Gareth Roberts is a TV scriptwriter and novelist who has worked on Doctor Who and Coronation Street. He is the author of The Age of Stupid substack.
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Big Brother is back – again. The show was axed by Channel 5 in 2018 but ITV has dragged it out of the grave. Watching the show’s opening episode last night made me wonder whether we’re trapped forever in a time loop with the big TV shows of the early noughties – Strictly, I’m A
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When Boris Johnson won his eighty-seat majority, Labour looked to be destined to spend a decade or so in the political wilderness. But ‘Partygate’, the eventual defenestration of Boris plus the psychodrama of Truss and the fraught first year of Sunak meant that the tables turned. All of a sudden, dreary Keir Starmer – with
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London was swamped with protesters this weekend but not all of them saw eye to eye. Bully XL dog owners and ‘Rejoiners’ who want Brexit to be reversed stomped down Whitehall. Anti-monarchists Republic were also in town. Things ended predictably badly: one angry dog owner heckled the ‘Rejoiners’, screaming ‘Traitors’ at them as they waved
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Theresa May always had a camp appeal. The clumsiness, the dancing, the incredible squareness. Mrs Thatcher never took that crown – she had too much of a hard edge – though it was a surprise to me to discover that Australians and Americans saw only the hair and the handbags and made her that most tedious and
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Liz Truss is back and she’s got a book to plug. ‘It will set out what we must do to counter the disastrous ideas of the global left,’ she told X at the weekend. Now, I think she’s right that there is a smorgasbord of disastrous ideas about in the modern West – net zero, increasing state power and
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The Office for National Statistics let a bombshell drop on Friday. Halfway down the first page of their grippingly-titled document ‘Impact of methodological and data improvements on current price and chain volume measure of quarterly gross domestic product (GDP), 1997 to 2021’, they slipped out this sentence: ‘Annual volume GDP growth in 2021 is revised
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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
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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
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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
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Steve Barclay is appalled. A source close to the health secretary has told the Mail that he is ‘appalled to hear some NHS managers are failing to respond’ to a directive that told them not to let Stonewall write their ‘inclusivity guidance’. But fear not! He ‘will be discussing with officials what further steps to
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Electric cars made in China could be turned off remotely, immobilising them instantly and crippling the West. That terrifying prospect was highlighted by Professor Jim Saker, president of the Institute of the Motor Industry. ‘The car manufacturer may be in Shanghai and could stop 100,000 to 300,000 cars across Europe thus paralysing a country,’ Saker warned.
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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
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The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘normie’ as ‘a normal person, who behaves in the same way as most other people in society’. Merriam-Webster tells us it refers ‘to one whose tastes, lifestyle, habits, and attitude are mainstream and far from the cutting edge, or a person who is otherwise not notable or remarkable’. Oh, how I miss normies. Flicking through the streaming channels recently, I took a swerve
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Have Just Stop Oil finally met their match? The splendidly named counter-organisation ‘Just Stop Pissing People Off’ have pulled off two bracing publicity coups in the last week. First, in Elephant & Castle in south London last Wednesday JSPPO ‘kettled’ JSO activists who were planning one of their slow marches down the public highway, forming
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28 min listen
This week (01.13) Freddy Gray, on why Ron De Santis is no longer ‘de future’ in the race for the Presidency, (09.50) Mary Wakefield recounts the train journey from hell,(16.10) we hear from Gareth Roberts about the screenwriters and actors striking over AI potentially taking their jobs and (22.24) Rachel Johnson shares her diary of
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38 min listen
This week: In his cover piece for the magazine Ross Clark writes about ‘the war on motorists’. He argues that the backlash against London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s expansion of Ulez is just the beginning, as motorists – and Labour MPs – prepare to revolt. He joins the podcast alongside Ben Clatworthy, transport correspondent at the Times, to
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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
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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
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The mucky allegations about a ‘household name’ BBC star – who is said to have paid thousands of pounds to a teenager for sexually explicit pictures – has exposed our obsession with TV presenters. We invite these people into our homes every day. Stars we never meet become familiar, a part of our lives and
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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
