Gareth Roberts

I’ve been reading the cracking, crackling new biography Biddy Baxter: The Woman Who Made Blue Peter by Richard Marson (he’s a friend, but I wouldn’t sell you a pup). There is always fun to be had in the gap between the transmitted, necessarily anodyne, product of children’s TV and the real-life shenanigans backstage, and the story of the often forbidding Biddy serves this up in satisfyingly salty dollops. In the collegiate, committee-ridden atmosphere of TV production, Baxter was a rare tyrant but one who always put the viewer ahead of any other consideration. Making TV is a battle; the reason so much of it is so bad is that the people involved don’t have the stomach to fight.

Personally I find TV panel shows pretty unbearable. They’re like being at a student party full of lairy smartarses you don’t know, and probably wouldn’t want to. But now a clip from one has, in the journalistic parlance of our time, ‘resurfaced on social media’. It is never a good thing for the people involved when a clip resurfaces on social media. It’s the kind of resurfacing that Jaws did in his heyday.   Then people knew exactly what a woman was about five cultural minutes ago, and found the idea of pretending not to know hilarious This particular eruption from the deep comes from the Big Fat Quiz Of The Year 2008, the fourth edition of the annual Channel 4 institution. (Its twentieth anniversary edition is due this December.

In my time I’ve watched a lot of TV, and so I’ve seen a lot of bad TV. But the interview with Graham Linehan this week on TalkTV marks a new nadir.   Rosanna Lockwood – who I must admit I’d previously never heard of – is currently standing in for Piers Morgan as host of his show Uncensored. On Wednesday’s edition she was joined via Zoom by Graham Linehan, whose appearance in a show at the Edinburgh Fringe as part of a line-up assembled by London-based group Comedy Unleashed led to the entire show being cancelled by the venue because of his entirely orthodox and very widely shared view that there are two sexes and that minors should not be ‘affirmed’ down a path of drugs and surgery.

So, the figures are in. The total weekly audience for BBC Radio 2 has dropped by a million in the last three months. Those are the three months, significantly, since the somewhat rushed and awkward departure of its biggest draw, the immaculate and imperturbable Ken Bruce. Radio 4 has likewise managed to lose 1.3 million more listeners in the last year. And television? The BBC’s terrestrial audience is heading down the pan too, with BBC1 losing 12 per cent of viewers in the last five years, and ‘sales volumes’ of the TV licence, according to the recent statement from the Television Licence Fee Trust, falling by about two million over roughly the same period. Destruction of a brand takes determination, and time.

We are edging into the third month of the strike by the Writers Guild of America, called because of shrivelling residual royalty payments from streaming movies and TV, as well as concern about AI such as ChatGPT being used to generate story ideas – and indeed to write scripts. Hollywood’s screenwriters have now been joined by the 150,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild, which was demonstrated very visibly by the cast of Oppenheimer walking out of its UK premiere last week. ‘We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines,’ said union president Fran Drescher. Susan Sarandon has said of AI: ‘I would hope that in the future people understand the difference between real people making real choices and something that’s basically animation.

Clive Myrie, now probably the top face of the BBC, and host of their television coverage of the Proms, had a strange one on Twitter this weekend. A fan gushed at him that ‘[the Proms are] completely accessible – no formal dress code and you can buy a Prom ticket on the day for the price of a pint! To hear some of the world’s best performers. What’s not to love?’ To which Myrie replied, ‘We’ve to keep pushing on that. This is music for everyone, not a select few who know their crotchets from their quavers!! That’s boring and naff!!’ The people who take these ‘vital’ and ‘important’ stands against phantoms enjoy the cost-free thrill of demanding an immediate end to something that nobody is actually doing What a strange exchange.

I read a lot of fiction. I always have. It’s not unusual for me to have three of four books on the go at the same time, which I read in rotation, a chapter at a time. I say this not as a brag. It just is. I do it because I really enjoy doing it. The fact that it might seem like a brag leads me to my point: there is nowadays an air of saintliness about reading, particularly reading fiction, that is very irritating.  A publisher has just slapped a trigger warning on, of all things, Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse – and not for any specific reason, but just because it’s old so there’s probably something ‘wrong’ in it, somewhere.

You may have missed it amid all the other news of the last few days, but the aliens have apparently landed. In fact, they’ve been landing – or more commonly crashing, the clumsy green scatterbrains – for decades. And just like in the movies, secret military departments around the world have been scooping up the bits of their super advanced technology, figuring out what makes it go, and using it to improve our earthly weapons and gadgets.  How do we know this? Because David Grusch, formerly of the US UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) task force, has blown the whistle on it to Congress and to the media. Look a little bit harder though (the details are buried in a very long read in tech news site The Debrief).

It’s forty years since the Smiths released their first single ‘Hand In Glove’. We’ve already seen a slew of articles on the anniversary, and the clichés about this most singular, most wonderful pop group are doing their weary rounds yet again. The Guardian tells us that the Smiths are incredibly influential. But this is sadly not so. I don’t hear any influence, not a note, in anything that’s followed. ‘Over the past 40 years, you can see their aesthetic and spiritual influence in everyone from the Stone Roses to Oasis and the 1975,’ they tell us. If only! Those bands are derivative, certainly, but of the Smiths? Guitars and the North of England aside, it’s hard to imagine greater artistic gulfs.