

Environmental issues are the stories of this generation. We’re calling on you to tell those stories… an unprecedented opportunity to shift mindsets and make positive environmental behaviours mainstream. It’s a chance to shape society’s response to climate change …  And you’ll be changing the world for the better … So, let’s grab the opportunity to tap into the zeitgeist and reimagine the role of TV and film in paving the way to a better world

Better, that is, for the woke left’s agenda. Channel 4, an albert groupie, boasts that it took on “the most pressing issue of our time: how to stop climate change.” Good luck with that; it would be the first stoppage in 4 billion years. Continuing with the idiocy, Channel 4 made a series – “guided by some of the most respected climate experts in the world” — on “how Britain can truly move to a carbon-free way of life [as if], and set out a vision of a future UK that is greener, happier and healthier – powered by abundant, cheaper sustainable energy.” Meanwhile British pensioners huddle beneath their blankets, unable to meet their power bills.

 Another Channel 4 woke-fest was titled, “IS IT TIME TO BREAK THE LAW?” to hype the “spectre” of global warming as we go “sleepwalking into oblivion”. Its talking head, an Extinction Rebellion fan called ‘Chris Packham 62’ is now “asking himself and viewers the shocking question, does extreme need require extreme measures? Would more disruptive protest methods finally force governments into action? Is now the time to break the law?”

A Channel 4 spruiker argues that eating beef, such as by King Charles’ loyal Beefeaters, “is the new smoking” . Beef should be “taken off the menu in government institutions, company canteens, restaurants and homes.” Channel 4 comments,

Asking a nation to give up one of its most beloved foods won’t be easy, but the data of its impact on the environment is eye-opening … we try to push the boundaries of journalism and entertainment, and this show is an exciting opportunity to make a real difference.[4]

It’s going to be a tight bromance between albert, SSA, ABC et al. For example, the SSA website will be “Empowered by albert with a library of case studies, resources and sustainability best practices.” I don’t know if ABC troops will go all the way with SSA, whose enthusiasts advocate for meat-free day a week on set. Eating crickets in the ABC canteen might not be popular.

Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. For a copy ($35 including postage), email tthomas061@gmail.com 

[1] Wallace-Wells: “First, worst-case temperature scenarios that recently seemed plausible now look much less so, which is inarguably good news and, in a time of climate panic and despair, a truly underappreciated sign of genuine and world-shaping progress.”

[2] Director Raftopolous co-wrote the screenplay with Dave Paterson based on the extraordinary true love story between himself and the woman he was destined to spend his life with, Claire Jensz, who is Executive Producer on the production.

[3] Arctic minimum summer ice last September was 4.67 million square kilometers. 

[4] Channel 4’s boss Ms Alex Mahon’s pay last year was an estimated UKP1.4m (AUD2.6m). I hope she spends it sustainably.