I’m Martin Scorsese and I applaud how the BBC made their big star Boris Johnson look less decrepit on Remembrance Sunday like I did for DeNiro in The Irishman

Although they’re all just make-believe, these stories I create are sometimes so powerful that they can make you completely forget about yourself, putting you in a trance for a few hours. For that little window of time, you’re mine.

Thing is – if you believe your mind is your own again once the sun hits your eyes outside the theatre, then pinch yourself – because the fact is we are all permanently attuned to artificial constructs of reality. Powerful forces target and enslave your brain from the day you are born – enchanting it with illusion, aspiration and fear to win permanent residence.

My own little spells? Simply brief flashes of respite from your polluted minds, temporarily breaking you free from the bespoke, curated perceptions of reality that are unceasingly projected by your 24-hour rolling news media. These inject the heady toxin of hierarchic subservience directly into your cerebral cortex – poisoning your critical faculties into meek and submissive acceptance of your lowly place in the scheme of things.

So whether you call the BBC a public service broadcaster, the colloquial, cosy, deliberately deceptive “Auntie” or the genesis of MSM reality distortion, it’s a fact that no other media entity has sculpted an entire nation’s perception quite like it.

Yet, the illusion is now flickering – allowing us a glimpse of the tragic decrepitude of antiquated conjurers who pull levers behind the curtain at Broadcasting House. Al Pacino could play them in the movie.

Always respect your boss

ON a surface level, my oeuvre runs pretty much the full gamut of genre, but it’s no big secret that every movie I ever did has the exact same underlying theme – respect. If you don’t show respect – for your friends, for your peers and most importantly, respect for the boss who pays your wages – then you pay the price. And in my movies, the wages for such sin is usually death. The BBC should take note.

Yet, I have to say I’m not surprised – my eyebrows always look like this – to see this once mighty towncrier-with-an-ego drowning, not waving, in the age of instant communication.

In this brave new world, the public now learn from 66 million other perceptions of reality in the UK alone – then countless more outside our myopic, inconsequential island. And having now shed allegiance to any self-proclaimed authoritative consensus of thought, 10% of Scots refuse to pay a licence fee – presumably in retaliation for skewed coverage of their 2014 independence referendum.

Yet, the BBC need no help accelerating their own inevitable demise, taking one step closer towards a grave they dug themselves this week. Just like Joe Pesci in Casino.

Sunday morning walk of shame

REMEMBRANCE Sunday is supposed to be the ultimate day of respect, one where we all fall silent to remember selfless sacrifice and also attempt to imagine a way forward for our toxic species without war or bloodshed. So it was certainly peculiar this was the day the BBC chose to go to war – on behalf of the Conservative party.

Now, I could spend hours drawing an analogy between the next-level CGI I used to de-age De Niro in my new movie The Irishman to how the BBC shed three years off Boris by using old footage to cover his Cenotaph appearance last Sunday.

Yet, despite their valiant efforts to make Boris look like a cohesive collection of molecules instead of an amoeba’s recollection of an ancient half-thought on the following day's breakfast TV coverage of the event, the archive footage from 2016 only made him look only slightly less “mad uncle in the attic” than the shambling wreck who – in reality – stepped out too early then placed his wreath upside down.

Not only did he look like he'd just been fished out of a septic tank after a week-long crack binge, but David Byrne thought his suit was particularly ill-fitting and Worzel Gummage wants his shoes back.

I must say, however, that the BBC's technical department continually impress me – the world’s greatest living director – with their editing and special-effects skills. Particularly their ability to make things that don’t fit the narrative disappear like magic.

For instance, any stories querying why Number 10 won’t let us see the conclusion to the Russian election manipulation inquiry or the outcome of the saga concerning Boris’ voluptuous “technical adviser”. Wiped from the BBC news agenda, just like magic, like De Niro’s eyebags from The Irishman. They clearly got some good practice in when editing Jimmy Savile out of the TOTP2 reruns. And also making those Panorama journalists who actually exposed Savile disappear from the Beeb payroll.

Auntie not relating to anyone

NOW, before the BBC accuse me of being a clapped-out crackpot from The Bronx who has no idea how things work in the UK, let me say I understand it can’t be easy to set your moral compass in a direction that is not only an arbiter of your nation’s psyche but also shows a non-partisan way forward.

I get it – it’s a tough gig, especially in the digital age of online thought silos and social media herd-think. And although it’s true that headbangers from all types of thought-bunker accuse you of taking sides, don’t let that fool you into thinking it means you’re doing a good, balanced job. Offending everyone simply means you appeal to no-one in this binary era.

Even the BBC Trust have had to hold themselves to account more than a few times, on one occasion having to come clean and apologise for a Laura Kuenssberg interview where Jeremy Corbyn’s views on a subject as serious as mass shootings in the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks were somewhat skewed in the edit. It never went as far as admitting that it simply exists to provide mass enchantment to further its own existence, but the Beeb did admit its fault on this occasion. And quite a few others. 

Yet, it is still to apologise for making a star of millionaire everyman Nigel Farage – and, in doing so, breaking Britain. And let’s not forget ex-Ukip council candidate, Billy Mitchell – Question Time’s favourite audience plant and so ubiquitous on the BBC that you'll soon be voting for him on Strictly.

A shortbread tin ear

UNFORTUNATELY, we cannot simply point the finger at a few London-centric media yahs for destroying the UK. A few years ago, after the BBC won the Scottish independence referendum, they were warned by the Audience Council Scotland that they should review their approach to “controversial political issues” in Scotland, condemning the coverage’s “Anglified perspective”.

It added that BBC Scotland focused too much on the official campaigns “at the expense of the wider civic and community engagement”. I always ask my actors to read between the lines of a script - and we should perhaps also apply that suggestion here.

So I guess repentance is partly why Scotland got its very own new channel. And listen, Rogue To Wrestler was hugely inspiring, Loki seems to be a good fella and old hand Martin Geissler could still charm a tale out of Tutankhamun’s death mask. That documentary series The Papers was a succinct and skilled homage to European cinematic existentialism in its unrelenting bleakness and numb ache of creeping, inevitable doom - worthy of Bergman himself. There's also untethered freethinkers Limmy and Robert Florence, who both admirably subvert and ridicule the status quo under the guise of colloquial comedy.

Yet, despite possessing an inquisitive nose for investigation distinctly lacking from its London counterpart, trust in the news department is all but gone. The Seven bulletin is one of 21 programmes on the new £32m channel that have had zero viewers. But hey, I’ve been there – even I refused to go see Age of Innocence.

I'd imagine part of this breakdown in trust is because old memories die hard. The BBC has, of course, been caught cynically manipulating footage before – and it was only thanks to Greg Philo and Glasgow University Media Unit that they were caught out, with striking miners being fully exonerated after a BBC report made it appear they were attacking police officers at Orgreave.

Dismissed as a “production error” at the time, this was clearly an early warning shot that the BBC’s much-heralded liberalism may infact be largely self-mythologised, a form of reality distortion that attempts to fog the fact that their wilful amplification of Tory narratives isn't a recent phenomenon.

Please accept my apologies for not expounding this allegation further – I only have a 1200 wordcount and don't want to mention Laura Kuenssberg again.

And finally ...

CAN we really believe any state broadcaster is liberal and benevolent if it criminalises those who choose not to pay for a service that there’s no way to cancel? It's just like that goddam U2 album on my iPhone. 

A fish rots from the head down, so who is actually running the show? Surely the higher echelons of the hierarchy is balanced in terms of political persuasion? Perhaps we should ignore that the BBC Trust chairman is Chris Patten, an ex-Tory Cabinet minister, and political editor Nick Robinson also once led the Young Conservatives.

His political producer, Thea Rogers, was George Osborne’s special adviser. Andrew Neil, the curiously-coiffured BBC stalwart, is also chairman of the conservative Spectator magazine.

Neil’s editor is Robbie Gibb, former chief of staff to Tory Francis Maude. Editorial director Kamal Ahmed came from the rather right-wing Sunday Telegraph, and was repeatedly accused of spinning government propaganda in the run-up to the Iraq war.

It works the other way too – Tory politicians also rather favour the BBC as a recruitment consultancy. When crap Malcolm Tucker Andy Coulson resigned as spin doctor due to the phone hacking scandal at his former paper the News of the World, David Cameron replaced him with BBC news controller Craig Oliver. And before the Mekon’s son Dominic Cummings took up residence in Number 10, Boris Johnson’s former comms chief was BBC political reporter Guto Harri. And after joining News International in 2012, he was replaced by BBC Westminster editor Will Walden.

Even former director general of the BBC, Greg Dyke, has accused the organisation of being part of a “Westminster conspiracy” to maintain the political status quo. Now, I usually frown upon guys from the inside ratting out their former business associates, but on this occasion I’ll let it slide. To the right, obviously.

Follow Bill on Twitter @futureshockbb