Bbc

Thursday

Lucy Vickery

Michael Craig-Martin pokes a giant yellow pitchfork at the ordinary

Visitors to Chatsworth House this spring might wonder if they have stumbled through the looking-glass. The estate’s rolling parkland has been invaded by an army of vibrantly coloured, outsized garden tools, whose outlines seem to hover, mirage-like, over the landscape. These painted-steel 2D ‘sculptures of drawings’ are the brainchildren of the conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin. Craig-Martin finds poetry in the everyday and here he has taken 12 commonplace objects — a wheelbarrow; a spade; a lightbulb — and transformed them into something extraordinary. He also believes that context is everything when it comes to art and the works have been carefully positioned.

Kate Chisholm

Radio that makes you feel the wind on your cheek

After a walk in Richmond Park beset by rush-hour traffic, the Heathrow flight path and a strange swarm of flying ants (strange because so early in the year), it was unsettling to come back in and switch on and listen to Kirsty Gunn’s spring walk for this week’s The Essay on Radio 3 (which I heard as a preview but you can now catch on iPlayer). Gunn lives in Sutherland in the far north of Scotland close to the River Brora, and has a view from her back windows that stretches for 500 square miles with no other house or sign of human life in sight. ‘There’s nothing out there,’ Gunn told us, ‘except space and emptiness, light and land — and the weather.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

An ex-fascist or two isn’t the BBC’s problem. Its boss class is

We live in a recriminatory age, one in which we are only ever a step away from the cringing, self-abnegating apology. Take the case of BBC Newsnight’s latest appointee, as economics editor, a chap called Duncan Weldon. Duncan is doing the tail between the legs thing right now, desperately attempting to excise part of his past in case it puts paid to his promising career in a fusillade of political accusations and an appalled reaction from the general public. The problem is, in his younger days, it seems Duncan worked as an adviser for the deputy leader of the Labour party, Harriet Harperson. ‘It is embarrassing. I was young and naive and didn’t properly understand what a mendacious and potentially dangerous bint she was.

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

FGM is a shaming indictment of multiculturalism and mass-immigration

A number of interesting things have happened recently: The Law Society has provided legal guidance to ensure that Muslims in Britain can have their wills judged according to Sharia. BBC Newsnight hosted an in-studio row between three Muslims over whether one Muslim should be allowed to say or do anything that is deemed religiously insensitive by any other Muslim. Majority opinion seemed to be ‘no’. Then there has been huge excitement that, after decades during which tens of thousands of girls in Britain were genitally mutilated, charges have for the first time been brought against some suspected perpetrators of this horrific crime. Just in case anyone is lost in all this – this is Britain in 2014. So what do these things have in common?

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Tony Hall’s new vision for BBC Arts: waffle, stale buns and chief execs

I can’t remember the last time I turned to the BBC for cultural guidance. That’s not to say that the BBC doesn’t provide an extremely valuable public service on the arts. It does. It’s just I doubt it’s the public service they ever wanted it to be. For the BBC has become an absolutely fantastic bet-your-bottom-dollar benchmark for what not to see, listen to, go to or respect. It is the finest cultural mortuary we have. You’re wondering whether Jarvis Cocker has any creative juice left in him, just switch on BBC Boring - I mean, BBC Four. Spot him? You have your answer. The BBC is where once talented, once creative beings go to die. And they were all packed into one gaudy room for Tony Hall’s first major speech on the future for BBC Arts.

Monday

David Blackburn

Silk vs The Good Wife

American TV drama trumps British TV drama – it’s a well-worn but unfair cliché. It’s not that British drama is necessarily bad – some of it is very good – it’s that American drama is often better. Compare and contrast Silk (BBC One) and The Good Wife (CBS/More4). Neither show is a blockbuster. Both are law/political office dramas: a staple of TV networks down the years, from the dog days of Judge John Deed all the way back to the glories of Rumpole. Viewers love the format of these wig and gown shows: a question is raised and resolved in every episode, while a wider, character-driven drama rumbles on for years. Each generation adds its own factors to the basic equation: Silk and The Good Wife are concerned primarily with female lawyers.

Friday

Steerpike

Newsnight of the long knives

The controversy over the appointment of TUC economist Duncan Weldon as Newsnight's economics correspondent has taken a surreal twist. The former Labour Party adviser appears to have used his blog to deaden the impact of a Sunday paper exposé about his connections with the extreme right. Weldon admits to a 'brief and misguided flirtation with the ideas of the far right,' yet denied that he had joined any organisation. However, when he was a student he wrote an anonymous piece about this 'flirtation' for a student newspaper, under the headline 'I was a fascist'. All water under the bridge, he now says: 'None of this should be read as a plea for sympathy.

Thursday

The Spectator

MH370 isn’t the only flight that’s still missing

Plane vanished Some other planes, besides Flight MH370, which have disappeared without trace: — A Boeing 727 cargo plane that was being prepared for a flight in Luana, Angola, on 25 May 2003. It took off without permission and when last seen was headed south-westwards over the Atlantic. — An Antonov An-72 cargo plane with a crew of five on a flight from Port Bouet, Côte d’Ivoire to Rundu Airport, Namibia, on 22 December 1997. — A de Havilland Twin Otter operated by Merpati Nusantara Airlines with four crew and ten passengers on an internal Indonesian flight from Birma to Satartacik on 10 January 1995. Baby bills Does Britain have particularly expensive childcare?

Rod Liddle

The BBC is more scared of offending Muslims than gay people

Just to ring the changes, I’ve written about the BBC and political correctness for the mag this week. Yeah, yeah, I know – you haven’t heard enough about that subject. But one of the writers of the 1970s situation comedy It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum has complained that aunty isn’t showing the series any more as a consequence of political correctness. My suspicion is that it isn’t being reshown because it was humourless unmitigated crap, but there we are. The bigger issue, though, is the one raised by the excellent (for a Blairite) Dan Hodges. As it happens, I was invited onto this show and now wish I had accepted. The irony of it all seems entirely lost on the BBC. Thank god they’re going to get rid of the channel entirely.

Mark Mason

First look at the BBC’s BBC mockumentary W1A

So, OK, here's the thing with W1A: it's just as brilliant as 2012. So that's all good. By which I mean the two most memorable characters from the BBC's Olympics mockumentary - Siobhan Sharpe and Ian Fletcher, whose catchphrases bookended the paragraph above - are back in the BBC's BBC mockumentary. Last night's first episode saw Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville) appointed as the corporation's new Head of Values, reunited (against his will) with brand expert Sharpe (Jessica Hynes). Their first crisis was who should present Britain's Tastiest Village, after Clare Balding had to pull out due to filming commitments on ITV's How Big Is Your Dog?

Damian Thompson

Menuhin is the world’s toughest violin competition. Why is it packed with Asians, and no Brits?

‘The truth is,’ says Gordon Back, lowering his voice, ‘that if the violin finalists from the BBC Young Musician of the Year were to enter the Menuhin Competition, they wouldn’t make it to the first round.’ Not through the first round, note, but to the first round: they wouldn’t be good enough to compete. Back is artistic director of the Menuhin, held every two years in a different country. In effect, it’s a search for the next Yehudi Menuhin, who recorded the Elgar concerto with the composer at the age of 15. Some critics think Menuhin never quite fulfilled that astonishing early promise — but I wouldn’t dare suggest that to Gordon Back.

Rod Liddle

So now we know – the BBC is more scared of offending Muslims than gay people

Are there enough black and minority ethnic people on our television screens? The comedian Lenny Henry thinks not and has proposed targets to ensure better representation. Lenny means stuff like Midsomer Murders, I think, which famously avoided using people of colour for a very long time in its absurd but strangely comforting dramas. I think this was to cater for people like me who enjoy watching affluent white people bludgeon each other with candlesticks in the library. In fairness, even Midsomer Murders once had some gypsies play a pivotal role in one episode — they lived in a gaily painted horse-drawn caravan, and were scrupulously tidy and probably filed their income tax returns ahead of schedule. But in general, Lenny has a point, I suppose.

Tuesday

Walter Ellis

The BBC’s march to war

Perhaps we are growing war-weary – weary, that is, of the gathering storm of World War One documentaries on the BBC. There have been so many, not just Max Hastings (for) and Niall Ferguson (against), but Jeremy Paxman keeping the home fires burning and the reheated I Was There interviews with veterans of the conflict whom age withered, unlike those who left their corpses to stink in the mud of Flanders. For all that, 37 Days, the corporation’s recent reconstruction of the events leading up to Germany’s invasion of Belgium, was utterly compelling, once again confirming the place of docudrama in the history schedule.

Monday

Steerpike

Owen Jones: ‘the BBC is stacked full of right wingers’

Owen Jones has denied that Newsnight's appointment of former Labour adviser and TUC official Duncan Weldon as economics correspondent is more evidence of 'left wing bias' at the BBC. On the contrary, Jones says that complaints about Weldon arise from 'myths and deception' and that the 'BBC is stacked full of right wingers'. Now, now, no laughing at the back please – we ought to take the Guardian's star columnist seriously. Jones names 10 people who are connected to the right (some of them very tenuously so): Chris Patten, Nick Robinson, Robbie Gibb, Thea Rogers, Guto Harri, Will Walden, Andrew Neil, Kamal Ahmed, John Humphrys and Craig Oliver.

Alex Massie

Yes, of course the BBC is biased against you

And it doesn't matter who you are. Conservative, Labour, Liberal, Nationalist, Green or UKIP it's all the same. The BBC is hopelessly prejudiced against you. As it should be. Why only this morning we see Owen Jones complaining that, contrary to what the Daily Mail would have you believe, the BBC is instinctively biased against the left and Lesley Riddoch suggesting  the corporation is reflexively biased against the very idea, let alone the prospect, of Scottish independence. Well, up to a point. But asking whether the BBC is inclined to the left or right is the wrong question. It is a kind of category error. Adding up the number of (presumed) right-of-centre - or Unionist - journalists or presenters on the BBC and supposing this "proves" anything is a fool's mistake.

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

The sound of growing rhubarb

When the BBC proposed to do away with 6 Music a few years ago, the media-savvy fans of the station created such a fuss on Twitter and Facebook that the Corporation caved in. Threat of closure was exactly what the station needed to grow its listener-base, now almost as big as Radio 3, and growing (up to 1.96 million per week in the latest Rajar figures, as opposed to Radio 3’s 1.99 million). The Asian Network, too, has flourished after suggestions that it would also have to be shut down if the BBC was to survive financially in the new digital age. But what’s good for them has now spelt doom for BBC3 (at least as a ‘linear’ channel) and further cuts are forecast. Which station will face the chop next time?

Douglas Murray

When Free Speech isn’t free

BBC3’s Free Speech programme is a good example of why the channel deserves to be shut down. Aimed at giving a voice to young people it is endlessly dumbing-down, seeks validity through instant Twitter reactions and all in all is a very degrading programme to appear on. I know because a couple of years ago I was on the first series and spent an evening at an ice rink in Doncaster debating the key issues of the day with a ‘Page 3 model’ and Owen Jones. Even now it makes me shiver. Anyhow – last night the show came from outside the Birmingham Central mosque. The panel included Mehdi Hasan and Julie Burchill’s friend, Paris Lees, who complained in the early part of the show that nobody had given her a job.

Monday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Culture House Pick of the Week: Minogue, Mahler, Strauss and Johansson

FILM: Under the Skin (dir. Jonathan Glazer)  Critics who saw it at the Venice Film Festival thought it either ‘laughably bad’ or a ‘masterpiece’. This week you get the chance to decide whether Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, in which Scarlett Johansson plays a kind of alien butcher on the hunt for human meat to ferry back to a group of extraterrestrial gourmands, is in the mould of Glazer's Oscar-nominated Sexy Beast or, like his Birth, will sink without trace. OPERA: Die Frau ohne Schatten, Royal Opera House Richard Strauss’ barmy opera about a part-human, part-gazelle Empress whose husband will turn to stone unless she can find a shadow for herself (and you thought you had problems) opens this Friday at the Royal Opera House.

Melanie McDonagh

Nigel Farage keeps on about EU migration, but non-EU migration is the greater problem

Last week, I spoke alongside Nigel Farage in a debate about immigration organised by the Evening Standard. It was good fun, as you’d expect, with David Lammy, Tessa Jowell and Simon Walker of the IoD on the other side, and David Goodhart alongside me and Mr Farage. You’d be startled, mind you, at the way Nigel Farage gets mobbed by an audience, and in a good way. I did get the chance to get to talk briefly to him myself and ask the question I’d wanted to put to him for ages: why it is that he keeps on about EU migration, when it’s non-EU migration that’s the greater problem. He was unfazed, of course, and said, look, when we meet again in the future to talk about all this, it’ll be EU immigration that’ll be the problem.

Thursday

Camilla Swift

Behind the scenes at Spitting Image

If Margaret Thatcher is remembered by many more as a caricature than as her actual self, then blame Spitting Image. The show, which ran from 1984 to 1996, portrayed her variously as a cross-dresser, a fascist and a bully but, to her credit, she never complained. Or, if she did, there’s no record of it. Of course it wasn’t just politicians who were targeted; anyone in the public eye was also ripe for a takedown, from Kylie to the Queen. Deference — what’s that? To mark the programme’s 30th anniversary, BBC4 has created an Arena documentary that takes viewers behind the scenes of the Spitting Image process; introducing us to the people who made the programme come to life, and the hellish hours they worked keeping the show on the road.