Bbc

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

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 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

Wednesday

Katy Balls

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

Thursday

James Walton

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

Thursday

Richard Bratby

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 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

Wednesday

James Kirkup

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

Thursday

Rod Liddle

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

Sunday

Charles Moore

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

Thursday

James Delingpole

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

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Profit and loss | 19 July 2018

There’s been a lot of fuss and many column inches written about levels of pay at the BBC, as revealed in its latest Annual Report. Who gets too much? Why are women presenters still paid less than their male counterparts? What can be done to create more equality at the BBC? But all this controversy about money and gender is a red herring, diverting attention away from what we should be far more concerned about. Quietly, without fanfare, the BBC has been changing the way it makes and delivers its programmes. As the report also reveals, BBC Worldwide, set up in the 1990s as the ‘commercial’ wing of the BBC,

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Bearers of bad news

When President Trump refused to take a question from a CNN reporter at the Chequers press conference last week, I imagine a lot of British viewers thought —as Theresa May clearly did — that he was being graceless, capricious and anti-freedom of speech. But I think we’re in danger of underestimating the extent to which the media landscape has changed in the past few years. Gone are the days — if they ever existed — when political interviewers were dispassionate seekers-after-truth on a mission to get the best out of their subjects. Now, it’s mostly activism-driven, the aim being to advance your preferred narrative while showing up your ideological opponents

Tuesday

Steerpike

Blue on Blue: Nadine Dorries attacks Anna Soubry – ‘they’ve lost the plot’

Oh dear. As No 10 attempt to stop more Commons rebellions today on the customs bill, relations between Tory Remain rebels and Tory Brexiteers have hit an all-time low – and that’s saying something. Appearing on the Daily Politics, Nadine Dorries launched a broadside against Anna Soubry over her comments in the Chamber on Monday – when the Tory MP accused her Brexiteer colleagues with a ‘gold-plated pension and inherited wealth’ of backing Brexit to the detriment of people’s jobs. One such Brexiteer colleague’s response? Dorries just described it as ‘one of the worst moments that we have ever seen or witnessed in the chamber’. “No longer anger, they have

Wednesday

Steerpike

Gary Lineker tops the BBC pay league

Whether or not England win their World Cup semi-final tonight, one thing is guaranteed: Gary Lineker has plenty to be happy about. The Match of the Day host, who flogs crisps and virtue signals on Twitter when he isn’t on the telly, has topped the BBC’s pay league for the first time. Lineker’s earnings last year of at least £1.75m means that he has overtaken Chris Evans to bag the top spot in taking home licence fee payers’ cash. The last time his earnings were published, Lineker doubled down by suggesting that he could earn more elsewhere. Will he do the same this time? Even if football doesn’t end up coming

Thursday

Taki

High life | 5 July 2018

Oh, to be in England, and almost die of heat after the Austrian Alps. Yes, Sarah Sands was right in her Speccie diary about last week being a great week of summer parties in London, but the really good ones are still to come. This weekend both Blenheim Palace and Badminton House play host to great balls. I only mention them because there are only two English dukes whom I acknowledge, Beaufort and Marlborough, because I knew both men when they were in their teens. There has been some grumbling about the fact that neither house would give in and change the date, but I’m fine with that. Two simultaneous

Kate Chisholm

Rules of engagement | 5 July 2018

‘Can one person really grasp the significance of what another person has been through?’ asks Dr Rita Charon in this week’s essay on Radio 3. She’s a physician in New York (isn’t it somehow telling that in Britain we’ve long since forgotten what GP actually stands for?) and as a result of her experiences as a doctor has set up a pioneering training programme at Columbia University. In Narrative Medicine (produced by Elizabeth Funning) Charon explained how she came to believe in the power of literature, of listening to stories, as a way of bringing physicians ‘near enough to the patient to recognise their suffering and help them through their

Monday

Steerpike

No more BBC Mairs for Boris Johnson

The news that Eddie Mair is departing the BBC for LBC has been met with disappointment by his former comrades. However, Mr S suspects that there is one man who will today be breathing a sigh of relief. Step forward Boris Johnson. It’s no secret that the foreign secretary has a frosty relationship with the broadcaster – in fact, the majority of Boris’s broadcast gaffes have been when Mair was the one asking the questions: Mair to Boris – ‘you’re a nasty piece of work’ In the first interview in 2013, Mair branded Boris a ‘nasty piece of work’. He was referring to Mr. Johnson’s integrity, which came under scrutiny

Thursday

James Walton

Coming up Trumps

Back when his country was controlled by the USSR, the Czech writer Milan Kundera pointed out that ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ was ‘four words, four lies’. It’s a strike rate that even the current US president has yet to match. Nonetheless, at one stage in Reporting Trump’s First Year: The Fourth Estate (BBC2, Sunday) we did see him pull off an impressive three-sentences, three-lies sequence in a speech about — inevitably — the mainstream media, including the New York Times. ‘They have no “sources”,’ said Trump baldly. ‘They just make ’em up. They are the enemy of the people.’ Not that Trump will care, but by then we already

Sunday

Charles Moore

Dealing with Question Time’s left-wing claque

The departure of David Dimbleby from Question Time is certainly sad from the point of view of the panellist. He was, in recent years, one’s sole protector. Calm, humorous, very slightly bored (but too polite to show it), David reminded one by his mere presence that there is a world of sane and civilised people outside the studio. He cheered me in adversity, rather as I once felt when I discovered Château Latour for £12 in an otherwise unremarkable hotel in Blackpool during a party conference. I also got no sense of his politics. Because he is rich, successful and on the BBC, I assume he must be mildly left-wing; but he

Friday

Steerpike

John Mann’s encounter with Kim Jong-il

We’ve all been there. You’re at a work event, you don’t really know anyone so soon you end up talking to the strange fellow in the corner. At least that’s what happened to John Mann a few years back when he attended a conference and ended up having a chinwag with a North Korean dictator. Speaking on Question Time, the Labour MP revealed his encounter with Kim Jong-un’s late father – Kim Jong-il: ‘I once met his father, only in passing and he was like him – strange family, strange people. It was at a conference and no-one was talking to him and no-one was talking to me so I went