Bbc

Thursday

James Walton

Fashion shoot

With documentary-makers these days, it can be hard to tell the difference between faux-naivety and the real thing. (Personally, I blame Louis Theroux.) Take BBC2’s Absolutely Fashion: Inside British Vogue (Thursday), directed and narrated by Richard Macer, who often seems suspiciously dazzled by whatever he sees: the editor’s office! The editor’s chair! He also has a tendency to proudly offer observations that aren’t necessarily as startling as he thinks: that the magazine appears to be largely run by women, for instance. But where it’s even trickier to decide whether he’s faking or not is when his off-screen voice anxiously wonders whether Alexandra Shulman, the editor in question, wants him there

Thursday

James Delingpole

Pussy galore

I think I might be turning into Alf Garnett. When I was growing up I saw him as an obnoxious, cantankerous, ranting old git that my grandparents’ generation seemed to find funny but who left me cold. Now I’m beginning to identify with him as an unfairly maligned and surprisingly youthful fount of wisdom whose tragedy is to be ignored by maddeningly unsympathetic womenfolk and infuriating kids. That was my thought, anyway, watching Till Death Us Do Part (Thursday, BBC Four) — a one-off remake of one of Johnny Speight’s original Sixties scripts, with The Fast Show’s Simon Day as Alf. It’s part of a short season, ‘Lost Sitcoms’, commissioned

Tuesday

Steerpike

Listen: BBC’s comedy sketch attack on ‘working class’ ITV

Yes, it was a bank holiday – but did that give the BBC an excuse to launch a licence-fee funded attack on its independent rival? The peg, if you can call it that, was ITV’s decision to turn off all its programming for an hour on Saturday morning as part of its ‘I am team GB’ campaign to get people into sports clubs, with the participation of an impressive number of freshly-garlanded Olympic medalists. The BBC is very sensitive to all of that: it likes to think it has the monopoly on piety, and can’t handle any other channel doing anything in the name of wider public service. So the BBC Radio 4

Sunday

Steerpike

Paul Mason lifts the lid on Labour’s guardians of elite power

After the nation voted in favour of Brexit in the EU referendum, Jeremy Corbyn faced a coup from Labour MPs left unsatisfied with his efforts for Remain. Leading the charge, Hilary Benn sparked a round of mass frontbench resignations after he said there was ‘no confidence’ in Corbyn’s ability to win the next election. However, could it all have been part of an elaborate trick? Mr S only asks after Paul Mason appeared on Broadcasting House to discuss the situation. The former Channel 4 economics editor turned revolutionary said that he was certain Corbyn would win a general election: ‘I think Jeremy Corbyn will win. Or let’s put it this way, he will be

Thursday

Toby Young

The yawn supremacy

The BBC has published a list of the 100 best films of the 21st century, compiled after consulting academics, cinema curators and critics — and, as you’d expect, it’s almost comically dull. The list contains numerous turgid meditations on the spiritual void at the heart of western civilisation by obscure European ‘auteurs’ and not a single Hollywood comedy. It’s as if the respondents mistook the word ‘best’ for ‘boring’. To give you an idea of just how absurd the list is, it doesn’t include any of the billion-dollar blockbusters from Marvel Studios — no, not even Guardians of the Galaxy — but does have two movies by the impenetrable Danish

James Delingpole James Delingpole

When autumn comes

You know when late summer has arrived because conkers are starting to form on the horse chestnuts, your eagerness to get the kids back to school has reached fever pitch, and another season of The Great British Bake Off (BBC1, Wednesdays) has begun. If it feels like there has never, ever been a time when GBBO wasn’t on, this is because there hasn’t. Here are some key facts about our favourite telly comfort blanket you won’t find on Wikipedia. 1. Mary Berry has barely aged at all since the show’s first edition was broadcast in 1946 immediately after Muffin the Mule. Mary was 11 at the time and was chosen

Friday

Alex Massie

Now the SNP are in power their skin seems to have thinned

Scotland is a small place. This has many advantages. There is an intimacy to Scottish public life that can, on occasion, be charming. It is a place where everyone knows everyone else and this helps foster a climate of relaxed informality. Politicians, even more than elsewhere, are known by their first names. So it’s Nicola vs Ruth vs Kezia and this isn’t just because they are all women and all, in their different ways and to different degrees, quietly impressive figures. But a small place, like a family, can be suffocating too. Intimacy is the other side of cosy. If that reflects itself in tight connections between politicians and those

Thursday

Roger Alton

Our (nearly) golden summer

It seems like a long time ago, but back in the day, when Sir John Major launched the National Lottery, there was a fair bit of sanctimonious tut-tutting from the liberal establishment: it was a tax on the poor who couldn’t be trusted to spend their own money, it encouraged gambling, it was just a bit vulgar. And all that. Well, how’s that drivel looking now? A shedload of Team GB golds later, and how do those who sneered at the lottery feel about it today? Notwithstanding Britain’s staggering achievements, the Games are not perfect, of course: there’s too much track cycling and way too many swimming events. And possibly

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Rio, Rio

Stuff I have learnt after two solid weeks watching the Olympics on TV. 1. Tennis and golf shouldn’t be Olympic sports. Yes, I know we won both and Rose’s final chip on to the 18th green was great to watch. But you can see this sort of thing done with a tougher range of competitors at any number of majors all the time. Olympic medals should be there to reward the Corinthian spirit not just an opportunity for millionaires to add something a bit different to their mantelpiece. 2. I still don’t understand the judging system for the diving but had arse quality been included in the women’s events —

Kate Chisholm

Super human

‘We think we’re in charge of this stuff but we’re not,’ said Quincy Jones, the composer, arranger, jazz trumpeter, musical genius. He was talking to Julian Joseph at the Montreux Jazz Festival for Jazz Line-Up on Radio 3 (Saturday). ‘It’s divine intervention.’ Jones, who masterminded Michael Jackson’s Thriller as well as countless other hits, film scores (including The Italian Job and The Color Purple) and his own ‘Soul Bossa Nova’, was remarkably sanguine about his extraordinary career. His enormous self-confidence was there from the start. Finding himself in Paris in the 1950s touring with a big band, he decided to stay on so that he could study with Nadia Boulanger

Wednesday

Tom Goodenough

Why did the BBC give a platform to Anjem Choudary?

Anjem Choudary’s arrogance eventually led to his downfall. He was convinced he could stay one step ahead of the authorities by picking his words carefully. Until now, that is. The hate preacher finally came unstuck when he encouraged others to join Islamic State. Yet whilst his extremist rants were always marked with an alarming confidence, his manner belied a somewhat different reality: Choudary was a man with few followers. His appearance in YouTube videos inevitably showed him with a tiny handful of half-witted acolytes alongside him. His ‘protests’ were of a kind likely to be greeted with indifference by passers-by. So why have we all heard of Choudary? Many media outlets have

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Is there something that the BBC isn’t telling us about these Norwegians?

A man has set fire to a train in Switzerland and stabbed lots of people. On the BBC News last night the perpetrator was described as ‘a Swiss national’. Similarly on the BBC News online today: ‘The suspect, described as a Swiss man aged 27, was also taken to hospital after the incident near Salez in St Gallen canton, close to Liechtenstein.’ Do you know, I think there is something the BBC – and the Swiss authorities – are not telling us. This attack was quite similar in some respects to one carried out in London recently, in which an elderly American woman was murdered. Then, at least, the BBC

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Northern exposure | 11 August 2016

As the festival grows, the good acts are harder to find and the prices keep rising to meet the throngs of showbiz refugees who surge north in the belief that the glory, this year, will be theirs. Arriving at my one-star hovel (no breakfast, no towels, shared bathroom), I was given a security key and a disc of see-through soap that I could have hidden beneath a tea-bag. The bill, payable in advance, was a third higher than last year. Glory in this city belongs to the landlord. Marcel Lucont’s Whine List is performed by a suave, self-adoring Frenchman who starts by asking if anyone in the crowd is new

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 11 August 2016

Those who want to revive grammar schools are accused of ‘bring backery’ — the unthinking idea that the past was better. But many of their accusers suffer from the rigid mindset of which they complain. They say that grammar schools ‘condemned most children to failure at the age of 11’, and that, even at their peak, grammars catered for less than 20 per cent of the school population. Why assume that the return of grammars must re-create either of these things? Grammar schools grew up, historically, in different ways and at different times. Then, in the mid‑20th-century mania for uniformity, they were standardised and, in the later 20th-century mania for comprehensives, almost

Kate Chisholm

Funny is dangerous

‘I’m off now,’ says Michael Heath, signing off from his selection of Desert Island Discs on Radio 4, ‘to go and do a gag about God knows what. I haven’t the foggiest idea.’ You’d think at 80 he might want to stop, or have to give up because he’d somehow lost his touch. But not the cartoon editor of this magazine, and chief creator of wicked skits on the idiocies and affectations of contemporary life. What’s it like working as a cartoonist after the attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo? asked Kirsty Young. ‘It adds a certain frisson to your drawing,’ Michael replies. ‘But I never wanted to be

Thursday

James Walton

1966 and all that

In the song ‘All the Young Dudes’, David Bowie gamely tried to reassure the youth of the Seventies that, despite what their Sixties elders were always telling them, they hadn’t been born too late after all. On the contrary: it was the ‘brother back at home with his Beatles and his Stones’ who was missing out. Sadly, for those of us growing up at the time, even Bowie at his most thrilling wasn’t quite as persuasive as we’d have liked. OK, so it was definitely annoying to be surrounded by people banging on about how great the Sixties were. But once we’d heard the music, there was an uncomfortable sense

Kate Chisholm

Fever pitch | 28 July 2016

It cost just £4/10s for 19-year-old Alan Dryland to buy a season ticket that would take him inside the stadium for all ten of the World Cup matches held in London in that magical summer of 1966. The pound was falling, the Vietnam war raging, but England made it through to the final and the Beatles and Rolling Stones were battling it out to top the charts. If nothing else, 66: We Were There, Radio 5 Live’s affectionate look back at that tremendous victory, proved that Sixties music was brilliant. The producer’s choice on Saturday was pitch-perfect, from the Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Summer in the City’ to Chris Farlowe’s ‘Out of

Thursday

Steerpike

BBC staff ‘whoop and cheer’ John Whittingdale’s sacking

During John Whittingdale’s tenure as Culture Secretary, the Tory MP has proved to be the thorn in the BBC’s side. So, it’s safe to say that some Beeb employees will be breathing a sigh of relief that Whitto has today been sacked from the Cabinet. However, it appears that staff at the Beeb have actually gone a bit further than just expressing mild relief. A BBC journalist claims that the newsroom actually erupted into ‘whoops and cheers’ on hearing the news that Whitto had lost his job: Although the hack has since deleted his tweet, this will only fuel concerns that the impartial Beeb isn’t so impartial after all when it comes to the Conservative government. Update: The

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Accentuate the positive | 7 July 2016

Fifty years ago on Monday the World Service programme Outlook was launched as an innovative news and current affairs programme presented ‘magazine style’ with live interviews featuring ‘star’ guests. Such ‘soft’ journalism was highly suspect back in 1966, as England won the World Cup, Russia landed the Lunar 9 mission on the moon and China embarked on its Maoist cultural revolution, because it relied not so much on factual truths or reportage but on the emotional truth of what it felt like to be there in that place at that moment in time. Over the years, though, the guests on Outlook have taken over from the news content precisely because

Adam Sweeting

And your point, Professor?

Pop idol turned top boffin Brian Cox doesn’t shy away from the big issues. With programmes such as Wonders of the Solar System, Wonders of Life and Human Universe, Cox, the heir apparent to His Eminence Sir David Attenborough, has dared to dream on a cosmic scale. Are there any limits to his mighty intellect? In his latest adventure, Forces of Nature (BBC1, Monday), the ambitious prof boldly seeks to illustrate the workings of ‘the underlying laws of nature’. As wistful electronic music tinkled Eno ishly in the background, he assured us, in a metaphysical tone, that ‘the whole universe, the whole of physics, is contained in a snowflake’. Representing