Bbc

Thursday

Jonathan Mirsky

BBC4’s The Vietnam War was unique, informative and shattering

From our UK edition

The Vietnam War BBC4 The BBC should be praised for showing all ten episodes of this unique, informative and shattering American series on the Vietnamese war, despite screening eight fewer hours than in the original. Before each episode the BBC warned that 'some viewers may find some scenes upsetting'. Which ones? A frog jumping in a pool of blood from the head of a dead Vietcong (NLF) fighter? The Saigon police chief shooting a prisoner in the head? The American colonel offering a case of whiskey to the first man to bring him the severed head of an enemy soldier? Which he gets. The eager US soldier on his first day in Vietnam noticing strings of what he thought were leaves, which he realised were the ears of dead enemies?

Nick Hilton

The Spectator Podcast: Save the children!

From our UK edition

On this week’s episode we look at whether the kids are alright or if we need to talk about their generation. We also ask whether Philip Hammond’s cautious approach is suited to the present economy, and consider why the best minds of a generation were lost to trash TV. First, with Scotland outlawing smacking and safe spaces coddling students, it sometimes seems like the sharp edges of childhood have been sanded down. That’s why our children are so unhappy, writes Rod Liddle in the magazine this week. But do kids really need to be exposed to the world? Or are there good reasons why we don’t let 9-year-olds ride alone on the underground? Rod was joined on the podcast by Lenore Skenazy, founder of the Free Range Kids movement, who also writes in this week's magazine.

Jonathan Maitland

The idiot box

From our UK edition

How to sum up David Frost? The lazy writer’s friend, aka Wikipedia, calls him ‘an English journalist, comedian, writer, media personality and television host’. To which I would add only: ‘Britain’s first TV superstar.’ (To some he was also ‘The Bubonic Plagiarist’, but we won’t dwell on that.) That Was The Week That Was, The Frost Report and The Nixon Interviews made him a key cultural figure of the 1960s and 1970s. But his true significance struck me only recently. He may have damaged Britain, unintentionally, as much as anyone in living memory. Frost, in my view, was a Pied Piper who helped to lure a generation of the brightest and best away from meaningful careers and into the often vacuous, inconsequential world of television.

Kate Chisholm

The ties that bound us

From our UK edition

Only Neil MacGregor could do it — take us in a single thread from a blackened copper coin, about the size of a 10p piece, dating from Rome in about 200 AD, to a packed music hall in London during the first world war. In his new 30-part series for Radio 4, Living with the Gods, the former director of the British Museum looks at the ways in which societies come together through shared rituals and beliefs and how these rituals are developed and used to make sense of our place in a universe beyond human comprehension. One side of the coin shows a fire burning within the Temple of Vesta, dedicated to the Roman goddess of fire, and surrounded by the Vestal Virgins, whose job it was to keep the flames alight, to protect the ‘hearth’, or the focus of Rome’s power.

Thursday

James Walton

Saints and sinners | 19 October 2017

From our UK edition

Any rival reality-TV makers watching Channel 5 on Thursday will, I suspect, have been both mystified and slightly embarrassed at not having thought up Bad Habits, Holy Orders themselves. After all, the concept is a blindingly obvious one. Take five young women whose primary interests are selfies, booze and clubbing and make them live like nuns for a month. And not metaphorically either: the five are staying with the Daughters of Divine Charity at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Swaffham, where days filled with prayer, reflection, manual work and wholesome play end at a 10 p.m. bedtime.

Kate Chisholm

Speed limit | 19 October 2017

From our UK edition

Slow radio is popping up everywhere at the moment — programmes that have no outward form but just meander through the schedule, and often, but not always, are played out live in real time. In spite of their spontaneous feel and free flow these programmes have usually been carefully orchestrated, and that’s part of slow radio’s appeal: crafted to sound like life itself, impressionistic, en plein air, long-running. It’s not to everyone’s taste — too slow, too redolent of nostalgia for a mystical past where there was once time and space to think. Who wants to follow Horatio Clare’s every footfall as he tramps for ten miles along Offa’s Dyke (as happened on Radio 3 in the spring)?

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Blame the grown-ups for the safe-space tribe

From our UK edition

A car driver ploughs into a bunch of people outside the Natural History Museum in London and lefties are furious mostly because the right-wing columnist Katie Hopkins thought it was another jihadi attack. For thinking this she is a racist bigot and consummately evil — despite the fact that I suspect most Londoners thought precisely the same as Hopkins when they heard the news. We are in the bizarre situation where horrible incidents not perpetrated by Muslims are gleefully welcomed by the lefties because they believe it adds grist to their idiotic mill: other people are capable of driving cars into pedestrians, you see, so it is racist to suggest that radical Muslims have a particular predilection for doing so.

Thursday

James Walton

Playing it safe | 5 October 2017

From our UK edition

BBC1’s latest Sunday-night drama The Last Post, about a British military base in Aden in 1965, feels like a programme on a mission: that mission being to avoid getting shouted at by either the Guardian or the Daily Mail. To this (possibly doomed) end, it goes about its business very gingerly, with an almost pathological devotion to balance, and a safety-first reliance on the trusty methods of the well-made play, where each scene makes a single discrete point and the characters are as carefully differentiated as the members of a boy band. The first episode opened with the base’s new captain landing at Aden airport with his wife. ‘It must be a hundred degrees,’ she said scene-settingly as they descended from the plane.

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

The BBC’s self-absorption has obscured Justin Welby’s real message

From our UK edition

You have to try really hard to get any idea of what the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby actually said in his interview for the BBC Today programme, the one where he said the BBC had acted with less integrity than the Church of England or the Catholic church when it came to the abuse of children by Jimmy Savile. You may well have heard that part because it is what the BBC itself reported on its own news broadcasts and duly, every other news outlet followed its lead. And the reason you can’t put the remarks in context is that the interview itself hasn’t yet been broadcast – it’s part of a series of interviews with prominent people for the 60th anniversary of the programme next month.

Monday

James Kirkup

What the threat to Laura Kuenssberg says about the country we live in

From our UK edition

For perfectly understandable reasons, neither she nor her employers want to talk about it, but the fact that Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC is covering the Labour Party conference in Brighton accompanied by a bodyguard is an outrage that has not been greeted with the anger and disgust it merits. Imagine, for a second, if you heard this story – first revealed by Charles Moore in The Spectator earlier this year – about a foreign country. Imagine a country where a journalist could not go about the basic task of reporting a political meeting without fear of physical attack. Would you consider that country to be a fully functioning democracy?

Friday

Steerpike

Watch: Paul Mason says Kim Jong-un has ‘done the world a favour’

From our UK edition

Oh dear. With North Korea threatening to detonate a nuclear bomb in the Pacific Ocean, world leaders are left scratching their heads over what to do about the rogue state's penchant for nuclear weapons. But has North Korea actually just done the world a favour by threatening to bomb Japan, South Korea and the US? That's the claim Paul Mason tried to peddle on last night's episode of Question Time. The journalist-turned-left-wing-revolutionary argued that Kim Jong-un has 'done the world a favour' by putting Donald Trump 'on the back foot' through his nuclear game plan: 'In a way, Kim Jong-Un has done - only in this metaphorical way - the world a favour because he has put Donald Trump on the back foot. Trump has all his life fantasised about using nuclear weapons.

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Seeing the light | 21 September 2017

From our UK edition

‘You can’t lie… on radio,’ says Liza Tarbuck. The Radio 2 DJ was being interviewed for the network’s birthday portrait, celebrating 50 years since it morphed from the Light Programme into its present status as the UK’s best-loved radio station — with almost 15 million listeners each week. ‘The intimacy of radio dictates you can’t lie because people can hear it.’ She’s absolutely right. As she went on to explain, when you’re driving and it’s just the radio and you, no distraction, ‘You can hear things in my voice that I don’t even know I’m giving away.

James Walton

Loose ends

From our UK edition

On Sunday night, Holliday Grainger was on two terrestrial channels at the same time playing a possibly smitten sidekick of a gruff but kindly detective with a beard. Even so, she needn’t worry too much about getting typecast. In BBC1’s Strike, she continued as the immaculately turned-out, London-dwelling Robin, who uses such traditional sleuthing methods as Google searches. On Channel 4, not only was she dressed in rags, with a spectacular facial scar and a weird hairdo, she was also living in an unnamed dystopian city, where her detective work relied on a handy capacity to read minds. This was the first and highly promising episode of Electric Dreams, which has set itself the ambitious task of adapting ten sci-fi stories by Philip K.

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Face time | 14 September 2017

From our UK edition

The inimitably pukka voice of Jacob Rees-Mogg echoed through Radio 4 on Thursday morning. He was not, though, talking about nappies, nannies or even Brexit; his topic instead was death masks and specifically that made of his father William, the newspaper editor and vice-chairman of the BBC, who died in 2012. Not long after Rees-Mogg had passed from this life, his facial features were immortalised in wax and silicon rubber by Nick Reynolds, godson of Ronnie Biggs and son of Bruce Reynolds (whose names you may recall from the great train robbery of August 1963).

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Blair says Britain can limit immigration without leaving the EU

From our UK edition

Tony Blair - Britain can limit immigration without leaving the EU Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has been trying to find a way to reduce immigration to the UK without leaving the European Union. The Institute for Global Change, the organisation that Blair set up earlier this year, has published a report on this very topic. Outlining his proposals to Andrew Marr, Blair also called on sympathetic MPs to unite against Brexit in order to prevent 'economic and political damage': https://youtu.be/rcimyFouCus AM: A lot of people already this morning have said 'It's a little bit rich coming from you given how you opened the doors back in the 2000s to mass immigration and changed lots of communities. TB: We shouldn't exaggerate this...

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

The listening project

From our UK edition

As Classic FM celebrated its quarter-century on Wednesday with not a recording but a live broadcast of a concert from Dumfries House in Scotland — Bach, Mendelssohn, Chopin and Liszt, and the première of a specially commissioned work by the Welsh composer Paul Mealor — Radio 3 has upped the ante by announcing an autumn schedule that promises to be ‘an antidote to today’s often frenzied world’. Its new programming ranges from a special opera season and a series of organ and choral music to ‘an immersive audio impression’ of what it feels like to hang vertically on the side of a mountain, wind whistling through the ears, feet teetering on the edge.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Straight to hell

From our UK edition

No, The State (Channel 4) wasn’t a recruiting manual for the Islamic State, though I did feel uneasy about it throughout the four episodes. The fundamental problem is this: if you’re going to make a watchable drama about bad people doing terrible things, you inevitably have to humanise them. And from there it’s just a short step to making them sympathetic. Peter Kosminsky’s drama followed four British Muslims to Syria to join IS.

Petroc Trelawny

‘Smile, segue and shut up’

From our UK edition

Three weeks before Classic FM launched, I was on the radio in Hong Kong, introducing hits by Rick Astley and Wet Wet Wet. I’d just turned 21, and was working as a presenter for British Forces Radio. A phone call came from London. ‘My name is Michael Bukht. I’m setting up a new radio station and have heard good things about you. We’d like you to present our afternoon show. By the way, do you know anything about classical music?’ Michael Bukht would not have fared well in today’s consensual media world, where respect is the watchword. He was a bit of a bully, capable of exploding at anyone promoting views not aligned with his own. But he had absolute belief in what he was doing.

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Universal appeal | 24 August 2017

From our UK edition

Yet another sign that we are living in very strange times: a pair of celebrities, their names made by TV, have switched over to radio for their next project. Not starring in their own series on BBC2 or Channel 4, but on a medium that could have become redundant yet is refusing to give way (the latest Rajar figures indicated that listening is on the up across all networks). Plenty of stars made by radio have gone on to household-name status on TV (Steve Coogan, David Mitchell, Chris Morris). But Eric Monkman and Bobby Seagull, who began trending on Twitter because of their appearances on BBC2’s University Challenge — Monkman, the geek with his razor-sharp eagerness to get on the button; Seagull, the cool, smiley guy — are now starring on Radio 4 in their own show.

Friday

Liam Stokes

Animal rights groups fail to rally outside of social media

From our UK edition

Another attempt to bring animal rights activism off social media and into the real world has faltered. Nothing changes, does it? But before we move on past another small march in Westminster, it might be an idea to stop and take stock of the irregularities. There are lessons to be learned for politicians, for the media and for the BBC in particular. If you missed it, and you probably did, there was a march in Westminster this past weekend. There may have been more than one for all I know; small protests in London are not uncommon. But the march in question was led by the BBC’s own Chris Packham, with a supporting cast of animal rights organisations.