Bbc

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Ukip isn’t a national party. It’s a Tory sickness

From our UK edition

It can happen that something ought to feel wrong yet somehow doesn’t; and you wonder whether this means that in some deep way it could be right. Take for example a discussion on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday last week. The subject was the rise of the ‘Teflon’ United Kingdom Independence Party. I ought to have found the programme’s handling of this to be inappropriate; yet it felt both appropriate and natural. In this column I shall discuss why. Radio presenters do not give explanatory headlines to political interviews. At about 8.20 a.m.

Monday

Adam Sweeting

Good Morning Britain: news, sport, showbiz and blithering nonsense

From our UK edition

Some of the greatest minds of our generation have struggled to get to grips with the thorny conundrum of breakfast television. Should it be fluffy, should it be tough, should it do sofas or puppet rats or news? Back in the 1980s, many believed it shouldn't do any of them, and shouldn't exist at all. As Nick Ross, one of Frank Bough's acolytes on the BBC's pioneering Breakfast Time, put it, 'television in the morning was outrageous - it was just decadence beyond belief.' Judging by the opening salvo from Good Morning Britain, ITV's latest revamp to the redeye slot kicking off this week, today's state-of-the-art thinking is that it should be everything at once, presented with almost intimidating professionalism.

Thursday

Steerpike

Russell Brand cannot let BBC row slide

From our UK edition

Russell Brand won’t let go of his row with the BBC. He popped up as the mystery guest at Letters Live (a spin off from the wonderful Twitter account @LettersOfNote, where assorted luvvies read great letters from the past). Inevitably, Brand screwed up his reading. He tried to rescue the situation by quipping: ‘Is this like when I broke the BBC?’ This was met by assorted groans and the odd clap. Brand’s references to his suspension and departure from the BBC over the ‘Sachs-gate’ affair in 2008 are getting very tiresome indeed. Mr S was under the impression that Brand was busy plotting a revolution.

James Delingpole

The lefty liberals may be losing their hold over the arts world

From our UK edition

If you happen to be reading this column at breakfast, I’d recommend you skip to something more agreeable like Dear Mary and save mine till a bit later. It concerns the ugly details of one of the most revolting mass murderers in US history. His name is Kermit Gosnell — a doctor who ran a particularly dodgy clinic in Philadelphia specialising in late-term abortions for mostly poor black women. When police raided it in 2010, they encountered a scene of quite appalling horror. In a flea-ridden, blood- and faeces-stained basement, Gosnell had been operating on women using unsterilised equipment, killing babies well over the legal term limit, sometimes by sucking out their brains with a machine.

Wednesday

Steerpike

Paxo turns fire on the Beeb

From our UK edition

Is Mr Steerpike alone in thinking that Jeremy Paxman can’t be bothered anymore? First there was his wet rag interview with the ‘Chrystal Methodist’ Paul Flowers, the former Co-op chairman. Now he’s turned his (still potent) guns on the BBC itself. In an interview with the Guardian, the well-remunerated Newsnight presenter has slammed Aunty’s ‘closed corporate culture’: ‘It is smug. I love the BBC in many ways, but at the same time it has made me loathe aspects of it, and that’s a very odd state of affairs.

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Gas gangrene, shell shock and flinty women: BBC One’s new Sunday night offering is no soother

From our UK edition

Sunday nights. What are they for? Eggs. Tea. Toast. Nerves about the week ahead. Something comforting on TV.  But comfort comes in many forms. For some, it’s twee life at Downton Abbey. For others, it’s the thrill of Homeland. With the BBC’s latest Sunday-night offering, comfort takes on a new guise: one that includes gas gangrene, shell shock, flinty women and war-damaged men. It won’t rock you to sleep. The Crimson Field, BBC1’s latest six-part drama, took us to the support system that existed behind the front line during the first world war. It’s 1915, and young women from Britain’s upper and middle classes have been drafted in as VADs — Voluntary Aid Detachments — to nurse casualties from the trenches.

Tuesday

Anna Baddeley

BBC1’s The Crimson Field: manipulative, saccharine, shallow – and addictive

From our UK edition

Thanks to BBC1’s new World War One drama The Crimson Field, I know now how to fake the symptoms of syphilis. All you need is a red hot needle, to create a genital blister, and some condensed milk, for realistic-looking discharge. You had to do this if you wanted to get sent home from the front, because the horrible public school officers didn’t believe in namby-pamby mental illnesses like shell-shock, and had absolutely no sympathy for the poor privates who wept when they listened to Madame Butterfly. Is it possible to make a WWI drama without resorting to cliché? Yes, actually: the BBC’s adaptation of Parade's End managed it a couple of years ago. Still, they at least had a book to go on.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The major parties don’t get UKIP, and neither does the BBC

From our UK edition

So, in the second debate between Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg the UKIP leader won by 69% to 31%, according to the post-debate polls. That, you would think, should be the top line of the story, but it was not the way in which the BBC News reported events. The corporation’s “package” of the debate showed Nick Clegg winning four-nil and the spoken introduction, at the top of the programme, simply stated that the debate had taken place. It is true that at the end of the sequence the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, delivered a fair and honest assessment of proceedings. There are plenty of reasons for me, at least, not to vote UKIP.

Lucy Vickery

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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

From our UK edition

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?

From our UK edition

‘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

From our UK edition

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.