The BBC were left with egg on their face after they had to heavily edit a promotional video for the Six Nations as it was deemed to be ‘anti-English’.
What is it about the English rugby team and promotional trailers? Last season, there was the ridiculously over-dramatic and prematurely-released Grand Slam celebratory video and now, the BBC have had to shelve a promotional video for this season’s Six Nations.
Well, not so much shelve, but heavily re-edit it. In fact, the watered down version was already shown in the build-up to England’s victory over Scotland on Saturday (see below).
But why were they forced to re-edit in the first place? For fear it will be deemed anti-English is the answer, according to a report in The Guardian yesterday.
In truth, however, the makers of the video dug a huge hole for themselves by asking fans of every country who they would most like to beat. What answers were they expecting from Welsh, Scottish and Irish fans?
Concerns were raised by tournament organisers after being sent an early copy of the trailer and it was subsequently re-edited to give what they called a more balanced perspective. Or, basically finding the few clips where fans of the other five nations said another country instead of England and putting those in the clip instead.
Commenting on the edited trailer, a BBC spokesperson said: “The creative concept for the Six Nations trail was around fans being united in rivalry.
“We featured real fans from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland in the trail all talking about who they wanted to beat. The non-English fans interviewed for the trail all wanted to beat England which made the first cut of the trail slightly unbalanced.
“We therefore changed the balance of the fans in the next edit to make the trail more representative.”
Sounds like a cop-out to us and we’d imagine that if given the chance, Paul O’Connell and Brian O’Driscoll would react to it in a similar fashion to how they reacted to the video below.
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