Bbc

Words and sentences

‘I’m not here to rehabilitate,’ says Pamela, who teaches creative writing to prisoners in Northern Ireland. She doesn’t think of her work as being about bars, bare walls and what happens when they leave jail. It’s all about meeting the prisoner as a person. She soon realised ‘how different prison writing is’. It’s much more direct, heartfelt. Jamie wrote a poem after just half an hour in Pamela’s class. He gave it the title ‘My journey in the care system’. More than a quarter of all prisoners were brought up in care, a figure that rises to almost half for those aged under 25. To Jamie it was a relief,

What Donald Trump gets wrong about climate change

Donald Trump now says of climate change: ‘I don’t think it’s a hoax, I think there’s probably a difference. But I don’t know that it’s man-made.’ The climate activist Eric Holthaus said: ‘The world’s top scientists just gave rigorous backing to systematically dismantle capitalism.’ Both are wrong. The truth is that climate change is happening, but more slowly than expected. It’s now 30 years since James Hansen of Nasa raised the alarm and, as climate scientist Pat Michaels and hurricane expert Ryan Maue have pointed out, ‘it’s time to acknowledge that the rapid warming he predicted isn’t happening’. Our own government’s climate-change committee, and the hysterical BBC, should take note. This

Novel gazing

At the beginning of Barneys, Books and Bust Ups: 50 Years of the Booker Prize (BBC4), Kirsty Wark’s voiceover promised us ‘a tale of fierce rivalries, bruised egos and, most importantly of all, countless brilliant books’. In the event, though — as the title perhaps suggested — those countless brilliant books proved rather less important to the programme than Kirsty’s edifying words had led us to believe. At one point, it noted in passing that Midnight’s Children is a very good novel. At another, it lamented the melancholy fact that Booker ‘voting intrigue and judges’ fallings-out’ have sometimes overshadowed ‘the books themselves’. But once those duties were discharged, it soon

Get woke, go broke

You won’t be aware of this because the BBC has been keeping it very quiet. But the new Doctor Who is — wait for it — a woman! Let me say straight away that Jodie Whittaker is a delight. Opening as the new Doctor is never easy — all that tiresome establishing rigmarole you have to go through along the lines of ‘I’m feeling all funny. Almost like I’m a completely different actor but in the same body. What can it be? Who am I? Has anyone watching at home worked it out yet?’ But already we like her. Yes, at the moment she’s still a bit of a mishmash

Mother’s ruin

It’s a radical thought I know, but I sometimes wonder what it would be like if a new TV thriller began by carefully introducing the characters and basic situation, before proceeding chronologically from there. In the meantime, though, there’s BBC1’s The Cry, which didn’t just start with the traditional blizzard of time-shifts, but continued like that for the next hour. In one of the more prolonged of Sunday’s many opening scenes — it lasted at least 60 seconds — main character Joanna (Jenna Coleman) explained to an unseen listener that ‘that’s when this began, with two faces’. When the scene was replayed 55 minutes later, we discovered that she was

Jacob Rees-Mogg: We need to stop the ‘Ukip-isation’ of Brexit

The star of Conservative party conference so far can’t be found in the main hall. Instead, they are best spotted at fringe events – each of which ends up being an oversubscribed event that involves a massive queue. Step forward Jacob Rees-Mogg. The arch-Brexiteer has been causing a scene wherever he goes with activists stopping him for photos. At today’s Policy Exchange fringe event – titled ‘Can the Conservatives win in Canterbury and Middlesbrough at the same time?’ – the Moggster only needed to take his seat on the panel to trigger cries of ‘Mogg for PM!’ from the audience. Although Rees-Mogg has repeatedly ruled himself out as a future

High five

What a load of utter tripe Bodyguard (BBC1, Sundays) was. Admittedly, I came to it late having missed all the sex scenes with Keeley Hawes and Robb Stark, which may have dazzled me in the way they seem to have dazzled many impressionable viewers. Sex scenes in TV drama are a bit like the chaff used by fighters to distract radar-guided missiles. You’re so busy feeling simultaneously awkward and embarrassed and half-titillated, covering your eyes with your fingers, wishing your other half wasn’t watching with you because then it would be proper porn and you could enjoy it, that you sometimes forget to notice what convoluted, implausible tosh the surrounding

Whose truths are they anyway?

Transcription, Kate Atkinson’s 11th novel, sees her returning to the detective fiction she honed in her series about Jackson Brodie, the haunted private eye who, after the murder of his young sister, chased the killers of girls. It also pursues some of the themes of her more recent fictions, Life After Life and A God in Ruins, which explored the ambiguities of war, and questions of chance and fate, with lives played out in multiple permutations. There is, however, no professional detective in Transcription. Instead it falls to an ordinary young woman to fathom the meaning of her life and, by extension, what it means to be caught in the

Let’s talk about sex | 6 September 2018

This week was bad news for fans of good television drama series — mainly because there’s now three more of the things to keep up with if you don’t want to feel left out of office conversations. The one that stirred up the most advance media excitement was Wanderlust (BBC1, Tuesday), on the traditional grounds that it promised to be unusually explicit about sex. And in that, it certainly didn’t disappoint. The first episode began with a flurry of masturbation (not a phrase I can remember using in a TV column before). First, Joy, a middle-aged therapist, slipped a hand beneath the morning bedclothes — until her teenage son came

The BBC’s anti-white rhetoric

Cassian Harrison, the editor of BBC Four, told the Edinburgh International Television Festival last week that no one wants to watch white men explaining stuff on TV any more. ‘There’s a mode of programming that involves a presenter, usually white, middle-aged and male, standing on a hill and “telling you like it is”,’ he said. ‘We all recognise the era of that has passed.’ I’ve been puzzling over this. Why would one of the Beeb’s most senior executives, himself a white, middle-aged man, say something likely to antagonise such a large number of the people who pay his £170,000 salary, i.e. licence payers? After all, 87.2 per cent of the

Listening habits

Here’s a thought. Matthew Bannister, former Radio 1 controller turned presenter of programmes such as Outlook on the World Service and Radio 4’s The Last Word, has just announced that he’s leaving Outlook, which goes out several times a week, to ‘join the world of podcasting’. In fact, he’s already launched his own podcast, Folk on Foot. It’s as if he now believes that podcasting is where the exciting new challenges in audio (note, not broadcasting) can be found. We wireless-lovers should pay attention. Bannister is a radio man through and through. Does he really believe that podcasting is the future? We’re still waiting for the podcast that truly challenges

James Delingpole

Shark treatment

All the good non-fiction things that were ever on TV — from Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation to David Attenborough’s Planet Earth (the bits where he’s not proselytising about climate doom, I mean), from Andrew Graham-Dixon’s arty jaunts to Italy to Jonathan Meades’s bizarro forays into architecture, from The World at War to all those more recent war porn documentaries narrated by Sam West, from Werner Herzog’s Little Dieter Needs To Fly to Louis Theroux doing a number on Jimmy Savile — have one thing in common: they were all made by middle-aged men. Middle-aged men are the business. They’re comfortable in their skin; they’ve got hinterland and character; they’ve put in

Is there any point infiltrating the Tory party?

The recurring story of the summer recess – aside from allegations of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia within the main two parties – has been reports of an influx of Ukip-esque members to the Tories. Today tensions reached boiling point. Following reports that pro-EU Tory MPs are seeing sharp rises in applications to join their local parties amid fears of deselection attempts, Anna Soubry called on Tory chairman Brandon Lewis to suspend a membership drive. He is yet to do so – but a leaked memo to Guido shows CCHQ officials have been offering advice to local Tory organisers on the best methods for refusing membership requests. The whole incident is curious

Rubbish on TV

Not the most beguiling of titles, I admit, but The Secret Life of Landfill: A Rubbish History (BBC4, Thursday) was a genuine eye-opener. The programme began with Dr George McGavin proudly announcing that ‘What we’re about to do has never been attempted on television before’: a claim that it’s usually best to treat with some scepticism, but that here seemed hard to deny. Certainly, I can’t remember another TV documentary in which the presenters spent 90 minutes digging through (non-metaphorical) rubbish. At first, the mood was one of rather determined excitement. McGavin twinkled away Scottishly behind his half-moon specs as he bombarded us with statistics about the hundreds of tons

The problem with Siegfried

There’s one big problem with Wagner’s Siegfried, and the clue’s in the name. None of Wagner’s mature works hangs so completely upon a single individual. The character himself isn’t really the issue either, however troublesome he might superficially appear (a ‘randy overgrown schoolboy’, if you believe the misguided programme note for this Usher Hall performance). As so often, confusion falls away once you assume that Wagner — who, after all, wasn’t a complete amateur — knew what he was doing, and take Siegfried as the life-force his creator intended. Someone’s still got to sing the damn role, though, and that’s an Olympian challenge. ‘Most people have never heard a really

James Delingpole

His dark materials | 16 August 2018

Apparently there’s a new ‘character’ on University Challenge. I wouldn’t know. Last year, I vowed never again to raise my blood pressure by exposing myself to its new, gender-balanced questions: ‘Your starter for ten: which composer of Serenade for My Cat, rated by her father as the equal of Bach’s Goldberg Variations…’ Don’t know. Don’t care. You bastards ruined it, just like you ruined Sanpellegrino and Lucozade. Same applies, now I think about it, to all the other programmes on the BBC. I never watch anything on it for pleasure these days: only out of duty — to see what the enemy is thinking — and also so I can

Is the BBC scared of the transgender debate? | 15 August 2018

I like the BBC. I like the idea of a national broadcaster and I like a lot of BBC output. I admire many BBC journalists – the Corporation employs some of the very best. I am not a Beeb-basher, not least since so many of the people who bang on relentlessly about the BBC’s supposed biases are stupid or horrible or both. I say these things because for all my affection for it, this is an article about an area where the BBC is sometimes getting things wrong. Some recent BBC coverage of transgender issues fails to meet the usual standards of its journalism. Those failings, in turn, raise some

Why Boris is wrong about burkas

Were you aware that men who transition into women can suffer period pains, despite not having a uterus? Oh, they can, apparently. There is of course no scientific explanation for this phenomenon, nor could there be, other than perhaps that the transitionee is mentally ill. But it is no longer enough simply to accept that a bloke who has had his scrotum turned inside out is as authentically female as a, um, female — you have to accept his right to a whole plethora of imagined victimhoods which are real enough in proper females but couldn’t possibly pertain to him (and which may, further down the line, include this new

The BBC’s new female panel show is patronising to women

Where’s the F in News, new on Radio 4, is ‘an energetic, intelligent female-anchored show with a female panel’, according to its BBC description, of ‘fresh and funny challenges’. I listened to the latest episode. The panel of two comedians, one restaurateur and the Labour MP Jess Phillips were unanimous in their prejudices. The subjects were: vegetarianism (good, unless producing food that tastes like meat), Brexit (bad), Jacob Rees-Mogg (bad), Theresa May (bad/robot), parliamentary traditions (bad), Sir Christopher Chope (bad), new Girl Guide badges (good because they’ve abolished the ones for ironing and vermin control and introduced ones for ‘protesting’). I’m glad we had been informed that these were fresh and

Top Trump

The thing I most regret having failed ever to ask brave, haunted, wise Sean O’Callaghan when I last saw him at a friend’s book launch was ‘So tell me about Shergar.’ It has long been known, of course, that the legendary racehorse — one of the five greatest in the last century, according to Lester Piggott who rode him to victory in the Irish Derby — was kidnapped in 1983 by the IRA and never seen thereafter. What I didn’t realise, till after O’Callaghan died last year, was that the ex-IRA man is the only insider ever to have gone on the record as to his fate. Turns out that