Gareth Roberts

The government has serious work to do. As world war looms and the economy dives perilously close to recession, they have announced yet another bold and exciting policy to meet the historical moment: banning chips from school dinners. Labour are bizarrely obsessed with directly feeding the nation, something that the private sector has done pretty well over the last few thousands of years We were told yesterday that ‘fried food including chicken nuggets and fish and chips will be banned from being served in schools.’ This will, apparently, ‘reduce obesity’. Pizzas and sausage rolls will also be severely limited, and desserts will need to be composed of at least 50 per cent fruit. Now I can’t get nostalgic about school dinners.

Before the 1980s, our broadcasters had a terrible habit of throwing their own recordings away to save storage space. Videotapes were simply wiped and reused. Every single episode of Doctor Who from the 1960s met this fate, but because the BBC sold the series around the world on film copies about two thirds have survived. Now, two more lost episodes from November 1965 – ‘The Nightmare Begins’ and ‘Devil’s Planet’, from an epic story featuring the Daleks – have been found in a private film collection, spruced up, and are available to watch on the iPlayer, 60 years on.

Yesterday’s news that Scott Mills had been dismissed as the host of BBC Radio 2’s breakfast show – with immediate effect, his contract terminated – was a shock. The BBC never moves that fast; we are used to suspensions, investigations and deliberations before anything is actually done. The BBC issued a terse announcement from its cold high peak overlooking the universe, which loftily stated, ‘While we do not comment on matters relating to individuals, we can confirm Scott Mills is no longer contracted and has left the BBC’. It is striking that this dry and patrician tone, once the ‘voice’ of the Corporation, is heard nowadays only when it is in trouble.

The news that a British version of Saturday Night Live was in the offing raised an enormous gestalt groan throughout the land. A US show that was last a reasonable proposition in about 1996, reimagined for the UK? Why stop with SNL - there’s also Home Improvement, Murder She Wrote or Dr Quinn Medicine Woman. The besetting sin of firing Norm Macdonald is a stain from which the American SNL has never truly recovered. This offshoot had the air of a calamity in the making. The biggest surprise was that SNL UK was quite an upbeat, silly, jolly affair And the trailer released last week felt like the death of hope. I didn’t think it was possible to make Tina Fey (SNL veteran and host of the first show) unfunny, but they managed it.

Nadiya Hussain, winner of The Great British Bake Off in 2015, has it seems reached the end of the road with the BBC. Ten years in prime time is an incredible run; most TV careers are far shorter, and reality show breakouts usually flash by. The Alison Hammonds of the TV world are rare. It’s hard to believe, but even Gemma Collins has lost some of her sparkle. But Nadiya isn’t happy. In a video on Instagram last June, she spoke about ‘gaslighting’ in the TV industry, and said she felt that ‘as a Muslim woman’, she had not always been supported or allowed to fulfil her potential. Considering how fervently the BBC plugged her, this takes quite some chutzpah.

At the Baftas on Sunday night, John Davidson – whose story of living with Tourette’s syndrome is dramatised in the (very good) film I Swear – shouted out the n-word when black actors Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan were on stage to present an award. You’d hope that by now people might understand the mechanics of Tourette’s symptoms – that the tics are totally involuntary, and consist of erupting with the worst possible things at the worst possible times; the imp of the perverse dialled up to 11. But no.

Actors have been saying unscripted things again. Riz Ahmed is the star of a new film version of Hamlet directed by Aneil Karia and set among the South Asian community in contemporary London. He told the BBC at the weekend that the ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy is not actually about contemplating suicide at all, but about ‘resistance’. He adds that Hamlet has been ‘deradicalised’ in ‘recent years’. We expect performers who have superb performing skills to be intelligent and insightful. But this is a mistake Elsewhere, Olivia Colman has been promoting her role in another new film Jimpa, the everyday story of introducing her ‘non-binary’ daughter to gay grandad Jimpa, telling Them magazine, ‘I've never felt massively feminine in my being female.

According to the Times, the BBC – strapped for cash as millions more stop paying the TV licence, and struggling to compete in a world dominated by high-gloss American ‘content’ – is brainstorming a portfolio of wizard wheezes to replenish its bank account. One of these, quite incredibly, could be the return of the radio licence. ‘BBC bosses are considering a new way of funding the corporation, which would result in people having to pay the licence fee to listen to any of its radio channels or use its news website.’ Here’s a wild idea. Maybe – just maybe – it would be a good idea to create programming that doesn’t routinely insult and abuse its audience, and then bill them for the pleasure?

MTV has pulled down the shutters on its dedicated music video channels, casting off what remained of its original raison d’être. In the age of YouTube and TikTok, the only surprise is that it’s taken so long. This is a signal moment. As a truly mass medium, the music video is – after almost half a century – over. Who mourns for it? Not me, anyway. For me, video shrunk music down rather than opened it up. The form emerged from the homespun promotional films shot by record companies in the 60s and 70s. These ‘pre-video’ videos, such as they are, are often more interesting than what followed, simply because the deadening smack of rote production, of This Is The Way Of Doing It, hadn’t yet occurred.

What a mess. This little phrase seems unequal to the task of describing the situation Britain finds itself in after decades of multiculturalism and liberalism. In a – perhaps surprising – spirit of compassion and generosity, I find myself feeling for some of the liberals who are now regularly being mugged at scale by reality. There is very little time to draw breath nowadays, to reset and forget, between what are still described as ‘incidents’. The Bondi Beach massacre followed on from the news of the two Afghan asylum seekers jailed for raping a girl of 15, which followed the news of the migrant hotel worker stabbed to death with a screwdriver, which followed the attack on a Manchester synagogue…all set against the continual background rumble of the rape gangs.