Bbc

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Even in Manchester, the BBC’s culture is purely and achingly London

An American woman started a website called ‘People I Want to Punch in the Throat’, in which she listed the people she wanted to punch in the throat. It was enormously successful and spawned a book called People I Want to Punch in the Throat, which sold very well. This is the heartening thing about the internet; the level of visceral loathing harboured by all of us for other people, which otherwise would remain hidden. I have thought about getting in on the action by starting a website called ‘People I Want to Stab to Death with a Bradawl’, or perhaps ‘People I Want to Dissolve in a Vat of Acid’. Very high up on my list for the bradawl treatment would be the BBC executive who decided that corporation staff would not be allowed to eat meat on Mondays.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Here’s what Sarah Sands should do with the Today programme

I wonder what Sarah Sands will do to Radio 4’s Today programme? She is the first editor in more than 30 years to come from outside the BBC, having previously run Evgeny Lebedev’s London Evening Standard. One assumes, then, that the BBC feels that the old war horse needs a bit of shaking up, and perhaps a slight tilting on the political rudder. Sands is, almost uniquely for the boss class of the BBC, Conservative inclined, even if she was a Remainer and is of a somewhat liberal disposition. I was rather cheered by her appointment — and said so in print — as I think she is an excellent journalist. However, one former staffer, reading these comments of mine, remarked: ‘But isn’t she exactly the sort of London-centred metropolitan liberal you so despise?

Thursday

Steerpike

Simon Jenkins lifts the lid on BBC chief’s ‘dinner circle wailing’ over Brexit

This week Nick Robinson set the cat among the pigeons when he claimed that the BBC no longer has a duty to ‘broadly balance’ the views of Remain and Leave in its Brexit reports now that the EU referendum is over. However, many have questioned Robinson's so-called  'due impartiality' -- with 70 Eurosceptic MPs previously signing a letter accusing the BBC of a biased and ‘pessimistic’ view. But could the gloomy tone really be down to a sense of Brexit guilt? Mr S only asks after coming across Simon Jenkins' column in the Guardian on the monoculture at the BBC.

James Walton

Age as allegory

Sky Atlantic — available only to Sky customers — has the cunning/infuriating policy of broadcasting the kind of programmes most likely to appeal to people who pride themselves on not being Sky customers. (Basically, the liberal, metropolitan you-know-what.) Now, to a list that includes Veep, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Girls and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, we can add The Trip, whose third series Sky has poached from the BBC. Like the first two — set in the Lake District and Italy — The Trip to Spain (Thursday) is directed by Michael Winterbottom and features Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan playing versions of themselves that feel teasingly close to the truth.

Rod Liddle

The future of Today

I wonder what Sarah Sands will do to Radio 4’s Today programme? She is the first editor in more than 30 years to come from outside the BBC, having previously run Evgeny Lebedev’s London Evening Standard. One assumes, then, that the BBC feels that the old war horse needs a bit of shaking up, and perhaps a slight tilting on the political rudder. Sands is, almost uniquely for the boss class of the BBC, Conservative inclined, even if she was a Remainer and is of a somewhat liberal disposition. I was rather cheered by her appointment — and said so in print — as I think she is an excellent journalist. However, one former staffer, reading these comments of mine, remarked: ‘But isn’t she exactly the sort of London-centred metropolitan liberal you so despise?

Rod Liddle

You can take the liberal media bubble out of London…

An American woman started a website called ‘People I Want to Punch in the Throat’, in which she listed the people she wanted to punch in the throat. It was enormously successful and spawned a book called People I Want to Punch in the Throat, which sold very well. This is the heartening thing about the internet; the level of visceral loathing harboured by all of us for other people, which otherwise would remain hidden. I have thought about getting in on the action by starting a website called ‘People I Want to Stab to Death with a Bradawl’, or perhaps ‘People I Want to Dissolve in a Vat of Acid’. Very high up on my list for the bradawl treatment would be the BBC executive who decided that corporation staff would not be allowed to eat meat on Mondays.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Oh! What a lovely Waugh

Jack Whitehall could have been perfectly awful as Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall (BBC1, Fridays). He has spent most of his career comically playing up to a common person’s idea of what a posh person looks like: the stand-up who went to the same public school (Marlborough) as Kate Middleton; JP, the Jack-Wills-wearing yah character from Fresh Meat, who went to Stowe; Alfie, the impeccably upper-middle-class, Mumford & Sons-loving history teacher, in Bad Education. But Evelyn Waugh’s class humour is more sophisticatedly snobbish than that, written for a more discerning audience in the days — sigh — when even semi-educated people knew the order of precedence between a duke, a marquess, an earl and, say, a common-or-garden baron.

Richard Bratby

Rued awakening

It’s always promising when the orchestra won’t fit on the stage. For the UK première, some 97 years after it was written, of the Danish composer Rued Langgaard’s Sixth Symphony (The Heaven-Rending), the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra filled every available inch of platform space, with four additional trumpeters perched in the choir seats. Everything was set for what the conductor Thomas Dausgaard described, pre-concert, as a ‘cosmic struggle between good and evil’. And god knows, it certainly made a fantastic noise. In a venue as compact as Glasgow City Halls, the onslaught of two sets of timpani had an almost physical impact. You felt the air wobble.

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Jeremy Corbyn undermines Scottish Labour over IndyRef2

After months of mixed messages from Labour over the party's position on Brexit, this evening Jeremy Corbyn attempted to set the record straight in an interview with Andrew Neil. Speaking on Britain and the EU: the Brexit interviews, Corbyn tried to clarify Labour's position on Brexit now that Theresa May has formally triggered Article 50. He said that his party would vote in Parliament against a Brexit deal if it does not meet the six tests set out by Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, earlier this week. When it was pointed out to him that a vote against the deal could lead to a 'cliff edge' Brexit on WTO terms, Corbyn said that he did not want the UK to leave without a deal -- and hoped a 'no vote' would mean May continued the talks in search of a better deal.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Why didn’t more MPs complain about BBC bias?

There’s one thing that bothers me a lot about the letter sent by ‘more than 70’ MPs to the director-general of the BBC complaining about bias in its coverage of the Brexit debate. There are 650 MPs in the House of Commons, of whom 330 are Conservative. So does this mean that more than 570 of our elected representatives, including the vast majority of Tories, think the BBC is doing a bloody good job and is an exemplar of impartial reporting? If so, I suspect they have been secretly lobotomised — perhaps by members of the BBC’s impeccably fair and impartial editorial board. In the dead of night. Silently, without remorse. Chloroform, a hacksaw, a scalpel.

Friday

Steerpike

Watch: Andrew Neil’s message for the jihadi johnnies out there

After a testing week which saw four fatalities and 40 injured following a terrorist incident in Westminster, 'PrayForLondon' has been doing the rounds on social media. Happily, the BBC offered its own striking tribute to Keith Palmer -- the police officer murdered in the attack -- last night. https://twitter.com/bbcthisweek/status/845064558548963328 Speaking on This Week, Andrew Neil said Palmer's action had served as a reminder that 'the most important people in this country are not the rich, the powerful, the famous but those who run to confront the enemies of our civilisation while the rest of us are running away': 'I know there are still some jihadi johnniess out there who think they will eventually triumph because their love of death is greater than our love of life.

Thursday

Will Heaven

Was there a gap in Parliament’s defences?

Yesterday's appalling Islamist attack in Westminster was not just an attack on Parliament. It began on Westminster bridge, where foreign tourists and members of the public were indiscriminately targeted as they made their way over the Thames. But the attack ended at the Palace of Westminster itself, when the assailant was shot dead by police in New Palace Yard, after he had stabbed to death an unarmed police officer. Parliament's defences are designed to resist this kind of attack, even if there is a gate that is necessarily open at times for MPs' cars. But as Theresa May told the House of Commons this morning, 'the whole country will want to know... the measures that we are taking to strengthen our security, including here in Westminster'.

Rod Liddle

The real BBC shocker: occasionally it isn’t biased

There’s one thing that bothers me a lot about the letter sent by ‘more than 70’ MPs to the director-general of the BBC complaining about bias in its coverage of the Brexit debate. There are 650 MPs in the House of Commons, of whom 330 are Conservative. So does this mean that more than 570 of our elected representatives, including the vast majority of Tories, think the BBC is doing a bloody good job and is an exemplar of impartial reporting? If so, I suspect they have been secretly lobotomised — perhaps by members of the BBC’s impeccably fair and impartial editorial board. In the dead of night. Silently, without remorse. Chloroform, a hacksaw, a scalpel.

Tuesday

Nick Cohen

The Brexit bunch are the real referendum whiners

In an age of fanaticism, it was always unlikely that the urge to censor would be confined to the left. If you think that the insults conservatives have thrown at liberals will not boomerang back to injure them, consider the following examples of right-wing invective. Conservatives claim millennials are ‘special snowflakes,’ unable to handle criticism – a generalisation that crashes and breaks on the vast number of exceptions. To concentrate on specifics for once, it is a matter of fact that the world’s most special snowflake is Donald Trump. He and his supporters target judges, journalists and any other critic. No slight is forgotten or forgiven.

Sunday

James Delingpole

What would we do without nutcases like Steve Backshall

Down the Mighty River with Steve Backshall (BBC2) was perfect Sunday-night TV — one of the most enjoyable adventure travelogues I’ve watched in ages. So I was quite surprised to see it reviewed lukewarmly by another critic. One of the critic’s objections was that the scene where Backshall spots a bird of paradise through his binoculars by the Baliem river in Papua New Guinea was a bit crap. Why couldn’t we have seen it in loving close-up detail, as you would on a David Attenborough? But this is precisely what I loved about the documentary. It had a roughness, an unpredictability, a spontaneity that you rarely find on TV any more.

Thursday

James Delingpole

To die for

Down the Mighty River with Steve Backshall (BBC2) was perfect Sunday-night TV — one of the most enjoyable adventure travelogues I’ve watched in ages. So I was quite surprised to see it reviewed lukewarmly by another critic. One of the critic’s objections was that the scene where Backshall spots a bird of paradise through his binoculars by the Baliem river in Papua New Guinea was a bit crap. Why couldn’t we have seen it in loving close-up detail, as you would on a David Attenborough? But this is precisely what I loved about the documentary. It had a roughness, an unpredictability, a spontaneity that you rarely find on TV any more.

Kate Chisholm

A matter of life and death | 16 March 2017

It was the crime story that showed us just how much China has changed since its years of social, political and economic isolation. The discovery on 16 November 2011 of the dead body of the British businessman Neil Heywood in Room 1605 of the Lucky Holiday Hotel in the Chinese city of Chongqing was not in itself so shocking. Sordid maybe, as it was declared by the Chinese authorities that he had died of excessive alcohol consumption. But nothing more than that. The revelations that followed, though, transformed the case into an international cause célèbre, the inner workings of Chinese politics unravelling before the greedy eyes of the foreign media. Heywood, it has been suggested, was if not a spy then at least an ‘informer’ working for the British government.

Friday

Steerpike

John McDonnell’s Question Time excuse falls short

On Thurday's Question Time, there was one politician notably absent from the panel. For a second time, John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, had to cancel his appearance -- this time putting it down to train delays. And whose fault is this? Well, the Conservatives obviously -- as if Labour were in power the trains would be nationalised: https://twitter.com/johnmcdonnellMP/status/839912841503199232 However, there's a problem. First, those flights sold out after Mr McDonnell had been booked on a flight - but he arrived at the airport too late and the gate was closed. So you can't really blame privately-owned railways for that. More importantly the delays in question were caused by a train caught up in overhead lines, and being left there for far too long.

Steerpike

Watch: BBC pundit’s interview interrupted… by his children

Oh dear. They say never work with animals or children, but what about when your own children get in the way of your job? This is what happened on BBC news when an American man by the name of Robert Kelly appeared 'down the line' to discuss the unfolding situation in South Korea. Alas things took a turn for the worse when his children made their way into the study -- leaving the BBC presenter perplexed. Mr S suspects a door lock would be useful in future...

Tuesday

Brendan O’Neill

Jenni Murray isn’t a bigot – she’s a victim of bigotry

It’s a curiosity of the 21st century that there is no one quite as bigoted as the person who screams ‘bigot!’ all the time. More often than not, those who casually brand as bigots anyone who has the temerity to hold a different point of view to theirs are the ones behaving with bigotry. Consider the stink over Jenni Murray’s comments on trans women. Murray is being demonised as a bigot, as a daft, obtuse ‘transphobe’, for saying trans women aren’t real women. But it’s her accusers who are the bigots; it’s their petitioning for Murray to be sacked and silenced that is the true bigotry. Murray is a victim of bigotry, not a practitioner of it.