Bbc

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Who is more upset about Labour’s results: Starmer or the BBC?

From our UK edition

It’s not just the Labour party which is institutionally incapable of understanding why the Conservative party kicked the hell out of them in these elections. It is also, of course, the BBC. The prime offender was — hold your breath in surprise — Emily Maitlis on Newsnight. Furlough and vaccines were the sole reason the Tories did well, according to this very affluent, metropolitan, liberal woman, who has a child in boarding school, natch. Dimbo voters again then, too dense to grasp the ‘realities'. But then there was Huw. There always is Mr Edwards. Conducting an interview with Labour’s Lucy Powell, he exuded sympathy and gratitude. No hard questions. Just ameliatory bilge.

Thursday

Toby Young

We Lumas have the weight of the world on our shoulders

From our UK edition

In the introduction to an anthology of his jazz record reviews, the poet Philip Larkin imagines his readers. They’re not exactly full of the joys of spring. He describes them as ‘sullen fleshy inarticulate men… whose first coronary is coming like Christmas’. Loaded down with ‘commitments and obligations and necessary observances’ they’re drifting helplessly towards ‘the darkening avenues of age and incapacity’. Everything that once made life sweet has deserted them and their only solace is the memory of the music they once loved. I first read that passage 35 years ago and didn’t think it would apply to me one day. Admittedly, the men Larkin conjures up are more miserable than I’ll ever be.

Daisy Dunn

Seldom less than gripping: Banged Up podcast reviewed

From our UK edition

Prison-based podcast Banged Up, now in its second series, is far more uplifting — and less soapy — than its name suggests. It begins with the tacit assumption that, if you haven’t personally been incarcerated, you probably have at least a dozen questions you’d want to ask someone who had. Is the food really awful? How likely are you to be beaten up? Is there a lending library? (I’d start with the last.) Banged Up has the answers to plenty more besides. The podcast is hosted by a prison lawyer named Claire Salama and two ex-inmates, a former footballer, Mike Boateng, known as ‘Boats’, and university-educated Rob Morrison, who describes himself as ‘probably not their [prisons’] target market’.

Thursday

James Delingpole

This Is My House has rekindled my love for the BBC

From our UK edition

Here’s a thought that will make you feel old. Or worried. Or both. The poke-fun-at-celebrity-houses series Through the Keyhole — originally presented by Loyd Grossman — was first broadcast as a segment on TV-am in February 1983. That means that we are now as far away in time from Through the Keyhole’s first episode as its debut was from the end of the second world war. It has endured almost till the present (I actually preferred the Keith Lemon version to the stilted and slightly turgid original) because it’s such an addictive format. Most of us fancy ourselves as amateur psychologist sleuths, picking up on those telling details missed by others less blessed with our perspicacity.

Thursday

Jonathan Dimbleby

Why I don’t regret leaving the BBC

From our UK edition

I have just had my second jab and it poses a dilemma. As an assiduous Covid rule-taker, I have been appalled by those — including friends and relatives — who have flouted or sidestepped the regulations and guidelines in the belief that they don’t apply to them. ‘We know we shouldn’t but it’s good for us’ or ‘We use our common sense’, they say. Since the issue is as incendiary as Brexit, I have fumed in silence. Of course the rules are anomalous and inadequately explained by ministers but I tend to trust the scientists. That said, the mantra ‘no one is safe until we are all safe’ is clearly nonsensical. Unlike those who are still waiting, I am now as safe as I am ever going to be. Hence my dilemma.

Charles Moore

The strangeness of Britain’s BLM mania

From our UK edition

The conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd makes last summer’s Black Lives Matter mania in British institutions look even stranger. The British Museum, Oxbridge colleges, Sir Keir Starmer, football teams, government departments, Kew Gardens, the National Trust and numerous corporations indulged in various forms of self-abasement. Some ‘took the knee’. At the Ministry of Defence, the permanent secretary, Sir Stephen Lovegrove, broke professional political impartiality by emailing his staff about the ‘deep roots’ of ‘systemic racial inequality’ in Britain, and signing off with a BLM hashtag. He was subsequently promoted to be the UK National Security Adviser.

Monday

Steerpike

Simon McCoy’s warning shot to the Beeb

From our UK edition

It was just a fortnight ago that the BBC's grumpiest new presenter Simon McCoy announced he was off to join GB News after 17 years at the Beeb. It has not taken long for the onetime viral iPad star to fire his first salvo at the Corporation's editorial choices, taking aim on Friday to criticise Auntie for running blackout tributes to the late Duke of Edinburgh. McCoy, who is renowned for his apathetic reportage on a generation of royal births, took to Twitter to complain about the saturation coverage, prompting a stand off with current BBC presenter Martine Croxall. https://twitter.com/MartineBBC/status/1380607017065254922?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/SimonMcCoyTV/status/1380609606100119559?

Thursday

James Walton

It’s impossible not to feel snooty watching ITV’s Agatha and Poirot

From our UK edition

Agatha and Poirot was one of those programmes that had the annoying effect of making you feel distinctly snooty. ITV’s decision to dedicate 85 minutes of primetime Easter Monday television to a books-related documentary was never likely to result in a steely Leavisite engagement with literature. Nor, of course, should it. Even so, it was hard to avoid a dowager-like shudder when, for example, one contributor declared that Agatha Christie ‘will never be surpassed as the world’s greatest novelist’ — especially when the contributor was that well-known literary critic Lesley Joseph.

Monday

Samir Shah

Faux fury against the race report is unsurprising

From our UK edition

Back in the 1960s, my brother Asim and I were smitten by the magical Manchester United trio of Law, Best and Charlton. We became London Reds and travelled on the MU Supporters’ Club coach to Old Trafford to watch our team — and we always went to see them play London clubs. But we stopped going in the 1970s; we feared for our physical safety. Marauding bands of skinheads outside the grounds were on the lookout for a spot of Paki-bashing. Instead, during the 1970s, we went on Anti-Nazi League marches and routinely confronted members of the National Front, a fascist party that was briefly the UK's fourth-largest party in terms of vote share.

Saturday

Hugh Thomson

BBC Four and the dumbing down of British television

From our UK edition

The announcement this week that BBC Four is to stop making new programmes and become a largely repeats-only channel – which they are cheekily calling ‘archive’ to make it sound better – is a depressing reminder to viewers of a very long-term trend. When BBC Four was launched amidst much fanfare in 2002, its slogan was 'Everybody Needs a Place to Think'. Has the BBC decided that they no longer do? Or perhaps the corporation – in focusing on ‘youth programming’ like BBC Three – thinks it isn't its job to provide one. Oh dear. Whatever happened to television? And in particular, the area that BBC Four was particularly supposed to promote: factual and arts television.

Saturday

James Innes-Smith

Why Gen-Z is turning its back on the BBC

From our UK edition

Do 16-34 year olds still watch terrestrial TV? More importantly, will they still be watching in a year's time when BBC 3 re-launches as a linear station? Six years ago, the youth orientated channel switched to digital-only as part of a £100 million cost cutting measure. Since then they have produced a couple of runaway successes such as the all-conquering Fleabag, hence the decision to have another crack at broadening their appeal to a rapidly dwindling youth market where TV sets are a rarity and scheduling anathema.   Once it is up and running again in January will the channel be able to fulfil its remit by appealing to a broad spectrum of younger viewers most of whom have already switched to subscription platforms?

Thursday

Steerpike

Watch: Simon McCoy’s greatest BBC hits

From our UK edition

BBC's grumpiest news presenter Simon McCoy today announced he's leaving the corporation, the latest big name hire poached by start up channel GB News. McCoy, 59, leaves after 17 years at the Beeb, signing off this afternoon's News at One with the words: 'From me, it's good afternoon – and goodbye.' Mr S thought it only right to gather a round up of highlights from McCoy's recent career, presenting to you below six of the best and starting with how he greeted Boris Johnson's Talk Radio interview in July 2019 during the Tory leadership race: https://twitter.com/scottygb/status/1375016454031077379?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw It came weeks after he was forced to read off an autocue for a segment about a dog-show in Scotland: https://twitter.

Monday

Steerpike

Watch: Tory MP slams Beeb’s lack of flags

From our UK edition

BBC Director General Tim Davie was grilled today by the Commons public accounts committee and for Tory MP James Wild there was one item top of his agenda: flags. It follows last week's sniggering incident in which two BBC breakfast presenters appeared to poke fun at Robert Jenrick's Union Jack. Wild asked Davie: 'In your own report last year of 268 pages, do you know how many union flags were pictured in any of the graphics?' to which the BBC man replied: 'In all the briefings I got for this meeting, that was not one of them' prompting Wild's answer: 'Zero.' https://twitter.com/jamesowild/status/1374052717841223683?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Wild went on: 'Maybe in the annual report for this year perhaps you could include some imagery around the union flag.

Roger Mosey

Tim Davie’s BBC ‘transformation’ doesn’t go far enough

From our UK edition

I’m sorry to say that I was a Salford refusenik. When the BBC first got the itch, almost 20 years ago, to send its London-based staff to new locations around the country, as a senior executive at the time I thought the idea was a grisly one. That’s not because I don’t like the north of England: I come from Bradford. But as director of sport I was being asked to put my staff and their families onto buses making a one-way trip to the Greater Manchester docklands – leaving behind the power centres of the BBC and the lifestyle of a capital city. I wrote grumpy emails to the director-general, Mark Thompson, contrasting his plans for Salford in 2011 with our plans for London 2012.

Robin Aitken

Was this the BBC’s ‘Emily Thornberry’ moment?

From our UK edition

Charlie Stayt and Naga Munchetty's mocking of Robert Jenrick's flag was unintentionally revealing of the BBC's problems. It also made it clear that Tim Davie's decision to shift hundreds of jobs outside London won't solve the corporation's quest for diversity. https://twitter.com/wallaceme/status/1372521185792167937?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw What instantly came to mind watching this interchange was another telling incident nearly seven years ago now, during the Rochester and Strood by-election. Ed Miliband had sent the Islington battlecruiser Emily Thornberry out on manoeuvres on the touchingly misplaced assumption that she would ‘bring out the vote’. She did, but not in the way intended.

Thursday

Steerpike

Watch: BBC presenters mock minister’s Union Jack

From our UK edition

The BBC is attempting today to break out of its London-centric mindset. The new Director General Tim Davie told BBC staff in a call this morning that the corporation will move 400 jobs out of the capital, and promised to make programmes that are more relevant to people who live outside the M25. Mr S wonders though if simply sending BBC staff up north will be enough, if BBC Breakfast (which broadcasts from Salford) was anything to go by this morning. On the show, housing secretary Robert Jenrick was interviewed by BBC presenters, who ended the segment by sniggering at the minister’s Union Jack in the background of his office and his portrait of the Queen on the wall: https://twitter.com/wallaceme/status/1372521185792167937?

John Phipps

Why In Our Time remains the best thing on radio

From our UK edition

In Our Time is the best thing on Radio 4, possibly the best thing on the radio full stop. It is broadcast regularly from a parallel universe where everyone is interesting, everything is worth knowing and anyone can know it if they want to. It gets the best out of its medium by being somewhat contemptuous of it. It understands that the overproduced trimmings of modern radio are entirely extraneous. There will be no sound effects, no music and no catchphrases. All that we need by way of introduction is the word ‘hello’. After that, there’s no telling what will follow. ‘Hello. In 541 AD, in the realm of Justinian, there was a plague in which the whole human race came near to being destroyed.’ ‘Hello.

Saturday

Andrew Tettenborn

Clive Myrie, the BBC and the trouble with Ofcom

From our UK edition

Ofcom’s tight grip on current affairs broadcasts has been likened by some observers to a choking collar. Clive Myrie, one of the BBC’s most decent and best educated correspondents, disagrees. But Myrie's robust defence of Ofcom's role, which he put forward in the inaugural Harold Evans Memorial Lecture this week, should trouble anyone concerned with preserving free speech on air. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VucKN2112eU Myrie took a simple line: to compare the US and UK broadcasting landscapes. In the US there is not, and under the First Amendment probably could not be, any regulation of how news is presented.

Felicity Graham

Why is going to Oxford being held against me?

From our UK edition

Should going to Oxford be held against you? In my experience, some employers think it should. A month before the first lockdown of 2020, I attended an interview with a prestigious company in London. With nearly 1000 applicants for each place on their internship scheme, the stakes were high; making it to the interview may have been a success in itself, but now it was time to impress the recruiters in person. After a frantic journey on the underground, I arrived at the interview location. Having spent the previous few days researching the interview process, I expected an hour of rigorous intellectual interrogation, followed by a brief case study assessment.  What I didn’t expect, however, was that in the first five minutes I would be told the odds were stacked against me.

Friday

Steerpike

The Mash Report 2017-2021, greatest hits

From our UK edition

So, farewell then, The Mash Report. This morning the Sun reports that the newly appointed BBC director general Tim Davie has ordered the axing of the notoriously unfunny BBC Two show after four series. The show’s creators were told at the time of the appointment to find a better balance of targets than ‘digs at the Tories’. Not that this seems to have been taken on board by the show's hosts.  Sources close to the Beeb’s top man report reportedly thought it disproportionately critical of Brexit — perhaps unsurprising given its main star Nish Kumar declared to the Guardian in 2019 that he had ‘still not got over it’.