Bbc

Thursday

James Delingpole

War of the Worlds is as bad as Doctor Who

Edwardian England deserved everything it got from those killer Martian invaders. Or so I learned from the BBC’s latest adaptation of The War of the Worlds (Sundays). Everything about that era, apparently, was hateful, backward and ripe for destruction: regressive attitudes to women and homosexuality; exultant white supremacy (cue, a speech from a government minister on the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race); a general prevailing bone-headedness and stuck-upness; stiff, stuffy, relentlessly brown clothing with superfluous belts; and as for those ridiculous bristling moustaches… Still, I don’t think H.G. Wells would have been totally appalled by this travesty of his 1898 potboiler.

Thursday

James Walton

Patronising, clichéd and corny: BBC1’s Gold Digger reviewed

Some last taboos, it seems, can remain last taboos no matter how frequently they’re confronted. Grief, the menopause, masturbation, mental illness are all routinely described that way whenever they get depicted on television — i.e. quite often. But perhaps the sturdiest last taboo of the lot is that older women can have sexual feelings: something that appears to come as a rather patronising surprise to TV folk every time they tackle it — i.e. quite often. The latest example of such bravery is Gold Digger (BBC1, Tuesday), a drama keen for us to understand that a woman of 60 can still be both desirable and a goer — although not so keen as to cast a woman of 60 in the role.

Thursday

Mark Mason

Why I love a bit of death on a Sunday night

There’s nothing like a nice bit of death on a Sunday evening. Radio 4 originally transmit their obituary programme Last Word on Friday afternoons, but I love listening to the repeat. Sunday at 8.30 p.m. is the perfect time — the ending of people’s lives at the ending of the week. The stresses of Monday morning are beginning to appear on your mental horizon, so Last Word is a handy reminder that none of it matters. Triumphs and tragedies come and go, but in the end we all check out. This week provided the usual smorgasbord of mortality. Everyone from Irene Shubik, the TV producer behind Rumpole of the Bailey, to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

James Delingpole

God awful: BBC1’s His Dark Materials reviewed

‘Here’s your new Sunday night obsession...’ the BBC announcer purred, overintoned and mini-orgasmed, like she was doing an audition for a Cadbury’s Flake commercial, ‘... a dazzling drama with a stellar cast.’ My hackles rose. Did no one ever mention to her the rule about ‘show not tell’? And my hackles were right. His Dark Materials has indeed become my Sunday night obsession: how can the BBC’s most-expensive-ever drama series possibly look, sound and feel so clunkingly, God-awfully, disappointingly flat? Yes, I know Philip Pullman’s trilogy is an extended, bitter rant against Christianity disguised as children’s entertainment.

Friday

Nick Robinson

I didn’t ‘ambush’ Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray was not 'ambushed' by me on the Today programme. Nor was he called out. Nor was he misquoted.  He was asked about something he once said and wrote in a lengthy Today programme discussion – around eight minutes and not the four he suggests – about Barack Obama’s warning about the idea that young people should be “woke” – quick to seize on allegedly offensive remarks.  Douglas had already had two opportunities to spell out his thinking in response to questions which could scarcely be described as aggressive: “Are you surprised to find yourself cheering along with Barack Obama?

Thursday

Douglas Murray

How I was ambushed by Nick Robinson

Ah, the BBC. There’s really nothing like it is there? This morning I had the pleasure of appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. I know what you’re already thinking: ‘You fool, you fool – it’s a trap’. But I was phoned last night and asked if I would come on this morning to discuss Barack Obama’s recent remarks against ‘wokeness’. At some inconvenience to myself I rearranged my schedule, got up early and headed to the BBC. Only to discover that I was today’s BBC effort at replaying the recent Rod Liddle – Emily Maitlis exchange.  I was on with a professor of grievance studies from Birmingham City University called Kehinde Andrews. Which is fair enough.

James Walton

BBC wildlife documentaries are just a chance to tell us all off

Older readers may remember a time when landmark BBC wildlife documentary series were joyous celebrations of the miraculous fecundity of the planet we’re lucky enough to find ourselves living on. Well, not any longer. In our more censorious age, they’ve become another chance to essentially tell us all off. So it was that Seven Worlds, One Planet (BBC1, Sunday) began with Sir David Attenborough presenting the usual highlights package of the wonders to come, with each episode focusing on a different continent. But then he put on his special serious voice to add the dark warning that ‘This may be the most critical moment for life on Earth since the continents formed.’ (Quite a long time, I think you’ll agree.

Thursday

James Delingpole

If we do get a good Anglo-American trade deal, we should thank Trump’s mother

In an uncharacteristic fit of almost-robustness, Culture Secretary Nicky Morgan has said she is ‘open-minded’ about scrapping the BBC licence fee and replacing it with a Netflix-style subscription service. Good idea. What would we actually miss if we didn’t subscribe? Not an awful lot in my view. Some people cite David Attenborough’s nature documentaries but I certainly wouldn’t now that they have become so obtrusively propagandistic. The problem with the BBC isn’t — and never has been — lack of talented filmmakers, wildlife camera crews, presenters, actors, writers or production teams. It’s that, from news to drama, the BBC’s woke politics now subsume and corrupt its entire output.

Henry Hitchings

Can giving voice to the horrors of the past re-traumatise?

It is 50 years since Ronald Blythe published Akenfield, his melancholy portrait of a Suffolk village on the cusp of dramatic change. Akenfield was actually a composite of two real villages, Charsfield and Debach, and Blythe’s oral history was a patchwork created from about 50 conversations — with figures including a pig-farming colonel, the over-stretched blacksmith and a rural dean who reported residents being ‘blunted and crushed by toil’. It was an unsparing vision of rural poverty, yet also a homage to disappearing ways of life and the virtues of small communities. Last Saturday’s Akenfield Now, on Radio 4, followed local sixth-former Anna Davies as she surveyed the landscape afresh.

Thursday

Richard Bratby

The joy of Malcolm Arnold’s optimistic, hummable tunes

Never meet your heroes, they say. But if you grew up with classical music in the 1980s, there was fat chance of that. Stravinsky, Britten, Shostakovich, Walton: you’d just missed them. Which is why, in 2001, and finding myself duty-managing an 80th birthday concert for Sir Malcolm Arnold, I inched past his minders and delivered a few trite, polite but entirely sincere words of gratitude and admiration. No response: Sir Malcolm stared blankly ahead. Then he gripped my hand, and started shaking. And kept shaking, faster and faster, his grip tightening like a vice. Raising his head slightly, and pumping my hand with increasing force, he growled: ‘I’m not letting go until you call me Sir.

James Walton

Should we be playing the surveillance state for laughs? Celebrity Hunted reviewed

One of the many great things about The Capture was that we could never be sure whether the British authorities’ capacity for virtually blanket surveillance was a nightmare vision of the future or a nightmare portrait of the present. Celebrity Hunted, though, suggests a third possibility: that virtually blanket surveillance is simply proof of how marvellous the authorities are, and so untroubling that it can be played for laughs. This third series is, once again, part of Channel 4’s annual Stand Up to Cancer season, and features four teams of two, whose job is to go on the run for a fortnight and avoid capture by intelligence experts equipped with the latest snooping technology.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

How the BBC can achieve real diversity

Exciting news from the BBC, where every employee has just received a flyer from the Director-General, Lord Hall, informing them about the creation of a new post — Director of Creative Diversity. Should they all apply? Certainly, when I found out about it, I thought I might throw my hat in the ring. I’d immediately employ some heterosexual weathermen and maybe a white presenter or reporter on the London regional news programmes — and then make Dominic Cummings the head of current affairs, if he has any spare time. That would introduce a little diversity into New Broadcasting House, I think.

Tuesday

Hardeep Singh

The BBC’s paranoia about causing offence has reached a new high

If the Naga Munchetty fiasco wasn’t cause for enough embarrassment for the BBC, an apparent attempt to censor a script referring to a Sikh Guru’s martyrdom for fear it, ‘might offend Muslims’ should certainly be. The Beeb’s in-house ‘thought police’ have driven Lord Singh to quit a radio slot he’s contributed to for thirty-five years. It’s a sorry state of affairs – not just because it highlights a new high in BBC paranoia on giving imagined offence to imaginary people, but because it demonstrates how historical facts (not just opinions) are not immune to censorship. In the end, the broadcast went ahead. It did not criticise Islam and unsurprisingly received no complaints.

Sunday

Paul Dacre

The BBC’s Brexit coverage is a disgrace

Lord Patten, rejected by voters 27 years ago, is the embodiment of a smug un-elected elite. As former chairman of the BBC Trust, he appointed not one but two director–generals of utter mediocrity. Now he criticises the Corporation for its ‘craven judgment about what constituted balance in its news coverage’ in the run-up to the referendum. He’s partially right. For the first time in memory, the Eurosceptic–hating BBC astonishingly gave equal air-time to both sides of the argument, which may have been a small factor in the result. How pathetic that their former chairman should attack them for this, but then the Corporation (is its Europe editor Katya Adler actually employed by Brussels?

Thursday

James Walton

A solid costume drama but Dame Helen has been miscast: Catherine the Great reviewed

It’s possibly not a great sign of a Britain at ease with itself that the historical character most likely to show up in a TV drama now seems to be Oswald Mosley. But the week after his starring role in Peaky Blinders ended, there he was again, right at the beginning of BBC1’s next Sunday-night drama. World on Fire opened with Mosley addressing a 1939 Manchester rally, where he duly whipped up his supporters and reminded the rest of us of the dangers of extremism. Luckily, there were two people in the hall brave enough to protest: salt-of-the-earth northern lass Lois Bennett and her much posher and therefore much stiffer boyfriend Harry Chase.

Monday

Brendan O’Neill

Yes, Trump’s tweet was racist. But BBC rules stop presenters saying so

All of the following things are true. Naga Munchetty, co-host of BBC Breakfast, is a very good TV journalist, one of the BBC’s best assets in fact. That tweet Donald Trump sent in July telling the non-white, female members of the Democratic ‘Squad’ to ‘go back’ to the countries they came from was racist. The BBC was correct, however, to partially uphold a complaint against Ms Munchetty for her on-air suggestion that the tweet was ‘embedded in racism’. Why was the BBC correct to criticise one of its most important presenters for describing a racist tweet as racist? Because it is not a BBC reporter’s job to do that.

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

How did BBC’s Late Night Line-Up get its name?

The title of the television review and discussion programme Late Night Line-Up is a curious one. I’d be interested if anyone knows how it was chosen. After the throaty sax notes of Gerry Mulligan’s Blue Boy, Joan Bakewell would leggily engage earnest folk in chatter long after the pubs had closed. Did the guests smoke? I can’t remember, but it was all very b&w. BBC iPlayer has a small selection on show, including a discussion of two Man Alive documentaries on homosexuality with Maureen Duffy, then writing a novel set in the Gateways club in Chelsea, popular with lesbians, Michael Schofield, fresh from his researches for The Sexual Behaviour of Young People, and an anonymous woman doctor. The presenter was Michael Dean.

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Simon Rattle’s Messiaen is improving with age

Two flutes, a clarinet and a bassoon breathe a chord on the edge of silence. As they fade, the sound quietly intensifies, morphing into the metallic buzz of cor anglais and muted horn. The third of Arnold Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces of 1909 doesn’t have a conventional melody, and there’s even less in the way of rhythmic or harmonic activity. It’s entirely about those minutely graded shifts in timbre. And having rendered this idea with such poetry, Schoenberg, being Schoenberg, duly slapped it with a label as clunky as his music was subtle: klangfarbenmelodie, literally, ‘sound-colour melody’. Apologies: it’s too easy to poke fun at Schoenberg.

Monday

Ross Clark

The BBC’s latest attack on Netflix is galling

Lord Hall of Birkenhead is feeling pretty bullish about the quality of the organisation he leads. “We’re not Netflix, we’re not Spotify. We’re not Apple News,” the BBC’s director general will apparently tell the Royal Television Society on Thursday. “We’re so much more than all of them put together.”     To which the obvious answer is: if you are so confident that the public loves your product, then why are you so frightened about exposing it to commercial competition? Surely, Lord Hall would be relishing the opportunity to get rid of the tax on TV-ownership which funds the BBC and fund itself in the way that all other TV and radio stations have to do – from subscriptions or advertising.

Thursday

James Walton

I have no clue what’s going on but can’t wait to find out: BBC1’s The Capture reviewed

How did the police ever solve any crimes before CCTV? That was the question which sprang to mind watching the first episodes of two highly promising new crime dramas this week. It’s also the central question now facing the detective in one of them. Part police officer, part career women, Rachel Carey in The Capture (BBC1, Tuesday) is being fast-tracked through the system to the traditional disapproval of her grizzled, old-school boss DCI Alex Boyd — imaginatively known as Boydy. Fortunately, Rachel (Holliday Grainger) won’t be with his unit for long. Having saved Britain from a deadly terrorist attack while working for special ops, she’s been sent there temporarily to see how she might handle a high-profile murder or kidnapping.