Bbc

I am glad that BBC Radio 4 is producing a series called How Reading Made Us, presented by the subtle, super-literate Times of London columnist James Marriott. I must declare an interest. Roughly 98 percent of my earnings over 45 years have depended on the fact that plenty of people like reading. Now we are thinking harder, however, about the fact that form affects substance. The idea of an encyclopedia, for example, as developed (from classical roots) in the 18th century, was that all needful knowledge on a particular subject could be assembled and consulted in a book or series of books. With AI, there is little need for this form. The form of a book, which often seemed so compendious, can now seem cumbersome. Fiction, too, is affected by form.

Six people meet for a picnic on Richmond Green. They eat Popeyes chicken nuggets, Sainsbury’s sausage rolls, M&S sandwiches, Cadbury Mini Rolls and Walkers crisps. They drink a bottle of Pinot Grigio and several cans of Sol lager. How do I know? I’m no detective but they’ve made it easy for me. After they’ve finished, they’ve simply got up and left the bottles, wrappers, packages and paper plates on the grass, laid out like a meal on the Marie Celeste. There’s always been litter – Bill Bryson described it as ‘a long continuum of anti-social behaviour’ – but this is something different. It feels more like social anarchy, a total blankness. I can’t get my head around it.

How to report Iran? It is a huge story. Perhaps as many as 30,000 people were recently murdered there by the tottering regime, but it won’t let western media in. The BBC’s solution is a deal: their correspondent can enter and report, but the report cannot appear on their Persian service. This agreement is rightly explained on air, unlike the BBC’s iniquitous deal with Hamas over Gaza. Do the terms of the deal benefit journalism, however? We are always told that BBC foreign language services are the lifeblood of truth for citizens of dictatorships. Why are Farsi speakers to be deprived of this? Also, what do we learn from Lyse Doucet walking the Tehran streets in a headscarf? (Is it compulsory or voluntary? Either way, she should explain.

I was intrigued to learn from the BBC Today programme on Tuesday that ‘buildings across the UK will be illuminated this evening to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, which commemorates the six million people murdered by the Nazi regime more than 80 years ago’. Who were these unfortunate ‘people’, I wondered? Just anyone at all? Was it a wholly indiscriminate spot of slaughter? I have some vague memory that it was one race in particular that was singled out for extermination, but the BBC dared not say their name. In fact, the sentence I quoted is wholly inaccurate: the ‘six million’ figure relates only to Jewish people.

I set up In Our Time 27 years ago. I had been shunted from Start the Week to what was cheerfully known as the ‘death slot’, 9 a.m. on Thursdays, because BBC management decided I could no longer present that programme after becoming a member of the House of Lords. I know I’ve said it before elsewhere, but its success from those inauspicious beginnings was very fulfilling for me. I decided to retire from IoT in September. I will miss it as it gave me a tremendous education, but I know it will be in very good hands – Misha Glenny is a first-class broadcaster and writer. While passing on the baton, I would like to say how much the audience reaction always meant to me. There were many young people who reacted to the programme and the podcast.

For quite a few members of the House of Commons culture, media and sport committee, the answer to the claims of left-wing bias against the BBC could be annulled by the simple expediency of firing the only supposedly right-of-centre person within the corporation, Robbie Gibb. It is a curious logic that the left employs. This is especially true in the case of Labour’s Rupa Huq, the MP for Ealing Central and Acton (which, I am told, is in London), who believes that people can only be ‘black’ if they subscribe to the same idiotic world view as herself.