Bbc

Monday

James Forsyth

The Andrew Neil Interviews: Hilary Benn dragged out Remain’s immigration agony

The first of the BBC’s series of prime-time EU referendum events took place this evening, with Andrew Neil interviewing Hilary Benn. The programme highlighted both the uneasy relationship between Benn and his leader Jeremy Corbyn and the Remain campaign’s difficulty in dealing with the immigration issue. Andrew Neil began by putting to Hilary Benn a very Eurosceptic quote from Jeremy Corbyn about the EU from the Maastricht debate of the 1990s and asking Benn what Corbyn got wrong. To which Benn replied, rather uncomfortably, that the ‘Jeremy of today’ supports Britain staying in the EU.

Thursday

Steerpike

Corbynistas heckle Laura Kuenssberg at Labour press conference

Given that Jeremy Corbyn described the BBC as 'obsessed with trying to damage the Labour leadership' in yesterday's VICE News documentary, it's little surprise that his supporters hold a low opinion of the Beeb. Today at Corbyn's EU press conference, his fanbase let their feelings known when BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg tried to ask a question. When her her name was announced, supporters hissed at her, before she asked a question: 'For Labour voters, what do you think is more important? Defending workers’ rights or immigration and the impact on communities in this country?' While Corbyn went on to tell his supporters not to do so, it was a somewhat half-hearted gesture given that he had kicked off proceedings by criticising the media once again.

James Walton

Impure thoughts

Spoiler alerts aren’t normally required for reviews of Shakespeare — but perhaps I’d better issue one before saying that in BBC1’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Monday) Theseus dies near the end. Not only that, but Hippolyta and Titania fly off on butterfly wings to become lovers, and the mechanicals’ play goes down a storm. Personally, I’ve never been sure about the existence of that mysterious tribe known as ‘Shakespeare purists’. If they do exist, though, Russell T. Davies’s heavily cut and cheerfully tweaked adaptation seems almost deliberately designed to flush them out.

William Leith

A force for good

When I saw this book, a biography of Huw Wheldon, who was managing director of BBC Television between 1968 and 1975, I thought ‘Aha!’ Inevitably, my mind was filled with images -of Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall, of the Led Zeppelin guitar riff at the start of Top of the Pops, of the men in charge who had no idea what was going on. Might Wheldon have been one of the guys who had no idea what was going on? I tried to put this thought to one side. The book is by Wheldon’s son, Wynn. It’s a very moving account of a son’s love and regard for his father. Wynn is telling the story of a man he reveres and misses. He thinks Huw was a wonderful person — charming and brilliant, a huge life force.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Counting on sheep

Going Forward (BBC4, Thursdays) is a BBC comedy about the continuing adventures of Kim Wilde, the fat, cynical but lovable nurse character played by former nurse Jo Brand. Now she has quit the NHS and is working in the private sector for a company called Buccaneer 2000 — which is, of course, exactly what a healthcare company would call itself in order to allay potential criticisms that it was backward-looking, heartless and rapacious. This is one of the series’ big problems. It wants to be naturalistic, almost fly-on-the-wall, observational comedy, with the dog wandering casually in and out, and parents and kids saying just the kind of things we all do in real life.

Victoria Lane

Baby love

I like Radio 4 — you can have it on in the background burbling away for hours and hours without taking in a word, and then there comes a moment when you’re making a cup of coffee and find yourself plunged into the story of how, during the first half of the 20th century, premature babies living in incubators were on display to the paying public at Coney Island amusement park. For instance. Life Under Glass (Radio 4, Tuesday) was an intriguing little half-hour documentary, presented by Claire Prentice, about Dr Martin Couney, an American paediatrician who started off touring world fairs in the 1890s with his ‘infant hatchery’ and then from 1903 to 1943 established a sideshow exhibition at Coney Island, that ‘great whirlpool of joy...

Thursday

James Walton

Animal attraction

Let me start this week with an admittedly hard quiz question: in 1954, how did the sudden illness of Jack Lester, head of London Zoo’s reptile house, transform British television? The answer is that his reluctant stand-in as the presenter of BBC’s Zoo Quest was the show’s director, David Attenborough. Offhand, it’s not easy to think of many people whose 90th birthday could overshadow the Queen’s, but this month Attenborough’s is coming pretty close. The latest tribute was David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest in Colour (BBC4, Tuesday), which dedicated an appropriate 90 minutes to his first TV hit. As the title indicates, the big coup here was that the archive clips were no longer in grainy black-and-white.

Kate Chisholm

Pulling power | 19 May 2016

Monday’s ‘World on the Move Day’ on Radio 4 was a bold challenge to government policy and proof that radio is much the most flexible, the most accommodating, the most powerful medium when compared with TV. Without much ado, the day’s planned schedule was squeezed, manipulated, overturned to allow the team behind the Today programme to mastermind a live discussion throughout the day about the migration issue, as if to say to the government, here’s what people not just in the UK but from around the world care about. Let’s listen to them and see what solutions they might have to offer.

Sunday

Ross Clark

Why does the government want a gay quota for BBC management?

Of all the things wrong with the BBC, it would be hard to argue that a shortage of gay people making and presenting programmes is one of them. As Andrew Marr observed a decade ago: 'The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities, and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.' Why, then, is the government intent on making the BBC even more gay? In one of the less-reported sections of this week’s white paper on the future of the corporation, John Whittingdale lays down a target that 10 per cent of senior leadership roles at the BBC be filled by LGBT staff by 2020.

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 12 May 2016

One of the many problems with David Cameron’s threat that leaving the European Union could plunge us into war is that it sits so strangely with how he spoke about the EU before he called a referendum. In those days, he was studiedly cool about the union: he had no sentimental attachment to it, he told us, just a pragmatic weighing of the advantages for Britain, depending on what he could obtain. His ‘deal’ for a ‘reformed Europe’, supposedly essential to recommending a Remain vote, contained no Tolstoyan themes at all, just stuff about when migrant EU workers could claim benefits and suchlike. When he now says, ‘By the way, if we leave we’re all going to die,’ one feels he should have thought of that earlier.

Hugo Rifkind

Vaping’s appeal isn’t about the nicotine. It’s about the gadgets

Probably you never visited the flats of middle-class student drug dealers in the 1990s, because crikey, neither did I, and look, let’s just move along. Even so, were there ever to be found a Platonic form of such a place, or, as the beer adverts might put it, If Heineken Did the Flats of 1990s Middle-Class Student Drug Dealers, then I now know precisely what such a place would look like. It would look like a vape shop. To be more specific, it would look like the vape shop I visited a few weeks ago in north London. It was perfect down to the last detail. Paraphernalia all over the place. The main wallah — the dealer, I suppose — had dreadlocks and bohemian clothes, and the bearing of an alpha male, and almost no vocabulary whatsoever.

Kate Chisholm

The power of song

You might not think that the Eurovision Song Contest (screened live from Stockholm tonight) could have any connection with how we might choose to vote in the coming referendum. Surely it’s just a string of naff pop songs stuck together with fake glitter and a lot of false jollity? The songs are uniformly terrible, the show so overproduced it’s impossible not to mock its grandiosity, the idea that it conjures up the meaning of Europe laughably misplaced. But in a programme for the World Service that caught my attention because it sounded so counterintuitive, Nicola Clase, head of mission at the Swedish embassy in London, tried to persuade us otherwise.

Rod Liddle

Write a leftie column and win a doctorate

I see that law students at Oxford University were told that if they found the contents of a lecture on rape and sexual assault ‘distressing’, they would be permitted to absent themselves. This is an interesting approach for future lawyers and barristers. Perhaps, further down the line, they will excuse themselves in court when the evidence is a bit gamey and go to a safe space for a good cry. Or should we be more concerned about those students who remained in the lecture theatre because they did not find the contents remotely distressing, but actually ‘a bit of a hoot’ or ‘bloody hilarious — especially that bit with the Rohypnol!

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Service with a smile | 5 May 2016

He’s been billed as the new Pied Piper but it’s going to take a while for Tom Service to quite match the engaging brilliance of David Munrow, who back in the 1960s persuaded us that medieval pipes-only music was cool listening. Munrow’s series on what was then the Third Programme was aimed at six-to-12-year-olds but succeeded in drawing everyone in because of his gift for communication and his willingness to explore the wilder shores of repertoire, creating sound connections we had never heard before. Service’s new magazine programme for Radio 3, The Listening Service, may be inspired by Munrow but it’s not yet sure what it’s meant to be. How experimental? How difficult the content? It’s timetabled at 5 p.m.

James Walton

That’s entertainment | 5 May 2016

The big returning show of the week began with servants laying out the silverware at a large country house in 1924. But rather than a shock comeback for Downton Abbey, this was — perhaps even more unexpectedly — Tommy Shelby’s new home in Peaky Blinders (BBC2, Thursday). Which explains why so many of the guests were carrying guns, and why the family matriarch was using the word ‘fuck’ a lot more than Lady Grantham ever did. When we last saw gang-leader Tommy (Cillian Murphy), he was still based in the Birmingham backstreets. He was also having a fairly tough time — what with juggling two women, trying not to get murdered and being required by the government to start the Irish Civil War. Two years on, however, things are clearly looking up.

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 28 April 2016

‘England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her interactions, her markets and her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most distant countries; she pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities, and only slight agricultural ones. She has, in all her doings, very marked and very original habits and traditions.’ This classic Eurosceptic statement was made, as Daniel Hannan reminds us in his excellent book Why Vote Leave, by a great European, Charles de Gaulle. He was explaining why France was rejecting our attempt to join the EEC in 1963. The General understood what the European project was, and why Britain was not a natural part of it. More than 50 years on, is there much to add?

Toby Young

What if Murdoch owned the Beeb?

A new book published today by the Institute of Economic Affairs called In Focus: The Case for Privatising the BBC includes a chapter by the economist Ryan Bourne on the BBC’s left-of-centre bias. As you’d expect, Bourne’s contribution includes plenty of fascinating data, such as the fact that ‘Thought for the Day’ contributors are eight times more likely to offer a negative view of market-based and capitalist activity than a positive view. However, Bourne doesn’t accuse the Beeb of straightforward left-wing bias. Its partiality is more subtle and complicated than that. He cites an example of the BBC’s coverage of immigration provided by Roger Mosey, a former editorial director.

Kate Chisholm

Word processing

‘Comedy is like music,’ said Edwin Apps, one of the characters in Wednesday afternoon’s Radio 4 play, All Mouth and Trousers (directed by David Blount). ‘The words are the notes and they have to be in exactly the right place. And every line has to pull its weight, add something to the situation.’ Apps was one half of the writing partnership who created that most unlikely of TV hits in the supposedly swinging Sixties, All Gas and Gaiters, set in the cathedral close of St Oggs and featuring a laughably inept quartet of Anglican clerics.

Tuesday

Theo Hobson

Will the human rights industry ever admit that it has Christian roots?

Helena Kennedy’s two-part radio programme on human rights was very predictable. She did a lot of hand-wringing. She spoke some passionate rhetoric about our common humanity. She quoted Hannah Arendt. She consulted a lot of non-Western thinkers, a lot of fellow human rights lawyers, and a token critic of the concept of human rights. The first part put much emphasis on the ancient global roots of the concept. Look how it is anticipated in this ancient Iranian or Mesopotamian or Buddhist document. I think this is misleading. Though many ancient cultures had impulses in this direction, they were frail. It was the Christian West that gradually heaved such aspirations into politics.

Rod Liddle

Why pretend that female footballers are as good as male ones?

Yay – Izzy Christiansen! Yay – Beth Mead! I daresay you were as thrilled as I was to see that these two women had been named as, respectively, PFA Women’s Players' Player of the Year and PFA Women’s Young Player of the Year. Izzy plays for Manchester City, Beth for Sun’lan. You have never heard of either of them. You will never see them play ever. Both are worse at football than the worst player your club has ever employed. Yes, worse than Seth Johnson. Worse than Ade Akinbiyi. And yet they were given equal billing by the BBC at the Professional Footballers' Association awards with Riyad Mahrez and Dele Alli. I have nothing against Izzy and Beth. I wish them luck. But why the pretence that they are on a level with the male players?