Mrs P and I were at the cinema on Saturday night, enjoying our popcorn. And then this popped up on screen:
I wonder if this is the ticking-bomb which will finally destroy the BBC. Perhaps idiotically, I've never really thought about Radio One when making my case for the end of the licence fee. And yet it is, obviously, the single biggest stick in our armoury.
It's possible to make a case for the forced funding of Radios 3 and 4, on the (spurious, I would argue) basis that the market wouldn't fund similar channels. But Radio One?
The radio is full of almost nothing but Radio One clone stations The channel's existence is a standing affront to every licence payer. And as if its very presence on the BBC platform isn't bad enough, along comes this advert. Only a bloated coroporation would even think about making and paying for a four minute long advert for the cinema. Four minutes! Not even Coke has four minute long adverts.
There can be no clearer demonstration of the BBC's scandalous waste and unfitness for purpose than this advert. And every time it is screened, that's a point which more and more people will get.,
I don't see any purpose in offering you my views on what's been going on in Georgia when there are so many more expert commentators around (see here, here and here).
What fascinates me is the pathology of tyrant worship which exists in some writers.
I suppose it is entirely to be expected that someone who hero worships a mass murderer would describe Russia's attacks as liberation for South Ossetia. But there are plenty of others out there, to whom I won't link (I am linking to Clark because I have previously provided numerous links to his site as an example of distortion in the cause of bully-worship).
Is it enough to describe such people - accuate though it may be - as buffoons? I don't think it is. I am curious as to the mindset of those who deliberately blind themselves to evidence and who ally themselves with brutal and violent regimes and despise the victims of their brutality. It's a longstanding phenomenon, of course - witness the worship of Stalin of so many on the left, even when evidence of his crimes was overwhelming. And it continues today with those who argue that Georgia is the aggressor and Russia merely coming to the aid of Georgia's victims.
Tim Worstall has an excellent post at Spectator Business on the reality of the global market for talent. And, rather graifyingly, he takes Polly Toynbee down a peg or two.
Here's my theory: the BBC's casually misleading attitude to news- its refusal to accept that Israel ever has a case for self-defence, its failure to label terrorism as terrorism, its sneering reporting of anything which doesn't fit into its left-liberal prejudices - is now so deep a part of its culture that its own executives don't even realise that their own deeply misleading statements (I'm being charitable) are so easy to spot.
Sky paid £300 million for five years. The BBC decided not to complete. It says the price was too high (although rumour has it that the sum paid to buy the rights to Formula 1 was £150 million for the same period).
Giles Clarke, the ECB chairman, has this morning been lambasting the BBC for failing to put in a bid of any kind. As he points out, almost three and half million of us play cricket, yet the nation's public broadcaster does not consider it worth bidding even a penny to show a Test Match, or highlights.
Because far from selling out to the highest bidder, the ECB went out of its way to lure the BBC into televising Test cricket. Its tender made clear that:
a bidder may bid for part only of any package, eg two Test matches or whatever, taking place in each season. However, any such bid must be for the full duration of the contract.
The ECB made it clear to the BBC that it wanted to have Test cricket on the BBC and would find a way to accomodate it within the overall rights package. Yet there was no bid of any sort from the BBC, not for one Test a year, not for two, and not for a highlights package. Cricket, as far as the BBC is now concerned, is not worth a penny.
That should lead to further questions about just what we pay our licence fee for, if it is not in part for the BBC to televise the national summer sport.
How has the BBC responded to Mr Clarke's attacks? By issuing an entirely misleading statement. Last night, it said that "scheduling and cost constraints" had meant it had had to rule out a bid. Utter rot.
This morning's statement was a deliberate obfuscation:
The BBC is astonished by the comments by the ECB. We've always said any bid for live Test cricket was subject to value for money and fitting into scheduling and in our view neither of these criteria were met. 'We have consistently argued that not having cricket as a listed event puts it out of the reach of all terrestrial broadcasters. That's the ECB's choice and they are entitled to it, but it's absurd to blame the BBC for this outcome.
This is utter nonsense. First, the ECB said it would accomodate the BBC. And if you doubt that it would have done, look at what it has done in Wales: it has given S4C the right to broadcast Test cricket. Is the BBC seriously suggesting that only S4C has the scheduling capacity and money to show Test cricket?
Worse is the misleading inclusion of the word 'live'. The highlights package was available at a snip, Indeed, Channel Five is now to continue showing them. The BBC could have had them, and at least one Test, if it has wanted them, But instead of pwning up to the truth - that it has made a policy decision not to televise cricket - is has tried to blame the ECB.
We go to prison if we don't pay for the salaries of these people.
I wrote last month about one of the problems with M&S. But it's clear that there is a lot more wrong with M&S than its obsession with Ms Klass.
Yesterday I had some spare time and wandered in to the Oxford Street branch as I needed a pair of shoes. Will I never learn?
It's been a good couple of years since I was there, but I remembered that one of the strong points of M&S shoes is that they are nothing fancy - good solid traditional shoes - and that one can try on all sorts of shapes and sizes easily.
No more. First, it seemed as if they didn't have a single pair of 'normal' shoes - the entire range now appears to consist of 'designer' shoes with all sorts of trendy designs and patterns on the leather. I'm sure I'm not alone in going to M&S specifically to avoid such fashions. I don't want to look like a sad 43 year old trying to look 25. I want to look my age, with nornal - boring, perhaps - shoes.
But that's the least of it. Instead of the usual M&S display - lots of different sizes out on display so one can try them for size at one's leisure - they now have just one pair of each shoe on display, and you have to ask the assistant to get the size you want from the stock cupboard.
And there is, of course, just one assistant working. In Oxford Street! There was a stream of people to the shoe department each of whom did what I did - took one look at the set up and left.
The two people who were being served were talking to each other, saying how ridiculous it was. One wanted to try four pairs on in three different sizes, but felt embarrassed to ask the assistant to bring out 12 pairs. The other said he couldn't be bothered any more and was leaving.
What is this obsession - M&S is not alone in this - with looking trendy, at the direct expense of practicality? Yes, the shoe area is now all light and airy. But that's partly because there are no longer any customers.
Slowly but surely, I am coming to hate M&S, as it seems now to stand for everything wrong with modern Britain: superficial, broken and completely bloody useless.
Mrs P and I went to see West Side Story last week. I was simply going to post here that you should run to the box office to get a ticket; but yesterday I read a bizarre review by Christopher Hart which leaves me wondering whether I should ever pay attention to his scribblings again. He talks of its superficial topicality; calls the piece a 1950s musical pop up; and dismisses it as camp, muscle-bound young men leaping around in jeans and tight T-shirts.
Is the man devoid of any musical or theatrical sense? The wondrous thing is how a musical premiered fifty years ago not only sounds astonishingly fresh, but how a story which is so clearly of its time is nonetheless so deeply relevant, and says so much about our own times. As for the production - I've seen three so far, and this is by quite a long way the best. It's riveting, and I can only urge you to get a ticket if you can. You won't regret it.
Romantic that I am, I bought my wife some roses last week. They're now all dead. They still have the look of roses - the stems, the thorns and even the petals. But the petals are shrivelled up and the stems dried out.
I wonder if Sir Roger Norrington, who is to conduct the Last Night of the Proms, has any flowers at home. I do hope not. Because if Sir Roger's approach to flowers matches his approach to music, the ambience in his home will be devoid of any joy.
Let me explain. Sir Roger will conduct Sir Edward Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No 1, also known as Land of Hope and Glory. Or rather, he is to conduct his own version of it. Because he will ask the orchestra to play it without vibrato - the technique whereby violinists add colour to a note by gently vibrating the finger holding down the string.
That's where my wife's roses come in. Elgar without vibrato is the musical equivalent of dead roses. It's like an omelette without yolks.
Sir Roger says he wants to “play one of Britain's most patriotic pieces as its composer intended”. Last week he showed what this meant in a Proms performance with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra of Elgar's First Symphony. To hear the orchestra's vibrato-less performance was to hear it with the soul ripped out. As Professor Raymond Cohen, of the Royal College of Music, put it: “Norrington calls this a ‘fresh' approach to music, but you can call anything ‘fresh' and it is still disgusting. If Elgar heard that performance, he would have turned in his grave.”
That's not just an assertion. We can only speculate about the sound of Beethoven's orchestras, but we have Elgar's recordings of his music to listen to, and the vibrato in those is positively intense. There is nothing historically aware in Sir Roger's version of orchestral sound, just a man with a bizarre fixation ruining the music he conducts. Sir Roger is a pioneering musician who has done wonders to bring about a new understanding of historic performance techniques. He was the first to record a cycle of Beethoven's symphonies played as they would have been performed in Beethoven's time. But like so many pioneers, Sir Roger has started taking his argument too far. Not only is he now a laughing stock; he is doing a disservice to the composer he is conducting.
Why does this matter? Sir Edward Elgar is, I would argue, the greatest of all British composers. His music is already labelled by some as “imperialist” and “jingoist”, which reveals only the ignorance of those making the accusation. But far, far worse than that would be if those listening to Sir Roger's screeching, unmusical performances thought they were listening to Elgar. That would be to dance on Elgar's grave.
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