Bbc

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

Donald Trump represents the views of millions of Americans. Does the BBC not realise this?

From our UK edition

If you saw the BBC Ten O'Clock News last night you will have witnessed Nick Bryant’s dispassionate, even-handed treatment of Republican candidate Donald Trump. Trump had called for an end to Muslim immigration into the United States. Bryant’s face was puffed up with outrage; he almost spat out the words of the story and ended by saying that 'this is the gutter'. https://soundcloud.com/spectator1828/nick-bryant-discusses-donald-trumps-comments-about-muslims-on-bbc-ten-oclock-news It does not matter how often they are told, it does not matter how many complaints they receive: the BBC continues to pursue its own political agenda at every possible opportunity. If it addressed this problem it might find that fewer people wished to see the licence fee abolished. But fat chance.

Monday

Miles Goslett

Alan Yentob’s ‘resignation’ only makes him less accountable

From our UK edition

The BBC’s spin doctors will be broadly happy at the coverage Alan Yentob’s 'resignation' as BBC Creative Director has generated, but licence fee payers should not be so pleased. For, on closer inspection, the whole thing is a gigantic swizz. Yentob may have relinquished his £183,000 salary, and his executive status, but it is now obvious that he will remain a very well paid fixture at the BBC for some time yet – and an even less accountable one. Firstly, it is important to note that as the Daily Telegraph reported today, by standing down from this job, Yentob escaped an internal BBC inquiry into allegations that he interfered with BBC News’s reporting of the Kids Company scandal over the summer.

Thursday

Peter Robins

New word order | 3 December 2015

From our UK edition

In the basement of a busy café in Hockley, Nottingham, which may not have known exactly what it was letting itself in for, a young woman is loudly dissecting an unsatisfactory lunch: ‘Deep in my heart I know I love chips.’ In another basement a few hundred yards away, lit by a single floor lamp, another woman is detailing the process of a man’s decline with tear-jerking, understated tenderness. For today only, both women are going by the name Bryan. They are among 60 volunteer performers in But I Know This City!, a unique adaptation of B.S. Johnson’s strange and sometimes wonderful 1969 novel The Unfortunates.

Quentin Letts

Diary – 3 December 2015

From our UK edition

First, an apology. Thanks to me, all journalists at BBC Radio’s ethics and religion division are being sent for indoctrination in climate change. Sorry. In July I made a short Radio 4 programme with them called What’s the Point of the Met Office?, which accidentally sent orthodox warmists into a boiling tizzy. Amid jolly stuff about the history of weather predictions and the drippiness of today’s forecasters, we touched on parliamentary lobbying done by the state-funded Met Office. All hell broke out. Cataracts and hurricanoes! The Met Office itself was unfazed but the eco-lobby, stirred by BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin, went nuts. I was accused of not giving a proper airing to ‘prevailing scientific opinion’. Apostasy had occurred.

Steerpike

Alan Yentob steps down as BBC creative director (but keeps his £150,000 TV gig)

From our UK edition

Alan Yentob has dramatically quit his £183,300 per year creative director role at the BBC. Today's decision comes after Yentob became the subject of intense scrutiny in recent months regarding the BBC's coverage of the Kids Company scandal. In a statement, Yentob - who was the chairman of Kids Company - explains his decision to leave, citing the Kids Company scandal -- which The Spectator were the first to cast light on -- as a contributing factor: 'The BBC is going through particularly challenging times and I have come to believe that the speculation about Kids Company and the media coverage revolving around my role is proving a serious distraction.

James Walton

Beyond a joke | 3 December 2015

From our UK edition

Let’s start this week with a joke: ‘You know Mrs Kelly? Do you know Mrs Kelly? Her husband’s that little stout man, always on the corner of the street in a greasy waistcoat. You must know Mrs Kelly. Well, of course if you don’t, you don’t, but I thought you did, because I thought everybody knew Mrs Kelly.’ No, I can’t claim my sides are entirely split either. Yet, according to the first episode of What a Performance! Pioneers of Popular Entertainment (BBC4, Thursday), this sort of material by the Victorian music-hall star Dan Leno marked the birth of stand-up comedy as we know and are perhaps overburdened by it today. The series’ stated aim is to explore mass entertainment from the days before television.

Kate Chisholm

There will be blood | 3 December 2015

From our UK edition

It was a stroke of genius to invite Glenda Jackson to make her return to acting as the star of Radio 4’s massive new series of dramas, Blood, Sex and Money, based on the novels of Émile Zola. Jackson plays Dide, the matriarch of the Rougon-Macquart families from Plassans in the depths of southern France. And she’s absolutely brilliant. Her voice is so distinctive, yet at the same time utterly ordinary, so it doesn’t stick out demanding attention but rather draws you in, like a spider weaving its web. Her timing, too, is pitch-perfect, each word given just the right weight for its meaning to be clear, whether making sinister predictions or laughing over another child’s comeuppance.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

While ‘Daesh’ prepare to fight, MPs debate how to hurt their feelings

From our UK edition

Today in the Commons the Tory backbencher Rehman Chishti asked: “Will the Prime Minister join me in urging the BBC to review their bizarre policy; when they wrote to me to say that they can’t use the word Daesh because it would breach their impartiality rules? We are at war with terrorists, Prime Minister. We have to defeat their ideology, their appeal. We have to be united in that. Will he join me now in urging the BBC to review their bizarre policy?” https://soundcloud.com/spectator1828/cameron-on-what-to-call-isis David Cameron positively purred: “I agree with my honourable friend.

Tuesday

Steerpike

Staff evacuated from BBC headquarters over suspicious vehicle

From our UK edition

Staff at the BBC have been evacuated from the Broadcasting House Piazza after a suspicious vehicle was sighted nearby. Newsnight's James Clayton reports that the decision to evacuate the area was made after a suspicious vehicle parked up on Regent Street, which is near the corporation's Broadcasting House headquarters in Portland Place. Workers in other neighbouring offices in the area have also been evacuated as a result of the bomb scare. https://twitter.com/JamesClayton5/status/671702161127055361 https://twitter.com/JamesClayton5/status/671702871906394113 Mr S will update this post as more details come to light.

Monday

Rod Liddle

I’ve changed my mind about where we should bomb…

From our UK edition

Just back after a few weeks away in the north east - thought I’d share this with you. I wrote a piece for The Sunday Times arguing against bombing Syria for a host of reasons – I will list them all in another blog tomorrow. Suffice to say I don’t think it will do any good, even if it might cheer us up. I also suggested that given the threat to us is largely internal, ie from domiciled Muslims who have been (weary sigh) 'radicalised' - we would be as well off bombing Luton as Syria. BBC Three Counties Radio took exception. They sent some poor sap of a reporter onto the streets of Luton to ask people if they thought it was right that Luton should be bombed (the ones who they reported as answering all said 'no, probably not, on balance').

Friday

Steerpike

Revealed: Newsnight’s No.10 security breach

From our UK edition

Newsnight producers are currently facing fresh woe over rumoured plans at the BBC to extend the News at Ten slot so it would overlap with the current affairs programme. Should the proposals go ahead, staffers will need to work especially hard to pull in high-profile guests in order to convince viewers to turn over. Alas Steerpike understands that they are unlikely to be getting the Prime Minister on the programme anytime soon, following an incident that occurred earlier this month which dampened relations between No.10 and Newsnight.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

The GP charged around to my side of the table and roved her hand all over my pubic area

From our UK edition

On Friday morning I was peeing razor blades so I rang up the doctor and was given an appointment after lunch. The surgery was at the top of a dingy staircase in an ancient, dilapidated village house. Except for some magazines spread out on a table, the waiting room might have been a comfortably furnished private sitting room. The woman with whom I am staying speaks better French than me and she came along to translate if necessary. We sat down on one of the sofas, and while we waited she picked up a magazine and was immediately absorbed by beach photos of celebrity couples. I made a snobbish remark about her interest in such things. She defended herself by saying that she simply couldn’t help herself.

Kate Chisholm

You can’t forget what Will Self says – even if you wish you could

From our UK edition

It lasted for just a few seconds but was such a graphic illustration of the statistics behind the bombing campaign in Syria — and not a word was spoken. Martha Kearney called it an ‘audio graphic’ on the World at One on Monday and explained how Neal Razzell and James Beard for the World Service had been monitoring the number of US combat missions on Islamic State targets in Syria, hour by hour, 24/7, and comparing them with earlier bombing campaigns. Each electronic beat we heard represents one hour, Razzell told us; each beep represents the launch of one combat mission. For Syria, the electronic beeps between each beat were quite far apart — clearly distinguishable. The sound we heard represented two raids an hour, he explained, every day for 450 days.

Monday

Nick Cohen

C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas le journalisme

From our UK edition

Andrew Neil is the best political interviewer in Britain. I am not just saying that because he is so high up here at The Spectator, although that helps. I am not saying it because he once bought me lunch, although he did his cause no harm there either. I am saying it because he is one of the few broadcasters who makes me stop what I am doing and listen. God help the interviewee who goes on his programme unprepared. If he or she has not thought through every flaw in their argument, they will find that Neil has done their thinking for them. He will expose their contradictions on live television. He will have a list of the inconvenient facts they forgot or never took the trouble to find in the first place, and will broadcast them to the nation.

Friday

Charles Moore

Did the BBC really need to deploy Huw Edwards to Paris?

From our UK edition

On Saturday morning, I watched BBC rolling news about the Paris atrocities. Then I spent the day hunting and switched on again at about half-past five. It was extraordinary how little the Corporation had advanced its coverage in the course of seven hours. It suffered from the curse of ‘big-footing’ — the custom of flying news ‘anchors’ from London to broadcast on the spot without knowing anything. No one needs Huw Edwards looking very serious in some boulevard and telling us again and again that ‘Paris is today a city in shock.

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 19 November 2015

From our UK edition

When Jeremy Corbyn says it is better to bring people to trial than to shoot them, he is right. So one might feel a little sorry for him as the critics attack his reaction to the Paris events. But in fact the critics are correct, for the wrong reason. It is not Mr Corbyn’s concern for restraint and due process which are the problem. It is the question of where his sympathies really lie, of what story he thinks all these things tell. Every single time that a terrorist act is committed (unless, of course, it be a right-wing one, like that of Anders Breivik), Mr Corbyn locates the ill as deriving from the behaviour of the West, especially the United States and Britain (and, where relevant, Israel).

Douglas Murray

On Question Time, will someone please ask Mehdi Hasan about his views on infidels?

From our UK edition

Various readers have been asking if I am doing Question Time, This Week or Any Questions this week. It's not the BBC's fault but I'm not able to be in the country at the moment. I am particularly sorry not to be able to do Question Time now that I learn that the line-up includes Mehdi Hasan and Anna Soubry. So could someone else on the panel or in the audience please point out that Mehdi Hasan has expressed similar contempt for us infidels as Isis have?

The Spectator

Listen: Is the BBC a national treasure? With Melvyn Bragg, James Purnell and Rachel Johnson

From our UK edition

Last night Spectator Events hosted a discussion at Church House, Westminster about whether the BBC really is a national treasure. Speakers included Melvyn Bragg, author and broadcaster, James Purnell, director of strategy and digital at the BBC, Andrew Bridgen MP, Meirion Jones, investigative journalist, Robin Aitken, author of Can we trust the BBC? and Rachel Johnson, author and broadcaster. The discussion was hosted by Andrew Neil. Both entertaining and informative, the discussion touched upon a number of different areas, including whether the BBC should reduce its print content, whether a 'liberal' bias exists and whether the BBC can actually be reformed.

Wednesday

Nick Cohen

Nobody will ever forgive the right if they destroy the BBC

From our UK edition

Nowhere does the right show its isolation from its own country more vividly than when it demands the destruction of the BBC. The corporation is not like the telephone system, which you can pass into private ownership without anyone noticing. It is as integral to Britain as the monarchy and the NHS, which is why Scottish nationalists devote so much energy to denouncing it. We are a small country, which is becoming smaller. In the world that is coming, Asian and African countries will have huge populations beside which Britain’s market of 70 million will seem puny.  Hence we subsidise culture that simply would not be produced in the private sector.

Monday

Steerpike

James Naughtie’s swear gaffe sends the BBC into a tizzy

From our UK edition

This morning Nick Robinson made his debut as a presenter on the Today show. However, it was Robinson's co-presenter James Naughtie who managed to make the news, after he turned the air blue during the broadcast. The Scottish presenter uttered a four letter expletive on air just before 7am after failing to realise he was on air. While the BBC have since had to issue an apology, it appears that the corporation are also keen to wipe the incident from history altogether. The radio show is usually made available to listen to on demand on BBC iPlayer within minutes of the broadcast finishing.